Produced by W2D1 Media. Work with us →
Day One Articles

The stories behind the interviews.

Long-form features drawn from full episode transcripts across the Day One Network.

Shaking Up the Snow Globe: Inside Australia's Legal Psychedelic Clinics

In February 2023, Australia became the first country where authorised psychiatrists could legally prescribe MDMA and psilocybin. Dr Michael Winlo, Chief Scientific Officer at Emyria, describes what an actual eight-hour dosing session looks like — and what still stands between this and mainstream medicine.

Read the article →

Ideas Are Free. The Pain Is in the Execution.

Taryn Williams started a modelling agency at 21 with $30,000 and no roadmap, and has built and exited six companies since. The part she's only recently started saying out loud: two relationships that didn't survive the businesses, a heart-rate variability she calls "absolutely shot," and the realisation that enough never actually feels like enough.

Read the article →

He Left School at 16 to Clean Toilets in the Outback. Now He's Trying to Keep AI Honest.

Dr Simon Longstaff left school at sixteen, cleaned toilets on a remote Gulf of Carpentaria island, drove ambulances, and was adopted into an Aboriginal clan before becoming one of Australia's most respected moral philosophers. His argument for governing AI borrows a single sentence from everyday life: the fact that you can do something does not mean that you should.

Read the article →

She Ran a $20 Million Student Union at 23. Then a Friend Called Her Work "The Trinkets."

Kirstin Hunter co-founded Australia's first fossil-fuel-free super fund, then walked away from it when her co-founders chose growth through acquisition over the mission she'd joined for. Now she runs Birchal, betting that ordinary people funding ordinary founders is a better filter than the VCs who still put 98% of their money into teams with at least one man.

Read the article →

The App That Shuts Off the Moment You Look Away

Chris Fresle dropped out in year nine, spent his teenage years in trouble, and had zero technical background. At twenty, one news segment convinced him to spend years and a six-country patent building an app that uses facial recognition to make sharing someone's intimate photo without consent almost impossible.

Read the article →

She Sold Her AI Company at 2PM. By 7PM She Was Drinking Ayahuasca.

Dr Catriona Wallace went from NSW police officer to founding one of the world's first enterprise AI companies, took it public on the ASX as one of the only woman CEO/chair pairs in the exchange's history, then watched Amazon and Google give away her product for free. The same afternoon she finally closed the sale, she drove to her first ayahuasca ceremony.

Read the article →

He Raised $40 Million, Then Shut It Down. Twice.

Darius Monsef has sold two companies and raised more than $40 million for a paediatric healthcare startup that treated 50,000 sick kids — then watched it collapse under U.S. insurance billing codes. His theory of why founders fail isn't the market. It's that nobody lies to a founder as effectively as the founder does.

Read the article →

She Made a Fake Nude of Herself in Under Five Minutes. Then She Held It Up in Parliament.

New Zealand MP Laura McClure Googled "deepfake nude," found a site that needed no login, and had ten convincing fakes of her own face within minutes. She used them to force a vote nobody in Parliament wanted to have.

Read the article →

She Raised $4 Million in Four Weeks. Then Her Own Board Locked Her Out.

Yas Grigaliunas built the circular economy in Australia before the term existed — a charity garage sale that grew into a $4 million capital raise. Then, in the middle of her divorce, the company she founded barred her from her own office for nine months. This is what she learned about power, trust, and building back.

Read the article →
—