As we become aware of climate collapse and its ripple effect on the financial and energy systems, and as houses become uninsurable and fossil fuel markets get wobbly, do things like investing, mortgages, and retirement savings become moot?

A Substack reader asks me how I’m personally prioritising these things, and I answer candidly. The chat moves into prepping and homesteading considerations. Background posts and pods about collapse are provided over at Substack, where you can WATCH these bonus episodes and join a conversation afterwards in the thread (and post a question for future AMAs).

SHOW NOTES

• Join the conversation over on Substack
• Subscribe and post your own Ask Me Anything here
• Previous episodes you might like to listen to Meg Wheatley, Gaya Herrington and Nate Hagens

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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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Annabel Abbs (English novelist; author of Sleepless) was crippled with insomnia. Rather than fight it she looked for its productive plus side and discovered that many incredible creatives have needed to stay awake to access their best selves – their Night Selves. Particularly women, as it turns out. Annabel chats to me about how famous writers, painters and Hollywood stars have used their sleeplessness to create their best work, and the science that explains why this happens  - the role hormones play, how the nocturnal quietening of the prefrontal cortex affects women’s ability to access their creative courage and how we can access our body’s hallucinogens! We also cover why it’s good to stay awake in a full moon, why women need to invest in blackout curtains (to cut their cancer risk!) and the role of feminist rage in all this!

SHOW NOTES

• Get hold of Annabel’s Sleepless: Discovering the Power of the Night Self
• You can connect with Annabel on IG here and read more about her work here
• I write a lot about different philosophical salves for insomnia in First, We Make the Beast Beautiful

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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.

Isabelle Reinecke (founder Grata Fund) is leading a super exciting landmark legal case that could force the Australian Government to actually stick to its climate commitments and stop approving fossil fuel projects immediately. By as early as the end of this year. Seriously!  It’s called the Uncles Australian Climate Case (it’s being brought by two Torres Strait Islander elders) and it’s being referred to as “Bigger than Mabo” (if it wins). There is a lot of international attention on it and it’s being supported by a team that led a similar (successful) case in The Netherlands.

This is a short, straight-to-the-point episode to get you abreast of this monumental opportunity for change so you know what to do to support it. Let’s do it!

SHOW NOTES

You can watch our chat and learn more about the case over on my Substack

You can get involved by sharing this podcast with everyone you know and sharing any news items, social media shares etc.

Social media accounts you can follow: 

• On Twitter: @gratafund and @isreinecke
• On Instagram: @australianclimatecase @isabelle.reinecke and @gratafund
• On Facebook: @australianclimatecase
• Hashtags to follow: #ClimateCaseAU #MuralKalmelSipa

You can sign the pledge and engage further HERE!

The Good Weekend did a cover story on the case, read 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.

Anna Funder (international bestselling author of Wifedom) pens books about power. She is the author of the international bestsellers Stasiland, about the Stasi, which is being made into a TV series starring Elizabeth Debicki, and All That I Am, about the Nazis, which won the Miles Franklin Award. Her latest book, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, sees Anna take on the patriarchy. She exposes how literary giant George Orwell wrote his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy “out of existence”, despite (and possibly because of) her pivotal role in his work.

Anna and I talk through Orwell’s misogyny and his own “doublethink” (believing two contradictory ideas while blanking out awareness of the contradiction), plus how doublethink works to keep patriarchy going. We dig into the delicate issue of the cancellation of these kinds of figures (we both agree they shouldn’t be), the passive voice technique, why women must “claim their pronouns”, the power structure difference between France and Australia and how women write books.

SHOW NOTES

• Get your copy of Wifedom here
• You can read more about Anna here and follow her work on Instagram
• This episode of Wild was recorded at Work Club, my workspace while I was in Sydney

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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.

In last week’s interview with a Palestinian and an Israeli Father, I promised to share how we met, a story that involves a famous actor, an Irish author and a bizarre email chain that starts in the Australian outback. Here it is. For some fun. And to remind us all of the power of story and of reaching out to humanity.

SHOW NOTES

• Catch the original interview here
• Read Apeirogon by Colom Mcann
• Learn about Parent’s Circle and donate here.
• Join the conversation and watch the video over on Substack

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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.

Helen Lewis (The Atlantic columnist, BBC podcaster, pop culture decoder) has become a darling of the heterodox podcasting community (and this podcast; catch my previous Wild chat with her about THAT GQ interview with Jordan Peterson here), and, relatedly, a pet target of the extreme Right and Left’s ongoing cancelling zeal.

In this interview, I invite Helen to talk through several very online eruptions that are crucial for fathoming what the hell is going on in the world today. We cover the feminist-trans wars playing out on “TERF Island”; why Kara Swisher has fallen out with Elon Musk and why the Left failed the October 7 “Hamas test”. Mostly this is a conversation about the role of discerning dialogue when the extreme Left and Right are dominating the online arena.

SHOW NOTES

• Listen to my previous Wild chat with Helen 
• Here’s the episode I did with Hannah Barnes about the trans debate in the UK
• Check out Helen’s brilliant The Bluestocking Substack
• Get hold of her most recent book, the bestseller bestseller Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
• Check out her Blocked and Reported episode here
• We reference a few of Helen’s recent The Atlantic columns: The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test; Is Kara Swisher Tearing Down Tech Billionaires? and Why I’ll Keep Saying “Pregnant Women” 

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.

Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan (peace activists with Parent’s Circle) are the two protagonists from Colum McCann’s Booker-Prize-longlisted book Apeirogon. Both lost their daughters to the conflict, ten years apart. Yet in spite of – or because of - this horror they became dedicated friends, or “brothers”, committed to opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine and working with “the enemy” via Parent’s Circle, a peace group set up for parents from “both sides” who’ve lost a child.

I spoke to Bassam and Rami on day #169 in the conflict and they’d just come from seeing the Pope. We cover how Bassam decided to study the Holocaust while imprisoned in an Israeli jail as a teenager for seven years, why Israelis are trapped by their victimhood and how we’ve all been locked into seeing this conflict as a football game of two sides.

This interview is a chapter in an incredible story that involves a big-time Hollywood actor, who reached out to me while I was camping in remote Western Australia, a secondhand book find, a six-way email chain and an incredible love that reaches across history, walls and global fragmentation. 

NOTE: I will cover the very intersecting story of how we (the dads, Colum, the actor and I met) in the next episode. 

SHOW NOTES

• Read Apeirogon by Colom Mcann
• Learn about Parent’s Circle and donate here.
• If you want a bit of extra background to this whole story, I write about it here on Substack.
• I mention Naomi Klein’s work on the role of victimhood. A good starting point is this podcast interview with On the Nose. 
• Naomi has also released two chapters from her latest book Doppelgänger for free online that cover her thesis super well.

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.

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.

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.

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 Why
• Follow 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” studies
• And with George Paxinos, regarded as the world’s leading brain expert on whether our brains are “good” enough to save the planet
• I 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.

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 here
• Read 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.