The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Radical Simplicity: The Opportunities of a World in Collapse with Sarah Wilson

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

For years, the climate movement ran on the promise that, if we all rally hard enough, we could have it all: continue with our current system and save the planet. Yet the events of the past few decades have shown that this isn't quite the case, and in fact, climate is just one crisis among many produced by our growth-at-all-costs system. This raises the question: What happens when a culture built on the certainty of progress has to confront its own uncertainty?  In this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and author Sarah Wilson for an exploration of the emotions that come from learning about, processing, and then embodying the full extent of the metacrisis. Sarah shares her own emotional arc through this journey, and makes the case that "hope" (at least the version most of us think of) is no longer helpful, since it defers responsibility to some future savior rather than requiring anything of us now. In its place, she argues for truth to ground us, revealing the only path forward is to be "thoroughly human" – grieving, laughing, dancing, showing up for our neighbors. She and Nate also explore why prepping alone doesn't work, and that we should instead be working toward a radical simplification: an intentional shift toward a slower, more communal way of living. Why does the fear of uncertainty run so much deeper than we admit, and what happens to us once we stop resisting it? What emotions and opportunities do we make room for when we let go of false hopes that someone else will solve our crises? And if collapse is actually a slow unraveling of the system we've built our lives around, what would it look like to meet it with the same sense of duty and connection that has always seen humans through hard times? (Conversation recorded on September 10th, 2026)    About Sarah Wilson: Sarah Wilson is a multiple-time New York Times and Amazon bestselling author, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, minimalist, and philanthropist. She edited Cosmopolitan magazine Australia at 29, founded the global I Quit Sugar movement, hosted the most-watched non-sports broadcast TV series in the nation's history – Masterchef Australia – and wrote the bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, which Mark Manson described as "the best book on living with anxiety that I've ever read." Her book, This One Wild and Precious Life, won the US Gold Nautilus Prize, and she has been ranked in the top 200 most influential authors in the world (two years in a row). Her latest book, I Eat the Stars, is now available globally. Sarah lives nomadically, leading dynamic, global conversations about modern philosophy, creativity, existential risk and climate change via her keynote speaking, Wild podcast, and her Substack and social communities (of 550,000 subscribers).   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

This is actually a period of opportunity. We're straddling an old world that's collapsing and a new world which is yet to be born. And so the opportunity that we have in this moment is to get the better ideas, the more life-generating ideas that we want going into the future. We need them lying around so that as this crisis really comes to ahead, they're ready to go.

And that is actually something we can all do. now. We don't have to wait. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today I'm joined by philosopher and writer Sarah Wilson to discuss. how to live well through the unfolding more than human predicament, and more specifically, how to remain as engaged,

prosocial, and loving humans, even as an uncertain world puts pressure on us to act otherwise. Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times bestselling author and philanthropists. She edited Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia, founded the global I Quit Sugar Movement, and hosted Master Chef, Australia. She also wrote the best-selling book, First We Make the Beast Beautiful, and her book, This One Wild and Precious Life, won the U.S. Gold Nautilus Literary Prize. Sarah lives nomatically,

leading dynamic global conversations about modern philosophy, creativity, existential risk, and climate change via her wild podcast, as well as her substack community. Her latest book, I eat the stars, how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world, takes us through her journey learning about and then learning to live with the unfolding collapse of complex civilization happening around us. And she and I discuss just that in today's episode, including her journey through letting go of the false hope, that if we only act now, we might save the current system we live in, and that letting go of that system might not actually be the worst thing humanity could do in this moment. A small caveat on this episode, I unfortunately had quite a bit of a cold while recording this conversation.

And I was feeling a bit lower in energy. And luckily, Sarah and I are friends. And she brought enough energy and stories to balance our conversation. With that, please welcome Sarah Wilson. Sarah Wilson, at long last, welcome to the Great Simplification. You have had one of those careers that is kind of hard to define and put in a single box. You edited Cosmopolitan Australia. You founded the global I Quit Sugar Movement.

You hosted Master Chef. And I understand you became. multiple New York Times bestselling author a bunch of times. And now you've turned your attention to this story, existential risks, societal collapse. With your new book, I Eat the Stars. So this episode could probably go a million ways. But I would like to start with a speed round challenge of sorts.

For anyone tuning in who isn't familiar with the term or might want a refresher, especially in different words, can you lay out the meta-crisis for us in five minutes or less? Nice, easy start to this conversation, Nate. Okay. So the metacrisis is basically all the crises that we are observing in the world today. So we're talking nuclear crisis, AI singularity, you know, sort of at our doorstep, the climate crisis, food and water scarcity. crises. We're talking about financial trade route crises, everything that we're kind of being bombarded with as we open up our social media or our newspapers. It's all of those things happening at

once. But it's even more than that because it's the crisis of all of these crises, the fact that there's so many crises happening at once. And so it's the crisis of our consciousness or the mindset behind why we have landed in this position with so much going on at once. So, you know, to my mind, and I think you probably share the same thinking, Nate, it's the mindset we're talking about here is the growth mindset, the infinite growth on a finite planet mindset and individualism. But on top of all of that, it is also the fact that we, with our limited consciousness, we can't get on top of it all to be able to get a bird's eye view and be able to fix what's going on, right? So it's gone beyond that. It's so complex. It's so

interconnected. Plus, we're in it and implicated in it. And that's what makes the whole thing matter. Does that make sense? That was under five minutes, I think. Yeah, it does make sense. You brought up several things. We have a growth mindset. We have an individualism mindset and a consciousness. And all three of those things are not the lenses with which to view this meta-crisis, which makes it really difficult for a lot of people. Yeah.

And it took me a while to learn that as well. It's not like everyone is just robots waiting for facts to change their actions. There are layers of the onion of our built worldviews that we have to first overcome. Yeah. And I think one of the sort of mindsets, sort of sub-mindsets of that individualistic mindset that we've all grown up with is this concept of linearity. You know, that's what's so hard to fathom. I know that when I was looking at all of this and first entering into this realm, I was just really coming up against my tendency, my insistence on sort of doing the,

well, if A, then B, and then we'll jump to this and all of this kind of thing. And we can't fathom what we're in with that linear mindset. You know, we've got to actually enter into the complexity. We've got to be in this. You know, again, that's what makes it matter. I really love your book, especially the fact. that each of the chapters, like you said, is kind of non-linear, and they just have a one word like ungrowth or hope or some of the other things, and we'll get into that. But it's impossible

to present this story in a linear way, which is one of the reasons I haven't written a book, but the way you did it was beautiful. Thanks. It was, I really had to be in it. You know, it was the only way to do it. And I've had some criticisms that, oh, hang on, it's all over the place, it's scattered and so on. But, you know, I explained from the outset in the little introductory chapter that I had to write it in a way that matched what we're in, you know. And so I do jump from philosophy to science, to economic modeling, to spiritual thoughts and mindsets and ideas.

And so I've got to, and also bring in my own personal story and my felt embodied experience. you know, as I went along. So that seemed to be the best way to reflect what we're in. You know, I had to be that message as I went through it myself. I wonder how critical that is and the fact that your book is so popular and well received. People aren't, I suspect, searching for facts. They're more searching for authenticity and someone's experience that's mirroring their own confusion and anxiety and uncertainty and all those things. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think it's both, to be honest. I grappled with that because when I first started writing this and when I first started learning

about all of this, I'm quite a left-brained person. I need the science. I need the facts. I need to know where it all stacks up. And I actually think for anyone sort of who's first entering into this space and becoming aware of things through this kind of metacrisis or systems lens, it's important to actually allow for that sort of left-brained way of thinking because it's familiar, because it's what will get us there. But as you go deeper and deeper into it, you realize that the facts just don't explain it all and they don't actually get us to where we need to be. Because, you know, Nate, you and I have spoken about this in the past. So intellectuals and academics in this space, they can get very bogged down in sort of discussions as to, you know,

the actual etiology of a word or, you know, whether we should be calling it this or that. And I actually see that as a fear response and also a reticence to embody the complexity and the unknowiness of everything that we're in, right? So I think once you get into it a bit and you start to line up the facts and knowing the factual stuff and knowing the theories and the thesis behind, you know, why this is all happening at once is really helpful. We need that. But then we actually do need the more embodied explainers.

