Wild with Sarah Wilson

Dr. Martha Beck (author; “best-known life coach in America”) is about to release a book on anxiety. The international best-selling author – who holds three Harvard degrees in social science and was described by Oprah as “one of the smartest women I know” – specialises in helping people find meaning and integrity in their lives.

In this episode, Sarah and Martha reconnect after 15 years to discuss their takes on the role of anxiety in our lives, and how it can be used to create purpose and direction (tune in to hear about the time Martha “bent a spoon with her mind” for Sarah!). They also share tangible techniques for using creativity to switch out of anxious spirals. Martha’s book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose comes out in early 2025.

SHOW NOTES

Here’s the newspaper column I wrote about my first meeting with Martha in 2010.

I refer to previous podcasts with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor and Iain McGilchrist, and another on the role of creativity with Ian Leslie.

You can read more about Martha's work here and connect on IG here.

Preorder a copy of her upcoming book Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose

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Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) re-imagines and redesigns systems for a changed world. The architect and Professor of Planetary Civics at Melbourne’s RMIT and the University of Sheffield has worked with and advised organisations worldwide. Including the Scottish Government, the Mayor of London and WikiHouse, solving complex, entangled problems. Using complexity, emergence and entanglement theories he is a rare expert in this space to provide the (only) path to fixing the world, which is to say fixing our relationship with the world.

This conversation goes to a level I’ve not been to before publicly. On his modelling, we don’t have any choice but to start building the world that comes next, for the current one has no viable pathway. He gives a vision for this this. And he gives a timeframe, too. 

For this episode, I’m providing a forum where you can talk through how you feel about the ideas and your feelings with others. Indy has offered to chime in too: Join the chat on Substack HERE.

SHOW NOTES

If you are new to this collapse topic you might want to catch up via this conversation with Luke Kemp, the one with Meg Wheatley and this one with Corey Bradshaw.

There are some previous guests and topics that are referenced in this chat:

You can learn more about Indy's work via DarkMatterLabs

Connect with Indy on socials @DarkMatter_Labs and @indy_johar 

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Lyndsey Stonebridge (Humans rights academic, Hannah Arendt biographer) was worried about the banality of evil she was observing in the world and so dug down into the work of controversial philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt for insights. Her new book, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience is a guide on how to live--and think--through a moment like the one we’re in now in the wake of the US election. It draws on Arendt’s ideas about totalitarianism, loneliness, the dulling of the mind, capitalism, as well as the imperative to love the world. Lyndsey is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and writes and broadcasts about a range of topical subjects: refugees, feminism and the moral mind. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. 

SHOW NOTES

I mention the Wild episode with BBC Washington correspondent Nick Bryant 

Get your copy of Lyndsey's new book, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

Read more about Lyndsey's work here and follow her on IG here

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

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Let’s connect onInstagram

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Luke Kemp (historical collapse expert; associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) has studied past civilisations and mapped out a picture of how long they tend to last before they collapse, what tends to tip them and what (if anything) can be done to stall their demise. Luke works alongside Lord Martin Rees and Yuval Noah Harari, is an honorary lecturer in environmental policy at the Australian National University and his collapse insights have been covered by the BBC, the New York Times and the New Yorker. His first book, 'Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse' will be published in June 2025.

In this episode I get Luke to provide a bit of a 101 on how civilisations do indeed decline and perish and to update us on the latest theories on how and whether ours might make it through. The answer is surprising.

SHOW NOTES

Here’s Luke’s original report on complex civilisation’s lifespans.

Keep up to date with Luke's work here

A few past Wild guests are referenced by Luke. You can catch the episode on Moloch with Liv Boeree here, the interview with Adam Mastroianni here and my chat with Nate Hagens here

The first chapter of my book serialisation – about hope – is available to everyone here

And here are the two chapters that I reference at the end

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of “Ask Me Anything” questions about the minutiae of writing about - and having to live through - collapse. I try to cover most of these kinds of questions as we work through the book Serialisation process, but a few get left behind. And so this week’s Wild episode covers these off.

You are welcome to join the 55,000 subscribers who are following the book, chapter by chapter, week by week, here. You’ll be invited to upgrade (sorry to have to use such commercial language) to a paid subscription…this helps me to be able to dedicate most of my working week to writing said book. But don’t feel obligated. You can stay a free subscriber and read these first few chapters here and a preview of every other one!

SHOW NOTES

Here’s where you can start reading the first chapter of the Book Serialisation

And here’s the link to subscribe to mySubstack newsletter

Want to ask me your own question…post it here

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Prof. Joel Pearson (Neuroscientist; AI and cognition scientist) returns to Wild, this time to discuss whether free will is an illusion. In our last chat (about intuition) the subject was raised and Joel promised to come back to discuss it further, particularly in the context of AI, algorithms, the rise of totalitarianism and our agency in systems collapse. 

Joel is the founder and Director of Future Minds Lab which applies neuroscience findings to art, AI, media, advertising and various philosophical quandaries. He’s also a National Health and Medical Research Council fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He developed the first scientific test to measure intuition and wrote The Intuition Toolkit. In this conversation, we also cover the science of manifesting!

SHOW NOTES

I mention the chapter on Blame and the very robust discussion the Substack community had around it. You can join this here

Here’s the previous episode where Joel talks about the scientific proof of intuition

Get Joel’s book The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why

Follow Joel on his Future Minds Lab Substack

I previously had willpower expert Roy Baumeister on Wild to talk about how the female orgasm shapes the world! 

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Christiana Figueres (the woman behind the Paris Agreement) is possibly the best-known official in the global climate change movement. The former Costa Rican diplomat and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2010-2016), managed to bring together 195 nations to sign the historical 2015 agreement that set the “1.5C” target/warning. She wrote The Future We Choose, cohosts the Outrage + Optimism podcast, has a moth, a wasp and an orchid named after her, and has won countless international awards for her work. 

In this episode, we challenge each other on whether hope and optimism are still useful given we’ve passed the 1.5C threshold in February, whether the Paris Agreement is still viable almost 10 years on and the viability of the green energy transition. We don’t agree on a number of points, but we come together on what keeps us in the “fight” …love. Listen to the end with this one.

SHOW NOTES

The work of rare earth minerals expert Olivia Lazard and energy futurist Nate Hagens supports the energy points I make in this episode. 

This international team of researchers and this team working out of France show fossil fuels will become net-energy negative in the future.

We are spending more energy to get less energy than before—our net energy is  “plummeting”.

The world’s consumption of fossil fuels climbed to a record high last year according to the University of Exeter's Global Carbon Project and NASA.

A Finnish Geological Survey finds that “global reserves are not large enough to supply enough metals to build the renewable non-fossil fuels industrial system”.

According to a study on societal tipping points, a peak and fall in global oil production would bring down the entire financial and trade system like a house of cards.

This chapter of my book outlines the argument in detail.

And here are the first two chapters of my book, that outline my position on hope v truth. 

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In this SPECIAL EPISODE British coach, author and broadcaster Elizabeth Oldfield and I sit down in her London intentional community home and interview EACH OTHER on…what is sacred (and how we access it), acedia ( the moral loneliness we feel in turbulent times), how we sit in the grief and despair of things, losing friends to the cause, how to be of service, how to be Fully Alive (the title of her book) and honour This One Wild and Precious Life (mine!).

Elizabeth’s book has been endorsed by Krista Tippett; she’s written and broadcast for the BBC, The Times, and The Economist; was the Director of Theos, the UK’s leading religion and society think tank; and her podcast The Sacred has featured Nick Cave, Jonathan Haidt and an incredible array of spiritualists and existential thinkers. This was a joyous meeting of spirits!

SHOW NOTES

Visit Elizabeth's website and subscribe to her Substack

Buy your copy of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times here

This One Wild and Precious Life is available here

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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I do these bonus episodes occasionally whereby I interview someone I serendipitously met on my adventures and who I wrote about in my books AND who struck a chord with readers. I track them down to see where they are now, and there is ALWAYS the most amazing follow-up story.

This time, Nika Kovač, a controversial Slovenian activist and Obama scholar who once invited me on a gondola ride with a communist philosopher when I was stranded without a bed for the night and pregnant (read This One Wild and Precious Life to learn more) found me. And it turns out I’d been following her activist work from afar…without realising, she was the dynamic founding director of The Research Institute of 8th March, which won two referendum campaigns, one against the privatisation of water in 2021 and the other against political influence on public media in 2022. 

Nika also led the most extensive “Get-Out-The-Vote” campaign in Slovenian history ahead of the 2022 Parliamentary election, contributing to a 71 per cent voter turnout. BUT HERE’S THE JUICY BIT: Her latest campaign could achieve free and accessible abortion for all women in the EU. I’ve asked her to explain how the campaign works so everyone here can help achieve the goal…it’s a wild goal (and it’s a wild, wild life), but if anyone can do it, it’s Nika. Join us for the ride!

SHOW NOTES

You can learn about Nika here and follow her on IG here.

You can get This One Wild and Precious Life in the US, UK, Australia, Spanish, Lithuanian, and more…here.

Listen to my previous chats with The Lady in Red and Mammoth Dude.

Watch and join the conversation on Substack.

To get involved in the campaign with us:

1. Read more here, and if you’re an EU citizen, sign here.

2. Send the info to all your EU friends.

3. Share this Mark Ruffalo IG post and tag or message a Euro celebrity in your midst.

4. Look out for posts by Nika and I on Instagram and share those too.

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Dr Iain McGilchrist (neuroscientist, psychiatrist, polymath, author of The Master and His Emissary) devised a thesis that sets out how the two sides of our brains can affect the way we both interact and create the world. The left hemisphere is a narrow, extractive, problem-solving “machine” that divides and conquers things, fails to see our part in the world and to fathom beauty, awe and responsibility. Our civilisation, Iain says, has become ruled by a left-brain mentality, which is killing us and leaving us “wretched”; we need to put the right side back in charge!  

Iain is an associate of Green Templeton College in Oxford and a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal Society of Arts. His 2009 book Master and his Emissary became a cult read and the recent follow-up, The Matter with Things took him 12 years to write (and is 600,000 words long!).

In this chat we cover why societies start out creative, happy and flourishing (right-brained!) but switch left and destructive as they expand; the secret to living a well and happy life and how to find meaning and beauty in a world we possibly can’t “fix” (in the left-brain sense of the word). 

SHOW NOTES

Learn more about Iain's work via his website and watch his videos here.

Buy Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things here.

Listen to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's Wild episode.

Here’s the link to the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival that I’m speaking at this month.

