Episodes
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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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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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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:
Nate Hagens on the future of fossil fuelsKate Raworth on Doughnut EconomicsWe talk about zero-sum theory. I talked about this with Liv Boeree, former world poker champion.We also cover the Blue Zones concept. I interviewed the man behind this, Dan Buettner, here. Indy also references the work of Iain McGilchrist, a guest a few weeks back.You can learn more about Indy's work via DarkMatterLabs
Connect with Indy on socials @DarkMatter_Labs and @indy_johar
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Missing episodes?
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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 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.
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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 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
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.
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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 my Substack 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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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.
This 7am 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 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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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 Olivia Lazard.
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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.
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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 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.
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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 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
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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 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.
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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 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? and Restoring 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
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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 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.
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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 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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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
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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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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.
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