Life Uncut - Not Buying Into Beauty Trends & Capitalism - Uncut with Sarah Wilson

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Today’s guest is the brilliant Sarah Wilson. Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times bestselling author, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, minimalist and philanthropist. She edited Cosmopolitan Australia at 29, founded the global I Quit Sugar movement, hosted Masterchef Australia – and wrote the bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful.  We previously had Sarah on the podcast 2 years ago where we spoke about dating in your forties, how Sarah had moved to Paris with only own 2 suitcases worth of belongings! Since we last spoke, Sarah has ended her long-running podcast Wild, and started serialising her new book on system collapse. Today, we’re talking about the chaos we’re all living through — the systems collapsing around us, the tech bros running wild, and the very real sense that everything’s just... a bit cooked. We also dive into: Living in a minimalistic way and how it’s classy in some cultures Australia is a young person’s culture with botox, lashes and ‘invisible’ older women Should we also have a tax on fast fashion? How beauty ideals change based on what’s going on economically  What it means to find meaning in messy times Why Sarah’s book will likely be banned in the US Why community and connection are more important than ever You can find Sarah on Substack  You can find Sarah on Instagram  You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! XxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. I'm Laura. And today we have a guest that has appeared on the podcast before a few years ago, but I absolutely loved the chat, Sarah Wilson. Now, Laura, you weren't on that episode. I think you were away or unwell or something. Who knows? It was years ago. We're not keeping track. But Sarah Wilson, for anyone who doesn't know who she is, she is the absolute superstar behind I Quit Sugar, which is how she kind of

came into the world of publications at the time. Yep. She's a bestselling author. She's an international keynote speaker, minimalist. She edited Cosmo magazine actually at 29 years old, which is really interesting because it's in stark contrast to what she believes in the way she lives her life. The other thing that I loved in our last chat, Sarah was talking about dating younger men. I obviously say that because I'm about to marry a younger man, but today is a little bit different. We're going to touch on all of those things again, but I think it's really interesting how you've serialized your new book. It's all about collapse. We're going to touch on climate change and different political climates in the world. So that's a little bit later in the chat.

Sarah Wilson, welcome back to the podcast. It's so nice to have you in the flesh this time. Yes. I was over the phone, wasn't I? I think I was in Paris. Yeah, sounds awful. Yeah, I think so. Having a horrible time. Well, I actually wasn't on the episode.

It was Britt and Keisha that time. So this is a real treat for me. We, I mean, I'm sure last time you told your embarrassing story, but like now that you're back, there's been a bit of time in between. What else has been happening to you? What is, and do you have a more recent embarrassing story? Well, I've got so many years of embarrassing stories. And in fact, my friends, whenever they see me, when I come back,

they're like right what's happened now but look the embarrassing story that I thought about because I know you guys are always after one is actually from a while back and I hope no one's eating their breakfast but I and it's sort of a time before the internet and mobile phones most of you weren't born but I went to Vietnam with uh to join one of my brothers he was living over there and we do lots of mountain bike riding together that's what we do as a family is just take off on mountain bikes and he built me a bike he'd traveled overnight on a bus to this remote town in Vietnam I had eaten an ice cream from the street and there is a moral to this story and it's this do not eat an ice cream from the street in Vietnam babe I did the same thing in India kulfi it's called like a

chai ice cream it put me in hospital for four days what's the bike link I was what's happening so I am then just excreting out of all orifices overnight and my brother arrives with two bikes so he's had to ride with an extra bike on his shoulder to meet me at five in the morning and I'm just a mess plus I'm menstruating and I don't know if anyone's been to Vietnam or went what 20 years ago or so but they don't have tampons they only have sanitary pads and I don't know if any of you have ridden long distance in bike shorts you cannot wear a sanitary pad they kind of just go back out the back you know what I mean and so I you know arrive oh yeah my brother arrives and we're like oh we've got to head off we've got to head off and basically it gets worse and worse

And I've got blood. I've got everything coming out of all the holes of my body. But we had to ride like nine hours up into this mountain village through a communist area. So you're not allowed to stop. So I'm just riding, riding, riding. I gave up on protecting myself with anything and it's just all running down my legs.

Oh, my God. It's interesting to me that you still committed to the ride. Like it wasn't a marathon you'd been training for. It was just your brother. Surely you could have postponed it. Oh, no, no, no. I've got four brothers. and there is – we say things to each other like confidence is king

and this kind of thing. Like there is no giving up. So I rode and he was riding next to me getting coconut waters from the side of the road and coming up to me and pouring it down my throat as I kept riding. And I knew that if I stopped pedalling, I would pass out. So I just pedalled and pedalled and pedalled, got to the mountain town called Dalat, which is a beautiful French village.

You walked in and they're like, we don't want you. Please don't kill me. I literally got off my bike and passed out. So my brother had to carry me upstairs. He carried my bike up. He rang my parents and go, what do I do with her? And I said, shower her and feed her. So he showered me, the poor guy.

