153 episodes

Sarah Wilson chats wild ideas for a fired up life.
The multi-New York Times bestselling author, activist, minimalist and former news journalist who founded the global phenomenon ‘I Quit Sugar’ travelled the world for 10 years (living out of one bag) to explore the freshest ways to live fully…and to save this one wild and precious life we have together.
She riffs with philosophers, creatives, poets, scientists (and at least one nun!) on the Big Questions that haunt us. What goes through the mind of a prisoner on death row? How does Sia invent her art? Will we die from climate change and can our rage save us? Is being Australian a mental health crisis? Join Sarah as she wrestles a path to the answers…

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

Wild with Sarah Wilson Sarah Wilson

    • Society & Culture
    • 5.0 • 1 Rating

Sarah Wilson chats wild ideas for a fired up life.
The multi-New York Times bestselling author, activist, minimalist and former news journalist who founded the global phenomenon ‘I Quit Sugar’ travelled the world for 10 years (living out of one bag) to explore the freshest ways to live fully…and to save this one wild and precious life we have together.
She riffs with philosophers, creatives, poets, scientists (and at least one nun!) on the Big Questions that haunt us. What goes through the mind of a prisoner on death row? How does Sia invent her art? Will we die from climate change and can our rage save us? Is being Australian a mental health crisis? Join Sarah as she wrestles a path to the answers…

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

    LIV BOEREE: Explaining Moloch, the mysterious game theory force breaking the world (plus a fix!)

    LIV BOEREE: Explaining Moloch, the mysterious game theory force breaking the world (plus a fix!)

    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.

    • 57 min
    AMA: How do you, Sarah, deal with a broken heart?

    AMA: How do you, Sarah, deal with a broken heart?

    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.

    You can catch my post about why I now distance myself from my bipolar diagnosis here.You can listen to my Wild chat with David Whyte here I mention David's book When the Heart Breaks: A Journey Through Requited and Unrequited Love Learn more about Liana 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.

    • 24 min
    PROF JOEL PEARSON: Gut feeling is (scientifically) real; this is how to use it

    PROF JOEL PEARSON: Gut feeling is (scientifically) real; this is how to use it

    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
    Get Joel’s book The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing WhyFollow Joel on his Future Minds Lab Substack You might also like to listen to my WILD chat with Sheena Iyengar, the scientist who first ran those “paradox of choice” studiesAnd with George Paxinos, regarded as the world’s leading brain expert on whether our brains are “good” enough to save the planetI mention the book Klara 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.

    • 1 hr 13 min
    PETER FRANKOPAN: How climate collapsed civilisations (and will it ours?)

    PETER FRANKOPAN: How climate collapsed civilisations (and will it ours?)

    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
    The Earth Transformed: An Untold History is available hereRead more about Peter via his website and you can connect with him on Twitter/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.

    • 53 min
    AMA with a Palestinian peace broker: What should we be doing to help, not hinder, the crisis? Does posting on social media do ANYTHING?

    AMA with a Palestinian peace broker: What should we be doing to help, not hinder, the crisis? Does posting on social media do ANYTHING?

    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:
    Where Aziz will join the comments thread and happily answer additional questions there.I will share the credible peace organisations, influencers and journalists that he recommends we support.I will also share some other useful links that explain points raised in our conversation, including the Israeli bias in media.
    SHOW NOTES
    You can listen to our previous conversation hereHere’s Aziz’s website, social media and his book, Crossing 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.

    • 58 min
    KELLY WEINERSMITH: Why settling Mars is a really dumb idea

    KELLY WEINERSMITH: Why settling Mars is a really dumb idea

    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
    A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? is available hereThe Wild episode with Douglas Rushkoff about billionaires and their apocalypse bunkers is 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.

    • 55 min

Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5
1 Rating

1 Rating

Top Podcasts In Society & Culture

Third Ear
Third Ear
Faldet - mysteriet om de rystede hjerner
DR
Tyran
DR
112 For Knuste Hjerter
24syv
DET SIDSTE MÅLTID
Radio4
Afhørt
Ekstra Bladet

You Might Also Like

The Imperfects
Hugh van Cuylenburg, Ryan Shelton & Josh van Cuylenburg
Conversations
ABC listen
No Filter
Mamamia Podcasts
Better Than Yesterday: Osher Günsberg
Osher Günsberg
Chat 10 Looks 3
Chat 10 Looks 3
Life Matters - Full program podcast
ABC listen