Wild is back!

I'm relaunching my podcast. But I need your assistance...

A quick community share with you, and, as always, an invite to you to pass on your thinking, because I treasure it and regard most of what I do now as an emerging, hive-mind process.

So I got a phone call some time back from someone - let’s call them Kim - who said, “I loved your Wild podcast, I’m sad it’s ended for financial reasons, I run a philanthropic trust that supports projects that foster life-generating ideas…how about we support Wild for a bit?”. Or something to this effect.

Kim and I met, hung out, and felt our ideas were aligned. I said, let’s do it.

These things always take longer than it says on the packet. Cut to many months later, here we are, with a means for picking up the Wild conversation where we left off (which was with an epic chat with Indigenous Knowledge leader Vanessa Andreotti in which she talks through how we must hospice modernity to its death and the value of “black belt aunties”, as you might recall).

So, onwards to Series #2

The first “series” of Wild, which was almost 400 episodes¹, was very much a wrangle with all the big issues in our orbit to establish what the hell was happening to the world (conclusions: it’s collapsing!).

This new short-run second series will explore the question that dangles: So, what next?

Firstly, how does a vulnerable, sensitive, tender soul actually live a human life in a collapsing world?

How do we adjust? How do we deal with the grief as we let the old paradigms go? What decisions do we make? What matters to us now? How do we deal with the confusion, fragmentation and the fact at least half of the people around me have a very different sense of what’s going on.

There’s also this:

What is the new reality, the “new normal” that we will have to move toward?

What do we need to be doing - or being - to bring into existence? What paradigms will we need to embrace to do so, and - equally importantly - what are the ones we must now wholly let go?

As I wrote a post or two back, quoting the visionary Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Milton Friedman once wrote something somewhat adjacent to this, about how only a crisis produces real change. But that when that crisis happens, what comes next depends on the ideas that are lying around at the time. We - you, me, the kids, the dog - are currently in that odd, liminal place between the old world collapsing and a new world becoming, in which the ideas that will be lying around are developed… by artists, expansive thinkers, Indigenous mob, and the collapse aware. As I write in I Eat the Stars (The Collapse Book), we’re in a time of “stunning possibility”. That’s how I felt into it as I wrote the book. And it’s what I’m now going to explore more fully via Wild - the stunning possibility of new models and ideas.

I have sensed that many of you here have been busting to get onto this “next” conversation. Once a tender soul becomes “collapse aware”, a certain internal momentum kicks in. And it must. We can’t stay hovering in this awareness; the anxiety and rage will kill us. We need to move the psychic energy into some kind of action. We need to put it to use and start imagining, which soon leads to the emerging that will take us to the “what next”.

Ca roule mes poules?²

Which is where you come in

I’m going to be booking guests who are truly living and embodying, both professionally and personally, the “what next” and I’d love your suggestions for folk who might fit this brief.

Here are the themes I wish to explore to narrow the brief a little:

• How to deal with the deep grief (and shame) we feel as we farewell things like winter, flippant conversations, renovations plans, a safe future for our kids, etc.

• A bit of an exploration of how societies emerge from fascism, and what they emerge into, typically.

• How to switch our value sets to the ones we’ll need for the future.

• Some tangible ideas that show how the new normal might look and operate.

• More details and explainers of how emergence actually works

• Perhaps some tips for how we navigate the fractured dynamics, scapegoating, bullshit, gaslighting etc going on?

• How do we take back control of some fundamentals (like our dopamine) from the fascists?

What else would you like to see me explore? And who do you feel answers these kinds of questions at an embodied level?

I want to emphasise that I won’t just be seeking out experts who have a material understanding of our predicament, or of what new models could work. Ideally they’ll also be authentically moving in alignment, or attunement, with what they advise. I’ll also need to do the same. So I’m going to try play with some less linear approaches in my interviewing style…I’m ready to do things differently!

I’m also cool to take on any other feedback from series 1 if you have it.

I look forward to your suggestions. Liana and are booking guests now and the series will kick off in a few weeks, so please shoot through your ideas/requests ASAP.

In the meantime…

Can I also invite you to “follow” Wild now on whatever platform you use. This way you will get all episodes in your feed as they go live. The “follow” button is normally in the top right-hand corner, and in the drop-down menu on the little (…) icon.

Oh, and while you’re there, share a recent episode with your mates. Perhaps this one with Martha Beck on her anxiety hack. Or this one with Cambridge collapse academic Luke Kemp talking the content of his bestseller Golliath’s Curse. We need to ensure this narrative gets out there…while we can.

Sarah xx

PS A wonderful woman I met at a Substack party here in Paris is going to help me tweak the tile, too. MTK.

1. And kicked off with a chat with the artist Sia in which we chatted creativity and bipolar disease EXACTLY 5 years ago (to the week). You can listen here.

2. Cute French enquiry: That rolls for you, my chickens?