Oh, this is wild. And then he took me downstairs and there was this little hole in the wall place with a cauldron, massive cauldron. And it was just full of this Vietnamese sort of red curry chicken with potatoes and served with a baguette because it's got this weird French kind of overlay. And so I had the first spoonful of this and it was like electricity going through my body like it was it was like no drug could produce this experience and I could

feel it snapping in all of my synapses so I mean that's an embarrassing experience I suppose look the story is longer and gets worse the next day but that's probably maybe for another episode yeah you'll come back for like episode three and then we can get the update the sequels you know I feel like at least if it's going to happen somewhere it needs to be in a foreign country where you know you're never going to see these people again like if that was down like Bondi promenade you'd probably feel a bit differently about the story you know the difference I think the biggest difference because that makes me think back to all my traveling times and I just thought to myself wow thank god like this makes me sound old too but iPhones weren't really a thing then

but that's the difference if you did that now you'd be going viral someone would have filmed you writing shitting vomiting and you would have been like a sensation online except that the person I was with my brother he has a Nokia he has not upgraded so there was no documenting probably going on, but he's told everybody we know the story. That's right. So have you now. Yeah, exactly. The last time we spoke to you, you were living in Paris.

You were having a wonderful time. We spoke a lot about, and I love this chat so much, we spoke a lot about you just living your best life. You were dating a lot of younger men. You were really living the dream. Are you still in Paris now? Are you still in the dating scene? Talk to us about what's been happening the last couple of years.

Yeah, well, you know what? I've got a funny story about that because I live in Paris and I've been there writing a book. so and a really interesting process you probably know the publishing industry like so many industries going through lots of flux so I wrote this book I've been researching it for two years and I wrote it on Substack do you guys yes yeah we're all across yeah you know Substack so I wrote it on Substack serializing it chapter by chapter so each week a new chapter was posted and this community built around it and it it's not a cheerful topic it's called it's about collapse

It's about civilizational collapse and systems collapse and why everything's happening at the moment, including Trump. So it was sort of off the back of the last election, the last Trump election, that I was like, things are not right. And I'd written a book on the climate crisis, et cetera. And I went, this is bigger than that now. It's AI, it's nuclear threat, it's fragmentation, it's all of this kind of thing. What's happening between men and women? This happened in civilizations all throughout history. All complex civilizations go through this process of decline. And we're in the middle of it. So the Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the Jing Dynasty, all of these civilizations, there's about 300 of them, collapse in around

about the 300-year mark, and our civilization's at 270 years. So I was watching all this. I've written this book, serializing it on Substack, and I was doing a podcast where I was interviewing people for the book. And then it got picked up by the biggest publisher in the world, Penguin US, because Trump came into power again. And so they were like, shit, we need a book about this. So that's what I've been doing. Dating-wise, the week I met this or started writing this book, I met a guy on a beach at a party down the south of France

and he's Corsican and he's, how can I put it? Beautiful? Yeah, he's awesome. The most beautiful man I ever met was my husband. And then after that, he was a Corsican. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very dark, a very dark past because most Corsicans men are involved in the mafia over there and they've all got guns

and all of this kind of thing. And he was a motorcycle champion as well and he now builds cars. So that's what he does. But anyway, we ended up dating for the six months that I wrote the book and then the week that I was finishing the book just before Christmas, we broke up but we're still together. He was out here with me in Australia. So you've sort of been a relationship.

A situation-ship. A situation-ship. Yeah. That's what the younger people call it, don't they? He's also younger. So this is the theme, right? So last time we talked about younger guys, that seems to be where I land, but this is the funny thing. I was in Greece. So while I'm in Europe, I travel around a bit. I'm about to go back and sort of travel around Greece again and just write my next book. And I was in this market square. I had to catch the bus down to the port to catch another ferry. And this girl came up to me and said, oh, is this the bus I need to catch? And she was Australian.

So we sat next to each other on the bus and she started talking about men and this guy that she met in some other Greek island and she doesn't know what to do. I don't know. I have a face that says, tell me all your problems. You're also a talker and probably the reflection of that is like being a very good question asker and that's how those stories flow out of people. Yeah, and look, I've lived on the road since I was 21.

I've lived out of two bags of belongings for 30 years. So this is my natural habitat is around strangers like put me in at a barbecue full of my friends with kids in suburban Australia and I can't last five minutes I become mute but in out in the world talking to people I don't know like it's just a beautiful dance for me I'm actually really shy elsewhere but out in in the world like that especially if it's a young woman that comes up to me like I'm fascinated by younger women I just want to learn everything about them anyway travelers also talk as well like travelers are known for that.

A lot of them are by themselves. And everyone's open, you know. So she sits down next to me on the bus and tells me all her woes and she said, look, but I listened to this podcast just before I set out travelling and it really inspired me. It was this woman called Sarah Wilson and she'd been talking about how she just has these relationships with younger men and she doesn't feel she needs to settle down and she's much older.