Here’s the starting point for joining my book serialisation project.

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Professor Corey Bradshaw (global ecologist; author) has spent a career studying species populations and biodiversity loss and has the starkest of messages for humanity: we are in our own mass extinction event. Debate rages as to whether humans have an overpopulation problem or are in a fertility collapse, and which is more likely to take us down.

The director of the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University talks us through the devasting finer points of this divide. We also cover why Australia has the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world, why we should be having one less child, what happens when bees die out, and the importance of supporting anyone trying to ban political donations. This conversation is a hard one, but like many in this space, Corey has a philosophy for living fully and joyously with the truth he feels compelled to share: Life is going to get far shittier than we can imagine; our noble obligation is to make it a bit less shitty.

SHOW NOTES

Here’s the chapter in my book where I explain in full how fertility collapse is playing out. A REMINDER!! Corey will be joining the comments and is happy to answer any questions you have. You’ll need to post them in the comment section of this post.

Here’s where you can get started with the Book Serialisation (Put Table of contents).

Here’s my Wild chat with Parag Khanna on the best place to live in the world going forward.

Read Corey's blog Conversation Bytes

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

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*(and that the wars, climate disasters, democratic upheavals etc today are VERY different to crises in the past)?

This episode’s question has been asked by too many of you to mention. Many of us have been in situations where we try to talk about the domino’ing of crisis - AI, nuclear, climate, food insecurity, democratic decline, political polarisation, fertility collapse - and get told we’re just being a big old Henny Penny, and that crises happen all the time and humanity survives. The belief is that tech innovation, price mechanisms, progress (!) and human ingenuity will find a way to save us. However, this time is categorically different to past near misses and calamities. There are reams of science that prove it (sadly). So how do you explain this in a calm, convincing way at the next BBQ? Sarah provides a comprehensive rundown of all the points that one can make that set out a picture of how the collapse of complex systems works.

SHOW NOTES

Here’s where you can start reading the first chapter of the Book Serialisation. And here’s the table of contents.

Here’s the Meg Wheatley episode from the recent Collapse Series. 

Here’s the written version of the explainer (should you want a printable version on hand!) 

Want to ask Sarah your question…post it here.

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Dr Nick Bryant (BBC Washington correspondent, author) has spent most of his career covering the events that many of us see as spelling the decline of the US, a once-great nation – the school shootings, Trump presidency, Roe v Wade, storming of the Capitol, George Floyd, conspiracy theories and…all the rest. But in his new book The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself Nick argues that the hate, divisiveness, racism and murmurings of civil war are part of the fabric of the country – “America is just doing America”.

Nick has been a foreign correspondent for three decades, writing for the BBC, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and more. A copy of his previous book, When America Stopped Being Great sat on Joe Biden’s Oval Office bookshelf. This chat sets out to give context to the issues swirling in the lead-up to the November election. We cover Gaza, RFK Jnr, Project 25, guns, media both side-ism and the fascinating history of American Exceptionalism.

SHOW NOTES

Get your copy of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself

I reference a post I wrote on Project 25. You can read it here.

This7am podcast about Project 25 is useful. 

And check out the Jim Jeffries clip on gun control. It’s brilliant.

You can get started with reading my next book here.

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Professor Clive Hamilton (public ethicist; climate activist; founder of the Australia Institute) has led the emissions reduction conversation for decades. But he - controversially - has recently switched tack, arguing that climate mitigation is now impossible. And irresponsible. And that we must instead put our efforts (and last resources) into trying to survive as best we can.

In this chat the professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, recently named a 'living legend' among Australian scholars, talks through the research published in his latest book Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet. We cover why Saul Griffith’s “electrify everything” campaign is flawed, the safest place to live and what we should now be fighting for, and we discuss the contentious issue of class and the dangerous role of private schools (strange but true) to our survival.

Clive’s previous Zeitgeist-shifting books include Requiem for a Species, Growth Fetish and Affluenza.

SHOW NOTES

You can get hold of Living Hot and The Privileged Few

You can read my Book Serialisation on Substack here. Here are the first two chapters, free to everyone.

You can listen to my Wild conversation with Saul Griffiths here.

My wonderful chat with Olivia Lazard on mineral depletion is a great backgrounder, too.

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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.

Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Jonathon Rowson.

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Jonathan Rowson (chess Grandmaster, metamodernist philosopher) is one of Britain’s biggest minds and I have invited him onto Wild to talk, well, what’s been dubbed the “meta-crisis” – the fundamental “meaning” crisis at the heart of “all the things” going on in the world today.

Jonathan is a theoretical psychologist with degrees from Oxford and Harvard and a Ph.D on what it means to become wiser. He has worked on “complex collective action” problem solving, was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and has run events with David Attenborough and Jordan Peterson (not on the same stage!). Jonathan now runs Perspectiva, a research institute that seeks to understand the relationship between systems, souls, and society. This is a big chat, but I think you’ll find this new and wild idea a helpful navigational tool for, well, “all the things”.

SHOW NOTES

As I flag, my UK friends can preorder This One Wild and Precious Life here.

Follow the Perspectiva community and their various events here.

Jonathan is also on Substack and Twitter.

His latest book The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is out now.

--

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.

Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Olivia Lazard.

--

Olivia Lazard (peace mediator; rare minerals expert) exposes missing chunks in the “green” energy transition that many of us assume to be the “fix” to the climate crisis. Via her work as a fellow at Carnegie Europe and advisor on global security, she explains how the mining and extraction of rare earth metals like lithium, graphite and cobalt - to make the batteries etc for the new green “economy” - are both rare (there’s literally not enough of them to make the transition), come with massive ecological costs (therefore rendering the “clean tech” very dirty), but are also destabilising the world in ways few are able to fathom. This is a very confronting reality, especially for climate activists and green economy evangelists.

In this chat we go deep and wide into climate security issues, pull apart the techno-optimist “but AI and innovation will save us!” mindset, and what we really need to know about geo-engineering. This, on paper, sounds like a very “head-y” conversation, but Olivia also weaves in “heart” considerations that I think many of you are aching for in this debate. At the end, we discuss whether we have “hope”.

SHOW NOTES

Connect with Olivia on X / Twitter

Check out Olivia’s TED talk to see the charts she talks about.

--

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.

Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Nate Hagens.

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Nate Hagens (mindblowing energy futurist) was working on Wall Street when he realised…we don’t have enough energy to fund the world’s economy! Massive pivot ensued and he is now the global leader in energy systems, director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, on the board of the Post Carbon Institute, teaches an honours course, aptly titled Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota, oh and he also advises governments and institutes around the world on the future of energy!

Nate and I met at a conference in Stockholm to address these very (meta)modern issues. In this chat we talk about how green growth is not possible, EVs are not the answer, and he makes a numbers-crunched case for how to live once collapse occurs, what he calls the “Great Simplification”. This is a big one. It changes (mostly) everything, including my own ideas about the climate crisis.

SHOW NOTES

You can learn more about Nate's work here and listen to his podcast here

I also mention previous episodes with Tyson Yunkaporta, Douglas Rushkoff and Gaya Herrington

--

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.

Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Meg Wheatley.

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Margaret Wheatley (collapse theorist, global leadership consultant) is something of a legend in her field. She has worked for 50 years helping humans adapt to their world using systems analysis, chaos theory and deep spiritualism. Poets, scientists and philosophers quote her writing, she has worked in countless disaster situations and was commissioned to transform the leadership of large institutions. Plus she’s the author of 12 books, including Who Do We Choose to Be? andRestoring Sanity.

This is a challenging conversation and the subject has its deniers. Meg steers our focus to becoming the leaders we want to see amid the cascading crises facing the world and to create “islands of sanity” amid the despair. In this conversation, we cover the responsibility of the rich, why it’s redundant to talk about saving the world, and how to sit in despair and create a meaningful life from it all.

SHOW NOTES

Meg references the poet David Whyte who has also been a guest on Wild

You can purchase Who Do We Choose to Be? now and Restoring Sanity 

Find out about her workshops and events here

--

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.

Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Gaya Herrington.

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Gaya Herrington (Club of Rome adviser, “global collapse” expert) hit the headlines when she showed that a world-stopping 1972 MIT study and bestselling book predicting the collapse of civilisation by 2040 was…right on track. She was a KPMG economist and financial advisor to the Dutch government when she released the report in 2021. I read it and was left speechless.

Gaya’s now just published a book, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse, which sets out a bunch of surprising ways we might be able to save ourselves in time. Gaya’s message is stark: Economic growth must stop now! We are hitting the global limits of our more-more-more approach and the decline will be fast. What does the data tell us that can save us? The answer won’t be what you’re expecting. In this chat we flesh out how systems theory works, why we’re obsessed with growth and why rich white men resist change the most.

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of the book Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

Feel free to read the now-famous 1972 paper The Limits to Growth

I mention the chat about the Indigenous knowledge system with Tyson Yunkaporta, you can listen to it here

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Jem Bendell (collapse “poster kid”, academic) wrote the paper that launched the “Deep Adaptation” movement and spawned Extinction Rebellion. That was in 2018. The paper argued that societal collapse was unavoidable and would happen in our lifetimes, probably before the end of the 2030s, and it went very, very viral.

The University of Cumbria Emeritus Professor and co-founder of the International Scholars’ Warning on Societal Disruption and Collapse has now released a new book, Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse,  which confirms the worst, but also provides, as per the subtitle, a path for a despairing soul to live beautifully beyond the doom.

This conversation is confronting and Jem’s honesty is brutal. He warns of food collapse in the next three years and that the economy could go (and our savings rendered worthless) any moment. But he also explains how we can use this reckoning to live a courageous, kind, noble life. For anyone on the collapse awareness journey, this is a crucial listen.

SHOW NOTES

You might want to follow my book serialisation on Substack where we are doing the collapse awareness journey together, one step at a time.

You can catch Jem in Sydney at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on 24-25 August, more details here.

Jem offers a couple of online courses a year, on the topic of Leading Through Collapse.

Here is the post he wrote about Talking to Relatives About Collapse we mentioned

Want to know more, you can engage with Jem via the following:

Find Emotional Support

Visit the Deep Adaptation Forum

Watch some of Jem’s talks

Read his key ideas on collapse

Read his book Breaking Together

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Jean Twenge (psychologist; professor at San Diego State University) is regarded as the world expert on “generations”. She famously described millennials as “Generation Me” (also the name of her 2006 book) and first made the (controversial) connection back in 2017 between smartphones and the sharp uptick in anxiety and depression among Gen Z teens, which has since become one of our culture’s top talking points. In her recent book, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future she explains how themes such as narcissism, individualism, fear and tech addiction play out between the generations (including the Boomers, Xers, and the latest cohort, “the Polars”).

