As many of us move into the holiday season and slower days, I wanted to reshare this conversation with Iain McGilchrist. It’s a spacious, illuminating exploration of how we’ve come to live as we do — and a reminder that meaning and beauty are still available to us, even when solutions feel out of reach. 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 inte...
Dec 30, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 200
As many of us head into the holiday season — travelling, slowing down, or looking for something good to listen to — I wanted to reshare this conversation with Martha Beck. It’s a thoughtful, generous discussion about anxiety as a guide rather than a problem, and one I have a feeling will land right now. 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 w...
Dec 23, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 199
Wild has been on hiatus while I finish my most recent book. We’ll be back with a fresh direction and new guests in the coming months, but in the meantime, I’m dropping in a small handful of interviews I’ve been doing on Substack that you might find interesting. They’re far more rustic and casual than my usual offerings. You can, of course, watch the video versions over on Substack . My guest today is Dr Sharon Blackie a psychologist, mythologist, and author whose work lives at the meeting point ...
Dec 09, 2025•34 min•Ep. 198
Wild has been on hiatus while I finish my most recent book. We’ll be back with a fresh direction and new guests in the coming months, but in the meantime, I’m dropping in a small handful of interviews I’ve been doing on Substack that you might find interesting. They’re far more rustic and casual than my usual offerings. You can, of course, watch the video versions over on Substack . My guest today is Rich from Ohh That’s RICH , who dissects the intersections of culture, politics, and privilege -...
Dec 02, 2025•38 min•Ep. 197
Wild has been on hiatus while I finish my most recent book. We’ll be back with a fresh direction and new guests in the coming months, but in the meantime I’m dropping in a small handful of interviews I’ve been doing on Substack that you might find interesting. They’re far more rustic and casual than my usual offerings. You can, of course, watch the video versions over on Substack . My guest today is Grace Blakeley , who explores the intersections of capitalism, politics, and economics… and prett...
Nov 25, 2025•43 min•Ep. 196
Dr Vanessa Andreotti (Indigenous Knowledge advocate; author) is a Brazilian academic who has developed a radical thesis for how to move through the multi-crises we face. In her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism she draws on Indigenous wisdoms and entanglement theory to steer humanity through the destruction, grief and uncertainty as democracy, the growth model, “the West” crumbles around us. Dr Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Educ...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 195
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 direct...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 194
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 t...
Nov 19, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 193
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 totalit...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 192
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 Yo...
Nov 05, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 191
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...
Oct 29, 2024•29 min•Ep. 190
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 philosoph...
Oct 22, 2024•58 min•Ep. 189
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, an...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 188
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 Kri...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 187
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 ...
Oct 03, 2024•24 min•Ep. 186
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...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 185
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 h...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 184
*(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 ...
Sep 05, 2024•28 min•Ep. 183
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 ...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 182
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' a...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 181
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 n...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 180
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 n...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 179
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 n...
Aug 06, 2024•53 min•Ep. 178
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 n...
Jul 30, 2024•51 min•Ep. 177
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 n...
Jul 23, 2024•54 min•Ep. 176
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:...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 175
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...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 174
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 mov...
Jul 04, 2024•38 min•Ep. 173
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 - T he 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 f...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 172
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...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 171