And that's where it becomes really spiritual. And I know, you know, you do that dance between the sort of the left and the right brain experience of it all. And we have to. It's this and that, not this or that. And, yeah, I think we need to be able to embody it because. this kind of heavy information, it produces so many big emotions and it's got to move through our body. It can't be processed in our head. In my case, I think I graduated from the left brain

analysis of the situation where I had enough and then like naturally moved towards more of a right brain or integrated view. But when you're first learning about it, there's a critical minimum threshold of connecting the dots that the left brain analysis integrated system science is is necessary. But you mentioned the emotional arc. So most of our viewers are somewhere on this journey of grappling with what you outlined. I'm wondering if you could talk about your own emotional journey and reaction when you first came to really understand the scope of what you outline in your book?

Well, for me, it was a little titrated because I came into this space, and I suspect a lot of people listening and watching this are much the same through the climate crisis. You know, it was, I'd been a climate activist most of my life. I grew up in this kind of space. And it was actually through the profoundly rude awakening. or realization that we weren't going to quote unquote make it. You know, that had been the great promise for decades. You know, if we do this, then we can still make it.

If we all rally together and get solar panels and vote climate and, you know, recycle a bit more, we can make it. And that was a fair, I think, rundown or approach to things because we did need critical mass. We all needed to do everything at once to be able to reach those, you know, Paris Agreement thresholds. And so I started to sort of realize that we weren't going to make those thresholds. We weren't going to make those targets. We were increasingly overstepping the planetary boundaries.

We're getting alerts telling us that, you know, we're in a red alert territory. I mean, the poor United Nations Secretary General ran out of superlatives to sort of, you you know, scream at us like this, you know, Code Red, you know, he didn't, he couldn't go any further. And, of course, all those other threats were piling on in, you know, over the last couple of years, the declining democracy, AI singularity, nuclear threat dialing up. We were closer than ever to the doomsday clock, you know, it was at 85 seconds from midnight and so on. And I suppose, like, it was just, it was overwhelming.

And what I was observing in the climate movement was that everybody was overwhelmed and everybody was in a state of agitated despair and sort of just fatigued. And I decided to look into why that was the case. And I really realized that we weren't looking at this through the right lens. That was the metacrisis lens that we needed to be viewing this through. We need to see this as complex systems collapse rather than a unilinear concept. And once I started to realize that and lining everything up and letting go of that idea that we can somehow make it, really what it was that I felt was a profound relief. And I almost felt grubby and guilty for that, because is this just me kind of giving up and thinking, oh, good, there's nothing to fight for anymore? I can just

kind of, you know, rest my climate boots, you know, hang up my climate boots. But I started writing about this. And of course, this book started out as a substact serialization. But when I started writing, the first chapter basically talks about exactly this, like confronting exactly where we're at and letting go of this promise of it, of us hopefully making it. And yeah, the overwhelming response from readers on my substack was relief. People said, thank God, that makes sense. You know, and I'm, I was reminded of that quote from the Klaevil, the Czechoslovakian president, the former president and dissident. And he said something, you know, I'm going to sort of butcher his quote, but it was along the lines of real hope is not the belief that things are going to work out well.

It's the belief or the knowing that things are starting to make sense. And I think that's where so many of us arrived. We were like, right, this finally makes sense. And really what was happening at a large scale, it was what was happening actually within my own brain. The cognitive dissonance of being told one thing and yet seeing the headlines that go up against that, it actually resolved that really uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. And so there was this sense of congruence. And so, yes, that expresses itself as a profound relief.

And I know that you know what, you and I have touched base on this a few times, just discussing that really profound, I don't know, the depths of human emotion that this journey takes you on. You know, it's both scary and terrifying and rude, like I've used that word a few times. I also use the word unholy. It's like, what the hell? We weren't promised this.

The neoliberal dream didn't include this. We were told that we would have increasing comfort and increasing ease. What the hell? We were not told about this. And then there's also this expansiveness because this is true. This is where we're at. And it's time to put on our grown-up pants and rise up into this, which is also, you know,

Another emotion that, you know, comes up a lot, I think, on this journey. Thank you for that. So a central theme that you emphasize building on what you just said throughout the book is the loss of certainty. The fact that we just don't know what's coming next or how things will exactly unfold, essentially living in a system that is destabilizing before our eyes. So, Sarah, why is that a system? idea of uncertainty so important, and why is it so difficult for us as humans to sit with uncertainty? Yeah, well, I think we're cognitively programmed to seek certainty. You know, as

humans, we want to make order out of the chaos, and that's how we're able to get through a life and put a roof over our heads and feed our kids. But the more interesting, I think, answer to this is more philosophical. And, you know, the philosophers and the spiritualists throughout the ages have addressed this exact quandary. And I find it really interesting to sort of reflect on the fact that we are apparently the only species that has a full and sort of overwhelming sense that we will die one day. Now, I think, you know, other species, and I know you've discussed this with other guests on your podcast, other species have a sense that, yes, you know, that death could be close and that kind of thing. But we apparently live with it, you know, sort of looming like a dark shadow,

you know, and, you know, the existentialists and the philosophers have tried to find a way through this, you know. Now, the problem with why we struggle to manage it in this day and age right when we need to be able to have, to be comfortable with uncertainty is partly because of modernity. Neoliberalism in particular, but it, you know, goes back several hundred years, has worked towards removing, and I have this phrase that I use in my book, removing the moral umpires of the footy field of life, right? So it's now a free-for-all. We're expected to grapple with all of this on our own right when things have dialed up, you know. And that is terrifying and it's hard. And I think it's so important to talk about this because, you know,

people out there are feeling crazy. Like somehow they're meant to be handling all of this on their own. But throughout history, we've never handled this on our own. And again, Again, this is part of the neoliberal mindset that we've all been entrapped in, that if you're not handling it, well, that's on you. You just need to work harder. I interviewed last year a guy named Sheldon Solomon. I don't know if you've heard of his work, but it's called Terror Management Theory, which is just that, that our culture is so afraid of death. And that actually manifests in our behaviors, our political voting and everything. Yeah, I interviewed him as well, actually. He is a beautiful man. He's a beautiful man. He's a beautiful man. Showed up in New York City with a tie-dye shirt and a swimsuit on. Yeah, yeah. And he lives his message. He really lives his message. You can sort of see that he's really gone down into the depths of that. And I think you've spoken to various people who've discussed this in terms of grief and other profoundly deep emotions, you know. So does the metacrisis awareness accelerate those emotions?

Yeah. It brings them forward. It brings them right in front of us. You know, we're smacked up against all of this. But really what it's doing is it's smacking us right up against our humanity. This is what it means to be human. And what it does is also forces us into a place where there's actually nowhere else to go. You know, you mentioned before that with your left-brained, you know, analysis of all the facts and everything, you reached a point where it couldn't go any further.

And in fact, it was annoying you, you know, like it becomes annoying because it, it can't provide the answers. And I almost think that, you know, sort of metacrisis awareness, the collapsed journey, it actually funnels us into a place that in some ways, all of our sort of, you know, meditation retreats and those books that sit next to us, you know, next to our bedside table and we sort of pick up and we get these profound, expansive feelings, right? They last an hour or an hour or two, but then they waft away because we've got to enter back into neo-liberal living. What we're going through is actually taking. us to that space, that thing, you know, that we can only just touch tentatively with our spiritual

practices. I actually think that collapse is taking us right to this where there is nowhere left to go other than through this, through our emotional, subjective experience of it all. And it is one of the gifts of what is going on. You know, as you know, to give away the end of the book, I refer to this journey, you know, through to collapse awareness and in fact collapse itself is a homecoming. We're being driven back into our full humanity again after we've wandered off. So I had a realization there while you were speaking and I'm a little slow on the uptake today because I have a bit of a cold,

but it's that I'm craving being around people that have embodied responses to this and not just well, did you know this and look at this? And to complete your thought, it feels like these are, to use Bill Plotkin's phrase, once again, ecological adulthood in humans where, yeah, okay, I understand roughly the shape of what we face and here's how I'm living and here's how I'm responding. And I didn't realize my aversion to the fact slingers until you just express that. So I'm going to have to process that a little bit. But it brings up another aspect of this.

For many people, their first response to uncertainty is almost a compulsion to find some sort of hope. But you wrote about this in I Eat the Star. Why can that reaction, this striving and requirement to have hope become actually dangerous in these circumstances? And how do we learn to let go of false hopes without losing the motivation to move forward altogether? Yeah. We sort of touched on this a little moment ago in reference to the climate movement. You know, I think the climate movement needed to actually have that hope. dangling in front of us at all times because there was this sense that we would give up without it.