In this chat we cover…Do millennials actually have it harder? Why do 60% of Gen Z girls have mental health problems? Why aren’t young people aren't getting their driver's licenses? Is modern parenting setting kids up for failure? As well as the “slow life” phenomenon.

You can catch Jean in Sydney at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on 24-25 August, speaking at the following talks.

SHOW NOTES

Subscribe to Jean's Substack​, Generation Tech

Here’s the teen mental health post I wrote on Substack

And here’s the Substack post about the difference in young men's and women’s political leanings

Learn more about the Festival of Dangerous Ideas here

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This week I asked fellow substacker Anya Kamenetz to help me answer the above question. Anya is a parent and climate activist, a former NPR journalist and she has written five books loosely related to the mental health of young people in the face of difficulty. She is also the producer of Joanna Macy’s incredible podcast with Jess Serrante, We Are The Great Turning. 

This question - How to parent in the face of collapse and crisis? - comes up often on my Substack and there was a particularly moving thread that opened up last week that spoke to this concern that so many parents have. Here it is, if you would like to read it. The gist is that while we (the adults) might be able to accept what is happening to the world on one level, when we reflect on the kids in our lives an incredible emotional dissonance kicks in. Anya and I talk about how to talk about the crises in front of kids, how to help them with their emotions, why prioritising enjoying the world is key and “parenting as activism”.

SHOW NOTES

Watch the video and join the conversation over on Substack

Subscribe to Anya's Substack

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Greg Lukianoff (New York Times best-selling author, attorney) co-wrote the blockbuster The Coddling of the American Mind, which argued we were failing young people by rendering them fragile victims. Then, 10 days after October 7, he came out with the first book to comprehensively track the rise of cancel culture -The Canceling of the American Mind. 

Greg, who’s also CEO of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions) and I talk through the confused aetiology of cancel culture and free speech, why the debate has been weaponised by both the Left and Right and he also outlines a bunch of solutions for parents wishing to raise kids who won’t buy into it. I am far from a free speech absolutist and take issue with America’s obsession with the First Amendment, but the subject fascinates me because it exposes so many other fault lines in our society that need to be understood urgently. 

SHOW NOTES

You can learn more about FIRE here

Subscribe to Greg's Substack

Greg's new book The Canceling of the American Mind is available now

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Jenny Odell (NYT bestseller, artist) wrote a bestselling book five years ago that Barack Obama declared one of his “books of the year”. “How to Do Nothing” stuck two fingers up to the productivity industry. Jenny followed it up with the recently published, “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond The Clock” that argues the original problem is our framing of time as a bunch of units we own, spend, must be efficient with etc.

In this chat, Jenny explains that how we relate to time is our choice and she – fascinatingly – shows how radically rejecting our current take on time (and the productivity bro’ efficiency hacks) can help us navigate climate dread, the capitalist trap and our collective sense of disconnect.

SHOW NOTES

Jenny's book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock is available now

Connect with Jenny on Instagram and keep up to date via her website

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OK, this week is a kind of personal and also sociological muse-fest (from someone who's been on ALL the apps since shortly after the last ice age). I cover how I first went on the apps in 2010 (and share what I wrote about it at the time), about my experiences on Raya and, yes, on the latest app people are talking about, Feeld. I had to drop my shame for this one. However, I include a bunch of sociological perspectives and reflections some of you might find useful (and very familiar).

Note, I’m making the Substack version of this episode free for everyone. Over there you can find all the links to the articles I reference.

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Frank Ostaseski (Buddhist; end-of-life teacher; elder) helps people die best. He has accompanied over 1,000 people through the dying process and trained thousands of healthcare clinicians and family caregivers around the world. He was also a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and has taught at Google and Apple Inc., has been honoured by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and appeared on Oprah and Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast. I asked Frank to join me to talk through his book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully.

Death, grief and loss are always with us, but I feel we are needing moral and spiritual guidance more than ever (every 6-12 months or so I try to cover this issue on Wild, generally aligning with a dialling up in world events). In this chat Frank and I talk through simple techniques for coping with the loss we’re feeling watching the carnage in Gaza, witnessing climate destruction and polarisation.

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of The Five Invitations

Here’s Frank Ostaseski's website where you can find a bunch of resources

You might like to listen to the interview I did with death walker Stephen Jenkinson

And this conversation with Clancy Martin about grief and suicide

As well as my glorious chat with Sister Helen Prejean and the other death row episode with Devin Moss

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I need to give everyone here a bunch of updates…Plus, the BONUS video episode I promised with Dr Louise Newson is now live. Louise answers your questions about libido, whether to take HRT, how to manage menopause when you have Hashimotos etc, you can find it here.

SHOW NOTES

Here’s the Wild chat about perimenopause and menopause with Dr Louise Newson from earlier this week.

Here’s more information about my news…(hint: a new book which you can be part of, STARTING NEXT WEEK).

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Dr Louise Newson (British GP; hormone specialist) is regarded as the “medic who kickstarted the menopause revolution”. For two decades women have been denied treatment for a debilitating condition that affects more than half the population, thanks to one (faulty) study that linked hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to cancer. Louise has been on a mission to undo the damage and educate women on their real choices.

In this chat, I try to cover off what every woman I know is asking right now:

NOTE: The next episode is a follow-up, where I get Louise to answer the granular, intimate menopause questions posed by theSubstackcommunity! Don’t miss it.

SHOW NOTES

To connect with Louise, and to check out her resources on menopause and peri-menopause, follow this link

You can download Louise's Balance app here

Get hold of her books here

And here’s that New York Times article on menopause

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Today’s question is one I always love answering…what do I stuff into my backpack, and what backpack do I actually use (ditto hiking shoes, tent, gear etc)?

I do a show and tell for this one, so the video version over at Substack probably makes sense. I throw in some minimalist hacks, too.

SHOW NOTES

Join the conversation over on Substack and post your own Ask Me Anything here

Book your one-on-one with me here

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Parag Khanna (climate migration expert; AI founder) is a global strategist who forecasts human movement around the world and has a company, Climate Alpha, that predicts real estate values based on exposure to climate risk. He’s also recently published a book - MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us  - that details how billions of us will be migrating, and living nomadically, within this century.

Parag has been named one of Esquire's "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century" and featured in Wired magazine's "Smart List" and has written several books on empires, global order, the future of conflict and migration… you get the drift. As fertility declines and large slabs of the planet go underwater or become too hot and too uninsurable (in a property sense), we’re left to ask, where in the world should we live? And, should we bother “investing” in real estate anymore? Parag answers both, plus how we should be future-proofing our kids and why the best place to live is where the young people are flocking.

SHOW NOTES

Visit Parag's website to learn more and find all his books here

Catch up on my recent episode on Doughnut Economics with Kate Raworth

Here’s the Substack post I wrote explaining fertility collapse where you can also post further questions you might have.

And here’s the AMA episode I did on buying real estate in 2024.

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In today’s AMA, I cover an intriguing phenomenon in male-female dynamics playing out in the dark, twisted underworld that is dating culture - hypergamy. The phenomenon that has existed for eons whereby women date/marry “up” in educational status, income, age, height etc and men tend to partner “down”. Where does this sit today with a generation dating online? Plus, does it explain (or not) why some older women partner with younger men?

I explain how I’ve been tracking this phenomenon for exactly 20 years, through “man droughts”, the “baby bonus”, Sex and the City tropes and more.

SHOW NOTES

Join the conversation over on Substack and post your own Ask Me Anything here.

I mentioned my Gaza post over on Substack, you can read it here

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Olivia Lazard (peace mediator; rare minerals expert) exposes missing chunks in the “green” energy transition that many of us assume to be the “fix” to the climate crisis. Via her work as a fellow at Carnegie Europe and advisor on global security, she explains how the mining and extraction of rare earth metals like lithium, graphite and cobalt - to make the batteries etc for the new green “economy” - are both rare (there’s literally not enough of them to make the transition), come with massive ecological costs (therefore rendering the “clean tech” very dirty), but are also destabilising the world in ways few are able to fathom. This is a very confronting reality, especially for climate activists and green economy evangelists.

In this chat we go deep and wide into climate security issues, pull apart the techno-optimist “but AI and innovation will save us!” mindset, and what we really need to know about geo-engineering. This, on paper, sounds like a very “head-y” conversation, but Olivia also weaves in “heart” considerations that I think many of you are aching for in this debate. At the end, we discuss whether we have “hope”.

SHOW NOTES

Connect with Olivia on X / Twitter

Check out Olivia’s TED talk to see the charts she talks about.

Listen to Nate Hagen on WILD here and Douglas Rushkoff here

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A cracking Ask Me Anything question this week that gives us a chance to talk about crazy-making tech bros and their antics. My answer sees me dive into p(doom) numbers, Freud, techno-optimistic manifestos and fertility collapse. Fun! 

Join the conversation over on Substack and post your own Ask Me Anything here.

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Kate Raworth (“renegade” economist; inventor of the “doughnut” systems model) has one of the most dynamic and controversial theories for “fixing” or adjusting to the planetary mess we’re in. Back in 2017 she released her book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist and it became a cult read – the Pope, Extinction Rebellion and the UN General Assembly praise it. It designs an economy that allows humans to flourish while ALSO not destroying the planet – existing within the planetary boundaries.

In this chat, Kate, an Oxford professor and Club of Rome member, and I talk about how the current economic model is fundamentally flawed (all those supply/demand and growth models have never been peer-reviewed!), how to debunk a Stephen Pinker disciple and how to balance the reality of looming (locked-in) collapse and living fully (the two are actually connected). Kate is a brilliant delight of a human – this chat is fun.

SHOW NOTES

Find visuals of a “rational economic man” and her doughnut head here

You can find out if your city has or is taking part in the Doughnut Economics Action Lab

If you’re from Melbourne, check out Regen Melbourne and Kate also mentions Takethejump.org

Here’s the chat with Nate Hagens on energy collapse

Here’s my Wild episode withJason Hickle on degrowth economics

Here’s my chat with Gaya Harrington about the Limits to Growth report

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On today's AMA, I share my hacks and my “mindset” for sifting through, retaining and managing all the data inflow (amino supplements, tilting, biting off more than I can chew as a tactic and advice gleaned from systems thinkers). And I wade into when to speak out and when not to wade into a rally and take the mic (and the responsibility that comes with being a privileged white woman who looks as tame as a mum from an OMO commercial).