And I said, oh, I'm Sarah Wilson. So on the other side of the world, on a bus somewhere in Greece. That is so funny. Was she so chuffed? Yeah, she took a photo and sent it to her friends or something, you know. So, yeah, I don't know where that photo turned up, but it's probably out there somewhere. I absolutely love that.

And this is from the first episode that you guys did together. So this is like a Life Uncut episode. So there was a lifer somewhere in Greece that was travelling around. Yeah. That was ground zero for this. I mean, something I found so interesting from the conversation that you guys had last time was, and you just mentioned it, living out of two bags, this minimalist lifestyle

that you've been attracted to, which seems, ironically, in contradiction for someone who worked for some of the biggest women's magazines of the country I mean firstly how did you come to this lifestyle how do you navigate what a minimalist lifestyle looks for you now and then I would love to know what that push and pull was like when you were working in a magazine that's predominantly for consumerism it's to sell stuff sell shit to women that they don't need that we don't need that was my job yeah I can say that now that the magazine's folded, but I think it's been reignited. It has. It has. It's gone back. I know. I saw it the other day. So yes, I grew up this way. I grew up in a subsistence living farm, which doesn't mean much

other than my parents were broke and had too many kids. And so we just wore secondhand stuff and anything that came into the property, we had to do something with it because there's no garbage collection and there wasn't enough petrol to go into town. So we just weren't around consumerism and my dad was anti-capitalist. So I did grow up with all of this and I was known as the little capitalist because I had a job from the age of 11, a business at age 12, and I was essentially, you know, I'm going to move beyond this and dot, dot, dot, the age of 29, I become the editor of Cosmo, which is very funny. However, all of my clothes were secondhand. I refused to be given a handbag, which was a thing, you know, with editors. So I've never owned a handbag in my life.

This is something that I've said a few times. The Daily Mail has scoured like 20 years of my life trying to find a picture of me with a handbag. Trying to catch you out in a lie. And they did a sort of a story with all of these pictures and I just had to go through it. I wrote a response and just said, that's a Byron Bay market tote that somebody gave me and literally I'm carrying celery in it in that photo.

Like not having a handbag doesn't mean that you don't ever use a vessel to carry shit. I think when we say handbag we mean of the Gucci variety. A hundred percent, obviously. Designer. Leather. Yeah, at least. You still need something to get things from point A to point B.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Although I was going to say, yeah, how else do you do it? Generally, per the minimalist concept, I put a lot of things down my bra. Oh, so you, I just picture you lifting your shirt up and you've got your beans and stuff taped to your stomach. You've got your groceries taped to you. Celery down the back. Anyway. So yeah, I've been like that. When I was at Cosmo, a lot of my stuff was secondhand. I rode a bike to work, which was, you know, people just thought was ridiculous. And then I'd ride my bike to, you know, red carpet events and that kind of thing. And in some ways I've got to admit, I kind of knew the gimmick and I knew that

it was a talking point and I loved it because it got people thinking about the fact they'd just driven their four wheel drive and spent 20 minutes trying to park. I've always been a little bit like that, if I'm to be honest, you know, like I like making that statement because I think it's a good statement to make. And I think normalising a different way of doing things that's better for the planet and better for your mental health and just better is a responsible thing to do. So back then, that's how I did it. And look, after I left Cosmo, I just didn't go shopping. So progressively, progressively, when you don't shop, you just use up everything else. And in fact, yesterday I went hiking and I've got a really small storage shed, like it's a third of a single

garage out in the Northern suburbs. And it's just got, you know, my school books from when I was little and you know school reports and photos and a couple of boxes of clothes and so I went out there yesterday with a friend and just like went shopping and this is what I do each time I come back to Australia I just go out to my boxes and I just find things swap it out yeah and this is stuff from when I was 18 or 21 or a lot of it's from when I was doing MasterChef so it's you know 10 15 sometimes 30 years old and I go oh I haven't worn that for a decade and so how it comes yeah And so I've got now got a new wardrobe to take back to Paris. I mean, when you talk about minimalism, because we are sort of victims to the world in which

we live in and everything is geared to sell to us now. And when you're a businesswoman yourself, I mean, in some ways we try to sell whatever it is, whether it's books, I guess now everything's online and people can listen to audio books. So that is definitely a way that's more beneficial. But, you know, I mean, I'm a small business owner, I'm a jewelry designer. So there's always like the thought process is always the strategy of how do you sell more? I mean, deeply, people don't need anything.

They don't need jewellery. I would argue special pieces of high-quality jewellery are things that humans need. And so this is something, even with my book that I'm writing at the moment about collapse, people go, well, should we be having children? Should we be creating art? And I'm like, yes, there are some things that are fundamentally human

and having a small number of very special things is the secret, right? It's the sweet spot. It's interesting about jewellery because it's like the one thing that we've had throughout generations and all of history, this like totem type, like having something that is of meaning and like, you know, people will wear it as a second skin, but then we have like on the flip side of that fast fashion. But do you think it is a result of us as consumers

or are we victims of the businesses that are pushing this on us? Oh, it's totally two-way. I mean, this is also what I write about in my book. There's this concept of Moloch and people find this really interesting and it's a quick one for me to explain. Essentially it shows that none of this is anyone's fault and it's all our fault. So Moloch is this game theory, like poker game kind of theory,

and it's a zero-sum sort of result that we find ourselves in. And what we do, imagine a concert and everyone's sitting down and one person at the front decides to stand up to get a better view. Then everyone behind them has to stand up. And then before you know it, the entire theatre is standing up. Because of that one person. Yeah, and the net result is everybody loses because everybody has to stand.