I've never really sat comfortably with that and I was constantly interrogating it. And I think the fact of the matter is there isn't hope and we've got to actually be clear on what we mean by this. We're not talking about all hope. We're talking about the particular hope that we've been sort of enticed with for decades now. It's the hope that we can continue business as usual and everything will turn out okay. And I had to sort of look into that. And I'd never done it before. I was like, well, what does it mean for everything to turn out okay?

And it's that, you know, we can continue the neoliberal capitalist growth, infinite growth on a finite planet myth uninterrupted. And there's not a single planet where that can stack up. There's not a mindset, a worldview, where that makes any sense, you know. It is a ridiculous thing to actually peg so much on. So I mentioned before the cognitive dissonance, that is real. I think as humans who have a visceral engagement with the world, we realize that. It doesn't stack up. Now, a big part of the problem with this kind of hope that we've been peddled is that

it's actually an immature response to the situation. And it's not that dissimilar to outright pessimism because pessimism basically says, look, it's so bad, there's nothing I can do, so I'm not going to do anything. This kind of hope, or hopium, as the Reverend, the late Reverend Michael O'Dard used to call it, is this idea that somebody, you know, look, it's pretty bad, but, you know, somebody else out there will fix it, so we're all good. And for years, we've been thinking it'd be the green economy that would fix it. There'd be these boffins that would work out so these great new green economy initiatives and we should be all good, you know. And then it's, you know, we've realized that that doesn't stack up. So now we're on to the tech bros. The tech bros apparently are going to

create this AI that is going to be able to work out a solution to the climate crisis that our limited consciousness cannot work out for ourselves. And that is actually, it sounds ridiculous, But that is actually where some of my most sophisticated, powerful friends working in the climate movement at the moment, that is where they've landed, that the tech bros are going to fix this. And it's a complete denial of our situation and it's incredibly immature. I don't know, Nate, have you ever had Toby Ord onto your podcast? He's actually an Australian philosopher. He works out of Cambridge, I believe. And he looks at the existential risk.

and he made a really good point a number of years ago that he sort of stacked up, he sort of took the average lifespan of a mammal, a mammalian species like the human species. Million years. Yes. And then lined up where we're at, right, and then sort of tracked it against a sort of an 85 year trajectory on the planet, you know, the average sort of lifespan for a human. And worked out that we kind of come in currently as a 16-year-old. And I reckon that makes sense. You know, we are behaving like a recalcitrant teenager who is aware of what's going on, but we think somehow there's an adult out there who's going to come and save us, you know?

So that's what, that's why I hope is dangerous. Well, it's worse than that because in our current system, and you follow this channel enough to know that there is a psychopathic instrumentality to our institutions and economic system. So our default hope as a culture is the market will solve it. That prices and technology will solve something that is ecological and spiritual and biophysical. And it cannot. And so that's maybe this deeper realization that you come to.

And so you asked me sort of where did I, you know, where did I come to in terms of, of giving people something to move towards if it was not hope. And essentially where I arrive at is truth. Truth is actually a far sturdier ballast for where we're at. It's actually going to service far more effectively, robustly, more humanly for the years ahead. So that's what I ground myself in now. Well, when I was reading your book, I hadn't expressed it or seen it that way, but that's what I'm trying to do with this platform.

Yeah. Is truth and understanding. And the hope and the response bubbles up from that, but I'm clearly not leading with hope. But here's the thing. How many people in the world are already overstressed and anxious and they don't know about the metacrisis. and I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

I mean, this isn't for everyone. And I think with your work, people find you, and it's like a beacon in the sky, and they are attracted to it. But it ain't for everyone. No, it's not. And we've got to realize that. And I think this is something that I've had to adjust to

from coming from the climate movement. Because with the climate crisis, it was actually quite valid for everybody to run around, you know, door knocking, having dinner parties and trying to, sort of swing their neighbors and recalcitrant uncle over into this way of thinking that, you know, we all need to do the big switcheroo, you know, to sort of electric. We need to decarbonize. We need to sort of stop our addiction to fossil fuels and everything. And we need to do it all at once.

It won't work if we don't all do it at once. And so that idea had merit. Well, it kind of worked because the narrative did change to that, even though it was a biophysically delusional solution. The narrative actually did scale for a while. while. It did. But applying it now to kind of the meta-crisis that we're in now, it doesn't translate for those exact reasons that you just outlined. A lot of people aren't ready for it. And besides, there's actually not something that we can do to fix this at scale with all the humans on board. Really, what we're doing is actually creating the invite for people to understand and adjust their thinking so they're prepared for what is actually coming. We can't fix it. We can

respond to it. I mean, the way that you adjust your thinking is there's a simplification happening, so get ahead of the rush. That's being your thesis, and that's, I think, the modus operandi behind what you do. And I think there's a lot of merit to that, but people need to come to it when they're ready because this is so overwhelming. And the best thing that we can do, Anybody who is actually, you know, really wanting their friends and family to wake up to this because they love and care about them is to actually just be, and it's a Meg Wheatley phrase, to be an island of sanity. So basically we need to get ourselves anchored, our nervous systems rock solid and sturdy so that we are a place where people can come to as they start to wake up to this kind of stuff. We can't hit them over the head with it. And so instead, all that energy that we could be spending, you know, hitting people over the head and doing lectures at dinner parties and getting worked up because, you know, nobody's listening, we can actually use that energy to get solid in ourselves.

And this is something that I really do believe in. And I'm, you know, referring to my cosmopolitan terminology from my deep, deep, dark past working in that space. But we need people who are actually in this space now, we need to actually make this new way of being. looks sexier than the status quo. That is actually a responsibility now. We've got to invite people in so that they can actually see their nervous systems can observe our nervous systems being grounded and sturdy. And they'll resonate.

They'll resonate and they'll say, I want to be part of this, you know. And again, that's right brain thinking, you know. It's being that message. So I think that's the big difference here, you know. Not everybody's ready for it. So what we do is we get ourselves as ready as we can be to hold the space when people are ready to enter it. That resonates with my view. In your work, Sarah, you present in your book the visual of a Venn diagram between the old world and whatever is coming next with the space in between being a place where we get to decide what we carry with us.

So what opportunity do you think this space offers us? Yeah. And what would you like to see carried through if we can? Yeah. So I describe that sort of that space in between. It's that kind of shaded crossover bit where the two circles cross over. It's a liminal time. We are currently in that liminal time.

We're straddling an old world that's collapsing and a new world which is yet to be born, you know. And there's that famous quote from Antonio Gramsci who he came up with the quote when he's been imprisoned by Mussolini in another liminal time, you know, that time between World War I and World War II. He said, you know, the old world hasn't quite died and the new world has yet to be born. Now is the time of monsters. And so that is certainly the case today. We are in an in-between uncertain liminal time.

and all kinds of nefarious forces are stepping into the void and filling it. Fascist leaders, bad faith actors and so on and so forth. I don't need to list them all. We're all living on this planet today. We know who they are and we know what they're doing. And this is what has always happened in liminal times like this. But what also can happen in these in-between times when everything is up for grabs, we, the people, we can step in. And there's that other quote from Milton Friedman. It's a wonderfully

ironic quote because, of course, he's the founder of modern capitalism. He said, you know, and I'm paraphrasing here once again, you know, change only happens off the back of a crisis, but what happens after the crisis will depend on the ideas that align around at the time. And so the opportunity that we have in this moment is to get those ideas, the better ideas, the more life-generating ideas that we want going into the future, we need them lying around. We need the line around so that as this crisis really comes to a head, they're ready to go. So that is the position that all of us are in. Now, liminal times have far from being super, super dark times.

They've actually produced incredible sort of isms. So that period I mentioned before between World War I and World War II, Simone de Beauvoir wrote about this in her book, What Is Existentialism? She talked about the fact that the world was trying to grapple with, well, what comes next and what matters now. And so fascism, communism and existentialism burst forward, you know. And a lot of that thought actually was happening here in the city I live in now, in Paris, in cafes, you know, as people were trying to grapple with all of this. Another liminal time, the Axial Age, it was a very long liminal time between two massive epochs.

It produced, the market system. produce Buddhism, Judaism, Judaism, Confuciism. You know, there's other dark times that have produced incredible art movements and, you know, and philosophical thinking. And so this is what I actually find exciting. And we need to remind ourselves of this. This is actually a period of opportunity. You know, we need to be stepping into this before the fascists do, if I can put it simply. I flesh that out in a fair bit of detail.