SHOW NOTES

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Johann Hari (bestselling author Stolen Focus and Lost Connections) has written another system-rattling book, this time about the new weight loss drugs that everyone is both talking about AND not talking about. I’ve been wanting a wild mind to come chat about the phenomenon for over a year. Johann happened to reach out and tell me he’d been experimenting with Ozempic, had travelled the world interviewing 100-plus experts on the matter and was up for a chat.

In this conversation, we talk through what he lays out in his book Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. We cover how the drugs work on our biology; the emerging risks; how the rich are the guinea pigs in this particular science experiment; the implications of a world with no appetite (“What will become of the dinner party?”); and the fact these drugs mask the real problem – how Big Food manipulates our hormones with their Franken-foods. And, so, here we are again, told to fix a systemic problem with the same mindset that caused it in the first place (ie: manipulating nature with additives for profit). The Ozempic debate is a lot. This chat goes there!

SHOW NOTES

Johann's book Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs is available now

Connect with Johann on Instagram and buy his books here

Listen to my Wild chat about Ultra-Processed Food with Dr Chris van Tulleken

Read my Substack post on the Ozempic “divide” here

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As we become aware of climate collapse and its ripple effect on the financial and energy systems, and as houses become uninsurable and fossil fuel markets get wobbly, do things like investing, mortgages, and retirement savings become moot?

A Substack reader asks me how I’m personally prioritising these things, and I answer candidly. The chat moves into prepping and homesteading considerations. Background posts and pods about collapse are provided over at Substack, where you can WATCH these bonus episodes and join a conversation afterwards in the thread (and post a question for future AMAs).

SHOW NOTES

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Annabel Abbs (English novelist; author of Sleepless) was crippled with insomnia. Rather than fight it she looked for its productive plus side and discovered that many incredible creatives have needed to stay awake to access their best selves – their Night Selves. Particularly women, as it turns out. Annabel chats to me about how famous writers, painters and Hollywood stars have used their sleeplessness to create their best work, and the science that explains why this happens  - the role hormones play, how the nocturnal quietening of the prefrontal cortex affects women’s ability to access their creative courage and how we can access our body’s hallucinogens! We also cover why it’s good to stay awake in a full moon, why women need to invest in blackout curtains (to cut their cancer risk!) and the role of feminist rage in all this!

SHOW NOTES

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Isabelle Reinecke (founder Grata Fund) is leading a super exciting landmark legal case that could force the Australian Government to actually stick to its climate commitments and stop approving fossil fuel projects immediately. By as early as the end of this year. Seriously!  It’s called the Uncles Australian Climate Case (it’s being brought by two Torres Strait Islander elders) and it’s being referred to as “Bigger than Mabo” (if it wins). There is a lot of international attention on it and it’s being supported by a team that led a similar (successful) case in The Netherlands.

This is a short, straight-to-the-point episode to get you abreast of this monumental opportunity for change so you know what to do to support it. Let’s do it!

SHOW NOTES

You can watch our chat and learn more about the case over on my Substack

You can get involved by sharing this podcast with everyone you know and sharing any news items, social media shares etc.

Social media accounts you can follow: 

You can sign the pledge and engage further HERE!

The Good Weekend did a cover story on the case, read it here

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Anna Funder (international bestselling author of Wifedom) pens books about power. She is the author of the international bestsellers Stasiland, about the Stasi, which is being made into a TV series starring Elizabeth Debicki, and All That I Am, about the Nazis, which won the Miles Franklin Award. Her latest book, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, sees Anna take on the patriarchy. She exposes how literary giant George Orwell wrote his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy “out of existence”, despite (and possibly because of) her pivotal role in his work.

Anna and I talk through Orwell’s misogyny and his own “doublethink” (believing two contradictory ideas while blanking out awareness of the contradiction), plus how doublethink works to keep patriarchy going. We dig into the delicate issue of the cancellation of these kinds of figures (we both agree they shouldn’t be), the passive voice technique, why women must “claim their pronouns”, the power structure difference between France and Australia and how women write books.

SHOW NOTES

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In last week’s interview with a Palestinian and an Israeli Father, I promised to share how we met, a story that involves a famous actor, an Irish author and a bizarre email chain that starts in the Australian outback. Here it is. For some fun. And to remind us all of the power of story and of reaching out to humanity.

SHOW NOTES

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Helen Lewis (The Atlantic columnist, BBC podcaster, pop culture decoder) has become a darling of the heterodox podcasting community (and this podcast; catch my previous Wild chat with her about THAT GQ interview with Jordan Peterson here), and, relatedly, a pet target of the extreme Right and Left’s ongoing cancelling zeal.

In this interview, I invite Helen to talk through several very online eruptions that are crucial for fathoming what the hell is going on in the world today. We cover the feminist-trans wars playing out on “TERF Island”; why Kara Swisher has fallen out with Elon Musk and why the Left failed the October 7 “Hamas test”. Mostly this is a conversation about the role of discerning dialogue when the extreme Left and Right are dominating the online arena.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan (peace activists with Parent’s Circle) are the two protagonists from Colum McCann’s Booker-Prize-longlisted book Apeirogon. Both lost their daughters to the conflict, ten years apart. Yet in spite of – or because of - this horror they became dedicated friends, or “brothers”, committed to opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine and working with “the enemy” via Parent’s Circle, a peace group set up for parents from “both sides” who’ve lost a child.

I spoke to Bassam and Rami on day #169 in the conflict and they’d just come from seeing the Pope. We cover how Bassam decided to study the Holocaust while imprisoned in an Israeli jail as a teenager for seven years, why Israelis are trapped by their victimhood and how we’ve all been locked into seeing this conflict as a football game of two sides.

This interview is a chapter in an incredible story that involves a big-time Hollywood actor, who reached out to me while I was camping in remote Western Australia, a secondhand book find, a six-way email chain and an incredible love that reaches across history, walls and global fragmentation. 

NOTE: I will cover the very intersecting story of how we (the dads, Colum, the actor and I met) in the next episode. 

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Liv Boeree (world poker champion; astrophysicist; game theorist) is on a mission to explain why we are all trapped in a zero-sum, race to the bottom…with climate, AI, social media and politics. Why do we keep digging up resources, consuming carbon, getting stuck in nasty online spats and building robots that could kill us? Why don’t we just STOP?? Why CAN’T we just STOP?!

It’s because of "moloch" – a game theory "force" that sees us do something we know is bad for us - because everyone else is doing it and if stop we’ll be disadvantaged - until we wind up ruining everything for everyone. I’ve been exploring this concept for a while and invited Liv to talk about her antidote to “competition gone wrong”, which I think will intuitively gel for many of you. In this chat we talk about the death spiral of beauty filters, why AI is repeating the nuclear arms race and the joy we share for steadfastly searching for a win-win solution that will see us in a race to the TOP.

SHOW NOTES

Subscribe to Liv’s Substack

Follow Liv on Instagram and via her YouTube Channel

Read my original Substack post about Moloch 

Listen to the Wild episode with Meg Wheatley on civilisation collapse

Watch the beauty fillers video Liv produced The Moloch Trap of AI Beauty Filters and Is the Media Moloch Driving Us Mad?

Read Scott Alexander’s Moloch essay we talk about

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Substack subscribers have posed some beautiful thought-provoking questions this week. Do I suffer from a broken heart and how do I cope with it at a spiritual level? Do I stand by my I Quit Sugar message all these years later, particularly given an awareness of the triggering effect of restrictive messages? And where do we draw the line when someone we love uses the “mental illness card” to justify piss-poor behaviour. I recorded this with my long-suffering assistant Liana who I got to hang with yesterday.

Access the full recording on Substack and join the conversation in the comment section and don't forget to add your questions to the AMA thread.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Prof. Joel Pearson(Neuroscientist; AI and intuition expert) developed the first scientific test to measure intuition, dragging it out of the woo-woo realm and into a cognitive framework. He’s now written The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why to show us how and when to use this mysterious superpower in our lives (not while rock-climbing on a date, not at a casino!).

Joel is the founder and Director of Future Minds Lab which applies neuroscience findings to art, AI, media, advertising and various philosophical quandaries. He’s also a National Health and Medical Research Council fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

In this chat we cover when and how to use intuition, why intuition is hijacked by anxiety and depression, whether AI will ever be able to have intuition, aphantasia and a bunch of deep, wide questions about what it means to be human, including the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Mostly, Joel is a great conversationalist, someone you’d want to sit next to at a dinner party.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Peter Frankopan (Silk Roads author, Oxford historian) has just written a mega-history book called The Earth Transformed that reframes human history not via various major battles and legendary leaders but through a climate lens. Floods, droughts and, invariably, a volcano or two, dictated the fall of the Roman Empire, the fate of Cleopatra, the rise of gossip and beer halls, slavery and the different flavours of religion that exist around the world.

I was keen to talk to Peter to find out what we might be able to learn from the past about adapting and surviving climate upheavals, what the factors that saw climate destroy some civilisations and not others and what it means to live in an era where climate calamities are global in scale, as are all the fundamental aspects of society – trade, finance, disease routes, warfare capabilities. Oh, and at the end we talk about what is entailed in writing a book that’s more than 600-pages!

This conversation feeds into previous episodes about limits to growth with the Club of Rome’s Gaya Harrington and collapse theories with Meg Wheatley.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Today’s question has come in from many of you over recent weeks. It’s an important one to ask as we grapple with the horror in the Middle East and our sense of powerlessness, as leaders around the world seem immobilised by geopolitical interests. I’ve invited Palestinian peace broker Aziz Abu Sarah to help answer it. Aziz is one of the world's most powerful and connected peacebuilders. He’s a National Geographic Explorer and Ted Fellow. He has founded and led countless global conflict resolution organisations and helped broker peace deals in more than 60 nations, including Syria and Afghanistan.

I put it to him: Is there a role that those of us outside the region can play that will actually help, not hinder, the ultimate cause – peace and the cessation of the bloodshed and humanitarian disaster? What is the right thing to do on social media? What should we post and not post? Do protests, boycotts, and petitions work at this point? And is peace possible any time soon? I learned a lot more than I expected to from this chat – some of Aziz’s answers are very very confronting. Strap in for this one, dear friends. It’s big and hard. It’s also longer than my normal AMAs (and forgive me for the sound quality - I don’t quite have the budget yet for a producer for these Friday episodes!).