So the atomic race is like that, like we're all racing to get the bigger atomic bomb, but if any one person drops that bomb, we're all stuffed, right? And it's the same with shopping and keeping up with the Joneses. So one person does it and then everyone needs to do it. Now what's really interesting, I live in Paris where there is not that imperative. Minimalism is a much more respected thing.

It's considered de classe, like not elegant to have vast amounts of fashion. And I sit there with French people and they go, oh, I can tell they're Australian or I can tell they're American. And it's because they're wearing too much contemporary fashion rather than just classic pieces. So, you know, I live in a tiny apartment, 35 square metres. Most Parisians live in small apartments. You have a very small wardrobe.

So you have maybe three pairs of shoes in total, one winter coat, you know, one pair of jeans. This is how everyone lives there and there is not that imperative. And what's really interesting is if you're not shopping, you don't see the billboards. Yeah. You don't see the billboards. So then you're not getting fed those messages

and that cycle gets disrupted. But you do see the social media side of things. You might not see the billboards if you're walking in, but like I think it's for me, I mean, and I guess like for most people who spend their lives online, it is the constantness of advertising that kind of filters through now. that it's hard to disassociate yourself if you're not even walking into a shop. That I would say that if you don't even go shopping online,

like my feed's got no shopping, no fashion on it. Because they're not dropping cookies. That's how the algorithms work, right? So yeah, shopping begets shopping. Like consumerism begets more consumerism. And if you dial it back, it all dials back. That's the great thing about the momentum of the algorithms. Once you actually make a statement, it starts to actually work the other way for you.

So it is a two-way thing. We do live in a society, particularly in Australia. Australia is the most consumerist society. We are the biggest consumers of fast fashion. We have such a high disposable income. Even though there's a cost of living crisis going on for a lot of people, the gap between the have-nots and have-and-have-nots is getting bigger and bigger. So there's two different worlds going on.

And the have-nots are still being influenced by the haves who are wearing all of this stuff and displaying it. So, you know, one thing that I do is I wear the same thing over and over again. It's not so much a statement as a necessity, but I try to normalize not giving a fuck about this stuff, you know, and having a wonderful full life without it. Like I can get on with a great life, you know, doing my public speaking, doing television, whatever it is, I can be part of the system, but I do not buy into that. And I think more young women need to see that that is a choice that they can make.

It is interesting. I will say that I have way too much stuff. Like my wardrobe is huge, but most of it is stuff that I have held onto for like 10 or 15 years. And I wear the same thing constantly. And not that long ago I went to a red carpet event and I wore a dress I'd already worn before and there was like this gotcha moment where someone wrote, oh, didn't you wear that to such and such?

And I was like. Yeah, isn't it cool? Yeah, it's a beautiful dress. So nice I wore it twice. Why wouldn't I wear it again? And I was like, that's really interesting that it's almost like a faux pas if you're in the media to have ever been seen to wear something twice. But like Laura and I and any listeners will know when you watch all of our podcast videos, we constantly wear the same thing over and over. Yeah, but I mean, have a look at any sort of like media cycle through the Daily Mail.

Like they love to go through women's fashion and pick out all of the repeat outfits or like how embarrassing like this person. Or how much it costs. Yeah, and I guess like the lens that we have on female fashion is very different to male fashion. I mean, we all know the anecdote around Obama wearing the same suit to everything and no one realised or caught him out. Karl Stefanovic did the same thing on the morning show. No one ever noticed. But, you know, if anyone's female, you know, counterpart did the same thing,

we would notice it within a week. And I guess like the standard is just very different between female expectation and male expectation. Look, I'm older and so I don't cop it as much. You know, you're becoming visible post 50. But I can say that I have been dressing in the same stuff and after a while no one notices. I promise you.

No one notices that I've never done my nails. No one notices that I haven't got the latest this or that. Like no one cares. And once you start to create that energy in yourself, you can then glide through life without spending time at a mall and doing shopping regret and having indecision fatigue. You can bypass that whole mess and have a great life. Sarah, I'm 39 and I can't tell you the last time I had my nails done,

can't tell you the last time I blow-dried my hair. And I would say I already recognise that no one cares. And I think that maybe it's something that also comes with like age and confidence, this like feeling of acceptance in yourself. But I don't think that age is necessarily a given to that. I don't think that it's like always correlative. I got my nails done last night and I loved it. You just said something interesting. You said you hit 50 and you're invisible.