And I make the parallels between these liminal times in history and sort of what we're going through now. And, you know, I think we all feel it. Nate, I know you do. I know many of your guests on your program do as well. There's a sense of urgency. Like, game on. This is, I mean, what a time to be alive. The challenge is that at the same time, all these crises are merging and bubbling up. The stock markets are at all-time highs. and the narratives in the news and the media are distracting from this. And so we probably, large numbers of people won't actually get the message until we're really in it. So let me ask you this. How long have you lived in Paris?

I've been here for just over three years now. Okay. So are people in the cafes and people that you talk to, do you notice a difference from three years ago, which was not too far in the Ukrainian war? I mean, right now this is September 10th. We're recording this. Forward prices on natural gas this winter in France and in Europe are $25 per million BTU. In the U.S., it's $3.

So this winter is going to be a challenge with storage and other things. And food. And food, right. So are people, everyday people talking about this, aware of it? or is it sleepwalking like it might be in Chicago or New York City? Or Sydney or Melbourne, Australia, or London. France, I think, has generally, and Europe more broadly, but particularly France, has always been a little more ahead of the curve on this stuff, I think.

There's a whole range of reasons for it. I think particular to France is the French Revolution. Like, I mean, I'm reading a book at the moment called How the French Think, and it goes into sort of historically why the French are so good at nuanced thinking, you know. I mean, anybody who's been to France, to Paris, you walk around the cafes, people are just talking. They're talking and they're arguing. This is what they do. This is their favorite pastime, that and protesting.

And so it's part of their national identity and they're so proud of it. You know, when I first arrived in Paris, somebody said to me, well, if you get invited to a dinner party, bring a good bottle of wine and a good argument. And it took me a while to adjust because I love arguing, but it has not gone down well in my home country for the last couple of decades, right, where there's this real anti-intellectualism that has taken hold since about the 1970s. So France has always been really good with nuance. There's also the socialist roots.

And so things can get done here. Governments can issue edicts on behalf of the country. And sure, people will protest if they think it's unfair. They'll have a wine because when I say wine, I mean a whinge, because that's French as well. I don't know what whinge means either. Oh, wine or whinge. I think one's British, one's Australian, to complain. Okay.

They have a really big fat complaint. And so, you know, there's a sense that they suck it up because it's for the greater good. And so socialist principles are still very much ingrained here. There is a sense that you do things. for the greater good. And it plays out in so many different ways, Nate, in everyday life here. And it really takes me a back. But as you know, collapseology has been a concept, a frontomont,

is something that's actually very familiar to everyday people. I've spoken to, you know, I had a Corsican boyfriend for a while who has had no education. He's, you know, lived a very, very alternative life. He's outside the system. but he's completely up to date on how collapse works and the terminology of it. So it's something that is definitely spoken about. On top of this, I think it was March last year, the European Union advised all leaders to inform there was at 450 million odd residents to prepare a disaster kit or an emergency kit,

a survival kit, you know, and they were really open about it. And I don't imagine an American or an Australian leader could say it in these terms. it was like, well, it's in the event of a major catastrophic life-threatening crisis, including a war. Like, the notion of Third World War is being talked about openly. Macron has converted a number of hospitals into hospitals that need to be ready for World War III. So it's also happening in the UK. So when I, you know, go back to Australia and talk about these things, people are in shock, absolute shock. But yes, to answer your question, it is part of the vernacular here.

and there is an awareness that and also an emotional, an intellectual ability to hold this information. So a frequent question that I often receive doing this work is, well, should I start stockpiling or prepping or other similar responses? What's your stance on that kind of sentiment as a reaction to, or as a first reaction to learning about these? topics. Well, I get asked the question a lot as well. And what I say to people is really simple and it generally cuts through. Okay, so if things get bad enough that warrants you stockpiling your tinned tuner and your batteries and so on, then are you prepared to defend your tuna and your batteries? And are you prepared to do it with guns and violence because that's what will be required if things get so bad that it justifies, you know, going off into the hills with your tinned products or your canned products.

And what about if the neighbours, you know, five-year-old comes around hungry? What are you going to do then? And when I actually went through that sort of chain of logic, I was thinking, absolutely no way could I do it because it goes against everything I know to be true about being human. And so I sort of try to meet people with those kinds of counterpoints. you know, to get them to think through the implications of what they're talking about. Now, the other way that I can sort of phrase it is to say, well, listen, that mindset is actually the mindset that caused the problem in the first place. It's the mindset that has fueled the

metacrisis, i.e. rampant individualism. So the flip side of all of that is, oh, and I should add to this, you know, for the left brain thinkers out there, I add to it that the studies have shown categorically that homesteading or heading off into the hills and living a subsistence living doesn't work. Less than 5% of these intentional communities last longer than five years, and that's just been studied that's been going for many, many years. They fall apart because you actually need a minimum of around 100 to 150 people to be self-sustaining, you know, to keep food and water systems going, but also to defend it. I mean, because that's the reality of things. And I found it really interesting. I remember when I first heard this, I thought,

hang on, isn't that the Dunbar number? You know? And somebody recently told me, it's also the most effective size of a congregation, a religious congregation. So, you know, it's a magic number, right? And we fail if we try to, you know, live on our own, separated from each other in smaller numbers. So, you know, again, when I tell people this, you know, they're like visibly relieved that they don't have to go and start looking at, you know, property outside of, you know, the major metropolis that's around the world. And, you know, learn how to work a generator and so on. But then I want to know, well, what does work? Well, what does work is actually, and I love this, you know, phrase from Pema Trojorn, which is start where you are. Like, stay where you are in your suburban sort of set up with your cul-de-sac and so on or in your apartment.

apartment building, or in your small town, and actually start to really form bonds of communication and cooperation and community within a group that would probably naturally fit to 150 people, because that is how we naturally operate. And that is actually something we can all do now. We don't have to wait. You know, we don't have to wait for, I don't know, the moment when we can sell the house and we can head off into the hills and we've read all the textbooks on all of this. Now, that's not to say if that's your great dreaming life, go off and do it, for sure.

But, you know, make sure you form bonds with all the people around you and cooperate and share and find ways to be resilient as a community. Now, I think many Americans now, as well as Australians, who have experienced some kind of climate calamity, they've had this as sort of a lived experience. You know, you can't rely on governments. and the money to come in from politicians or from wealthy people to save you. What actually works is community bonds, you know. And I think we're starting to really realize that more and more people going through

some kind of climate calamity, I think it's registering. It's really registering this idea that going off on your own, it can't work. Yeah, I've decided that long ago as well. I mean, you've been living with your ducks and your, you know, out in the country for a while. But I don't get the sense that you're trying to live in a subsistence, you know, sort of isolated way. No, we grow maybe 30 to 40 percent of our own food. But I think this work boils down for me four things. One, and I think I'll do it frankly on this in the near future.

One is preparing for a bend's not break economic. deflationary depression and all the things that that entails to avoiding strategic thermonuclear war and I work on that a little bit in the background three protecting the web of life and midwifing the um the uh biosphere and all our nieces nephews cousins in nature through what's coming and four isn't a response or something we do per se but it's inculcating a sense of the sacred for those that come after us, a homecoming, as you will, as you mentioned earlier. And that will take time.

Like we almost had to go through this to recognize our species level right of passage. But on that note, I just have to assume that nuclear war is not going to happen. But if it does, there's nothing we can do once it does. So there's no point staying in that space. Exactly. But applying that to what you just said in the same way, what I realized is if there's a Mad Max future, I'm, you know, my work is no longer relevant and we failed. So I'm just kind of assuming that a Mad Max outcome is not going to happen and do the

best I can with the other things. Yeah. I have not made huge progress on local community. I live in, you know, rural Midwest, and the nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away and then another quarter mile. So it's a little bit of a dissonance because my community is online and through the networks that you and I share. And I'm still hopeful that we navigate away from the darker trajectories, which is why we're doing this work. But I do agree with you that, well, I have the term pro-social prepping as opposed to guns and gold and beans and Bitcoin. It's more of a community, you know, networking the type of thing that you said.