I encourage you to head over to my Substack for additional content, including:

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Dr Kelly Weinersmith (behavioural ecologist and space expert) and her husband Zach have just spent four years researching a subject that perplexes many of us – why all the fuss about moving to Mars? Which begs, can we actually build a human settlement on Mars? And, would we want to?

They share their findings in their new book A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? which became an instantNew York Times bestseller and Scientific American’s #1 Book for 2023.

Kelly, an adjunct with Rice University in Texas, joins me to talk through both the broad and the granular implications of what I think amounts to a “destroy and run” attitude to our relationship with Earth. I have a lot of questions, like: What’s with the tech bros and their obsession with living on a dusty, toxic planet? Who would “own” space settlements? Who would control the oxygen? Surely we’re not going to let Elon run rampant with this? And can you actually have sex in space? If you’re after a TL;DR, Kelly concludes: “Space: quite bad”.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Devin Moss (atheist chaplain and humanist) late last year ministered a convicted murderer to his death by execution in the state of Oklahoma. Significantly he provided the prisoner, Phillip Hancock, spiritual counsel for more than a year, and “prayed” with him in the execution room…all without drawing on notions of an afterlife or a forgiving God entity. Which begs, what does spiritual counsel look like without “God” and the promise of hope that comes with It? What can be turned to? What are the practices and consolations that work to provide peace and cosmic perspective in the face of this final terror?

In this chat, Devin and I talk about humanist approaches to death and, to life more broadly. This is a conversation for everyone (all of us?) grappling with a world facing increased existential threats.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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I’ve been doing a bunch of Substack meetups around Australia over the past few weeks (the Sydney and Northern NSW ones are happening in March and you can register in the Substack post here). And several people in the community have posed some related questions to do with balancing where the world is at with your need for creative freedom, our own mental health, our tendency to run from hard topics and emotions. Yes, we MUST create and make art in these difficult, “liminal” times. I reference Teju Cole and late 19th-century philosophers to make my case.

I also answer:

I share how I’ve been navigating things, lying awake many nights in a row, trying to rise to the challenges inherent in these questions.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Maggie Jackson (award-winning author and journalist) has just written a book - Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure – that argues that while humans crave certainty, we actually experience a less anxious, more productive, happier life when we embrace not knowing.

Maggie is known for her writing on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. She’s written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and New Philosopher.  But her latest work draws on a wave of new science that shows how building “uncertainty tolerance” (instead of running from what we don’t know or can’t get an immediate answer or fix for) is an antidote to the dangerous complexity of our times. Maggie and I chat about the wild idea of ocean swimming, using hedge words and actively championing leaders who say, “I don’t know” as ways to save humanity.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More than 43,000 studies have been done to show how and why walking in nature (hiking) has so many mental and physical benefits. In this episode, prompted by listener Stefan’s question that came through on Substack, I talk through my favourite explainers and how it plays out for me.

Conservatively, I would say I have done more than 500 hikes in my lifetime…and can vouch for the fact… it just works. Start walking and the movement, the phytoncides, and the fractals do their work on you.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maggie Dent (the “queen of common sense”;  parenting expert) raised four sons, largely solo, and went on to write about her experiences and lessons learned. She soon became highly sought after for her candid and loving take on raising young men (she’s also known as the “boy champion”). Maggie is host of The Good Enough Dad and Parental As Anything podcasts, and the author of nine books, including her bestselling boys’ books From Boys to Men and Mothering Our Boys.

I’ve been doing an occasional series here on Wild addressing the issues affecting boys and men and was super keen to get Maggie on to answer some of the questions that keep coming up. Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions for Maggie.

In this episode we cover where the issues are stemming from, how we can benefit from boys’ “aggression nurturance”, what good men can be doing to plug the “Andrew Tate gap”, why parents need to buy boys a guinea pig, the need for a bro podcast on hacks for being an uber-productive life partner… and why mums need to fart in front of their sons!

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Did you see the results of the survey published in the Financial Times that showed there is a growing political gap between millennial men and women? I was asked this week what my thoughts were, what’s causing the drift in both directions and other gaps, between young people, should we be worried and what to do?

I reference lots of different articles and data and put all the links over at Substack where you have the option to WATCH these bonus episodes and you can also join a conversation afterwards in the thread (and post a question for future AMAs).

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Chris van Tulleken (doctor, TV host) is a London infectious diseases specialist known for his popular BBC health TV programs that he hosts with his identical twin brother (including the kids series Operation Ouch; they’ve won two BAFTAs). In his recent book Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?, which has been a #1 Sunday Times bestseller for 9 weeks, he exposes how ultra-processed food (AKA junk food) is making us fat and sick, destroying the planet, eradicating traditional cultures, shrinking our faces and making us infertile.

We talk about why Pringles are “crack in a cardboard tube”, why he thinks sugar and a lack of exercise are not the problem (!) and instead how the issue is the fact Big Food does NOTHING BUT refine their “profit-making product” to make us more perfectly addicted to it and to eat greater quantities. We also cover how to spot the worst food offenders and how the best fix for beating weight gain is to turn addiction into disgust.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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A quick, breezy episode that talks about how to navigate decision-making regret, honing in on landing in one's post-repro years and not having had kids. Thank you Megan from my Substack community who sent in the question: Do you regret not having had kids?

You have the option to WATCH these bonus episodes over on Substack where you can also join a conversation afterwards in the thread (and post a question for future AMAs. I also post extra content, extracts from my book etc here. When you become a paid subscriber, you get access to bonus intimate conversations with me, as well as access to my one-on-one online coffee (or wine) sessions. This is how I’m doing things from now on – real, raw, intimate… and provocative. 

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram and WeAre8

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Alain de Botton (School of Life founder; author) has written 15 books about the philosophy of living – such as The Art of Travel; Status Anxiety; Art as Therapy; and The Course of Love – but he has recently turned his focus to mental health and how philosophy can be used as a therapeutic aid. Alain argues that a mental breakdown can provide the opening a despairing soul seeks. Indeed, anxiety so often is its own fix.

We sat down in WeAre8’s London office for this two-way conversation about the philosophical wisdoms we personally use to have a life of meaning in the face of despair. We also talk about the writing process (and why it’s a salve), the healing effects of figs and dark chocolate, how to love, plus a super fresh take on “adult boredom” (embrace your impatience, get to the point!).

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over the Australian summer, I’ve been picking out some cracker eps that you might have missed or would benefit from revisiting. This chat with Beau Miles, a Patagonia and Outward Bound ambassador, author and YouTube star, is perfectly calibrated to keep the holiday spirit alive just a little longer.

Beau used to be a mad explorer – he’s indeed conquered Everest base camp, became the first person to run 650kms across the Australian Alps, kayaked Bass Strait and the rest. But a few years back he made the switch to exploring the world closer to home and now inspires a league of fans who froth over his mad-as videos of running the length of the old Warragul-Noojee Railway line to learn its history (dressed in a train driver uniform, carrying a shovel and three jars of dried pasta, just to chuck a hardship bomb into the equation), eating his body weight in beans (to see what happens), and spending a night in the tree outside his front door. This is more of a fun two-way chat where the two of us compare notes on flipping your day-to-day life into a flirtation, getting out of life ruts, playing and loving being weird.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Wild is having a bit of a break as the New Year gets started and we’ll be running a bunch of important or really poignant episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Last year I lost my dear friend Tim Brown, my meditation teacher and confidente. He was an incredibly wise man and impacted a lot of people …some of you listening might have read my books - his wisdom and reality checks feature throughout…I don’t know how many times I’ve started with the sentence..as my meditation teacher Tim once said. Anyway, this episode in which he and I talk back and forth on …life…is very special to me and I feel his legacy needs to live on, joyfully, and playfully. 

SHOW NOTES

The movie we mention, Groundhog Day

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

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Wild is having a break for a few weeks as the New Year gets started and we’ll be running a bunch of my favourite episodes that you might have missed along the way.

I’ve chosen this chat with Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way because her advice is the kind we all need for starting off something new, like a year, a year that’s likely going to require that we have solid footings and an expansive outlook. Happy 2024, everyone!

SHOW NOTES

Julia’s book Seeking Wisdom is available here

You can check out her creative work on her website

In this episode, I also mention my interview about curiosity with DR JUD BREWER and my chat with SETH GODIN about the artist process.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wild will be taking a pause for a few weeks over the summer period and we’ll be running a bunch of my favourite episodes that you might have missed along the way.

I feel given everything going on in the world it's appropriate to share my interview with Aziz Abu Sarah, a palestinian arab peace broker who knows and and has lived, or lives, the conflict in Israel and Palestine. So much noise, so much horror and so hard to comprehend the pain and the complexity…But Aziz provides the most compassionate, humane throughline I’ve come across.

SHOW NOTES

Aziz’s dual narrative tour business is Mejdi Tours and he ran this tour with Impact Safari

He’s also written a book that shows how to travel as a force for peace  

I ran a bunch of other interviews with peacebuilders while I was there, which you can find on my substack 

And here are the organisations employing the dual narrative approach that I promised to list:

Combatants for Peace 

Bereaved Families Forum 

Interact International 

Hands of Peace 

Healing Across the Divides 

Creativity for Peace

Tech for Peace

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram

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Wild will be taking a pause for a few weeks over the summer period and we’ll be running a bunch of my favourite episodes that you might have missed along the way.

I’ve chosen this chat with poet Bayo Akomalafe because it is DENSE with advice for complex times, times in which humanity struggles to encapsulate things with tidy answers. Bayo riffs in this ep with the most uplifting advice for “relaxing into our entanglement with the world” and joining the chaos. Forever timely.

Happy Christmas slash school holidays slash summer break if you’re in Australia, etc.

SHOW NOTES

You can connect with Bayo via his website and Twitter 

Here is the poem I ask Bayo to read out 

And here is the essay What Climate Collapse Asks of Us 

He references Ursula K Le Guin’s book The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram

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Wild will be taking a pause for a few weeks over the summer period and we’ll be running a bunch of my favourite episodes that you might have missed along the way.

I know a bunch of you have watched the Netflix series Blue Zones and some of you know that I worked on the project briefly and became friends with the National Geographic explorer - Dan Buettner who coined the term, wrote the book and started in the series. We actually caught up for dinner in Paris recently - we try to find each other in the world when we can to talk not so much about longevity, but how to max a life, short or long. I hope you enjoy this one...OH and if listening on a road trip heading off on Christmas holidays or some such and ur in the passenger seat…please do take a minute to rate Wild, give it a review share it amongst your friends. It helps out a lot. 

