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 t...
Jan 16, 2024•45 min•Ep. 135
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...
Jan 09, 2024•41 min•Ep. 134
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 m...
Dec 26, 2023•56 min•Ep. 133
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...
Dec 19, 2023•49 min•Ep. 132
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 recentl...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 131
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 Ho...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 130
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 chos...
Nov 30, 2023•22 min•Ep. 129
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 treatmen...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 128
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 opportunit...
Nov 23, 2023•24 min•Ep. 127
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 ...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 126
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, th...
Nov 16, 2023•23 min•Ep. 125
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 eve...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 124
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 e...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 123
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 o...
Nov 07, 2023•51 min•Ep. 122
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 e...
Nov 02, 2023•22 min•Ep. 121
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 N...
Oct 31, 2023•56 min•Ep. 120
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 ...
Oct 26, 2023•55 min•Ep. 119
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 ...
Oct 24, 2023•44 min•Ep. 118
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 w...
Oct 19, 2023•16 min•Ep. 117
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 pe...
Oct 17, 2023•48 min•Ep. 116
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 th...
Oct 12, 2023•17 min•Ep. 115
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 starte...
Oct 10, 2023•42 min•Ep. 114
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 energ...
Oct 03, 2023•53 min•Ep. 113
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...
Sep 26, 2023•50 min•Ep. 112
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...
Sep 19, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 111
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 cit...
Sep 12, 2023•54 min•Ep. 110
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 ...
Sep 05, 2023•47 min•Ep. 109
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 Centr...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 108
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 abl...
Aug 22, 2023•53 min•Ep. 107
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 ...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 106