I'm a little bit like you as well. I'm living in a foreign city. You know, my friends and my family network is, you know, on the other side of the world. However, I've weighed things up. And I think, you know, I think people are probably interested to hear what our take on all. of this is. I've gone down the route of thinking, do I go and buy some property for my family and we can all set up there and, you know, it's quite a large family, you know, and I've put a line through that. But equally, there's so much that's going to be uncertain when we don't know how it's going to play out. But all I do know is right now, and again, collapse slams us

into the present. Again, another spiritual experience we weren't expecting. It's forced me to go, okay, I need to be of service now. And so I have made all kinds of decisions in my life over the last couple of years that essentially are about me being as available as I can to people who are wanting this kind of information presented to them in a palatable way. And if that means that I'm not prepared for, you know, a Mad Max scenario, so be it, because I will put everything into doing this work now and preparing other people. And I think that's a, a far better use of my time. That is exactly how I feel and where I've landed.

Yeah. And I also do think that if you are in a community and you're able to get a generator and you're able to actually start talking about water sources and things like that, do it, do it. And I would also add, follow the advice of various governments now around the world that are saying get together a 72-hour emergency kit. because what collapse is going to look like in the near future, we all can almost guarantee it as long as, you know, the robots don't take over and a bomb doesn't drop.

It's going to look like sort of increasing blackouts and the internet going down and inconveniences. And, you know, to go back to sort of what was happening in Europe over the summer, here in Paris, I was here during the heat waves that just ground the city to a halt. And everything stops. and you can't rely on all the things that you normally rely on to be a cog in the system. And so, yes, there are sensible things you can do as well, like get together food and water to last you three days in case there is a shutdown. So from first glance, Sarah, your books, including I Quit Sugar, I Think Another One Was Called First We Make the Beast Beautiful and now Your newest One, I Eat the Stars, could seem disconnected from topic to topic. But you've expressed that there is a fact that runs through these, that they all take complex ideas and unapproachable topics and that you have a skill for distilling them down to a general audience.

So how do you approach that type of ask, that type of project, especially as someone who isn't necessarily coming from an academic discipline? like you're trying to explain these things to the common man or woman. I've always taken the approach, you know, show, don't tell. I think that's the most effective way to go about things. So the I quit sugar sort of message was I quit sugar, I gave it a go, I went down the rabbit hole because that's how my head works and worked out all the science and how it all works and all the political implications and so on. And I emerged with a book and a bunch of recipes, you can give it a go if you like.

And that kind of approach was cognitively bearable for people, because most people do not want to quit sugar. But if it can be treated as a lightly, lightly invitation in an experiment that they're just going to see how it goes. And what I worked out is that, you know, in that case, two weeks in, if you get people there for two weeks, the biology starts to kick in. You start seeing the benefits. And so vanity takes over. Their skin's better. You know, they start to see a weight change and so on. So I've used that approach with a bunch of things.

Also, that message I said before about we need to make the new way of being sexier than the status quo. I also think when you're a messenger in this space and you're trying to speak to everyday people, you really do need to go first. You need to be the guinea pig. You need to put yourself in there. And actually, all of my books have been written in real time. So I'm only half a step ahead of the reader.

I don't purport to be on a pedestal speaking down to them, you know. And so I think that's super important. People don't, the self-help industry has all been about somebody who's being there. They've trademarked the concept and now they tour the world, you know, sold out stadiums with pyramid scheme products to boot and talk down to people. And that works for a while because a lot of people are wanting to be told what to do. but it doesn't, it's not sustainable. Ultimately, change happens when people embody the change themselves

and they can relate at a human level to what the promise at the end is, you know? So they're some of the tactics that I use, but also just doing that dance between the left and the right brain, you know? Give the factual information because people need to know it because, you know, they need to explain it to their husbands on the couch that evening and go, well, hang on, that doesn't sound right. You do need some of that ammunition, and you need to do the emotional, spiritual side of things.

You know, there's a really interesting point in my journey with the book where I was in Greece and I hitchhiked home one night from a dinner party and this guy picked me up and drove me up the hill. Was he Corsican by any chance? No, this guy was actually English. And he was very, very wealthy as it turns out, the next morning he ran into me and he said, oh, it's you and sat down with me and was asking what I was writing because I was writing my book. You know, this book was written in cafes and

various places, bus stops and so on around the world. And he drilled me on it all and was doing that sort of, you know, well, what about this? What about that? And haven't people always been saying the world's going to come to an end? And how's this different to, you know, we all know this line of questioning. And so we went down, down, down, down, down. And of course, we landed a spot where it started to get quite emotional. And at one point, he put down his coffee and he looked at me and he just said, this is going to have to be spiritual, isn't it? And it was so interesting. He got there on his own, you know, through this kind of going layer after layer after layer where I wasn't trying to tell him he wasn't, he was wrong for feeling the way he was. But we just kind of, we went there

together. And so, yeah, I tell that anecdote in the book and sort of, you know, open it up into that sort of spiritual chapter about how, yeah, that's where we're at. This is, this is spiritual. Let me ask you a difficult question because it's something, I mean, we rhyme in our audiences and what we're trying to convey. You mentioned a few minutes ago the bulk of humanity, but in truth, Sarah, the bulk of humanity is not watching our podcasts or reading your substack. And so, how do we convey the magnitude of our situation? I mean, it is to a academic, erudite, global north, western sort of audience. But there are billions, well, there's two billion people that heat their food with cow dung and charcoal and such today.

So how do you include non-parisians and Australians in your thinking on what we face or do you? Because I struggle with this. I get asked this in audiences when I do events around the world on this topic. You know, well, hang on, what about the global South? You know, not great phrasing, but it's a shorthand. Because, of course, much of the world is already in what looks like collapse. I'd argue in Sudan, Congo, Gaza, that is what collapse looks like. And so my answer to that is, I don't know that we can do anything material at this stage to address that inequality.

It is, in fact, the inequality and the polarization. You know, Peter Churchill, have you had him on your podcast? I have. Yeah, the guy who wrote End Times. He said the two levers, you know, in collapse are really. you know, polarization and high levels of inequality or reducing the levels of inequalities. So there is work that we can do there, right? We can reduce inequality and reduce polarization wherever we can. And there's some really tangible things that I know you talk about,

but I talk about in my book that, you know, anybody who's wanting to have a, you know, a list of things that they can go off and do, there are some things. But really, I've got to be honest with myself, I write books that are not cheap, that, and you know, you do podcasts as do I, that require technology to be able to access them, we communicate to a particular audience. It's a very important audience because they're the audience that actually do have some kind of agency still. And so that's what I actually have to stick to because that's the medium that I'm able to use. What I'd also say is that, and I'm going to be really brutally honest here, we've got the furthest to fall. And one of the biggest, you know, one of the things that I

write about a lot and talk about a lot is that we probably won't die of being burnt to a crisp or, you know, by wildfires or drought. We probably won't be inundated by floods. The greatest risk you face in the U.S. I face, you know, here in the Northern Hemisphere, but, you know, a lot of the listeners in Australia also face, the greatest risk we face is mass civil unrest. And we're on the brink of that. We are so close to it. It is a perfect storm of conditions for it. There are the material conditions, but then there's the subjective conditions,

i. The polarization, the fact that we are so distant from each other, the acedia that is set in, this incredible loneliness from meaning. It's a perfect storm for us to really lose our shit. And so the work that I do that I'm really focused on is actually speaking to an audience who have access to my books to basically get them informed so that they do not add to this massive unrest, which could actually see the whole stack of cards go down. Let's double click on that. You often push back on the Hollywood version of collapse of zombies and wastelands and describe something more mundane and slow moving, like power outages, you mentioned earlier, crumbling infrastructure,

a long, vulnerable night on the porch with your friends and the like. And you call the response in your book a radical simplification, and you give people permission to actually consider and enjoy a simpler life. And as you can imagine, this framing is close to my heart. So paint a picture of what a simplification looks like, maybe in your own life and how someone who hears simpler but feels poorer in their body when the word lands. Yeah. Yeah, unpack that a little bit. Well, I mean, I've got to confess or at least put this out there. I've lived in a very simple way for a number of decades now. I grew up, you know, sort of in a very simple way. on a would you believe a self-sustaining farm.

As dad said, you know, it was because we were broke more than anything else with just too many kids, you know, floating around. So it's quite familiar to me. I was very much brought up to sort of see the pointlessness of waste and the pointlessness of owning things. And so despite the fact that I was the editor of Cosmo and so on, I used to write a bite to work. I wore secondhand clothing.

