Wild with Sarah Wilson

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 Substackhere-- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 -- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 SubstackhereMeg Wheatley,Gaya HerringtonNate Hagens -- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Sleepless: Discovering the Power of the Night SelfIG here here First, We Make the Beast Beautiful--- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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: @gratafund@isreinecke@australianclimatecase@isabelle.reinecke@gratafund@australianclimatecase You can sign the pledge and engage further HERE! The Good Weekend did a cover story on the case, read it here --- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Wifedom heremore about Anna hereInstagramWork Club-- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 hereApeirogon by Colom McannParent’s Circledonate hereSubstack -- 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 HelenHannah Barnes The Bluestocking SubstackDifficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 FightshereThe Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas TestIs Kara Swisher Tearing Down Tech Billionaires?Why I’ll Keep Saying “Pregnant Women” 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Apeirogon by Colom McannParent’s Circledonate hereSubstackthis podcast interview with On the Nose. two chapters from her latest book Doppelgänger 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. hereDavid Whyte hereWhen the Heart Breaks: A Journey Through Requited and Unrequited Love here 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing WhyFuture Minds Lab Substack WILD chat with Sheena IyengarGeorge PaxinosKlara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 hereTwitter/X 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 herewebsitesocial mediaCrossing Boundaries: A Traveler's Guide to World 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 instant New 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 herehere 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 hereNew York Times article 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsureguest essay here 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 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 This One Wild and Precious Lifehere 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 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 hereThe Good Enough DadParental As AnythingwebsiteInstagramConnor Beatonmasculinitytoxic menwhy we should be worried about boys 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 and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.