This week’s question comes from concerned mum Emma, but it’s one that is cropping up a lot - What to do about the burden young people are shouldering in the face of a crumbling world? Emma is worried her 16-year-old activist son is taking on too much and she’s worried about his climate anxiety.Research shows one-third of young people have sought counselling or medical help for eco-anxiety. However, my answer to Emma and her son takes a different direction. What if kids are pissed off and we, the adults, are projecting OUR anxiety (and shame?) onto them? I also cover my recent warm jacket purchase and why it is so very not French-fashionable.SHOW NOTESI mention in this rant the previous Wild podcast episodes with Meg Wheatley and Paul Hawken and the one with Margaret Klein Salamon. We will continue the conversation over at my Substack if you’d like to join. It’s here you can also post another AMA question for me.If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown, discusses the failure of climate change communication and the power of community in addressing the climate crisis. He emphasizes the importance of regenerative agriculture, tackling food waste, and finding joy in solutions. The speaker also explores the role of hope and interconnectedness in fixing the planet and questions the sustainability of infinite growth.

Figured many of you here would like to hear the conversation I had recently with Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals over at the British intellectual podcast Intelligence Squared. It’s one of my favourite podcasts, and so I was supremely thrilled when they invited me to lead an "in conversation” about self-help scepticism. Here’s the blurb they ran: Oliver Burkeman is the anti-self-help author that everyone interested in self-help should read. He encourages us to embrace uncertainty and imperfection in a world obsessed with self-improvement and relentless goal-setting. For over ten years he wrote the popular ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’ column for The Guardian and his latest book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Sarah Wilson is the founder of the global ‘I Quit Sugar’ movement, was editor of Cosmopolitan Australia at the age of 29, and has interviewed two Australian prime ministers, Beyoncé, Brené Brown, the Dalai Lama and dozens of moral philosophers, effective altruists and existential risk experts during her career. Her most recent book, This One Wild and Precious Life, won the US Gold Nautilus Prize and describes how she spent three years hiking around the world, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche and Wordsworth and emerging with a blueprint for living a wilder, more connected life. For this episode, Burkeman and Wilson come together at Intelligence Squared for an engaging discussion about the limitations of the traditional self-help industry, the importance of mindfulness, and practical strategies for leading a more balanced and purposeful life.SHOW NOTESCatch my interview with Oliver (about his book Four Thousand Weeks) hereCheck out Intelligence Squared hereIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Margaret (Meg) Wheatley (collapse theorist, global leadership consultant) is something of a legend in her field. She has worked for 50 years helping humans adapt to their world using systems analysis, chaos theory and deep spiritualism (she’s good friends with one of my heroes the Buddhist monk Pema Chödrön). Poets, scientists and philosophers quote her writing, she has worked in countless disaster situations around the world and was commissioned to transform the leadership of large institutions such as the US Army and the National Park Service. Plus she’s the author of 12 books, including Who Do We Choose to Be? and the forthcoming Restoring Sanity. Meg has also researched the collapse of civilisations throughout history and is a leading voice among a community of scientists, economists, historians and philosophers who are arguing that our civilisation is also currently heading toward collapse. This is a challenging conversation and the subject has its deniers. Meg steers our focus to becoming the leaders we want to see amid the cascading crises facing the world and to create “islands of sanity” amid the despair. In this conversation, we cover the responsibility of the rich, why it’s redundant to talk about saving the world, and how to sit in despair and create a meaningful life from it all.Meg and I also recorded a second and even more challenging episode that can be found over at my Substack. In this extra episode we cover how long we’ve got left (when will collapse occur?), how to cope when others are still consuming and distracting themselves away from the issue, how to raise kids in this knowledge, where to live in coming years… SHOW NOTESMeg references the poet David Whyte who has also been a guest on Wild You can purchase Who Do We Choose to Be? now and preorder Restoring Sanity (coming March 2024)Find out about her workshops and events hereOther Wild conversations with elders: Stephen Jenkinson, Sister Helen Prejean and Margaret Atwood If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s question comes from long-time reader, frequent and generous commenter Kei Ikeda, but it’s one I’ve been asked a few times - What goes into producing Wild? My short answer would be: a lot of swirling self-doubt, over-analysis, faking-till-making and ad hoc recording set-ups. Here, I chat (on a cold Paris afternoon) about my