Do you really find that? Have you found like a marked difference from 30s to 40s, 50s? Dare I say it again, and it's terrible that I've come back to Australia and, you know, make these comparisons, but it's a comparison that a lot of people, you know, friends of mine, there's a lot of Australian creatives in Paris and we notice the same thing. So in Australia it's a very young person's culture.

The Botox, the collagen, the this, the that, like it's unbelievable. I got off the plane and was just blown away by just these faces that look so different. Useful. Quote, unquote, like done. Done. Done, yeah. I would say that in Paris it's a place where women are coming

to their own in their 50s. You're more celebrated, aren't you, as you age? Celebrated, yeah. If I'm waiting in a queue at a cafe, the waiter will come and pick me out to seat me, you know. You are super hot though. He's probably listened to the podcast where you talked about dating younger men.

Yes, French men do live up to that reputation of being very charming. But no, I think there's just culturally a respect for sheer years on the planet. They've assumed that you might actually have something to say. And look, there's an adage in France, if you get invited to a dinner party, bring a good bottle of wine and a good argument. And that's for men and women. I mean, that is bliss for me.

So I think there's just a different set of values and it's not as consumerist. It's still quite a socialist country. The government makes fast fashion very difficult. There's a 12% extra tax on fast fashion, right? So if you buy a 10 euro singlet, you're paying an euro 20 extra, right? So they just don't do as well. Repair shops are subsidised. So if you want to go and get something mended or, you know, whatever, part of it's subsidised

by the government. So there's a whole range of things. Secondhand shops are given extra support. So they get shop frontage at discount rates. There's all of these kinds of measures to steer the population away from crass consumerism. And from one-use items. So if you're a woman who's just dressing simply and everything, you're not getting drowned out by lips and eyelashes and all of that kind of thing. I suppose there is a really big difference.

And it is hard being back here, you know, for that reason because I see young women struggling with all of this. And I wrote a blog post about this and I think you may have seen it. I think Keisha saw it. The blog post about beauty ideals during times of economic austerity. You guys are literally just about to ask you about it. I did your own prompt. But yeah. Well, what did you find about that?

Well, I mean, firstly, I find it very interesting how you're putting your work out at the moment and using Substack. I think so many creatives are moving to Substack and there's so many very interesting discussions that are coming off the back of it. And we ourselves, there have been so many discussions that we've had on a Wednesday episode that have been prompted by Substack discussions. This article that you wrote, which was women will wear this fascist turn on their bodies, all kind of surrounds how the way in which we present ourselves during different political

climates, things that rise and fall on the social media trends. I'm talking like trad wife, how that's just come out of nowhere, that a lot of it is tied into what is happening in the political landscape. Can you tell us a little bit about like how this is something that you've come to recognise and how people can be more aware of how we're being influenced by what's happening in the world. Super interesting. And I think when women read it, they kind of get a different slant

on how they buy into fashion, I think. So I don't think I'm telling anyone here anything new. Like the political times are very, very precarious. There's weird shit going on and America's collapsing. You know, a lot of commentators are saying that it's no longer a democracy and democracy is declining worldwide. Population is about to decline. We've hit peak energy.

It's about to decline. Food, water systems about to decline. Like they're in decline, but they're about to speed up to a point where we're really going to struggle to eat. Like has anyone noticed chocolate prices? That is the start of things. Cacao is missing in the world. But I've noticed every food price.

Every food price. Coffee, coffee beans. Yeah. Well, it's a whole different chapter. Well, no, coffee and chocolate are the two things that go first. Oh, yeah, cacao beans obviously, yeah. So the two things are going and people think there'll be a correction. It's not.

This is what collapse looks like. So the times are very volatile, as you say. And what has happened throughout history is that women have dressed to the times and been forced to dress to the times. So I studied this in feminism studies back in the early 90s. And, you know, back then the look was the waif look, you know, sort of heroine chic. And it was the last time the world had a major recession. Sorry, Australia had a major recession because there's been a recession in 2008.

We managed to skip it here in Australia. But that austerity created a very streamlined, androgynous look, sort of grunge was in, women dressed like boys, didn't wear makeup, all of that kind of thing. And if you cast your mind back to between the war eras, another austere period of economic tough times, women had the flapper look, moved to World War II, it was pants. Women started wearing pants and blazers, you know, Lauren Bacall, that kind of thing. Women were getting the vote. So it sort of comes in line with feminism.

Women are in the workforce. Exactly. But then when you have times of opulence, it swings back the other way. So the 1950s, governments pumped money into the economy. Women were sent back to the suburbs to have children. What do you know? Big boobs, big hips, blonde, voluptuous hair, heaps of makeup, women being constricted into cinched waists, shoes that they couldn't walk in, et cetera, et cetera. And they all ended up having to take Valium to cope with such imprisonment. That again happened in the 80s, another time of austerity off the back of sort of the oil implosion in the US. So think of the Texan Baywatch boobs and lips and, you know, power suits, even though it wasn't a big time for