I've never owned a handbag in my life. I manage to sort of slip through that whole system and play the role of editor, but sort of take off the accruatimons at the end of the day and live very, very differently. I've worked out that once you enter into that system, it is painful and tedious and it's just horrible. And once you actually exit from it, you start to realize how much flow there is to living this far more simpler life. So I've been doing this for a while and I've been, you know, talking about it for many years and through all the layers of living, the way I cook, the way I travel, the way I be with people, it's I pair it all back, you know, it's as analog as I can make it. And I can only say it just brings more joy and, you know, there's so many studies that show that to be true.

But when I actually started talking about this kind of thing, and on the substack, which then became the book, The feedback in the comments, again, was this kind of, it was kind of comical relief. People were like relieved to actually have it put out there. And then people started having fun with realizing what this actually looks like, the implications of this. And I got people to write a list of, you know, if we got rid of this system. Because what we're really talking about here, collapse could just be the death of the system. You know, that's a framing that we can work to.

We are letting go of a system. People started listing all these things. They went, oh my God, no more unboxing videos. No more golf courses. You know, they went golf, golf courses, golf clubs. You know, no more of that. The idea of, you know, driving your kids to weekend sports, like your entire weekend spent shuffling your kids in and out of cars and activities

and, you know, everyone's exhausted by Monday morning. And one person wrote the LinkedIn version of myself. You can finally get rid of that. And I think the point here is that we've been hanging on to this mythological, perfect way of being that's promised more and more and more growth and more and more comfort and more ease. But really what it is, is it's basically all about sort of preparing for something. It's this idea of the run-up, the dress rehearsal, right? So we build nest eggs and we save our money and we go off and get an education so that we can go and do this.

And it goes on and on and on. And basically the promise is you do all of this and then you retire, you join a golf club, and then you die. And what I think when you really start to absorb the implications of simplifying your life, you realize that what it's doing is, again, planting you in the present. And we've been forced to live now. We're being forced to do all the things that neoliberalism promises us, but way, way down the track, we now get to do it now. There's that parable of the fisherman.

It's told in all different ways, but the Greek version is the one I know. There's a Greek fisherman, and he goes out each day, he catches a fish, he takes it to the tavernor, and his mate who owns the tavernor, he cooks it up, and they share a tippero and play cards and talk all night and eat this fish. And he goes out the next day, does the same. A German tourist, it's always a German for the Greeks. A German tourist sees all of this and says, well, what are you doing? Why don't you get a boat? And then you can catch more fish, and the Greek goes, well, why would I do that?

and it goes on and on, you know, well, then you could catch more fish and then you could actually employ some staff and then you could catch more fish and then you can get a bigger boat, then you can have a fleet of boats. And eventually the Greek goes, and why would I do all of this? And he said, oh, so that you can go and sit in the taverno with your friend and drink tippero and play cards and talk all night. You know, the point is made. It's really a microcosm of our whole culture in many ways. I think so too. And it's actually a penny drops. And I think for a lot of people, again, there's a palpable relief.

So throughout I Eat the Stars, you emphasize the idea of collaboration and collective action as the fundamental root of any viable response to the situation we're likely to face. Can you explain why you believe this so strongly? And what might that idea look like in practice? It's actually the only thing that works in tough times. I mean, the fact of the matter is that humans, we're not a very strong species. We're quite feeble. We can't run fast. We don't have fangs.

We don't have horns. Like, all we've had is our ability to communicate and to collaborate and get collectivist. And that's actually what has seen us rise to the top of the proverbial food chain, is that ability. And so it's our superpower. We actually can't survive without it because, you know, we don't run fast. We don't have much else going for us. I mean, it's been in our system for hundreds of thousands of years to behave this way. There's, you know, wonderful studies that show that, you know, kindness is completely contagious.

And it gives us an incredible sort of happiness boost. Even watching someone be kind to somebody else makes, gives us the same happiness jolt. We are a collective species. It's not only what sees us survive, it sees us thrive. Without it, I don't know that life's worth living, really. Where does duty fit into that picture? And how do you think that's different than many weird Western cultures' current perception? Yeah, Judy is something that I think our Western perception,

we have a sort of self-flagellating negative connotation to it. you know, that's what you do on the side. You go to church and you do it, you know, you tone a bit or you give some money to a trust or a philanthropic organisation. But actually I flesh out this point of duty, a sort of a particular take on it that I think, again, reframes things a little into a far more human way. You know that study that was done to show that the idea of the hedonic treadmill,

that happiness actually doesn't fulfill us, you know? And the study was done a number of decades ago, but it basically compared, I think, the happiness levels or the sort of the satisfaction levels of people who'd won the lottery with paraplegics. They really took two extremes there. And what they found was that after a couple of years, both had similar levels of happiness because there's this, you know, this set point that we all go back to. And so the idea of buying things and trying to sort of manage our way to happiness, it's, it's, it's, pointless. Now, what a lot of people don't realize is that one of the scientists who worked on that study, there was two guys that were involved, he went off many years later to go, well, what is it that actually does produce meaning for humans? What is it that actually, you know,

is long-lasting? And what he found was it was our commitments. It was what we actually do out of duty that brings the most meaning to our lives. And I don't think that's something that you know, is talked about often enough. I mean, again, we had philosophers and spiritualists who used to remind us of that, but of course, they've gone, you know. We haven't had that tradition, at least for, you know, most of us listening here, we haven't grown up with that tradition. And I talk about a friend of mine who talked about the idea of being compelled.

And I think that's a really powerful word. I think a lot of us are feeling a compulsion to be of service. you know, that sense of duty is no longer something that we feel we have to do to sort of look, look good. It's actually coming forward as something that is part of this very, very human experience we're going through. We are feeling compelled to do it, and we know it actually brings us incredible, incredible meaning. I certainly feel it. I don't know how many people feel it, but what you just said really resonates with me. And you mentioned set point theory, but also Abraham. Maslow, in his personal writings after he died, they found out that he had a tier above self-actualization,

which was in service to something larger than your own life. That was the top of the Maslow's hierarchy. Yeah. And it's the same with Victor Frankel in Man's Search for Meaning. You know, he'd actually worked on this sort of area of psychology all of his life. And then he spent four years in Auschwitz, came out and wrote a book in nine days about what it was that saw some people survive Auschwitz and some people perish. And he boiled it down to those who had something to live for bigger than themselves were able to get through. And they're often not the big Berlin blokes. They were the sort of more introspective people. It comes up time and time again. And really, it's a matter of us all revisiting those wisdoms because they're timeless. They're part

of our human experience. So the next question touches on a sensitive topic that I would like to ask you, but it's a big question that comes up for people after learning about all this and the synthesis and what we face, but I know you've spoken about it before, the choice of whether or not to bring a child into the world right now. Can you explain why this has become such a contentious and difficult decision for people, especially at this moment in history. Yeah.

I mean, I speak from personal experience because I had to confront this exact quandary at one point. And in fact, I write about it extensively. For anybody who's kind of wanting to deep dive into sort of my grappling with it, it's a sort of a secondary thread of my book about the climate crisis that I wrote five years ago, six years ago, called this one Wild and Precious Life.

But anyway, that was the sidebar. I think the reason why it's particularly tricky and contentious today is that up until quite recently, like only a couple of years ago, most of us were concerned about bringing more children into the world because we thought it would just, you know, add to further carbon emissions and that there was this, you know, population bomb per, you know, Paul Elric's book from decades ago. And honestly, it is such, it blows my mind to think it was only a couple of years ago. Like we're talking four or five years ago when all of the modelling and all of the modelling and all of the, all the experts in this realm of population came out and went, oh, actually that trajectory, that exponential trajectory in human numbers on the planet that we thought was just going to go up and up and up and up, and up. It's actually going to hit a peak, you know, sort of in a couple of decades, in and around

sort of 10 to 11 billion people. And then it's going to come back down the other side at the same incline as it went up. So I should just add to this before anybody starts to wanting to correct me on all of this. Since then, in the last kind of 12 months, the modelling has shown that that deadline is going to come, you know, I think they were talking about it being 2080. They're now looking at 2040 to 2060 that we're going to hit peak population and it will barely make 10 billion. So it's a very different picture that we're facing here. And so for political leaders around the world, they're starting to freak out because

less people being born means less tax-paying citizens to pay into the coffers to fund all of these different things, to fund the system. And so we're now witnessing a absolute turnabout where conservative governments, particular, around the world, are clamping down on women's abortion rights, obviously that's happening in the States, all kinds of pro-natalist measures are coming into play. China, which had a one-child policy for years, now has a three-child policy. I mean, it's a complete, you know, about face. And it's sort of understandable because we are actually facing a massive crisis where we are going to be dropping in numbers at an exponential rate and it has huge implications because we're going to see crumbling cities. We're going

to see crumbling infrastructure. The entire system is going to collapse. And for a lot of people, when I'm actually trying to describe how the domino effect of all the different things are going to play out, I actually use the example of population collapse because it's actually quite easy to comprehend. And population collapse, once it sets in, it can't be averted. It has a life of its own. And we're already seen it play out. In Taiwan, for instance, there's hundreds of schools that have shut down.