recording equipment, how I contact guests, how the costs stack up, how the brand advertising and sponsorship works and more.I flagged a few previous episodes you might want to catch up on with Sheena Iyengar and Sister Helen Prejean.In 15 minutes (OK, 20 minutes) I don’t cover everything, so I invite you to ask me anything I missed in the comment section over on Substack. Also, I’ll start a thread on Sunday (again, over at Substack), as suggested by a bunch of you, where we can maybe thrash out a few ways to keep Wild going together. See you there.If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Like many of us, Anand Giridharadas (American political commentator, bestselling author) despaired how the world had become stuck in a fractured suckhole and he could no longer convince people to change their hearts and minds to be kinder and better. So he went on a mission to find out how to persuade more effectively, resulting in his recent book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.In this chat, the former foreign correspondent and New York Times columnist argues this wild idea: Progressives working on issues like race equality and climate (and, um, an Indigenous Voice to parliament) need to give up on political purity and… persuade! This is not your usual “effective communications” thesis. We cover what we can learn from the Russian bot farms, A.O.C. and a cult deprogrammer. This episode comes at a critical time, as many of us are 1. feeling defeatist about progressive/humane discussion today, and 2. seeking techniques to equip us for being of service in a troubled world.  SHOW NOTESGet hold of Anands’ book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and DemocracyFollow Anand at his Substack The.InkIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Berry Liberman, impact investor, filmmaker, and philanthropist who founded Dumbo Feather magazine, discusses sensemaking in troubled times, reflecting on recent trips and the power of words. They explore navigating the Metacrisis, the importance of wisdom and action, and the stages of personal and societal crises. Therapeutic tools, the impact of trauma, and the power of walking in nature are also explored. An uplifting and enlightening conversation about being of service in troubled times.

There are many ways to challenge the AI juggernaut that has been unleashed on the world, but Tracey Spicer (multi-Walkley winning journalist, feminist) tackles it through a gender lens. In her latest book, Man-Made, she shows how the unresolved biases that exist in the world today are being fed into the emerging AI. The implications of this bigotry being embedded into our future are profound and could render any progressive work being done to address consent, pay gaps and so on moot. Tracey has won two prestigious Walkley Awards in recognition of her journalism work, was awarded the NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year, accepted the Sydney Peace Prize with Tarana Burke for the Me Too Movement, and won the national award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership. We talk about sexbot design, the significance of Siri et al being female, how our period tracker apps put us in danger and how she wrote this book with a crippling case of long covid.SHOW NOTESGet hold of Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the futureCatch up on the Wild chat with ChatGPT expert and linguist Emily M. BenderTracey mentions good work being done by Andrew Leigh MPWe also talk about the work of Caroline Criado-Perez who you can follow on her Substack Invisible WomenIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing with this new weekly format, each week I’m answering a hoary question from my Substack community (you can join here and post YOUR hoary - or otherwise - question in the thread). This week I answer Dan: What do you think of marriage?I take the opportunity to pull apart those studies that surface every few years that try to tell us that marriage makes you happier. Turns out it makes MEN happier than it does women, and not for very long (about two years). By implication, I also answer why I never got married. My answer has something to do with the Shaman from Eat Pray Love…If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Annie Murphy Paul (US science writer and author of The Extended Mind) recently came out with a bold theory about how we think – we don’t think with our brains, instead, we think with our bodies, feelings, physical spaces and other minds. Her work on the topic won awards, was presented as a TED talk viewed by more than 2.6 million people and has been described by New York Times’ Ezra Klein as having “radical implications”. In this conversation we discuss how our bodies can read other people’s minds and solve problems when our brains can't, why schools and workplaces stunt our thinking, how to get our clearest thoughts and why all those productivity hacks are…wrong.I’ll continue the conversation over on my Substack where I’ll share more detail on how I loop.SHOW NOTESAnnie's book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain is available now. I refer to my conversation with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor about right-brain thinking, listen here.And my interview with Tyson Yunkaporta that covers in detail, Indigenous complex thinking. If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor 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 LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.