women entering the workforce. I mentioned the 90s. And so where are we today, right? In Australia, we've had 30 years of uninterrupted economic growth, unheard of for any other Western country in the world. So we sort of skipped the 2008 recession. Yeah, we really did. Yeah. And it's something that Australians don't really recognise. It's because of the mining stuff. So body shapes in Australia have become more voluptuous because it's a time of opulence, right? Voluptuous. Your generation are having far more children than my generation did, you know, getting married. None of my friends got married, right, in the 90s and early 2000s. But I think, you know, your generation went back to the altar. So a lot of traditional views came in. And what we're seeing

now though, so we cut to now 2025, there's these weird stuff going on. So on the one hand, we're seeing the stock market dive, the American dollar's plunging and cost of living stuff is kind of really strange, like strange things are kind of happening. We're seeing some people getting mega rich and then others really struggling. And so there is a return to the ultra thin and you would have seen that on TikTok. There's another sort of wave of anti-woke, anti-DEI, really full-on thinness and the conservative look, so the pulled-back bun, all of that kind of thing. But at the same time, there's this weird what's called

Mar-a-Lago face, you know, the sort of full Dallas look, which is sort of inspired by those Trump wives and the tech bro wives that were there at the inauguration with the big boobs and the big hair and, you know, they all went off to space. But I was watching it going, hang on, why have we got these two? We've got everything, yeah. And I think it reflects exactly what's going on in the world.

The confusion. Exactly. We're going through this incredible time of flux where people are sort of, the Trumpians are trying to go, this is amazing, we're having this great time. And then other forces are going, oh, no, things are not right. So as women, what I advise to women is do not buy into this. There's this great phrase from somebody who's writing about tyranny

and this authoritarian creep that's happening into the world. and it's Timothy Snyder. He says, do not obey in advance. It's the number one rule to try to resist authoritarianism, which is what's happening to the world at the moment. More of the world is now in an authoritarian state than a democracy. It's so subtle too that you don't even see it happening,

which is why it's like the creep. Exactly. So this is where if you're a woman who's like, I am not going to be part of this. I want to resist somehow. What can I do? My number one advice would be do not buy into fashion trends. And basically stop the algorithmic kind of, you know,

death trap by literally not looking at these things. And you'll see in a matter of weeks it'll all back off. Do not go to shopping malls. Buy jewellery, special pieces of jewellery. Tony Mays. Yeah. And just you can not obey in advance, right? You can just not buy into these things because, as you say,

it creeps up, right? These trends creep up and before you know it you're wearing cottagecore, you know like like just don't do it just don't buy shit don't like look in your wardrobe from 10 years ago and just wear that and just say yep I'm wearing something I've worn before how cool's that speaking about the confusion in the world right now you have taken a bit of a turn in your writing as we've been speaking about and you have been writing about system collapse you have decided to serialize this book which you haven't done in the past and I feel like we have seen authors in the past do this, but it's not common. Why did you decide to serialize this? And I guess,

what are the pros and cons of doing it the way you've done it? Yeah. As you say, there is a legacy. And in fact, a lot of the top books that, you know, have been written throughout history were serialized. So War and Peace. Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens, exactly. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, all kinds, all of Virginia Woolf's books, Simone de Beauvoir's books. It was a really common thing that you would write a chapter or two and you would publish it in a journal or a magazine or a newspaper and the public would follow along. And then a few months, six months later, a publisher would

go, well, there's interest in this. We'll produce it as a book. And then it becomes, you know, a book that's now banned by Trump, but dot, dot, dot now banned by Trump. But I was watching what was happening to the publishing industry and it's really struggling. And I, you know, obviously I'm very fond of the publishing industry because I've had wonderful experiences publishing books in the past, but they were really struggling. And I feared that this particular subject was going to be too big and scary for traditional publishing. But I knew there was a community of people who needed a space to talk about this stuff. So I was quite an early adopter of Substack. I think I was one of the earliest, you know, first Australians on there.

And, you know, this is sort of almost four years ago, I think now. And so I figured, well, I'll just try it here. And it just accumulated a bigger and bigger following. And little did I know there were publishers around the world and journalists who'd subscribed and were watching it and reading it. So, yeah, I managed to write a 100,000-word book in six months, which I can't normally do. But the deadline, you know, of a weekly deadline got me there.

And then I had this community giving me feedback the whole way. So I was able to have the confidence that I was on the right track, you know, which is really hard as a writer to gauge when you're, you know, in the trenches with it. For sure. But I also find it so interesting because the stuff that you're talking about is also happening in real time. So when you're talking about things that are happening in the world that might be politically geared or environmentally geared, the process of publication where you might write something

that takes a year and then it's, you know, there's process of back and forth with an editor. it almost feels as though then if you were to release it in a traditional way it would be have it would have missed the boat a little bit with some of these topics that was another reason why i decided to serialize it because the world is moving so fast now you've you've really got to write in real time and publishing as it turns out penguin are going to be turning my book around faster than they normally turn a book around but it's not going to be published until june next year yeah that's crazy yeah so who knows where we are in june next year look i don't know if

There'll be bookstores in the U.S., you know. And I say that legitimately in my books about it. And I certainly won't be able to go to the U.S. I'll be disappeared. Like I am prime target for being disappeared. People like me are currently being disappeared in the U.S. Is your book actually banned by Trump? Are you making a joke?