There's entire villages that are starting to shut down there. Replacement rate is currently, I think, at 0.7 or 0.8. Same with South Korea. So we're really facing a massive drop-off in humans. Now, for a lot of people that might be like, great, less humans, less carbon emissions. The problem is the actual, we're hitting peak replacement rate, sort of now-ish. It'll take a couple of decades before we actually see the numbers drop off. It's too late to meet those deadlines of net zero by 2050 and so on.

So how does that answer the question of, you know, anybody? out there thinking about having children? Well, it's kind of, you know, the fear of adding to population numbers has gone. Sure, another person is going to add to carbon emissions in the next couple of critical, you know, a couple of decades. But I think there's a bigger, there's a bigger thesis to all of this. And that is, to have children is to be human. And I basically think we must remain.

as human as we can in this moment. Margaret Mead got asked by her sister, a very, very similar question, and it was just before the outbreak of World War II. And obviously, there was all kind of tensions happening around the world, a lot of fear. And Margaret Mead, the wonderful anthropologist, responded, well, listen, do you think that anybody, you know, a mother, parents just prior to World War II, or she rattled off different points in history, do you think that they were wrong to have children. And, you know, she sort of has, you know, she basically says, we don't know. There's been dark times all throughout history. And the wonderful, sort of outcome of all of this is her sister wound up having two children. And one of them became a very

famous psychiatrist and the other became a very famous jazz flautist. And this is the point, right? We have children and who knows what kind of, you know, these children were obviously born into wartime and had, you know, probably a very horrible start to their life. But we don't know how a human is going to flourish off the back of trauma like that. You know, Nate, you'd be aware of those studies that show that 70% of people that go through trauma don't go through PTSD. Instead, they go through post-traumatic growth. We don't talk about that.

But that is like what humans do. We thrive, we tend to thrive in adversity. and we can't lose sight of that of that in all of this. I'm actually not familiar with that post-traumatic growth. Can you define that? Yeah, so I think Sebastian Junger did a lot of the work on this. Yeah. In that book Tribe or Tribes, I can't remember which one.

That's an awesome book. That's where that comes from it. But there's, you know, studies that have been done. I've got the citations in my book. The growth is actually the more common human response to trauma. And, you know, a really wonderful example that, Sebastian outlines in his book is that during the London Blitz, you know, Winston Churchill and everybody else was, you know,

worried that the Brits would lose their minds. And so he went and opened up a bunch of mental institutions on the outskirts of the city so that, you know, people who lost their mind could be sent out there as, you know, bombs fell. And what actually, and they had to close the mental institutions that were in the center of the city because it needed to be used for, you know, for people who are injured. But what wound up happening is that the institution's stayed empty. And in fact, the people, the patients in the mental wards joined the movement and started driving ambulances and things like this. And the studies have shown that it was the

happiest time in British history. It was also recorded as the having the highest wellness levels of all time. And that was because of the austerity measures, the rationing, right? And it was because people were coming together in solidarity. They were arising to their commitments and to their duty, so they had this incredible sense of bigger meaning to their lives, and they were collaborating and communicating and forming, you know, these sort of these larger communities. And I think that's one of the best examples of things of this point that we've been fleshing out here. Under various scenarios, that could in fact be how things unfold. And I wish it will be so. So one of the central questions I took away from your book is something like,

how do we continue to live as sensitive, tenderhearted humans amid such a tumultuous, expected shift? It's a beautiful and an important question. And my follow-up, Sarah, is, what about people who are coming from a starting place of being less sensitive and less tender-hearted when they start to learn about the metacrisis and everything coming down the pike? Do you have any recommendations for those individuals who would like to deepen that side of themselves but don't quite know how? Gosh, as you ask that question, I can feel so much into the pain of anybody who's in that

position. It's really kind of a round-up of some of the things that we've been talking about here. I think some left brain analysis, you know, allowing for indulging in the, in sort of the rational side of yourself and going and looking into the studies that sort of back up some of this stuff, actually, you know, enter into it that way. Once your nervous system is okay with all of that, then I think it's about being open to more embodied experiences. I don't recommend meditation for those who have come from, you know, a long way to the left. I know that when I first started meditating, it was a bridge too far. Meditation has become part of my practice in sort of more recent years as I've been able to sort of move into all of this.

The way I suggest people to get more of an embodied understanding all of this is actually through movement. just to remember that this stuff needs to be, the big emotions need to be moved through our bodies. So go and move in nature. That is a silver bullet for all of this. Run in nature, walk in nature, dance in nature, which I do a lot of. That's how I got through the writing of this book was catching a train outside of Paris into one of the forests and just sort of running slash dancing with music, listening to music, And again, this is another little tip in the minor key.

So this kind of, you know, melodic, melancholic kind of beautiful ephemeral music that kind of allowed me to expand. And then allowing myself to cry. You know, I think one thing I've learned is that women, we're given societal permission to cry and tears are an incredible outlet for these big emotions that we're experiencing. I think men really suffer from not being able to do that. And so there's other practices. I think that some psychedelic experiences can enable men to access ways of releasing the emotional buildup. So another thing that I sort of write about in a previous book in this one wild and precious life, I came up with a term soul nerding.

So it's reading the works of troubled mind. who have existed before us, who have chronicled their journey through big, complex issues. So the existentialists, you know, are probably a really good starting point for all of this. And, you know, I think if you're an A-type, that's sort of the person you described before. If you're an A-type, almost see this as a sort of a practice, a developmental practice, you know, equally to sort of soul nerd, but then equally to get your nervous system prepared for what's ahead. So they're the sort of the mindsets that I would probably present to somebody who is struggling with entering into this space is to appeal to their A-type tendencies for a goal and for a need to know,

you know? Yeah, I get what you say about society gives women more permission to cry than men. I've cried more in the last five years than I did the 50 before that combined. Well, maybe when I was one, I don't remember crying then. And it's cathartic, and I feel like I had an oil change or something, and it's moving something through my body. So I resonate with that. The tears of recognition are really important as well.

I don't know if you feel this as well, mate, but I speak at different events and so on, and people will get up and they'll share their vulnerable, you know, I guess reaction to all of this. And they'll start to cry. And then for me, the tears are them releasing something. And then I start to cry because there's this recognition, you know. This is what we are craving.

We are craving to see reflected in the other that which we know to be true, but we haven't been able to surface ourselves yet, you know. and one of the other antidotes or sort of tricks that I outline in the book, which kind of speaks to your question here, is go out into the world. Go out into the world and look into other people's faces. You know, like go out into the street and walk along, you know, in your neighborhood and look into people's faces. And I highly recommend doing that and smiling, giving a slight smile. And I highly recommend doing that when you're feeling despair because you will get the feedback that humanity is a heaving, messy, but ultimately compassionate species. Yeah, and our current economic system accentuated by walking six abreast in New York City with your heads down, you don't even look at the other person, let alone give full attention to their face.

I mean, it's a perfect storm, as I've said several times in this interview, a perfect storm of circumstances that have landed us here. And once we start to realize all the systemic factors that have brought us here, not only do we get a sense of compassion for our species and how ridiculous we are and how vulnerable we are, but we also have, I think, a very important hit of humility. And that is part of what we're going to have to go through. We've been overlaughting over nature and over life, thinking that we can control, we can do a better job than the incredible flow of life. And, you know, part of what we're going through is a humbling, you know, and God, it's relief. One of the things I say in the book is, you know, perhaps we don't have to effort so much. Maybe there could be some ease to this. Maybe there's going to be ease to this.

and it almost feels like, I almost feel guilty saying it. But I actually know it to be true. It's part of this simplification process. So I'm wondering where you are now personally, Sarah, with all this. Are you mostly at peace and fully aligned with everything that you've laid out in your book? Or is this an ongoing up and down process continually for you? Both. At the same time, you know?