SHOW NOTES

Get Dan's latest book, The Blue Zone Challenge here

Watch Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones on Netflix

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram

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David Brooks (New York Times columnist; best-selling author) is both one of America’s best-known conservative commentators and one of its most committed to pushing the case for deep moral discussion. David’s also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and NBC’s “Meet the Press”, has 30 honorary doctorates, is a teacher at Yale and is something of a regular guest on Oprah, the Sam Harris podcast and so on. He wrote the books The Road to Character, The Second Mountain and the recently published How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

In this nourishing conversation we discuss whether humanism – coming back to moral, generous interactions with others – is the fix for our polarising times. We discuss whether you can be “right” with the Middle East conflict, the best-ever dinner party conversation starters (the only kind I’m interested in doing), and whether civilizational collapse is preventable. He has ideas…

SHOW NOTES

David's book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seeis available now, along with The Road to Character and The Second Mountain.

If you would like to read more of David's work:

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Recently I was interviewed on the popular British podcast A Life More Wild which interviews prominent (mostly British) folk about what matters in life WHILE they hike in a favourite locale in the UK. It’s run by the outdoor holiday company Canopy & Stars, which is part of the Alastair Sawday Group (they publish a massive range of hiking guides).

For this episode, we do a circuit track in the Chiltern Hills (“Area of Outstanding Beauty”) in Buckinghamshire, about an hour out of London. I chose this one because it starts and finishes at a pub, passes by a very cute church that serves tea and scones on weekends and does a loop around the Prime Minister's holiday residence - Chequers. I share my various theories, tips and tricks for hiking in the chat amid birdsong and churchbells.

SHOW NOTES

Here's the trail I did.

For more inspiring stories, simply search for A Life More Wild on your favourite podcast app. Don't forget to follow Canopy & Stars on Instagram for additional content.

I have shared a bunch of epic hikes that I had done over the years, including all the details for accommodation, where to eat etc. You. can check them out over on my Substack: I’ve done a bunch of amazing multi-day Australian ones, several in the UK, Europe and more. 

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Hannah Barnes (BBC journalist; exposed the “Tavistock Clinic” scandal) has become the somewhat reluctant global voice on the raging child transgender debate. In her award-winning BBC investigation, and in her new book, Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, she investigates how the UK Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at Tavistock Clinic in London referred more than 1200 kids, some as young 9 years old for treatment to block puberty, largely in the absence of data and research about its safety and efficacy. Her research highlighted a whole range of complex issues about the well-being of teens, trans people and our culture broadly.

In this chat, Hannah and I cover how 35 per cent of gender dysphoric teens are autistic, the massive uptick in kids identifying as trans worldwide (one study reports a 1000% increase in young people identifying as trans or nonbinary), and the important reasons why there are suddenly way more girls than boys wanting to transition.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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In this episode of Ask Me Anything I answer three questions: 

How should I do the massive cleanout of my life - to Kondo or to Wilson? What does your life in Paris look like? How do you find accommodation (in Paris and beyond) when travelling (or just living nomadically)?

I cover a bunch of links that you can get over at my Substack page. You can watch the video version there, too, where I show how I reworked a dress I’ve worn every summer since I was 21 and take the opportunity to give my denim shorts, which I’ve had for 18 years, a send-off.

SHOW NOTES

You can get hold of my Simplicious books here

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Connor Beaton (men’s coach, porn addict mentor) helps men face their shadows. The US author and podcaster has coached thousands of men on “how to be good at being men”. The masculinity crisis is a persistent theme here on Wild (and in the world) and so I am having these chats to better understand it and how it impacts all of us.

I asked Connor to join us to chat about porn – what it’s doing to men, what is not being satisfied and how it’s affecting relationships. We also cover why boys flock to Andrew Tate, what women really mean when they say they want a man to be vulnerable and what happens in relationships when women earn more than the bloke.

If there are any specific angles or experts on men and masculinity you’d like covered here, do let me know over in my Substack comments.

SHOW NOTES

You can follow Connor on Instagram and listen to his podcast Man Talks

Get hold of his book Man Talks: A Practical Guide to Face Your Darkness, End Self Sabotage and Find Freedom

Learn more via his website

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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This week’s question comes from concerned mum Emma, but it’s one that is cropping up a lot - What to do about the burden young people are shouldering in the face of a crumbling world? Emma is worried her 16-year-old activist son is taking on too much and she’s worried about his climate anxiety.

Research shows one-third of young people have sought counselling or medical help for eco-anxiety. However, my answer to Emma and her son takes a different direction. What if kids are pissed off and we, the adults, are projecting OUR anxiety (and shame?) onto them? I also cover my recent warm jacket purchase and why it is so very not French-fashionable.

SHOW NOTES

I mention in this rant the previous Wild podcast episodes with Meg Wheatley and Paul Hawken and the one with Margaret Klein Salamon.

We will continue the conversation over at my Substack if you’d like to join. It’s here you can also post another AMA question for me.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Paul Hawken (Project Drawdown founder) is the climate activist who, for decades, has shown us how we can *actually* make a difference. He’s been an activist since the 1960s (he was once seized by the KKK), is the most influential voice on corporate sustainability and created the legendary Project Drawdown, which calculated the top 100 actions that bring down CO2 (tl;dr: educating girls and tackling food waste top the list).

Paul's latest project Regeneration (a book and website) takes things even further and provides the world’s largest listing and network of climate solutions geared not at fixing the crisis but rebuilding our sense of connection to the planet.

In this chat, Paul and I talk honestly about why 98% of people are still not changing their behaviour even though we now know the facts AND we are now living IN climate change, whether “drawdown” is possible and how to be most effective as a climate activist in light of all this.

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of Paul’s books Drawdown and Regeneration

Play around on the Regeneration site to find very tangible solutions to things you might be doing or projects you might want to dive into.

Get your copy of This One Wild and Precious Life

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Figured many of you here would like to hear the conversation I had recently with Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals over at the British intellectual podcast Intelligence Squared. It’s one of my favourite podcasts, and so I was supremely thrilled when they invited me to lead an "in conversation” about self-help scepticism. 

Here’s the blurb they ran: Oliver Burkeman is the anti-self-help author that everyone interested in self-help should read. He encourages us to embrace uncertainty and imperfection in a world obsessed with self-improvement and relentless goal-setting. For over ten years he wrote the popular ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’ column for The Guardian and his latest book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Sarah Wilson is the founder of the global ‘I Quit Sugar’ movement, was editor of Cosmopolitan Australia at the age of 29, and has interviewed two Australian prime ministers, Beyoncé, Brené Brown, the Dalai Lama and dozens of moral philosophers, effective altruists and existential risk experts during her career. Her most recent book, This One Wild and Precious Life, won the US Gold Nautilus Prize and describes how she spent three years hiking around the world, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche and Wordsworth and emerging with a blueprint for living a wilder, more connected life. For this episode, Burkeman and Wilson come together at Intelligence Squared for an engaging discussion about the limitations of the traditional self-help industry, the importance of mindfulness, and practical strategies for leading a more balanced and purposeful life.

SHOW NOTES

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Margaret (Meg) Wheatley (collapse theorist, global leadership consultant) is something of a legend in her field. She has worked for 50 years helping humans adapt to their world using systems analysis, chaos theory and deep spiritualism (she’s good friends with one of my heroes the Buddhist monk Pema Chödrön). Poets, scientists and philosophers quote her writing, she has worked in countless disaster situations around the world and was commissioned to transform the leadership of large institutions such as the US Army and the National Park Service. Plus she’s the author of 12 books, including Who Do We Choose to Be? and the forthcoming Restoring Sanity. Meg has also researched the collapse of civilisations throughout history and is a leading voice among a community of scientists, economists, historians and philosophers who are arguing that our civilisation is also currently heading toward collapse.

This is a challenging conversation and the subject has its deniers. Meg steers our focus to becoming the leaders we want to see amid the cascading crises facing the world and to create “islands of sanity” amid the despair. In this conversation, we cover the responsibility of the rich, why it’s redundant to talk about saving the world, and how to sit in despair and create a meaningful life from it all.

Meg and I also recorded a second and even more challenging episode that can be found over at my Substack. In this extra episode we cover how long we’ve got left (when will collapse occur?), how to cope when others are still consuming and distracting themselves away from the issue, how to raise kids in this knowledge, where to live in coming years…

SHOW NOTES

Meg references the poet David Whyte who has also been a guest on Wild

You can purchase Who Do We Choose to Be? now and preorder Restoring Sanity (coming March 2024)

Find out about her workshops and events here

Other Wild conversations with elders: Stephen Jenkinson, Sister Helen Prejean and Margaret Atwood

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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This week’s question comes from long-time reader, frequent and generous commenter Kei Ikeda, but it’s one I’ve been asked a few times - What goes into producing Wild?

My short answer would be: a lot of swirling self-doubt, over-analysis, faking-till-making and ad hoc recording set-ups. Here, I chat (on a cold Paris afternoon) about my recording equipment, how I contact guests, how the costs stack up, how the brand advertising and sponsorship works and more.

I flagged a few previous episodes you might want to catch up on with Sheena Iyengar and Sister Helen Prejean.

In 15 minutes (OK, 20 minutes) I don’t cover everything, so I invite you to ask me anything I missed in the comment section over on Substack. Also, I’ll start a thread on Sunday (again, over at Substack), as suggested by a bunch of you, where we can maybe thrash out a few ways to keep Wild going together. See you there.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Like many of us, Anand Giridharadas (American political commentator, bestselling author) despaired how the world had become stuck in a fractured suckhole and he could no longer convince people to change their hearts and minds to be kinder and better. So he went on a mission to find out how to persuade more effectively, resulting in his recent book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.

In this chat, the former foreign correspondent and New York Times columnist argues this wild idea: Progressives working on issues like race equality and climate (and, um, an Indigenous Voice to parliament) need to give up on political purity and… persuade! This is not your usual “effective communications” thesis. We cover what we can learn from the Russian bot farms, A.O.C. and a cult deprogrammer. This episode comes at a critical time, as many of us are 1. feeling defeatist about progressive/humane discussion today, and 2. seeking techniques to equip us for being of service in a troubled world. 

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of Anands’ book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

Follow Anand at his Substack The.Ink

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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For something a bit different this week, I’m posting an important conversation I had a few days ago via the Small Giants Academy with its co-founder Berry Liberman. Berry is also an impact investor, filmmaker and philanthropist who founded Dumbo Feather magazine on top of all this.

The conversation was titled Sensemaking in the Metacrisis: How to be of service in troubled times and it’s a big, wild, looping and uplifting chat about everything going on.

