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

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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.

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 here
• Here’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.

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 here
• The 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.

Devin Moss (atheist chaplain and humanist) late last year ministered a convicted murderer to his death by execution in the state of Oklahoma. Significantly he provided the prisoner, Phillip Hancock, spiritual counsel for more than a year, and “prayed” with him in the execution room…all without drawing on notions of an afterlife or a forgiving God entity. Which begs, what does spiritual counsel look like without “God” and the promise of hope that comes with It? What can be turned to? What are the practices and consolations that work to provide peace and cosmic perspective in the face of this final terror?

In this chat, Devin and I talk about humanist approaches to death and, to life more broadly. This is a conversation for everyone (all of us?) grappling with a world facing increased existential threats.

SHOW NOTES

• You can listen to the Wild episode with Sister Helen Prejean here
• Here is the original New York Times article about Devin and Phillip’s relationship

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.

I’ve been doing a bunch of Substack meetups around Australia over the past few weeks (the Sydney and Northern NSW ones are happening in March and you can register in the Substack post here). And several people in the community have posed some related questions to do with balancing where the world is at with your need for creative freedom, our own mental health, our tendency to run from hard topics and emotions. Yes, we MUST create and make art in these difficult, “liminal” times. I reference Teju Cole and late 19th-century philosophers to make my case.

I also answer:

• How do you stay sane and be of service?
• How do I motivate myself out of depression to be of service?

I share how I’ve been navigating things, lying awake many nights in a row, trying to rise to the challenges inherent in these questions.

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.

Maggie Jackson (award-winning author and journalist) has just written a book - Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure – that argues that while humans crave certainty, we actually experience a less anxious, more productive, happier life when we embrace not knowing.

Maggie is known for her writing on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. She’s written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and New Philosopher.  But her latest work draws on a wave of new science that shows how building “uncertainty tolerance” (instead of running from what we don’t know or can’t get an immediate answer or fix for) is an antidote to the dangerous complexity of our times. Maggie and I chat about the wild idea of ocean swimming, using hedge words and actively championing leaders who say, “I don’t know” as ways to save humanity.

SHOW NOTES

• Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure is available now
• You can read Maggie's recent New York Times guest essay on uncertainty and resilience
• Learn more about Maggie and her work 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.

More than 43,000 studies have been done to show how and why walking in nature (hiking) has so many mental and physical benefits. In this episode, prompted by listener Stefan’s question that came through on Substack, I talk through my favourite explainers and how it plays out for me.

Conservatively, I would say I have done more than 500 hikes in my lifetime…and can vouch for the fact… it just works. Start walking and the movement, the phytoncides, and the fractals do their work on you.

SHOW NOTES

• You can learn more about the studies and hikes in This One Wild and Precious Life
• Here is the 2-for-1 code for the Wanderlust Adelaide event: Go here and use TNBOGO

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.

Maggie Dent (the “queen of common sense”;  parenting expert) raised four sons, largely solo, and went on to write about her experiences and lessons learned. She soon became highly sought after for her candid and loving take on raising young men (she’s also known as the “boy champion”). Maggie is host of The Good Enough Dad and Parental As Anything podcasts, and the author of nine books, including her bestselling boys’ books From Boys to Men and Mothering Our Boys.

I’ve been doing an occasional series here on Wild addressing the issues affecting boys and men and was super keen to get Maggie on to answer some of the questions that keep coming up. Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions for Maggie.

In this episode we cover where the issues are stemming from, how we can benefit from boys’ “aggression nurturance”, what good men can be doing to plug the “Andrew Tate gap”, why parents need to buy boys a guinea pig, the need for a bro podcast on hacks for being an uber-productive life partner… and why mums need to fart in front of their sons!

SHOW NOTES

• You can get hold of Maggie’s books here
• Listen to The Good Enough Dad and Parental As Anything podcasts
• Learn more about Maggie and her work via her website and Instagram
• Here’s a Wild episode on men and porn with Connor Beaton
• I have written about issues relating to masculinity, toxic men and why we should be worried about boys on Substack

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.