I kind of, I'm in pain a lot, you know, I am in grief, I wail and wail and wail and it just erupts, you know, and it can last days, just feeling into just the grief, grieving what we're losing, you know, grieving even the idea of certainty and increased ease and comfort, you know, but also grieving the animals, grieving the loss of seasons, feeling the grief of everybody, really. And then flip side is I feel incredible joy. You know, the point is I feel more alive than never before. And I wouldn't swap that out for anything. No, I'd probably swap it out for some kind of resolution to what we're in. A rebalancing now of everything. But that's what we are going through. We are going through a rebalancing.

This is a correction. It is a coming back around to a homecoming. I mean, this is unfortunate. what it's going to have to look like. But to answer your question, yes, I am far more sturdy. I mean, I've made no secret of the fact that I've struggled with anxiety, bipolar disorder and obsessive disorder. I wrote a book about it.

First, we make the beast beautiful. And I would say that I'm in the calmest, like, most stable position I've ever been in my life, and it really is because of the work I've done on this journey. It has taken me to a spot where this is a thesis that I've been sort of playing around with, but I haven't got the evidence to back it yet. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But I actually think a lot of the anxiety as well as a lot of the neurodivergence that has been sort of surfacing over the last decade or so, I think it's actually coming from a

people who are feeling the lack of congruence. You know, a lot of autism, for instance, is about pattern recognition. And so those of us who can actually recognize that this patterning does not stack up, that it's fundamentally wrong, we've been feeling a dis-ease for a number of years. And so once you actually start to realize, no, you weren't going crazy, right? Like this, what you were seeing and feeling into as a human at a visceral level, it's real. It actually sees a lot of the anxiety subside. And I notice this in the spaces that, you know, you and I work in.

And I speak to people who've had chronic anxiety. I'm like, do you feel less anxious these days? And I'm like, they say, yes. And I'm much the same. You know, less incongruence, a lot more attunement, as painful as it is. But this is where we're at. So do you have advice for people listening to this episode on what they can do to address some of the things in the metacrisis?

or do you think it's mostly up to politicians and leaders? I don't think we can rely on politicians or leaders because they can't solve it. It's not because they wouldn't like to. They're not capable of it. Nobody is capable of this. And once we realize that, then we can then put our energy into the first part of your question, what can we do? I think simplify now per your thesis.

I think that's a tangible thing that we can actually, you know, focus on, going analog, developing various life skills, but that also includes building community networks, getting to know your grumpy neighbour down the corridor of your apartment, take them some nuffins, whatever it might be. That's some tangible stuff you can do. I would also say that treat getting your nervous system sturdy as not something that's nice to do that will give you glowing skin

and a nice gut microbiome is actually part of the work now. you know, we can't afford to lose our shit. So we're going to need some sturdy entities that take the place of the fascists who are coming in with their false security. So I would certainly suggest that. And I would also soul nerd and start to learn some of these truisms and start to adopt them and have them, you know, sort of absorb them, absorb as much of it as you can, the truisms that tell us that to live for, fully, we need to know how to die well, you know, to fully, you know, to be pushed up against a deadline like we are now, then it actually forces us to live beautifully, you know. And so once we,

once we can really get comfortable with some of those very age-old truisms and beliefs and teachings, it all starts to make more and more sense. So I think there, I think there's they're a good starting point for all of this. And how would you change the advice you just gave for young humans in their teens and 20s who are becoming aware of all this? I love that you ask that question of people on your podcast. It's the hardest question to answer. One tangible that I can answer with is, you know, for anybody who's entering college or

university as it's called in Australia and the UK, if you're looking for something to study, study humanities. I think knowing how to think in a discerning and nuanced way is going to be, it's so valuable in the future. And yeah, so study philosophy. I mean, even the tech bros are telling us, you know, that that's what they, that's what's valued now. I mean, they're, they're offering six-figure incomes to philosophers to come and work, you know, for these big companies now. Not that that should be factoring into the, into things at the moment. But I think, yeah, discerning thinking is going to be at a premium going forward. So that's what I would suggest that young people study. And this is something that I say to people who come to my talks and sit in the front row, young people, and they're

very earnest. They're usually in pain. They're seeing what's happening in the world. And they'll ask a question. I'll say, well, listen, hey, listen, tell me, do you feel that everything that you're feeling and doubting? Do you know it to be true? And they say, well, yes. And I said, please go with it. just if you can actually trust what your body is telling you and what your gut instinct is telling you, please trust it because I don't know that there's authorities out there that can actually dispute what you're feeling any longer. And young people do have access to that more than we do, you know? I would ask every adult out there to encourage their children to actually to listen to that intuition. Yeah, that's good advice.

You follow the podcast, so you know some of my clients. closing questions, what do you care most about in the world, Sarah Wilson? I could come up with a polyamish answer or the right answer, but what I actually care about is the pain in people's hearts. Like the mass human pain that I think is being felt, it's, um, that's what I care about. That's what, you know, that's what brings tears to my eyes as it is now. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve the future?

Oh my goodness. I can't stand questions like this because I can't narrow it down to one thing. I would say, I mean, a really simple one would be to actually fully embody our part in the natural way of things. I think that would be probably the closest to a silver ball. bullet in all of this. What does that mean exactly? It's to have a real sense that we are part of something much bigger, to actually know that

the answers that we seek are to be found in the natural rhythms, you know, that we can't meddle with it, you know, we can't actually disrupt the flow. We've got to join it, you know, and then the answer will become apparent. I think indigenous knowledge systems work with. this and they've preserved it at all, like they've just preserved it over hundreds of years and despite everything that's gone on because it is so fundamental to the human endeavor. So I would probably trust our, you know, our indigenous friends on that one, that that is actually probably the silver bullet.

So your book just came out, but are there any research questions or things that you are super focused on, passionate about, obsessed with right now about the, future or the world that is keeping you up? Like, what is most alive for you right now? What are you most curious about? Oh, that's a great question. I'm actually at the moment, again, I'm just going to answer as honestly as I can. I am actually, and I'm ringing around the various elders that I've interviewed over the years, and I've had, you know, been really lucky to have some incredible elders who were mentors throughout the writing of this book, women in their 80s predominantly, who are work have been working in this space for for decades. I've been asking them how, how they maintain

this, how it is that they find the, the vigilance to actually really believe their path and to maintain it and to find meaning in the minutiae. Like, it's all very well to talk about these broader ideas of what matters and, you know, its connection and its nature and all. all this kind of thing. But when you wake up in the morning, right, and you're feeling a little bit groggy because you haven't had quite enough sleep and you've got a whole heap of emails to attend to and everything, I sort of am really wanting to know how it is that we're all to sort of move forward in this and find meaning at a daily level, you know, in the granular process of life. And that sounds particularly esoteric. It kind of is, but it's right, that's right where I'm at at the moment,

because I'm needing to find that thing to sustain myself going forward. I have moments, you know, like to your earlier question, you know, it's up and down. I have moments of insight and expansiveness and sense of my duty and my place in all of this. And then I have moments of what matters anymore? What's the point? You know, as we all do. And so I'm trying to work out how to maintain the sweet spot, you know, on an ongoing basis. That's very, very esoteric.

But I think some of you out there would probably know what I'm talking. about. When you find the answer to that, leave me a WhatsApp message. I will. It'll be a long voice note. Do you have any closing comments for people watching and listening who understand and agree with what you've laid out here today and in your book, which I recommend reading? Be as thoroughly human as you can, not least of all because it's what brings us joy.

It's what actually, you know, is the point of it all. But also because it does stick to fingers up, to the technophascists, to the bad faith actors who are making our situation worse. While ever we are being as human as we can, they can't get at us, you know. I'm not really suggesting that there's an us versus then thing going on. I don't think there's a cabal of bad dudes in a room with a white board, plotting to get at us. That's not what's going on here. But again, it really speaks to that idea of making a new way of being sexier than status quo. Be human. Advertise the joy, the importance of

being fully human. Investigate it if you don't know what that means for yourself. I've got a chapter in the book where I ask all kinds of people that question if you need some help with it. But actually investigate this, be it. And it's an active deviant. and defiance today. And I think that's an important, that's an important attitude to take. Sarah Wilson, thank you for your work and your continued voice in these times to be continued, my friend. I hope so. Thanks, Nate. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe.

to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyen, Julia

Maxwell, Gabriella Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.