Wild with Sarah Wilson

INDY JOHAR: "How do we prepare the world for what’s coming?"

Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most original voices on redesigning societies and he has a radical thesis that brings together most of the themes we’ve discussed so far. He calls it “civilisational optionality”. Our job is not to save civilisation or to know what comes next…. It’s to preserve or expand the capacity for life (that is, humanity and the living world) to adapt to whatever comes next.Indy is an architect and Professor of Planetary Civics at Melbourne’s RMIT and the University of Sheffield. He has advised organisations including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and governments across Europe and the UK, helping them solve all kinds of complex, entangled problems.In this very wild conversation, Indy returns to Wild to loop together many of the themes of this series – emergence, fascism, steering AI to a pro-human future and, importantly, wrestling with what it means to be human. An expansive, fun and very real finale, to be sure!SHOW NOTESYou can listen to our previous conversation: The Starkest Collapse Prognosis I’ve HeardWe discuss game theory, and I point to a former Wild interview that explains this, specifically “Moloch”. Catch up here.I reference Indy’s Substack essay on the collapse of the self.---Watch on YouTube or SubstackIf 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!Let’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SARAH STEIN LUBRANO: How do we change people’s minds about what’s happening to the world?

Sarah Stein Lubrano (neuroscientist, political scientist, former obituary writer!) is an expert in how to change people’s minds most effectively and for the betterment of all beings. In this chat, we talk through why the techniques that dominated the “old world” – debate, reason, bludgeoning people with facts – no longer serve us. We then go through how persuasion and change will need to work going forward, as we find ourselves needing to cooperate and communicate more effectively than ever before. We cover the role of third spaces, why fascist governments always want to shut down cafes, the “gateway” rituals, practices and spaces that get people to open into change as well as how to talk about collapse with people still stuck in a linear mindset (essentially the content of her new book Don’t Talk About Politics, How to Change 21st Century Minds).Sarah is the head of research for The Future Narratives Lab, which focuses on narratives about social and political change, and serves on the Institute of Imagination’s Global Imagination Board. She was previously the head of content at Alain de Botton’s School of Life.SHOW NOTES You can get your copy of Sarah’s book Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds here. You can also follow her work on socials.Here’s the Substack post that Sarah mentions toward the end: "Don't Talk About Politics"Alain de Botton was also a Wild guest, and you can listen to his episode here.----Watch on YouTube or SubstackIf 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!Let’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

JOHN SEED: Is Deep Ecology the answer?

John Seed (Deep Ecology OG, global rainforest steward) says we can’t save the world. And that the planetary crisis is not a failure of information or awareness; it’s a failure of human identity. We have the story, the mindset, all wrong. And we need to change it (from human chauvinism to deep ecological connection) if we’re to keep spinning in the Earth’s embrace.John is a globally respected Australian rainforest activist and one of the foundational figures of the global Deep Ecology movement. He collaborated for decades with the late Joanna Macy – they co-wrote How To Think Like a Mountain and developed a “re-earthing” technique called Council of All Beings. John’s activist work - via the Rainforest Information Centre he founded - has seen rainforests around the world receive various forms of protection status, including World Heritage listings. In this chat, John and I get to “the work that reconnects”, how to use our despair and numbness to lift into action and how to get around our fear of “woo woo”.SHOW NOTESHere is the Features of Narara Ecovillage that John mentions at the end of the episode.You can subscribe to John’s SubstackLearn more about the Rainforest Information Centre here, and follow him on Instagram and YouTubeYou can catch up on my episode with Meg Wheatley (in which we discuss “islands of sanity”) here---Watch on YouTube or SubstackIf 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!Let’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

JEREMY LENT: Can humans build a (beautiful) new civilisation?

Jeremy Lent (author, systems thinker) is a leading authority on civilisations and has just created a manifesto on how to shift from the current crumbling one to what he calls an Ecocivilization. He joins me to discuss how we can actually get there, drawing on real-life, tangible examples and a bunch of concepts that tend to get people excited. In this chat, we cover: fractal flourishing, phase transition, mutually beneficial symbiosis and the Basque self-governing cooperative Mondragón.Jeremy is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network, an online discussion community, and convenes the Ecocivilization Coalition. He has been described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age”. Lent’s latest book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, follows two previous award-winning books, The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning.SHOW NOTESYou can learn more about Jeremy Lent’s work via his website.Get your copy of his book Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All here. ---Watch on YouTube or SubstackIf 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!Let’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

FRANCIS WELLER: “Grief will wake us up”…so how do we do good grief again?

Francis Weller (psychotherapist, bestselling author + “soul activist”) believes we have entered a “Long Dark”, a multi-decade (century?) period of collapse and psychological pain that will demand we learn to grieve deeply, messily, fully.In this episode, I ask Francis whether grief is the missing piece of the impasse we’re at. If we finally drop into our grief, will we wake up, will we finally let ourselves move into a new way of being that ditches the destructive soul-sucking paradigms, and prioritises our aliveness? Because that’s what I think we all know we’re aching for.Francis has worked for more than four decades, bringing together psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions to educate communities on how to metabolise loss and grief. He’s also written a bunch of books, including The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which Anderson Cooper repeatedly raves about.As he is famous for saying, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”SHOW NOTESYou might also enjoy one of my all-time favourite episodes, this one with James Hollis: The Jungian take on 2021I really loved this chat with death walker Stephen Jenkinson, too. It covers similar, still and deep themes.You can find links to grief circles run by therapists who were trained under Francis here.---Watch on YouTube or SubstackIf 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!Let’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.