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My guest today is Sarah Wilson.
Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times and Amazon best-selling author, podcaster, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, philanthropist and climate change advisor.
Sarah is known globally for founding the I Quit Sugar movement – a digital wellness program with 13 award-winning books that sell in 52 countries – which saw millions around the world transform their health. In 2022 Sarah sold the business and gave everything to charity.
Sarah is an experienced journalist and broadcaster. She was previously the editor of Cosmopolitan Australia at age 29; host of MasterChef Australia; was a News Corp journalist and columnist; and has hosted ABC’s Compass, Ten’s The Project and has been a regular panelist and news commentator on Australian, UK and US screens for two decades.
Her New York Times bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful is described by bestselling author (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck) Mark Manson as, “The best book on living with anxiety that I’ve ever read,” and was featured as the book of the year on NBC’s Today Show. It’s published in 27 countries. Sarah’s book, This One Wild & Precious Life, won the 2021 US Gold Nautilus Prize.
Sarah is the host of the thought-leading podcast Wild with Sarah Wilson and writes the popular Substack newsletter This is Precious, which has an engaged community of 60,000 subscribers.
Most recently, she serialized her book I Eat The Stars on Substack – an exploration of system collapse and how we navigate it, which was acquired by Penguin US and will be released globally across May and June.
A lot of writing about collapse ends up feeling abstract—like the authors are writing from a remove about an alien species. I’m not saying this is the intent of those authors, but rather that, when dealing with something as charged as the prospect of systemic collapse, there’s an inevitable tendency to stay zoomed out—a tendency only amplified when the authors operate within the structures of academia. And to be clear: I’m so grateful for the renegade scholars and authors who have been banging the collapse drum in whatever fashion they have; the collective effect of this work in my life has profoundly transformed my life, work, and priorities.
But Sarah’s latest book, I Eat The Stars, does something that’s rare in the world of collapse books: she imbues it with heart and personal narrative, letting us not only learn about collapse with her, but share in hard emotions with her, even when that amounts to deep existential grief.
Grab your copy of I Eat The Stars now!
Along the way, she also invokes the key ideas that anybody learning about collapse should encounter (e.g., poly- and metacrisis, planetary boundaries, sensemaking, moloch, et al.), so if you’ve been feeling like maybe you should spend a little more time understanding the shape of contemporary collapse, this book will also be of great value to you.
So, so much in this episode(!)—please enjoy this powerful conversation with Sarah Wilson.
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Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with media theorist Cy Canterel:
