The podcasts and reads I sent to friends this week
good utterings to put your care into glorious perspective
There is a lot to care about and it can get overwhelming. I often feel lonely in the onslaught. But there are supreme voices putting good words to the tragedies and complexities, making care a joy to engage in. Below is what got my brain and heart zinging and singing this week, if only because the care of the words and cleverisms reminded me of my meanwhile. Four pods, four quick reads.
I just interviewed a leading voice in the longtermism/AI realm who puts existential risk by the end of the century at “over 50 per cent”. How do we vibe with this, continue to find meaning, bother living? I tell him my “in the meantime” theory. We do the work, we fret. And this forces or necessarily compels us to consider what matters in life, what we should focus on and care about if we “might lose it all” (as per the question I ask at the end of many wild podcasts). There is nothing like a deadline to get us clear. As I write in This One Wild and Precious Life:
I am wholly and vibrantly motivated to fight for life in
the meantime. Not my life. But Big Life. Our Life, together.
That “meantime” might be a very long time. And so – in the
meantime – this way I’ve walked with you here serves as a
wild and precious way to live. Like, really live.
Wrestling with the darkness has left me more committed
to this path than I could ever have imagined. And with one
last beautiful question that guides me in my most personal
moments: “What is left if we might lose it all?” My answer gets
more beautiful by the hour: nature, humanity, and my wildly
alive love of it all.
But onto some care-full shares…
1. Full Story podcast: Peter Dutton + nuclear power are redundant. End. Story.
Not a sexy topic, but nuclear power (is it a green/good solution?) keeps coming up and I reckon many of you might like to have surgical strikes ready to go when your local conservative tries to tell you it’s the future. Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor Adam Morton has a voice that a tired brain can track with ease and he explains the farce that is nukes on Full Story podcast this week to this effect:
If we are going to thwart climate disaster, we gotta make that dint on emissions in the next 5-10 years, no later.
Nuclear is currently banned in Australia. Leaving aside the risks and astronomical costs inherent, to arrive at a nuclear solution will take a good decade to get legal, to raise $$ for and to build.
Nuclear as a solution is thusly redundant and clearly a diversionary tactic to delay action on climate change…and Peter Dutton knows it.
Listen through to the bit where Adams talks about how we are tracking with renewables…it’s not a pipe dream; we are dead close and Pete Dutton’s dopey duping is just another form of denialism (“delay is the new denial” as the New York Times put it).
2. Pivot Podcast: Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway talk Chief Twit’s crowd funder * but honestly I’d listen to them talk drying paint
Yesterday Twitter’s new boss got confused about who is letting whom eat cake and suggested the blue tick should not be used to distinguish “official” personages on Twitter, but instead those who can pay up. Which should raise the bar of things wonderfully, right?
Musk has been frothing about how he will bring free speech back to the world…but then charges for it. Ha! Meanwhile, the Network Contagion Research Institute, an organisation that “identifies and forecasts cyber-social threats”, found that use of the N-word had jumped 500% since Musk’s deal went through.
I won’t be paying to keep my tick and will likely deactivate if the accounts I follow for news and reasoned opinion drop away. Hundreds of thousands, including blue-ticked celebrities, have already fled Twitter since the Chief Twit took the reigns.
Anyway, Kara and Scott talk this all out on a recent ep of Pivot, peppered with jibes and factlets. Like, did you know the more moderated a social platform, the more popular it is? And that TikTok is the most moderated of all platforms in the world and also the largest and fastest growing? Unfettered, vile “free speech” does not pay or hold sway. They make great points, but mostly they are delightfully acerbic humans, possibly the smartest and fastest doing the pod rounds.
** Full disclosure: I have a massive intellectual crush on Scott…a thinking woman’s crumpet. He and Alan Kohler.
3. The Daily Podcast about the Brazil biz.
I listened to this before the results came through (Lula narrowly beat Bolsonaro and so the dregs of the Amazon, the planet’s lungs, are in safer hands). But you might want to do a catch up on the background to the two leaders…it’s soap-opera fascinating.
4. And an old favourite: A Good Walk Spoiled
This is an epidode of Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful Revisionist History podcast about rich people and the history of their addiction to golf (Malcolm describes it as a philosophical investigation). It starts with the line, “I hate golf courses”. So do I.
Plus some reads:
Fast furniture…just stop doing it. It’s killing then planet like fast fashion. The New York Times covers it.
My friends with young daughters have been talking this: Why young girls are getting their periods earlier, especially since Covid. Here’s the answer.
This article by a former ABC Middle East correspondent about why Penny Wong was correct in reversing recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is required reading, especially as the election results are set to roll in. I will share more on what I learned about the world being on the brink of “the next holy war” in my next post.
I support Just Stop Oil activists chucking food at art. Rather than me explain why, read this. However, I do not support the vegan activists who poured hundreds of litres of milk onto supermarket floors in UK as a protest stunt. I mean, doesn’t it defeat the message?
On Wild this week I talk turning real life into an adventure with Beau Miles. He is much loved by parents for instilling a sense of play and freedom into family lives. We talk hiking tricks and mindsets and how we chuck risk bombs into our day to day living. I think you’ll enjoy it.
If you get a moment to share this newsletter with friends and to encourage them to subscribe, please do. I do see when the new subs came in and who they were referred by. I’m always chuffed.
Sarah xx
Hey Sarah,
I’d love to ask if you could clarify your thoughts on the longtermism movement? I posted a lengthy response to the post you wrote a month or so ago about your interview with Elise Bohan, but you didn’t respond (not that you’re obliged to respond to every subscriber comment, of course).
I hope this doesn’t come across the wrong way because I’m a big fan of your work, love your podcast, and feel deeply aligned with your thinking on most issues, but I’ve felt a bit confounded by the interviews you’ve done with William MacAskill especially (less so Elise Bohan, as I felt that you pushed back on a lot of the things she was saying) and the way you’ve spoken so positively about longtermism in a couple of your Instagram stories.
The longtermism movement seems so at odds with your values, beliefs and thinking around other issues, and I would love to see you interview some of its vocal critics, such as Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru, to bring some of the important critiques of these movements to your audience. Longtermism is a philosophy that’s rooted in eugenics and white supremacy and one (along with the related EA movement) that I personally find abhorrent and terrifying.
Aside from this, I absolutely agree with your points about Dutton’s push for nuclear power, fast furniture, Penny Wong’s decision on Jerusalem, and the Just Stop Oil vs vegan milk throwing protestors!
I also love that beautiful quote from ‘This One Wild and Precious Life’.
Siobhán x
I have a crush on Kara Swisher...you can totally have Scott. She be the brains of that duo. How can you stand all Scott’s constant sexual innuendos? It’s childish.