Ethan Kross (University of Michigan neuroscientist, author of bestseller Chatter) is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the mind. I came across his work while researching anxiety and found his perspectives on when and how to tame our relentless head chatter (or monkey mind) refreshing. And wild. Ethan is all about appreciating the “beast” that is the fretty voice in our head, while modulating it artfully.

We chat through some seriously effective tools such as talking to ourselves in the second and third person, temporal distancing, sorting your sock drawer and, yep, going for a hike. A life-hack-ish episode, but with scientific grunt.

Check out Ethan’s new book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters and How to Harness It

You can catch up on his work here

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Bo Seo (world champion debater, author of Good Arguments) knows how to argue really very well.

The Australian immigrant, now based out of Harvard, is the two-time world debating champion and his new book applies his secret debating sauce to the meatloaf that is this polarised, bifurcated, relentlessly bickering world we now live in. Bo’s wild point is that the problem of polarization isn’t that we disagree, it’s that we need to disagree more. But I need to learn how to do it way better and kinder.

He talks us through how to make killer points; how to combat bullshitters, neg’ers and bullies; when to walk away; plus how to argue with your partner and not lose your shit. He also warns against not arguing. “The cost of being too agreeable is a small life,” he says. At a broader level, the cost is a world unhinged.

Connect with Bo’s work here

Get hold of his book Good Argument

Catch up on my interview with Sara Ness: How to “win" difficult conversations

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversation

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life 

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most 

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Marcus Buckingham (British pop trend researcher, New York Times bestselling author of Standout Strengths) has researched the paradox of female unhappiness - which sees women get more miserable the more freedoms and choices they have - for several decades now (and used to contribute to Cosmopolitan magazine back when I was editor). 

Specifically – and inversely -  Marcus has worked to determine the thing that the happiest women are doing right. The results are jolting. Far from trying to find balance in their lives, they explicitly seek imbalance. They embrace the chaos, and the competing responsibilities and choose to “tilt” toward the stuff that strengthens them, or that brings them joy and love. 

In this chat, we establish how to work out what you love, how to tilt and why it’s imperative that we do so. As Marcus says, “Your brain on love is smarter”.

You can read more about Marcus’s work here and join him on Twitter. 

Purchase Love & Work here.

I mention other, wise wild people that I have “hunted down” after writing about their wisdom in one of my books:

The Lady in Red

James Hollis

Sheena Iyengar - discusses the paradox of choice

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life 

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most 

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Stephen Jenkinson (Harvard-trained theologian, activist and elder) is an expert in dying. During his 20 years working in “the death trade” he counselled more than 1500 people to their death. He is also the founder of The Orphan Wisdom School, a teaching house for the skills of deep living, he's the subject of the documentary Griefwalker and author of Die Wise: A Manifesto For Sanity and Soul.

Stephen's wild idea is that we must learn to die well…so that we can live well. This is a challenging and poetic conversation. We cover euthanasia (it's death-phobic), elderhood (current boomers have failed at it) and not being “too late” to work it all out.

Stephen reads from his book A Generation’s Worth and we reference his recent books Die Wise and Reckoning

You can get hold of all three at Orphan Wisdom

Stephen is touring his Nights of Grief and Mystery show internationally

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life 

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most 

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Douglas Rushkoff (author, cyberpunk OG (!) and documentarian) is named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, and studies humans struggling to live in an increasingly unhuman world. Which is to say most of us in 2023. I tracked down this big, excitable mind to continue an earlier WILD chat about billionaire apocalypse preppers (August 2022, with Mark O’Connell).

Rushkoff has a wild theory – which he spells out in his latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires - for why it is all such a “thing”. It’s The Mindset. He also has an antidote, equally wild: we just need to be more human. We get chatting circular economies, Timothy Leary and how fleeing to Mars is fear of the feminine. Also, stay tuned for a follow-up bonus episode (for my Substack subscribers) in which Rushkoff bangs out intimate life hacks.

Do listen to Douglas' podcast Team Human

Get your copy of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Listen to my previous chat with Mark O'Connell

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversation

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life 

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most 

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Dr Michael E. Mann (super notorious climate scientist; El Niño expert) is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (and more such academic titles). But he is best known for bringing the world the “hockey-stick graph” back in 1999, which showed a sharp “uptick” in global temperatures since the industrial age and signalled to the world “humans did it!”.