As with the weekly AMAs, the video version of this interview will be posted over at my Substack and it’s over there that you can engage in a conversation with me, the community and Berry afterwards.

SHOW NOTES

Learn more about Small Giants Academy

Here’s an explainer of Three Horizons that Berry references

You can read about Berry’s reflections on the recent Scandinavian sensemaking trip. Mine are here

Books to delve into: Walking the Tiger by Peter Levine, God is an Octopus by Ben Goldsmith

And someone in the chat asked for “my dancing & running playlist”

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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There are many ways to challenge the AI juggernaut that has been unleashed on the world, but Tracey Spicer (multi-Walkley winning journalist, feminist) tackles it through a gender lens. In her latest book, Man-Made, she shows how the unresolved biases that exist in the world today are being fed into the emerging AI. The implications of this bigotry being embedded into our future are profound and could render any progressive work being done to address consent, pay gaps and so on moot.

Tracey has won two prestigious Walkley Awards in recognition of her journalism work, was awarded the NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year, accepted the Sydney Peace Prize with Tarana Burke for the Me Too Movement, and won the national award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership. We talk about sexbot design, the significance of Siri et al being female, how our period tracker apps put us in danger and how she wrote this book with a crippling case of long covid.

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future

Catch up on the Wild chat with ChatGPT expert and linguist Emily M. Bender

Tracey mentions good work being done by Andrew Leigh MP

We also talk about the work of Caroline Criado-Perez who you can follow on her Substack Invisible Women

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Continuing with this new weekly format, each week I’m answering a hoary question from my Substack community (you can join here and post YOUR hoary - or otherwise - question in the thread).

This week I answer Dan: What do you think of marriage?

I take the opportunity to pull apart those studies that surface every few years that try to tell us that marriage makes you happier. Turns out it makes MEN happier than it does women, and not for very long (about two years). By implication, I also answer why I never got married. My answer has something to do with the Shaman from Eat Pray Love…

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Annie Murphy Paul (US science writer and author of The Extended Mind) recently came out with a bold theory about how we think – we don’t think with our brains, instead, we think with our bodies, feelings, physical spaces and other minds. Her work on the topic won awards, was presented as a TED talk viewed by more than 2.6 million people and has been described by New York Times’ Ezra Klein as having “radical implications”.

In this conversation we discuss how our bodies can read other people’s minds and solve problems when our brains can't, why schools and workplaces stunt our thinking, how to get our clearest thoughts and why all those productivity hacks are…wrong.

I’ll continue the conversation over on my Substack where I’ll share more detail on how I loop.

SHOW NOTES

Annie's book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain is available now.

I refer to my conversation with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor about right-brain thinking, listen here.

And my interview with Tyson Yunkaporta that covers in detail, Indigenous complex thinking.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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News! Sarah is now answering your questions.

No fanfare here…I’m just launching into this by announcing I’ll publish an extra 10-15 minute episode here each week where You Ask Me Anything and I Answer it. Questions are posted via my Substack newsletter which you can subscribe to here. To kick off: SARAH, WHY DID YOU MOVE AWAY FROM AUSTRALIA?

I’ll keep things raw, frank, and short in these episodes. I won’t apologise for the background noises and stumbles. Nor for being contentious. I’m doing these extra episodes to be provocative because that’s what the world demands of us now. I answer this first question by referencing the larrikin myth, the reckoning of the Voice referendum, the way Australia’s land forces its people to “endure”.

You have the option to WATCH these bonus episodes over on Substack where you can also join a conversation afterwards in the thread. When you become a paid subscriber, you get access to bonus, intimate conversations with me as well as access to my one-on-one online coffee (or wine) sessions. 

This is how I’m doing things from now on – real, raw, intimate… and provocative. 

SHOW NOTES

You can watch this in full over on my Substack

Become a paid subscriber to join the thread conversation and submit an Ask Me Anything question for an upcoming ep.

You can book a One-on-One virtual coffee chat with me here

I reference the Larrikin myth episode, a conversation I had with Lech Blaine

Here are my thoughts on the Voice from a recent Substack

Here’s the Nate Hagens episode if you missed it

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Missy Sims (TikToker, Republican, lawyer taking down Fossil Fuel companies) could be described as the modern-day Erin Brockovich. Late last year she filed a world-first lawsuit on behalf of Puerto Rican municipalities against Exxon, Chevron and Shell. Claiming the atmosphere-destroying emissions they produced were directly responsible for the deaths and horrific damage caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And - wait for it - she’s doing it via the laws she uses to take down mobsters.

I started reading about the case, then about Missy, with her 2.2 million TikTok followers and her belief that God steers her vigilante work, and I had to know more. I also wanted to get her inside take on whether this wild approach to the climate emergency might just work.

SHOW NOTES

Here's the Shell TINA document Missy references

You can follow Missy on TikTok here

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Nate Hagens (mindblowing energy futurist) was working on Wall Street when he realised…we don’t have enough energy to fund the world’s economy! Massive pivot ensued and he is now the global leader in energy systems, director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, on the board of the Post Carbon Institute, teaches an honours course, aptly titled Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota, oh and he also advises governments and institutes around the world on the future of energy!

Nate and I met recently at a conference in Stockholm to address these very (meta)modern issues. In this chat we talk about how green growth is not possible, EVs are not the answer, and he makes a numbers-crunched case for how to live once collapse occurs, what he calls the “Great Simplification”. This is a big one. It changes (mostly) everything, including my own ideas about the climate crisis.

SHOW NOTES

Here’s the link to vote for Wild in the Podcast Awards. I promise it only takes a few seconds

You can learn more about Nate's work here and listen to his podcast here

I also mention previous episodes with Tyson Yunkaporta, Douglas Rushkoff and Gaya Herrington

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Adam Mastroianni (experimental psychologist, Substacker) recently published a study in Nature that hit headlines. The paper, co-published with happiness expert Daniel Gilbert, demonstrated that everyone (literally) thinks the world is in moral decline, that we are less honest, and less kind, and that we need to return to the golden days of yore. The controversial bit? Everyone has ALWAYS thought this. And ALL of us are wrong.

Adam and I talk through the mad cognitive biases that steer us to this error and cover a bunch more that explain why being smart doesn’t make you happy, why we forget what we've learned and why we all (again) think the general public is stupider than us (we can’t all be right!?). I was overdue for a confrontation on my biases and my moral despair…you?

SHOW NOTES

Follow Adam's Substack - Experimental History

Read The illusion of moral decline

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Emily M. Bender (ChatGPT expert) is a linguist, a scholar of the societal impact of language AI and a professor at the University of Washington where she’s director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She recently became internet-famous for her no-nonsense, almost comical, papers that criticise the hype around large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT. Her message is: Don’t believe the tech bro’ hype; it’s spin!

In this chat we cover whether AI can take over the world; the real motives behind Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s excited calls for an “AI pause”; where longtermism, the singularity, effective altruism, pro-natalism and transhumanism (I’ve covered these in previous eps and on my Substack) all fit into the palaver; plus what we really should be terrified about. This is a thoroughly important and correcting conversation.

SHOW NOTES

I flag this explainer that I wrote on my Substack: Say it isn’t so: Human Eugenics

You can read Emily’s papers “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” and the “Octopus Paper” 

Here’s the Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter

Emily also wanted to point everyone to this paper on AI Safety vs. AI Ethics

And if you want to do more of a deep dive into all this, check out her podcast

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Ian Leslie (British journalist, curiosity expert) is worried the world has become too fixated on absolutes and predictability just as our life circumstances are swinging the other way. The fix, he says, is to cultivate curiosity. He got curious about curiosity and wrote a book called, yep, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It and we met in London at the WeAre8 offices to talk about why some people are incurious, what’s stopping us from being more curious, the role of cities and travel and the need to engage in mysteries instead of puzzles.

In this conversation we get quite urgently to this very wild point: To survive going forward we need to reclaim our curiosity. And we share ways to go about this.

SHOW NOTES

You can get hold of Ian’s book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

Follow Ian’s curious ramblings on his Substack The Ruffian

Here’s the Wild episode with Dr. Jud Brewer on curiosity as the fix for anxiety

I mention my chat with the poet David Whyte about asking beautiful questions

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Dr Gladys McGarey (102 years old, founder of the “holistic” medicine movement) has lived a big, wild life and joins me to chat through her secrets for doing it (life) like you really only have one of them. Recognised as *the* pioneer of alternative medicine, Dr Gladys is a founding diplomat of the American Board of Holistic Medicine and cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association.

In her long life, Gladys practiced as a general practitioner for seven decades, had six kids, lived with dyslexia (before it was a supported thing) and almost died twice. At 86 she went to Afghanistan to work in a war zone; at 94 she says she finally “found her voice”; and at 100  she did her first TED talk. Today, nudging 103, she’s still a practicing doctor and has just published a new book, The Well Lived Life.

We talk through her daily step count, recovering from divorce at 70 and hone in on her #1 tip for living longer – “Spend your energy wildly”.

SHOW NOTES

The Well Lived Life is available here

You can follow Glady on Instagram

You might like to listen to the interviews with Julia Cameron, Margaret Atwood and Sister Helen Prejean

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Jonathan Rowson (chess Grandmaster, metamodernist philosopher) is one of Britain’s biggest minds and I have invited him onto Wild to talk, well, what’s been dubbed the “meta-crisis” – the fundamental “meaning” crisis at the heart of “all the things” going on in the world today.

Jonathan is a theoretical psychologist with degrees from Oxford and Harvard and a Ph.D on what it means to become wiser. He has worked on “complex collective action” problem solving, was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and has run events with David Attenborough and Jordan Peterson (not on the same stage!). Jonathan now runs Perspectiva, a research institute that seeks to understand the relationship between systems, souls, and society.

This is a big chat, but I think you’ll find this new and wild idea a helpful navigational tool for, well, “all the things”.

SHOW NOTES

As I flag, my UK friends can preorder This One Wild and Precious Life here.

Follow the Perspectiva community and their various events here.

Jonathan is also on Substack and Twitter.

His latest book The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is out now.

I mention a bunch of previous wild episodes that you might like to listen to:

Sensemaking with David Fuller, Indigenous Knowledge Systems with Tyson Yankaporta and the Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor episode.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gaya Herrington (Club of Rome adviser, “global collapse” expert) hit headlines when she showed that a world-stopping 1972 MIT study and bestselling book predicting the collapse of civilisation by 2040 was…right on track. She was a KPMG economist and financial advisor to the Dutch government when she released the report in 2021. I read it and was left speechless.

