You can spend years building something impressive and still wonder if it's what you actually wanted.

Izzy Di Domenico is a lecturer, unit chair, and nine-year Deakin veteran whose path ran through a PhD and a stint inside elite AFL.

We talk about what academic life actually involves once you're in it, the identity shift a PhD quietly produces, and what it's like to step into leadership while still wondering if you really know what you're doing. We also get into AI in education — whether it's a useful tool or a crutch that stops students learning to think — and why universities are struggling to respond coherently.

Underneath all of it: the pressure of your 20s and 30s to keep moving, the trap of saying yes to everything, and the slow realisation that busy isn't the same as living.

If this one sounds familiar, send it to someone in their early career.

Most new dads want to be present and involved. Many quietly become passengers in their own family — and don't realise until it's already happened.

Norma Barrett is a public health researcher at Deakin University who studies the transition to fatherhood — particularly why so many men show up committed and still end up feeling peripheral, guilty, or unsure of their role.

We talk about what "passenger parenting" actually looks like, how it develops without men really choosing it, and whether it's possible to interrupt the drift. We also get into dad guilt and self-care, why fathers find it hard to ask for support, the pressure of the provider role, and how to speak honestly about fathers' needs without minimising what mothers carry.

This is a conversation about fatherhood. But it's also about identity, relationships, and the gap between the parent you hope to become and the one early parenthood can quietly shape you into.

If this episode lands for you, send it to a new dad or an expecting one.

Billy Griffiths, author of Deep Time Dreaming, is a historian who has spent years thinking about what it means to inhabit a continent where people have lived for at least 60,000 years — and how rarely that depth of time sits at the centre of how most Australians understand this country.

This conversation covers how Australian archaeology went from a chaotic, under-resourced field to something more careful and collaborative — and why it took so long for ancient Australia to be taken seriously. Billy unpacks what "at least 60,000 years" actually means: what the evidence looks like, where it's contested, and what uncertainty still sits behind the number.

The unanswered questions are also here: the sea crossings, the routes taken, the societies that emerged, and why phrases like "Aboriginal culture" can hide more than they reveal — alongside how imagination helps and misleads when thinking about people tens of thousands of years ago, and what new partnerships with Indigenous knowledge holders might still change the story.

Some conversations make you more certain. These ones don't.

Uncomfortably Curious is long-form conversations with researchers and thinkers who are more interested in understanding than performing certainty.

Hosted by Aidan Mill. New episodes weekly.