It would invariably be banned if his minions could pay attention to such things. But if I go through immigration, ICE will stop me. I mean I'll have to go with a burner phone. I encourage anyone going to America to basically wipe your phone. But even anything you've deleted recently, ICE can go through your phone and find it. So take a burner phone to America. Look, number one, don't go to America.

In Europe, everyone's been advised not to. It's a travel alert. Australia will issue it certainly very soon. It's too dangerous. If you've got stuff that's about Palestine or about Trump or about the tech bros on your phone, you have no rights once you land there. ICE can take your phone. I mean, Trump is showing us that with the people he's deporting now with just completely

fabricated lies on why they're being deported. You've got no rights once they decide that you are a problem. So yeah, to your point, I don't know what will happen to that effect, but I think the publishing industry is going, we've got to continue business as usual and just hope the worst of this doesn't happen. But yeah, the uncertainty is palpable. Here in Australia, it's so strange. People aren't talking about this.

Yeah, but people do talk about things in isolation. I think people are concerned about climate change or they're concerned about wars or they're concerned about politics. And they're not seeing that it's the same crisis. Yeah, and this is something that you've spoken about. I saw that you wrote about it in terms of like being a meta-crisis, that it's that all of these things that are happening across the world are in ways connected to each other.

My question for you is when it is placed like that, there is such a doomsday way of looking at things. How do you cope with that then? How do you process that in a way when it seems like everything is so futile, how are you able to go, okay, well, here is how we can still live a connected life or a life that has meaning or a life that has purpose when everything seems like there is no purpose? Yeah.

I mean, obviously it's one of the first questions I get asked apart from how long do we have and will I die? And also- Should we keep having kids and procreating? And should I have a bunker? You know, should I be moving off to Daylesford or something and building a bunker? Yeah. I've been in this space for three years researching it and, you know, going to the conferences

And I think, you know, I'm aware that I can sound like a conspiracy theorist, you know, but there's no conspiracy going on. All of this information is out there and the modelling is being done by the top institutes and universities around the world. But you make a really good point. It's being dealt with in isolation. Very few people are seeing it as part of systemic collapse, partly because we live in a world where we think about things as linear, you know, a beginning and an end. If you could just stop the problem somewhere in the middle, then you have a good outcome. Exactly. But complexity theory, which is the theory that governs how our bodies work, you know,

the knee bones connected to the thigh bone, all of that kind of thing, the way that we interact with nature, it actually sees this as a whole range of dominoing, cascading systems that once one goes, all the others start to tip. And anyone who understands the climate crisis knows that, yeah, the implications for the food system, for biodiversity. Yeah, you get it. So how do I live through all of this? Well, it's really funny.

My mother, who finds this way too hard to cope with, my dad gets it and he's fully into it and he's read the book and he, yeah, just really understands it. But my mother says to me, like, you know, when I visited over Easter, she said, I don't understand it, Sarah. You've been in this space. You think and talk about it all day but you seem the happiest you've ever been.

And I said, well, that's because I am. and I think what it is is that and I write about in the first two chapters of the book which are free by the way if anyone wants to go onto my sub stack there's a couple of the chapters that are free because they're the ones that I think people could just get a taste of it so go and go and check that out but the first two chapters are called hope and then relief and then the next one's called truth and what I say is I've got no longer got hope we've been thinking oh but there's still hope. If we just all get solar panels and recycle properly, we'll make it. The point is we will no longer make it. Okay. And it depends what you mean by make it, but we'll no longer be

returning to a place of the comfort that we've known previously. And this has happened all throughout history. You have times of opulence and then it comes back up down the other side and it's going to go into deep decline and very, very fast. So what happens when I tell people of this and go into the details of it, people tell me they feel a relief. The reason they feel a relief is there's this cognitive congruence that happens because finally it's like, yeah, we've been told we can still make it and, you know, the Paris Accords and, you know, it'll all be fine.

But we're seeing headlines coming in going we've reached another planetary boundary, you know, another couple of thousands of species have died off that are critical to our food bowl system. Well, I think as well with it is that there's so much emphasis on the small changes that we as people can make that's going to move and shift the dial. And realistically, it's not the things that we are doing on a day-to-day level personally that is creating the greater problem,

especially when it comes to climate, you know, the climate change and where we're at in the world. And, I mean, yeah, what was the documentary that we were talking about recently around fast fashion and all of like the- Shop Now, Buy Now. Yeah, Buy Now. I mean, anyone who watched that, docker, I highly recommend it. but it was like the horrifying things that you don't normally see

like beaches in Africa that are lined with clothes in Ghana because there's nowhere else for it to go and we're shipping all of the stuff we don't want to people who are quote-unquote in need and it is like kilometres of beach that is just full of clothing being discarded. When you see that and you realise you're still shopping and playing into that and you feel powerless, this incongruency happens in your brain and it's creating what I refer to as a moral injury amongst people. And I think the pain, like I start talking about this and