This conversation, however, goes to a new chapter in the climate fight. We cover two doozies: the role of Russian interference in the Australian carbon pricing fight and the terrifying El Niño event set to hit as early as July. I also push Michael to be honest - does he have hope, or is it a professional front…

Michael is touring Australia with Think Inc. in May/June 2023

Pre-Order a copy of Michael’s book The Climate War here

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversation

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most

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Margaret Atwood is best known for her mega-bestselling dystopian fiction, including the Booker Prize-winning novels “The Blind Assassin” and “The Testaments”, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and, most recently, the essay collection “Burning Questions”.

The Canadian firebrand imagines future societies, specifically the worst scenarios in these future societies, worlds of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, human-made disasters and theocracies where women’s bodies are controlled by capitalist overlords. And this is the thing – her dark fantasies have a horrifying habit of coming true, Exhibit A: “The Handmaid’s Tale”, a portent for the new abortion laws in the US, the erosion of American democracy, even the January 6 insurrection.

However, at age 83 Margaret, dubbed “the prophet of dystopia”, is turning her vibrancy and wild care to creating… utopias. Or rather, she is trying to find a way to save the world via an online program where participants work with experts to develop solutions to all the wicked problems we’ve created.

Today we discuss how the subordination of women and theocracies follow particular economic cycles, why she’s not quitting Twitter (yet) and what hope will need to look like. 

We mention Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark and Paul Hawken's book Drawdown, as well as Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Follow Margaret on Substack

Check out Practical Utopias here

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Helen Lewis (internet famous for her GQ interview with Jordan Peterson, pop culture expert) is a British journalist, BBC broadcaster and currently a staff writer for Atlantic magazine. Her work covers the rise of TikTok tics in teenagers, Harry-and-Meghan, Andrew Tate, the absurdities of US and UK politics…you know, all the chunky bits of life in 2023. She also wrote the best bestseller Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights and just released the BBC podcast series The New Gurus. However, Helen is probably best known for her 2018 GQ interview with Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist and messiah of the manosphere (the video version has been viewed 60 million times).

My conversation with Helen was fast and intense and we cover the IDW, Andrew Tate (she declined an invitation to debate him), tactics for arguing with Galaxy Brains and why we don’t use pronouns in our bios. This episode is extra-long because Helen’s riff is that good.

**BONUS ** Join Helen and I over at my Substack, (this is precious) as we talk through our tips for remaining sane amid the noise – a productivity tip, a writing tip, two podcasts, two Substack follows, the book to read and the journalist to follow. Available only on Substack, Friday 3rd March.

Subscribe to Helen’s Substack The Bluestocking – it's a good place to follow her writing and projects

The New Gurus series can be downloaded here

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Rebecca Giblin (author Chokepoint Capitalism, media academic) joins me to explain how the Big Tech squillionaires are choking creatives – musicians, authors, screenwriters etc – and their customers. And in so doing, killing culture. Hmmm….

Rebecca is a Melbourne Law School professor specialising in creators’ rights and the director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Her new book Chokepoint Capitalism (co-written with LA-based bestselling science fiction writer and Boing Boing website owner Cory Doctorow) was awarded a Financial Times' “best books of 2022” gong and is one the most talked about polemics doing the podcast rounds.

In this chat, we discuss the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster debacle, “chickenization” (how the lock-in tactics used by Monsanto are now applied to live music), whether Spotify playlists are part of the problem, and what we can all do to win back culture again! A must-listen for creatives, music lovers, concert-goers.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow is out now.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter. She does good twit!

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversation

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life 

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most

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Nick Riggle (Ex-pro skater, philosophy professor at the University of California, YOLO expert) has become known for dissecting contemporary phenomena in a distinctly Socratic manner.

In this chat, we delve into the philosophical significance of awesomeness (and its antonym, suckiness), the existential imperative of YOLO (!) and the aetiology of the high five. Nick’s theses on these cliched expressions ultimately lead to a wonderfully wild answer to the quandary of what makes life worth living in such a fraught era. To flesh it all out we draw on sporting analogies, the poetry of Mary Oliver and each other’s really rather near-death experiences. 

We mention philosopher Kieran Setiya, here you can listen to Kieran’s Wild episode featuring his take on how to love living a hard life.

You can read more about Nick via his website and follow him on Twitter

Nicks books can be purchased via the below links:

On Being Awesome

This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversation

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life 

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most

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