Gaya’s now just published a book, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse, which sets out a bunch of surprising ways we might be able to save ourselves in time. Gaya’s message is stark: Economic growth must stop now! We are hitting the global limits of our more-more-more approach and the decline will be fast. What does the data tell us that can save us? The answer won’t be what you’re expecting. In this chat we flesh out how systems theory works, why we’re obsessed with growth and why rich white men resist change the most.

SHOW NOTES

Get hold of the book Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

Feel free to read the now-famous 1972 paper The Limits to Growth

I mention the chat about the indigenous knowledge system with Tyson Yunkaporta, you can listen to it here

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Luke Burgis (ethical entrepreneur, mimetic desire expert) reckons none of us knows what we want. We like to think we are incredibly original creators of our artfully curated lives. But, in fact, we only ever mimic others’ desires. Luke’s thesis draws on the work of philosopher Rene Girard who coined the term “mimetic desire” and who has become an obsession among Silicon Valley bros. I was keen to find out why Girard’s idea has become so hot and asked Luke to join me to put things straight.

Luke is a veteran entrepreneur, the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC and the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, named by the Financial Times as one of the most important business books of 2021.

In this chat we cover how the social media pile-on is not so much about difference, why women are so often scapegoats and how Lamborghini cars came about due to a mimetic rivalry with Ferrari (and their bad clutches).

SHOW NOTES

Wanting is available to purchase here

You can follow Luke’s writing over on his Substack: Anti-Mimetic

Follow Luke on Instagram

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Clancy Martin (professor of philosophy, multiple suicide survivor) has tried – unsuccessfully, obviously – to depart this mortal coil a dozen-plus times and has just published a book, How Not to Kill Yourself, that explores the complexity of one the most fundamental question we can ever ask – why live?

Clancy teaches philosophy at the University of Missouri, is a Guggenheim Fellow, bestselling novelist, a father and… “suicide addict”.

In the wake of having lost one of my closest friends to suicide, I reached out to Clancy to get his insights and wisdoms on this challenging topic. He shares the mindsets that can change a despairing person’s mind, how to deal with the sense of betrayal and anger after a loved one takes their life and how his own “suicidal addiction” started at 3. This beautiful conversation is mostly a reminder to live fully and wildly and… to care (particularly for those who care so deeply they despair).

Get hold of Clancy’s book How Not to Kill Yourself: My life in suicide.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the suicide and crisis lifeline can be reached by dialling

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my “about” page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Susan Neiman (world-leading moral philosopher, socialist, Einstein Forum director) joins me to clear up a wholly frustrating and destructive dialogue stopper – wokeism.

Susan is the Director of the Einstein Forum, in Potsdam, Germany. She has a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard and has written big, influential tomes on German guilt, the value of evil and how we all need to grow up, all through a philosophical lens. Her latest book is titled Left is Not Woke and in this episode, she explains why woke has become a loaded term, weaponised by the Right and has inverted to contradict Left or progressive principles. Susan plants the wild idea we need to abandon wokeism and become truly awake to the threat so much infighting is distracting us (sigh) from the rise of fascism. Much as Left infighting enabled Hitler to rise to power in the 1930s.

The Show Notes

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram

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Frances Haugen (globally renowned whistleblower, author of The Power of One) singlehandedly created social media’s Big Tobacco moment.

In 2021, the algorithms specialist exposed 20,000 internal documents to media and lawmakers that showed Facebook consistently and knowingly prioritised profits over public safety. A few months later, and at great personal risk, she “outed” herself on 60 Minutes and has worked tirelessly since to change laws on social media transparency around the world. 

What sees a 37-year-old woman do what hundreds of thousands of employees before her did not? Courage? Blind optimism? What fuels her commitment to truth? And what do we – the rest of us – need to do once we are armed with the truth? 

Frances also shares insights on The Zuck and what we should be doing instead of having an AI pause.

Get hold of her book The Power of One.

Frances and her team are building a movement to create social media that works for humanity, you can sign up here to hear about upcoming ways to get involved.

If you want to learn more about the AI pause, and why many (women) oppose it, check out my post on substack 'Why we should NOT have a pause on AI'. 

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Pico Iyer (bestselling travel writer; author of The Art of Stillness; Leonard Cohen’s close mate) studies the paradox of our desire to go out and explore foreign lands…and our need for stillness, the delicate dance between our outer and inner lives.

Pico has spent 50 years writing about travel for more than 250 publications, but he also spent three decades living in monasteries and 48 years as a friend and travel companion of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And he concludes a bunch of things we cover off in this beautiful conversation: we move to feel moved; the benefits of global travel outweigh the carbon miles (understanding humanity is more important right now); and paradise is mostly lost. He also shares insights into how Leonard Cohen wrote Hallelujah, arguably the most stunning song ever recorded.

Get hold of Pico’s new book The Half-Known Life: Finding Paradise in a Divided World.

Read more of his work via his website and you can also find Pico on Twitter.

Listen to Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Tyson Yunkaporta (Indigenous knowledge expert and renegade) is an Aboriginal scholar and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Melbourne’s Deakin University. His prize-winning book Sand Talk explains how Indigenous methods are best calibrated for resolving the complex global crises we face today and it’s attracted fawning attention in sensemaking, complexity and integral circles globally.

Tyson’s wild approach tips a stack of Western thinking on its head. He challenges…not just with ideas, but with the way, the how, of his knowledge sharing. We talk the IDW, wokism and red-pilling, but mostly how we in the West have forgotten how to read the patterns of the universe, which has seen Emu energy (narcissism) flourish, which then renders us unable to navigate complexity in an increasingly complex, multi-crisis world. This chat is big and challenging…so you know.

You can buy Sand Talk here and Tyson’s new book Right Story Wrong Story is out in October.

Discover more about the IK Systems Lab.

Listen to the Douglas Rushkoff interview I reference.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

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Will Storr (award-winning UK journalist and author) writes about humans in fun ways, and goes to lengths to do this, including joining holocaust denier David Irving (undercover) on holiday. His books The Heretics, and Selfie, are about how self-obsession changed the culture.

Will's latest book is The Status Game and it argues that “Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and that silently directs our thoughts, beliefs and actions. This game is inside us. It is us.” Will chats through how his thesis can explain the rise of Nazi Germany, how the world might deal with dangerous humiliated men (Putin, Trump, gun massacrists) and how it can produce more empathy in the world.

​

I mention my WILD episode with Mary Ann Sieghart, author of The Authority Gap which you can listen to here.

The Status Game is available to purchase now.

Join Will on Twitter and read more about his work via his website.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page.

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

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Tim Winton (author + climate activist) is a four-time winner of Australia’s most prominent literary award, the Miles Franklin, several of his books (Cloudstreet, Breath, Blueback) have been turned into movies, he has an Australian fish named after him(!), and he has been declared a “living treasure” by the National Trust. Notoriously private,

Tim now only emerges to do press to speak out on big issues – toxic masculinity, fossil fuel sponsorship of the arts (and the “nippers”) and saving Western Australia’s Ningaloo Reef.

In this conversation we talk this wild idea: Is Australia’s colonial past and capitalist fixation holding us all back from being adults?

Ningaloo Nyinggulu is screening on ABC iView in Australia and as Ningaloo Nyinggulu: Australia’s Ocean Wonder on Now TV for Sky Nature in the UK, Germany and Italy, and on Love Nature in Canada and 130 other countries.

Here’s the excerpt from the toxic masculinity speech Tim gave during the book tour of The Sheperd’s Hut.

Here's the speech he made at the Perth Writers Festival.

I mention getting involved in Save Our Marine Life

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Ingrid Newkirk (founder of PETA, radical stuntwoman) is one of the most controversial – and wild - humans on the planet. After founding People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980 she campaigned to change animal cruelty laws, halted cosmetic and crash testing on animals and has largely rid the world of fur fashion.

She didn’t take the mild, collaborative route, though. Ingrid has hung naked among pigs’ carcasses in London’s Smithfield market, famously raided Vogue HQ to protest their use of fur, along with a KKK meeting to stop the shooting of pigeons. Ingrid is now 74, her hobbies include Formula One racing (Michael Schumacher is a mate) and she is cited as a “hero” to countless celebrities, including Bill Maher (on her board) and Joaquin Phoenix (bought the film rights to her book Free the Animals). Ingrid reached out to me to chat on Wild. I’m not vegan and I wear wool. Our chat was both robustly challenging and moving.

You can buy the 30th Anniversary Edition of Free the Animals here and read more about PETA Australia here.

Here’s that Australian perspective data I mention, outlined in The Conversation essay and here’s a rebuttal written by another academic, also published in The Conversation.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations subscribe to mySubstack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

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Genevieve Bell (“superstar” Silicon Valley futurist, cybernetician) is possibly the world’s best-placed human to tell us what the future of AI holds for us. She is a Stanford cultural anthropologist, the Vice President of Intel, has been dubbed “technology’s foremost fortune teller” and has been inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame. Oh, and she has been South Australia’s thinker in residence. And holds a lazy 13 patents!

Genevieve is now based at Australia’s ANU where she’s the head of the School of Cybernetics and in this episode, we wrangle with the idea of whether AI will kill us, do we need a global “pause” and how indigenous systems thinking could save us.

Catch up on the Wild episode with David Whyte that I mention here.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Roy Baumeister (infamous willpower psychologist + NYT bestseller) ​is one of the world’s most prolific and influential psychologists. He has published 700-plus scientific works, including more than 40 books, and has received the highest award given by the Association for Psychological Science for his lifetime achievements. He is the guy who coined the term “negativity bias” and “decision fatigue”, and writes about why we do stupid things, the psychology of heartbreak and S&M.​ ​Roy also, somewhat notoriously, wrote the book Willpower, which saw life-hackers worldwide take up morning routines and inspired Barack Obama to wear the same two suits for the entirety of his presidency. 

In this episode Roy, who’d been based out of Queensland until the pandemic took him back to the States, talks ​about ​all of the above and how it feeds into chocolate, radishes and the economic power of the female orgasm…and the tragedy of ​​male sex drive.

If you want to catch up on the episode with Joseph Henrich talking about the WEIRD phenomenon of psychological studies, here it is.

Read the Pew Research​ ​about young people having less sex​.​

Buy Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

​You can follow Roy Baumeister’s work​ here.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

Subscribe to mySubstack newsletter for more such conversation

Get your copy of my book,This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect onInstagram! It’s where I interact the most

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