people go, oh my God, that's exactly how I feel. And that deep despair. I look at the way people, young people are depressed. I look at ADHD rates. I look at so many things and I go, I think there is a deep sense amongst all of us that all is not right, that the center can uphold. This idea of infinite growth on a finite planet, that does not stack up, right? And we know it. We know it. We're not stupid. Humans have a visceral connection to nature and we know we're not in attunement. And so when you start talking about the truth, people do feel this relief. And for me, now that I'm just like being perfectly honest about what is happening, I can actually then start to reframe the way that I live my life. And so the piece of advice that I

give to everybody, you know, people want to know what can we do? What can we do? The first thing is live your fullest life now. Even just sitting here now, we don't know how long we've got. We don't know if we walk outside and get hit by a bus. Humans have never known when they're going to die and that has not changed. But we do know that the existential situation is pretty bad. So live your fullest life now. Now, what does fullest life mean? It doesn't mean going to a all it doesn't mean raping and extracting the planet it means being our full human self which is loving it is contributing it is attending to a greater good at times like this throughout history we are programmed to like collectivize to form communities so I advise people get to

know your neighbors the greatest survival trick and like you might not think any of this is going to happen. Cool. But you might actually like the ways that we're going to need to live. If it does happen, you might like to do it anyway. That is form communities. You don't have to go off to a bunker in New Zealand. Form the communities around where you are now. Bake muffins for the neighbour you've never met. Invite their kids over. It's called pro-social prepping. It is the only thing we can do if shit goes down. So form communities and it's kind of a fun thing to do anyway. Send your kids to scouts or there's people I know doing bush survival skills. We're going to need to know this because it's only a matter of Elon Musk having a bad mood and turning off 80% of the

satellites up there. We will not have ATM machines. We will not have technology. We will not have mobile phones. So in Europe, 450 million citizens are being told over the summer to prepare a survival kit in the event of World War III. Do you know what's interesting? We live in such a world here where we are so sheltered from it in Australia, but my fiance lives in Europe and his teammates are from all over Europe. He plays football. They're all from all over. And when I was there recently, there were some from Estonia, some from Ukraine, all over. And they had just received in the mail, and it sounds like a movie, they received a pamphlet of what to prepare from the government. This is not like a little woo-woo underground thing.

It's from the European Commission. Yep. They received it saying, this is what you guys need to get ready because the world is getting ready for impending doom, whether that's another world war or whatever it is we have too much control resting in very few people, like you just said, like Elon Musk. And for me to hear that, I was like, this sounds like Armageddon. Like to have the government be sending you these pamphlets saying this is what you need to go out and buy as every household was wild.

You're not alone. Australians listen to me talk about this and they're like, what? So realising that over in Europe we're talking about this. My friends have got, we're getting together paper maps and learning how to read maps. I can read a map, but I would suspect your generation probably can't. Well, I think you aged me down too much. Yes, we had maps.

I moved to Europe with a map. I was on the last cusp of the McGregors. Don't worry. The Gregory's maps. But, yeah, so we're learning how to read maps. We're getting together radios with batteries. You know, this is real, and it's happened throughout history. It's just a rude shock because most of us have only grown up

with life getting so-called better. but growth and abundance it actually runs out and it goes back down the other side and that's what we're heading for how do you think building communities and this is something we actually had a conversation about this recently about how traditional community is something that we've really lost and like even from like a motherhood perspective like having your tribe around you is something that's very different these days how do you think that this is something that we do create for ourselves now and what does a modern community look like to you a modern community and I use this phrase, it's a Pima Chodron phrase, start where you are. You don't have to go to a

intentional farming community somewhere. Just start wherever you are. If you're in a block of apartments, get to know the people all around you. Invite them over, you know, invite them over for afternoon drinks sometime. Be the proactive one to do this. Look out for Facebook groups before Facebook implodes, where you can actually join up with people who are doing similar kind of things. also talk about sharing skills. So I speak to people who've got, like, they do it under the auspices of having, you know, a sort of a book club or whatever it is. Use those kinds of groups that you might already be forming

to start talking about these kinds of things. So I grew up going, oh, community, is that really what we've got to do? And it sort of all sounds a bit twee and a bit ineffectual. It's not. It's what's kept us as humans human but also surviving threats throughout the ages, it is the number one thing that works and we're going to have to return to it. I think most of us know how to reconnect.

We're craving it. That is the gift of collapse. That is the gift of all of this is we're going to be returned to our most human selves and we ache for it. It's also something that is completely in our control. You can go and put those. A lot of things that are in your control but this is. Sarah, we could talk to you about this for so long.

If you guys want to go and continue these discussions, go to Sarah's Substack. We're going to link that in the show notes. We're also going to link our first episode we did with you a few years ago. I love talking to you. It's always interesting. I always learn something and it's always thought-provoking. So thank you so much for coming on today.

Thank you for giving me the time. I love these kinds of conversations. Thank you. Thanks, Sarah. We'll be right back.