Tane Hunter & Dara Simkin: What It Actually Means to Stay Human While the World Speeds Up

Leadership Podcast | Workplace Culture | Play at Work | Intelligent Optimism | Full Stack Human Book

There is a question that most leaders are quietly asking but rarely say out loud: if I keep doing more, why does something still feel off? Not broken, not lazy, not wrong. Just stretched past the point where effort alone solves anything. This conversation sits right inside that tension. Two thinkers, two very different paths, and one shared conviction that the world has changed faster than the playbook we were handed, and that staying human is not a soft skill. It is the strategy.

The Guests

Tane Hunter grew up an outsider — a blonde-haired nerd in rural New Mexico, raised by a mathematician father and a counsellor mother, who found his footing on a mountain bike and then lost it again to a spinal injury that ended his national champion career. What followed was science, cancer research, sailing solo across the South Pacific, and eventually co-founding Future Crunch, a global platform built on intelligent optimism and the belief that the stories we tell about the world shape the world we build.

Dara Simkin arrived in Australia by winning a camper van competition, fell in love with Melbourne, and built a career from the inside out: coaching, mental health workshops, a summer camp nobody came to, and then the insight that changed everything. Play is not a reward for finishing the work. It is how the work gets done well. She is the founder of Culture Hero and Australia's leading voice on play in the workplace, a late ADHD diagnosis lighting up everything she always knew about herself.

Together, they wrote The Full Stack Human — a book for anyone who refuses to sacrifice their humanity for success.

What We Get Into

The myth of discipline and resilience

Dara reframes one of leadership's most overused words. It is not that high-achievers lack discipline or resilience. It is that they are operating beyond their capacity. When you are running on empty, no amount of grit closes the gap. The real question is not how hard you push but where your energy is going and whether you are getting any of it back.

What it takes to rebuild when the thing you love is taken away

Tane's spinal injury did not arrive as a single moment. It arrived slowly, until he could barely walk. He talks honestly about grief, misdiagnosis, and what happens when your identity is wrapped up in something your body can no longer do. His answer was not to power through. It was to go back to his first love: science. That decision changed everything that followed.

The child void, success amnesia, and the addiction to achievement

Dara introduces the concept of the child void — that liminal space between achievements where high-performers feel most lost. She and Tane explore how success amnesia keeps driven people from celebrating anything before chasing the next thing, and why the messy middle is not a problem to be solved but a fertile space to be inhabited. Comprehension, they argue, is what creates compassion.

Why the most dangerous leadership strategy right now is control

In a world moving this fast, risk aversion is itself a risk. Tane and Dara dismantle the lie that seriousness equals success and make the case for the yes-and leader — someone who creates conditions for their people to bring their real thinking, not their polished version of it. Psychological safety is not about being nice. It is about building cultures where people can say this is not working and feel safe doing it.

Play is not the reward. It is the on-ramp.

The most common mistake leaders make with culture is treating play as a treat you get after the real work. Dara makes a different case entirely. Play, in its truest form — curiosity, flexibility, permission to experiment — is what expands capacity. You cannot force a frazzled nervous system to rest. But you can give it an on-ramp. Recovery and rest are not the same thing, and knowing the difference might be the most practical leadership insight in this whole conversation.

Quotes From the Conversation

"It's not resilience or discipline. It's capacity. When we are up to our eyeballs, we have very little capacity to navigate our lives. Where is my energy going, and am I getting it back?"

— Dara Simkin

"Don't treat hope as a noun or a hashtag. Treat it as a verb. Create strong pathways, your people's ability to imagine solutions. And couple it with agency — the belief that those goals can actually be obtained."

— Tane Hunter

A Note From Kirsty

What I keep thinking about after this conversation is how much we have confused being stretched with being strong. Tane and Dara gave me a different frame: that the most human thing a leader can do right now is not grind harder, but genuinely ask where their energy is going — and whether any of it is coming back. That is not softness. That is strategy. And if you have ever crashed on a holiday because your body finally got permission to stop, this one is for you.

Links & Resources Mentioned

The Full Stack Human — Book Website

https://www.culturehero.co/full-stack-human-book

Future Crunch

Tane Hunter's platform exploring the frontiers of science, technology and intelligent optimism.

futurecrunch.com | LinkedIn: Future Crunch

Culture Hero

Dara Simkin's workplace culture and play consultancy.

culturehero.co | LinkedIn: Culture Hero

Connect with Dara: Linkedin

Connect with Tane: LinkedIn

This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree

Connect with Kirsty Gee: LinkedIn | Instagram | Website