Grey Areas with Petra Bagust

What does it take to stop drifting toward frailty as we age, to challenge the "live within your means" mindset, and completely rewrite how we approach both our finances and our health? Well, I’d ask Hannah McQueen… so I did. In this fiery episode of Grey Areas, Petra sits down with force-of-nature Hannah McQueen, chartered accountant, founder of EnableMe, and creator of the healthcare venture Age Brightly. Hannah traces her journey from calculating an eight-page calculus formula to pay off her own mortgage, to helping tens of thousands of New Zealanders break free from the "death grip" of compound interest and master the emotional psychology of money. Now, Hannah is taking that same bold, system-challenging energy into a new mission: ageing brightly. After witnessing a client face a sudden $750,000 crisis to place a parent into rest home care, Hannah began pulling on a thread that led her to launch Age Brightly, a private, geriatrician-led healthcare service aimed at detecting early biological decline, preventing unnecessary hospital admissions, and slowing down cognitive decline like dementia. Together, Hannah and I explore why money and health are deeply emotional rather than purely logical, the power of coming "down the mountain" to fight for families, and why we must start honoring our elders by giving them more good, vibrant years rather than just more years of existence. Support the show: greyareas.nz/support Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Looker and published by Songbroker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do you do when you’re feeling in "rude good health," working across your dream broadcasting gigs, and a routine test turns your world upside down in an afternoon? Seasoned Kiwi broadcaster Mel Homer was checking her heart health via a blood test when hours later, she was admitted to hospital, diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A rare, aggressive, and life-threatening blood cancer that gave her zero warning. In this raw and courageously funny episode, Petra sits down with her longtime broadcasting peer to unpack the long, high-stakes journey through "scorched earth" chemotherapy, biopsies and eyeball bleeds, and losing her hair, to finding a life-saving stem cell donor in a young French woman on the other side of the globe. Relief and love showed up in quirky moments, like sending her adult sons via FaceTime to search through her drawers for comfy undies. Mel opens up about the terrifying reality of high-risk genetic mutations, the brutal physical toll of Graft-versus-Host disease, and the emotional shift from survival mode to navigating recovery as "Mel Homer 2.0". Together, Petra and Mel explore why aging in your 50s is a profound privilege, the importance of keeping a soft heart, and how choosing relentless positivity and dark humor can light up even the darkest hospital rooms. Support the show: greyareas.nz/support Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Looker and published by Songbroker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full of great kōrero about the areas of life where we find ourselves in the grey - significant health diagnosis, neurodivergence… now what?!, aging parents and more. I sit down with disruptors, survivors, songwriters and spiritual leaders. It’s okay to be in mid-life, just don’t attempt it alone. 😂 Join me this coming Thursday for more mayhem and magic - the brand new season is coming in hot. Hit follow on your favourite audio platform 👊 so you don’t miss out. Can’t wait to share it with you! xx Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sir Ashley Bloomfield spent 300-odd consecutive days walking out to a lectern and telling New Zealand the status of the public health plan. As Director-General of Health through the COVID-19 pandemic, he became one of the most recognisable faces in the country's history. Calm, consistent, and quietly formidable/ a constant presence. Five years on, he's a professor at the University of Auckland, CEO of Public Health and Forensic Science, and, as of March this year, 60 years old. In this kōrero, Petra sits down with Ashley for a broad conversation that moves from COVID reflections to growing up in Tawa, from his challenging leadership philosophy to the public health win he's most proud of, one that's adding nearly a year to the life expectancy of wāhine Māori and barely made the news. Ashley talks honestly about what it was like to lead through the pandemic and why he hopes the inquiry findings will be used to strengthen Aotearoa's future response rather than score political points. He reflects on the stranger who stopped him on a Wellington street and how that moment helped Ashley frame the season. Ashley outlines the four values he returns to again and again, kindness, courage, integrity, and humility, and why self-doubt is a feature not a bug. There's also a meander down memory lane into Ashley's early years, the year off medical school hitchhiking around Europe, sailing a yacht back from Australia, and working on a dairy farm in the UK. The Territorial Army training that stress-tested him in ways that would matter decades later. And there's the long game of public health, the slow, unsexy, generation-spanning work that doesn't get thanked, and why aging is, in Ashley's view, humankind's greatest achievement. This is a deeply decent conversation about what good leadership looks like and what it feels like to dare to be hopeful. Support the show: greyareas.nz/support Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Louker and published by Songbroker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Morgana O'Reilly is an actor, writer, and one-woman force of nature whose credits span Billy T James Award-nominated theatre, Mean Mums, Neighbours, an Emmy award-winning covid comedy thriller series called INSiDE, and White Lotus. Her one-woman show ‘Stories About My Body’, a sellout tour exploring what it means to live inside a female body across the seasons of life, has just been made into a film, crowdfunded on kindness and released into New Zealand cinemas in July. Buckle up for a rollicking ride. In this kōrero, Morgana and Petra have the kind of conversation that goes absolutely everywhere and enjoys every twist and turn. They talk about bodies, the loathing, the wrestling, the slow, imperfect, ongoing journey of coming home to yourself. Morgana shares the internal voice that shows up when disappointment strikes (“too fat, too old, too fat, too old”), as well as the realisation that her body has been bearing the brunt of any professional rejection for years, when really it's never been her body's fault at all. Morgana offers her insightful framework of whether she’s engaging in conforming or adorning as a woman and an actress. It’s a very useful frame of reference for thinking about makeup, botox, aging, and beauty standards as we move through life. The question Morgana now asks herself whenever she considers changing something about how she looks: is this a celebration, or is it an apology? They talk about dopamine as the hormone of feminism, slow-release versus quick-hit joy, and why exercise stopped being about weight and became about keeping her brain juicy, pink, and moist. There's a beautiful thread about what life looks like when the White Lotus tide recedes, the blue months, the practical brain that books the GP and the blood test but has yet to action the blood test, and what it means to succeed as an artist in cycles rather than destinations. And there's the game Morgana plays with her daughter, which might be the most quietly useful parenting tool in the entire season: what is life filled with? Pain. Which is why we have to find the joys. This one is funny, warm, wise, and genuinely fizzy. Don't miss the boob impersonation. Support the show: greyareas.nz/support Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Louker and published by Songbroker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices