June 12, 2025 • 46 mins
Today’s guest is the brilliant Sarah Wilson. Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times bestselling author, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, minimalist and philanthropist. She edited Cosmopolitan Australia at 29, founded the global I Quit Sugar movement, hosted Masterchef Australia – and wrote the bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful.
We previously had Sarah on the podcast 2 years ago where we spoke about dating in your forties, how Sarah had moved to Paris with only own 2 suitcases worth of belongings!
Since we last spoke, Sarah has ended her long-running podcast Wild, and started serialising her new book on system collapse. Today, we’re talking about the chaos we’re all living through — the systems collapsing around us, the tech bros running wild, and the very real sense that everything’s just... a bit cooked.
We also dive into:
- Living in a minimalistic way and how it’s classy in some cultures
- Australia is a young person’s culture with botox, lashes and ‘invisible’ older women
- Should we also have a tax on fast fashion?
- How beauty ideals change based on what’s going on economically
- What it means to find meaning in messy times
- Why Sarah’s book will likely be banned in the US
- Why community and connection are more important than ever
You can find Sarah on Substack
You can find Sarah on Instagram
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life
on Cut. I'm Brittany, I'm Laura, and today we have
a guest that has appeared on the podcast before a
few years ago. But I absolutely loved the chat, Sarah Wilson. Now, Laura,
you weren't on that episode. I think you were away
or unwell or something.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I don't knows. It was years ago. We're not keeping track.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
But Sarah Wilson, for anyone who doesn't know who she is,
she is the absolute superstar behind I Quit Sugar, which
is how she kind of came into the world of
publications at the time.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yep, she's the best selling author, She's an international keynote speaker, minimalist.
She edited Cosmo magazine actually at twenty nine years old,
which is really interesting because it's in stark contrast to
what she believes in the way she lives her life.
The other thing that I loved in our last chat,
Sarah was talking about dating younger man. I obviously say
(01:00):
that because I'm about to marry a younger man. But
today is a little bit different. We're going to touch
on all of those things again, but I think it's
really interesting how you've serialized.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Your new book.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
It's all about collapse. We're going to touch on climate
change and different political climates in the world. So that's
a little bit later in the chat.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Sarah Wilson, Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's so nice to have you in the flesh this time.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yes, I was over the phone, wasn't it. I think
I was in Paris. Yeah, it sounds awful. Yeah, I
think so having.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
A horrible time. Well, I actually wasn't on the episode.
It was Britt and Keisha that time. So this is
a real treat for me. We I mean, I'm sure
last time you told your embarrassing story, but like, now
that you're back, there's been a bit of time in between.
What else has been happening to you? What is and
do you have a more recent embarrassing story.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Well, I've got so many years of embarrassing stories, and
in fact, my friends whenever they see me when I
come back, they're like, right, what's happened now? But look,
the embarrassing story that I thought about, because I know
you guys are always after one is actually from a
while back, and I hope no one's eating their breakfast.
But I and it's sort of a time before the
internet and mobile phones. Most of you weren't born. But
(02:03):
I went to Vietnam with to join one of my brothers.
He was living over there, and we do lots of
mountain bike riding together. That's what we do as a family,
is just take off on mountain bikes. And he built
me a bike. He'd traveled overnight on a bus to
this remote town in Vietnam. I had eaten an ice
cream from the street and there is a moral to
this story, and it's this, do not eat an ice
cream for the street in Vietnam. They've had the same
(02:25):
thing in India cool fee.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
It's called like a chai ice cream and put me
in hospital for four d what's the bike link?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I was four to a So I am then just
excreeting out of all orifices overnight and my brother arrives
with two bikes, so he's had to ride with an
extra bike on his shoulder to meet me at five
in the morning, and I'm just a mess. Plus I'm innstruating,
and I don't know if anyone's been to Vietnam or
it went what twenty years ago or so, But they
(02:53):
don't have tampons. They only have sanitary pads. And I
don't know if any of you have ridden long distance
in bike shorts, you cannot wear a sanitary pad. They
kind of just go back out the back, you know
what I mean. And so I, you know, arrive, Oh
my brother arrives, and I'm like, oh, we've got a
head off. We have got a head off, and basically
(03:14):
it gets worse and worse, and I've got blood, I've
got everything coming out of all the holes of my body.
But we had to ride like nine hours up into
this mountain village through a communist area, so you're not
allowed to stop. So I'm just riding, riding, riding. I
gave up on protecting myself with anything, and I've just
it's just all running down my legs. Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
So interesting to me that you still committed to the ride,
like it wasn't a marathon you've been training for. It
was just your brother. Surely you could have postponed.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Oh no, no, no, I've got four brothers, and there
is we say things to each other like confidence is
king and this kind of thing, like there is no
giving up. So I rode and he was riding next
to me, getting coconut orders from the side of the
road and coming up to me and pouring it down
my throat as I kept riding, and I knew that
if I stopped peddling, I would out, so I just
(04:01):
pedaled and pedaled. Got to the mountain town called Du Lat,
which is beautiful. He walked in and they're like, we
don't want you. I literally got off my bike and
passed out, so my brother to carry up me upstairs.
He carried my bike up. He rang my parents and go,
what do I do with her? And I said, shower
her and feed her. So he showered me. The poor guy,
Oh this is wild. And then he took me downstairs
(04:24):
and there was this little hole in the wall place
with a cauldron, massive cauldron, and it was just full
of this Vietnamese It's of red curry chicken with potatoes
and served with a baguette because it's got this weird
French kind of overlay. And so I had the first
spoonful of this and it was like electricity going through
my body like it was it was like no drug
(04:45):
could produce this experience, and I could feel it snapping
in all of my sign NATSes, So I mean, that's
an embarrassing experience. I suppose, look, the stakes eat longer
and gets worse the next day, but that's probably maybe
for another episode.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You'll come back for like episode three, and then we
can get the update.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
That's you know.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
I feel like, at least, if it's going to happen somewhere,
it needs to be in a foreign country where you
know you're never going to see these people again.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And like if that was.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Down like Bondai Promenade, you'd probably feel a bit differently
about the story. You know.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
The difference I think the biggest difference because that makes
me think back to all my traveling times and I
just thought to myself, well, thank god, Like this makes
me sound old too. But iPhones weren't really a thing then.
But that's the difference. If you did that now, you'd
be going direl Someone would have filmed you writing, shitting, vomiting,
and but you would have been like a sensation online.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Except that the person I was with, my brother, he
has a nock here. He has not upgraded, so there
was no documenting probably going on. But he's told everybody
we know the story. That's all right, So of you exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
The last time we spoke to you, you were living
in Paris, you were having a wonderful time. We spoke
a lot about and I love this chat so much.
We spoke a lot about you just living your best life.
You were dating a lot of younger men. You were
really living the dream. Are you still in Paris now?
Are you still in the dating scene? Talk to us
about what's happen happening the last couple of years.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, Well, you know what, I've got a funny story
about that, because I live in Paris and I've been
there writing a book. So it's a really interesting process.
You probably know, the publishing industry, like so many industries,
going through lots of flux. So I wrote this book.
I've been researching it for two years, and I wrote
it on substack. Do you guys, Yes, we're all across
(06:20):
you know substack. So I wrote it on substack, serializing
it chapter by chapter, so each week a new chapter
was posted, and this community built around it. And it's
not a cheerful topic. It's called It's about collapse. It's
about civilizational collapse and systems collapse and why everything's happening
at the moment, including Trump. So it was sort of
off the back of the last election, the last Trump election,
(06:41):
that I was like, things are not right. And I'd
written a book on the climate crisis, et cetera, and I went,
this is bigger than that. Now it's AI, it's nuclear threat,
it's fragmentation, it's all of this kind of thing. What's
happening between men and women. This happened in civilizations all
throughout history. All complex civilizations go through this process of decline,
and we're in the middle of it. So the Roman Empire,
(07:02):
the Mayan Empire, the Xing Dynasty, all of these civilizations
there is about a three hundred of them collapse and
around about the three hundred year mark and our civilizations
at two seventy years. So I was watching all this.
I've written this book, serializing it on substack, and I
was doing a podcast where I was interviewing people for
the book, and then it got picked up by the
(07:23):
biggest publisher in the world, Penguin US, because Trump came
into power again and so they were like, shit, we
need a book about this. So that's what I've been doing.
Dating wise. The week I met this or started writing
this book, I met a guy on a beach down
at a party down the south of France, and he's
(07:43):
Corsican and his how can I put it beautiful?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, the most beautiful man I ever met was my husband,
and then after that when I was a Corsican y.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Yeah, it's very very dark, a very dark past because
most Corsicans men are involved in the mafia over there
and they've all got guns and all of this kind
of thing. So he's and he was a motorcycle champion
as well, so and he now builds cards, so that's
what he does. But anyway, we ended up dating for
the six months that I wrote the book, and then
the week that I was finishing the book, just before Christmas,
(08:18):
we broke up. But we're still still together. He was
out here with me in Australia, so you've sort of
in a relationship situation share, situation share, that's what That's
what the younger people call it, don't they. He's also younger,
So this is the theme. Right, So last time we
talked about younger guy. That seems to be where I land.
But this is the funny thing. I was in Greece,
so while I'm in Europe, I travel around a bit.
(08:38):
I'm about to go back and seat of travel around
Greece again and just write my next book. And I
was on I was in this market square, had to
catch the bus down to the port to catch another ferry,
you know, and this girl came up to me and said, oh,
is this the bus I need to catch? And she
was Australian. So we sat next to each other on
the bus and she started talking about men and this
guy that she met in some other Greek island does
(09:00):
know what to do. I don't know. I have a
face that says, tell me all your problems.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yeah, you're also a talker, and probably in the reflection
of that is like being a very good question asker,
and that's how those stories flow out of people.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, and look, I've lived on the road since I
was twenty one. I've lived out of two bags of
belongings for thirty years. So this is my natural habitat
is around strangers. Like put me in at a barbecue
full of my friends with kids in suburban Australia and
I can't last five minutes. I become mute. But out
(09:34):
in the world talking to people I don't know, like
it's just a beautiful dance for me. I'm actually really
shy elsewhere, but in the world like that, especially if
it's a young woman that comes up to me, Like,
I'm fascinated by younger women. I just want to learn
everything about them.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Travelers also talk as well, Like travelers are known for
time them and by themselves.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And everyone's open, you know. So she sits down next
to me on the bus and tells me all her woes,
and she said, look, but I listened to his podcast
just before I set out traveling. It really inspired me.
It was this woman called Sarah Wilson, and she'd been
talking about how she just has these relationships with younger
men and she doesn't feel she needs to settle down
and she's much old. And I said, oh, I'm Sarah Wilison.
(10:13):
So on the other part of the world on a
bus somewhere in Greece.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
That is so funny.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Was she so toughed? Yeah, she took a photo and
sent it to her friends or something, you know. So, yeah,
I don't know where that photo turned up, but it's
probably out there somewhere. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
And this is from the first episode that you guys
did to Yeah, so this is like a Life Uncut episode,
So there was a life of somewhere in Greece that
was traveling around.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
There was ground zero for this. I mean.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Something I found so interesting from the conversation that you
guys had last time was, and you just mentioned it,
living out of two bags, this minimalist lifestyle that you've
been attracted to, which seems ironically in contradiction for someone
who worked for some of the biggest women's magazines of
the country. I mean, firstly, how did you come to
this lifestyle? How do you navigate what a minimalist lifestyle
looks for you now? And then I would love to
(11:00):
know what that push and pull was like when you
were working in a magazine that's predominantly for consumerism.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
It's to sell stuff, sell shit to women that they
don't need, but we don't need to use my job. Yeah,
I can say that now that the magazine's folded back,
it's been re ignited, it has it has got back.
I saw it the other day. So yes, I grew
up this way. I grew up in a subsistence living farm,
which doesn't mean much other than my parents were broke
and had too many kids and so we we just
(11:27):
wore secondhand stuff and anything that came into the property,
we had to do something with it because there's no
garbage collection and there wasn't enough petrol to go into town.
So we just weren't around consumerism. And my dad was
anti capitalist. So I did grow up with all of this,
and I was known as the little capitalist because I
had a job from the age of eleven, a business
at age twelve, and I was essentially, you know, I'm
(11:48):
going to move beyond this and dot dot dot. The
age of twenty nine, I've become the edit of Cosmo,
which is very funny. However, all of my clothes were secondhand.
I refused to be given a handbag, which was a thing,
you know with editors, so I've never owned a handbag
in my life. This is something that I've said a
few times. The Daily Mail has scoured like twenty years
of my life trying to find a picture of me
(12:10):
with a ham trying to catch you out in a lie,
and they did a sort of a story with all
of these pictures, and I just had to go through it.
I wrote a response and just said, that's a Byron
Bay Market tote that somebody gave me, and literally I'm
carrying Celery in it in that photo.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Like, not having a handbag doesn't mean that you don't
ever use a vessel to Gary.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Shite, I think when we say handbag we mean of
the Gucci design leather.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, at least you're still needed something to get things
from point A to point Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah, that's it. Although I was going to say, yeah,
how else do you do it? Generally per the minimalist concept,
I put a lot of things down my bra I'll
see you. Yeah, I just picture you lifting your shirt up.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
You've got your baby beans and stuff taped your stomach.
You're like got your grocery estate selery down the back anyway.
So yeah, I've been like that. When I was at Cosmo,
a lot of my stuff was secondhand. I wrote bike
to work, which was, you know, people just thought was ridiculous,
and then I'd ride my bike to you know, red
carpet events and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
And in some ways, I've got to admit I kind
of knew the gimmick, and I knew that it was
a talking point, and I loved it because it got
people thinking about the fact they'd just driven their full
drive and spent twenty minutes trying to park. I've always
been a little bit like that, if I'm to be honest,
you know, like I like making that statement because I
think it's a good statement to make. And I think
(13:29):
normalizing a different way of doing things that's better for
the planet and better for your mental health and just
better is a responsible thing to do. So back then,
that's how I did it. And look after I left Cosmo,
I just didn't go shopping so progressively. Progressively, when you
don't shop, you just use up everything else. And in fact,
yesterday I went hiking and I've got a really small
(13:49):
storage shed, like it's a third of a single garage
out in the Northern Suburbs and it's just got you know,
my school books from when I was little, and you know,
school reports and photos and a couple of boxes of clothes.
And so I went out there yesterday with a friend
and just like went shopping. And this is what I
do eas the time I come back to Australia. I
just go out to my boxes and I just find things.
(14:11):
Stop it out. Yeah, and this is stuff from when
I was eighteen or twenty one, or a lot of
it's from when I was doing Master chef. So it's
you know, ten, fifteen, sometimes thirty years old, and I go, oh,
I haven't worn that for a decade, and so I
kind of comes yeah, and so I've got now got
a new wardrobe to take back to Paris.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
I mean when you talk about minimalism, because we are
sort of victims to the world in which we live
in and everything is geared to sell to us now,
and when you're a businesswoman yourself, I mean, in some
ways were trying to sell whatever it is, whether it's books.
I guess now everything's online and people can listen to audiobooks,
so that is definitely a way that's more beneficial. But
you know, I mean I'm a small business owner, I'm
(14:49):
a dury designer, so there's always like the thought process
is always the strategy of how do you sell more?
And I mean deeply, people don't need anything. They don't
need jewelry.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I want to argue pieces of high quality jewelry totally, ah,
things that humans need. And so this is something even
with my book that I'm writing at the moment about collapse,
people go, well, should we be having children? Should we
be creating art? And I'm like, yes, there are some
things that are fundamentally human and having a small number
of very special things is the secret, right, it's our
(15:21):
sweet spot.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
It's interesting about jewelry because it's like the one thing
that we've had throughout generations and all of history. This
like totem type, like having something that is of meaning
and like you know, people will wear it as a
second skin. But then we have like on the flip
side of that, fast fashion. But do you think it
is a result of us as consumers or are we
victims of the businesses that are pushing this on us?
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Oh, it's totally two way. I mean, this is also
what I write about in my book. There's this concept
of molok and it's people find this really interesting and
it's a quick one for me to explain. Essentially, it
shows that none of this is anyone's fault and it's
all our fault totally. So molok is this game theory,
like poker game theory, and it's a zero sum sort
of result that we find ourselves in. And what we do.
(16:05):
Imagine a concert and everyone's sitting down and one person
at the front decides to stand up to get a
better view. Then everyone behind them has to stand up
and then before you know it, the entire theater is
standing up.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Because of that one person.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, and the net result is everybody loses because everybody
has to stand. So the atomic race is like that,
like we've all racing to get the bigger atomic bomb.
But if any one person drops that bomb, we're all stuffed, right.
And it's the same with shopping, like and the keeping
up with the joneses. So one person does it and
(16:39):
then everyone needs to do it. Now, what's really interesting.
I live in Paris, where there is not that imperative.
Minimalism is a much more respected thing. It's considered de
class a, like, not elegant to have vast amounts of fashion.
And I sit there with French people and they go, oh,
I can tell they're Australian, or I can tell they're American.
And it's because they're wearing too much contemporary fashion rather
(17:01):
than just classic pieces. So you know, I live in
a tiny apartment thirty five square meters. Most Parisians live
in small apartments. You have a very small wardrobe, so
you have maybe three pairs of shoes in total, one
winter coat, you know, one pair of jeans. This is
how everyone lives there and there is not that imperative.
And what's really interesting is if you're not shopping, you
(17:23):
don't see the billboards. Yeah, you don't see the billboards,
So then you're not getting fed those messages and that
cycle gets disrupted.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
But you do see the social media side of things.
You might not see the billboards if you're walking in.
But like, I think it's for me, I mean, and
I guess like for most people who spend their lives online.
It is the constantness of advertising that kind of filters
through now that it's hard to it's hard to disassociate
yourself if you're not even walking into a shop.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
That I would say that if you don't even go
shopping online, Like my feed's got no shopping, no fashion
on it because they're not dropped, that the algorithms work, right,
So yeah, shopping begets shopping, like consumerism begets more consumerism.
And if you dial it back, it all dials back.
That's a great thing about the momentum of the algorithms.
(18:10):
Once you actually make a statement, it starts to actually
work the other way for you. So it is a
two way thing. We do live in a society, particularly
in Australia. Australia is the most consumerist society. We are
the biggest consumers of fast fashion. We have such a
high disposable income, even though there's a cost of living
crisis going on for a lot of people. The gap
(18:30):
between the have nots and have and have nots is
getting bigger and bigger. So there's two different worlds going on,
and the have nots as still been influenced by the
haves who are wearing all of this stuff and displaying it. So,
you know, one thing that I do is I wear
the same thing over and over again. It's not so
much a statement as a necessity. But I try to
normalize not giving a fuck about this stuff, you know, yeah,
(18:54):
and having a wonderful, full life without it. Like I
can get on with a great life, you know, doing
my public speaking, doing television, whatever it is. I can
be part of the system. But I do not buy
into that, and I think more young women need to
see that that is a choice that they can make.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
It is interesting. I will say that I have way
too much stuff, Like my wardrobe is huge, but most
of it is stuff that I have held on to
for like ten or fifteen years, and I wear the
same thing constantly. And not that long ago, I went
to a red carpet event and I wore a dress
I had already worn before, and there was like this
gotcha moment where someone wrote, Oh, didn't you wear that
(19:30):
to such and such?
Speaker 1 (19:31):
And I was like, yeah, isn't it cool?
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, it's a beautiful.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Dremone night, I wore it twice. Why wouldn't I wear
it again?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
And I was like, that's really interesting that it's almost
like a stroke car if you're in the media to
have ever been seen to wear something twice. But like
Laura and I and any listeners will know when you
watch all of our podcast videos, we constantly wear the
same thing.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
But I mean, have a look at any sort of
like media cycles through the Daily Mail, like they love
to go through women's fashion and pick out all of
the repeat outfits or like how.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Embarrassing, like this, how much it costs you? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
And I guess like the lens that we have on
female fashion is very different to male fashion. I mean,
we all know the anecdote around Obama wearing the same
suit to everything and no one realized or cough him out.
Carl Stefanovic did the same thing on the morning show. Yeah,
no one ever noticed. But you know, if anyone's female,
you know, counterpart did the same thing, we would notice
it within a week. And I guess like the standard
is just very different between female expectation and male expectation.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Look, I'm older, and so I don't cop it as much.
You know, you're becoming visible post fifty. But I can
say that I have been dressing in the same stuff
and after a while, no one notices. I promise you,
no one notices that I've never done my nails. No
one notices that I haven't got the latest this or that.
Like no one cares. And once you start to create
that energy in yourself, you can then glide through life
(20:44):
without spending time at all and doing shopping regret and
having decision fatigue. You can bypass that whole mess, I mean,
and have a great life. Sarah.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
I'm thirty nine, and I can't tell you the last
time I hadn't my nails done. Can't tell you last
time I blow dried my hair. And I would say
I already recognize that no one you know, And I
think that that maybe it's something that also comes with
like age and confidence this like feeling of acceptance in yourself.
But I don't think that age is necessarily given to that,
you know, I don't think that it's like always correlative.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
I got my nails on last night and I loved it.
You just said something interesting. So you hit fifty and
you're invisible. Do you really find that? Have you found
like a market difference from thirties to forties?
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Fifties? Dare I say it again? And it's terrible that
I've come back to Australia and you know, make these comparisons,
But it's a comparison that a lot of people, you know,
friends of mine, there's a lot of Australian creatives in Paris,
and we notice the same thing. So in Australia it's
a very young person's culture. The blotox, the collagen, the this,
the that, Like it's unbelievable. I got off the plane
(21:49):
and was just blown away by just these faces that
look so different.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Useful quote unquote like direct done done.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah, yeah, I would say that in Paris it's a
place where women are coming to their own in their fifties.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
You're more celebrated, aren't You're celebrated?
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Yeah? If I'm waiting in a queue at a cafe,
the waiter will come and pick me out to seat me.
You know, and you are super hot, though.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
He'd probably listened to the podcast where you talked about
dating younger men.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yes, french Men do live up to that reputation of
being very charming, but no, I think there's just culturally
a respect for sheer years on the planet. They assume
that you might actually have something to say. And look,
there's an adage in France if you get invited to
a dinner party, bring a good bottle of wine and
a good argument. And that's for men and women. I
mean that is bliss for me. So I think there's
(22:43):
just a different set of values, and it's not as consumers.
It's still quite a socialist country. The government makes fast
fashion very difficult. There's a twelve percent extra tax on
fast fashion, right, so if you buy a fascinating ten
euro single, it your pain and euro twenty extra, right,
So they just don't do as well. Repair shops are subsidized,
(23:04):
so if you want to go and get something mended
or you know whatever, part of its subsidized by the government.
So there's a whole range of things. Secondhand shops are
given extra support so they get shop frontage at discount rates.
There's all of these kinds of measures to steer the
population away from crass consumerism and from one of these items.
(23:24):
So yeah, so if you're a woman who's just dressing
simply and everything, you're not getting drowned out by lips
and eyelashes and all of that kind of thing. I
suppose there is a really big difference. Yeah, And it
is hard being back here, you know, for that reason,
because I see young women struggling with all of this.
(23:45):
And I wrote a blog post about this, and I
think you may have seen it. I think Kakeisha saw it,
the blog post about beauty ideals during times of economic austerity.
Because you're just about to ask you about it, I
did your own prompt. But yeah, well, yeah, what did
you find?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Well, I mean, firstly, I find it very interesting how
you're putting your work out at the moment and using substack.
I think so many creatives are moving to substack, and
there's so many very interesting discussions that are coming off
the back of it, and we ourselves there's been so
many discussions that we've had on a Wednesday episode that
have been prompted by substack discussions. Ye, this article that
you wrote, which was women will wear this fascist turn
(24:22):
on their bodies all kind of surrounds how the way
in which we present ourselves during different political climates, things
that rise and fall on the social media trends. I'm
talking like tradwife, how that's just come out of nowhere
that a lot of it is tied into what is
happening in the political landscape.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Can you tell us a little.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Bit about like how this is something that you've come
to recognize and how people can be more aware of
how we're being influenced by what's happening in the world.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Super interesting, and I think when women read it, they
kind of get a different slant on how they buy
into fashion. I think. So, I don't think I'm telling
anyone here anything new. Like the political times are very
very precarious. There's politic shit going on, and America's collapsing.
You know, a lot of commentators are saying that it's
no longer a democracy and democracies declining. Worldwide population is
(25:09):
about to decline with peak energy, it's about to decline,
food water systems about to decline, like they're in decline
but they're about to speed up to a point where
we're really going to struggle to eat, Like has eyone
noticed chocolate prices that Istar is missing.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Every food price every for coffee, coffee beans.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, coffee, coffee, Well, no, coffee and chocolate are the
two things that go far beans. So the two things
are going. And this people think thats just a there'll
be a correction. It's not. This is what collapse looks like.
So the times are very volatile, as you say, and
what has happened throughout history is that women have dressed
to the times and been forced to dress to the time.
(25:48):
So I studied this in feminism studies back in the
early nineties. And you know, back then the look was
the waif look, you know, sort of heroin chic. And
it was the last time the world had a major recession,
sorry Australia had a major recession, because there's been a
recession in two thousand and we managed to skip it
here in Australia. But that austerity created a very streamlined,
(26:10):
androgynous look, sort of grunge was in women dressed like boys,
didn't wear makeup, all of that kind of thing. And
if you cast your mind back to between the war
eras another austere period of economic tough times. Women had
the flapper look. Moved to World War Two, it was pants.
Women started wearing pants and blazes, you know, Lauren Bacall,
(26:30):
that kind of thing. Women were getting the vote, So
it sort of comes in line with feminism. Women are
in the power laws exactly. But then when you have
times of opulence, swings back the other way. So the
nineteen fifties, governments pumped money into the economy. Women were
sent back to the suburbs to have children. What do
you know, big boobs, big hips, blonde, voluptuous hair, heaps
(26:51):
of makeup, women being constricted into cinched wastes, shoes that
they couldn't walk in, et cetera, et cetera, And they
all ended up having to take value to cope with
such imprisonment. That again happened in the eighties, another time
of austerity, off the back of sort of the oil
implosion in the US. So I think of the Texan
baywatch boobs and lips and you know, power suits. Even
(27:14):
though it wasn't a big time for women entering the workforce.
I mentioned the nineties, and so where are we today?
Right in Australia. We've had thirty years of uninterrupted economic growth,
unheard of for any other western country in the world.
So we sort of skipped the two thousand and eight recession. Yeah,
we really did. Yeah, And it's something that Australians don't
really recognize. It's because of the mining stuff. So body
(27:37):
shapes in Australia have become more voluptuous because it's a
time of opulence, right, the luptious. Your generation are having
far more children than my generation. Did you know getting married?
None of my friends got married right in the nineties
and early two thousands, but I think you know your
generation went back to the altar, so a lot of
traditional fews came in. And what we're seeing now though
(28:00):
we cut to our twenty twenty five, there's this weird
stuff going on. So on the one hand, we're seeing
the stock market dive, the American dollars plunging, and the
cost of living stuff is kind of really strange, like
strange things a kind of happening. We're seeing some people
getting mega rich and then others really struggling, and so
there is a return to the ultra thin and you
(28:21):
would have seen that on TikTok. There's another sort of
wave of anti woke, anti DEI really full on Thinness
and the conservative look, so the pulled back bun all
of that kind of thing. But at the same time,
there's this weird what's called Mara Lago face, you know,
the sort of full Dallas look, which is sort of
inspired by those Trump wives and the techbro wives that
(28:44):
were there at the inauguration with the big boobs and
the big hair, and you know, they all went off
to space. But I was watching it, going, hang on,
why have we got? These two got everything else? And
I think it reflects exactly what's going on in world.
Who can we got exactly? We're going through this incredible
time of flux where people are sort of the Trumpians
(29:07):
are trying to go this is amazing, We're having this
great time, and then other forces are going, oh, no,
things are not right. So as women, what I sort
of advise to women is do not buy into this.
There's this great phrase from somebody who's writing about tyranny
and this authoritarian creep that's happening into the world, and
it's Timothy Snyder. He says, do not obey in advance.
(29:29):
It's the number one rule to try to resist authoritarianism,
which is what's happening to the world at the moment.
More of the world is now in an authoritarian state
than a democracy.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
So subtle too that you don't even see that, correct,
which is why it's like as a creep exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So this is where if you're a woman who's like,
I am not going to be part of this. I
want to resist somehow, what can I do? My number
one advice would be, do not buy into fashion trends
and basically stop the algorithmic kind of you know, death
trap by literally not looking at these things, and you'll
see a matter of weeks it'll all back off. Do
(30:07):
not go to shopping malls, do buy jewelry, special pieces
of jewelry tony maum. Yeah. And just just you can
not obey in advance, right, you can just not buy
into these things because as you say, it creeps up, right,
these trends creep up and before you know it, you're
wearing cottage core. You know, like like, just don't do it,
(30:27):
Just don't buy shit. Don't like look in your wardrobe
from ten years ago and just wear that and just say, yep,
I'm wearing something I've worn before. How cool is that?
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Speaking about the confusion in the world right now, you
have taken a bit of a turn in your writing,
as we've been speaking about and you have been writing
about system collapse. You have decided to serialize this book,
which you haven't done in the past. And I feel
like we have seen authors in the past do this,
but it's not common. Why did you decide to serialize this?
And I guess what are the pros and cons of
(30:55):
doing it the way you've done it?
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, as you say, there is a legacy, and in fact,
a lot the top books that you know have been
written throughout history were serialized. So War and Peace Charles Dickens,
Charles Dickens exactly, if you'ar and loathing in Las Vegas,
all kinds of all of Virginia Wolf's books simoned Bovoire's books.
It was a really common thing that you would write
a chapter or two and you would publish it in
(31:18):
a journal or a magazine or a newspaper, and the
public would follow along. And then a few months six
months later, a publisher would go, well, there's interest in this,
will produce it as a book, and then it becomes
you know, a book that's now banned by Trump, but
dot dot dot now banned by Trump. But I was
watching what was happening to the publishing industry, and it's
(31:38):
really struggling. And I, you know, obviously am very fond
of the publisher industry because I've had wonderful experiences publishing
books in the past. But they were really struggling, and
I feared that this particular subject was going to be
too big and scary. Yeah, exactly for traditional publishing. But
I knew there was a community of people who needed
(31:58):
a space to talk about this stuff. So I was
quite an early adopter of substack. I think I was
one of the earlier first Australians on there. And you know,
this is sort of almost four years ago, I think now,
and so I figured, well, I'll just try it here
and just accumulated a bigger and bigger following, and little
did I know there were publishers around the world and
(32:19):
journalists who'd subscribed and were watching it and reading it.
So yeah, I managed to write a one hundred thousand
words book in six months, which I can't normally do.
But the deadline, you know, of a weekly deadline got
me there, and then I had this community giving me
feedback the whole way, so I was able to have
the confidence that I was on the right track, you know,
(32:40):
which is really hard as a writer to gauge when
you're you know, in the trenches with it, for sure.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
But I also find it so interesting because the stuff
that you're talking about is also happening in real time.
So when you're talking about things that are happening in
the world that might be politically good or environmentally gird
the process of publication where you might write something that
it takes a year and then you know there's processes
back and forth with an editor. It almost feels as
though then if you were to release it in a
(33:06):
traditional way, it would be it would have missed the
boat a little bit.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Yes, with some of these topics. That was another reason
why I decided to serialize it, because the world is
moving so fast. Now you've you've really got to write
in real time and publishing. As it turns out, Penguin
are going to be turning my book around faster than
they normally turn a book around. But it's not going
to be published until June next year. Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, So who knows where we are in June next year.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Look, I don't know if there'll be bookstores in the US.
You know so, And I say that legitimately, and my
book's about it, and I certainly won't be able to
go to the US. I'll be disappeared. Like I am
prime target for being disappeared. People like me are currently
being disappeared in the US.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Is your book actually banned by Trump? It was you
making a joke.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
It would invariably be banned if his minions could pay
attention to such things. But if I go through immigration,
Ice will stop me. I mean, I'll have to go
with a burn a phone. I encourage anyone going to
America to basically wipe your phone. But even anything you've
deleted recently, Ice can go through your phone and find it.
(34:11):
So take a burner phone to America. Number one, don't
go to America. In Europe, everyone's been advised not to.
It's a travel alert. Australia will issue it certainly very soon.
It's too dangerous. If you've got stuff that's about Palestine,
or about Trump or about the tech bros on your phone,
you have no rights. Once you land there, Ice can
take your phone.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
I mean Trump is showing us that with the people
who's deporting now with just completely fabricated lies on why
they're being deported.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I've got no rights once they decide that you are
a problem. So yet, to your point, I don't know
what will happen to that effect, but I think the
publishing industry is going we've got to continue business as
usual and just hope the worst of this doesn't happen.
But yeah, the uncertainty is palpable here in Australia. It's
so strange people aren't talking about this. Yeah, but people
(34:56):
do talk about things in isolation.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
I think people are concerned about climate change, joy they're
concerned about wars, or they're concerned about and they're.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Not seeing that it's the same crisis.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Yeah, and this is something that you've spoken about. I
saw that you wrote about it in terms of like
being a better crisis. That it's that all of these
things that are happening across the world are in ways
connected to each other. My question for you is is
when it is placed like that, there is such a
doomsday way of looking at things, how do you cope
with that?
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Then?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
How do you process that in a way when it
seems like everything is so futile. How are you able
to go Okay, Well, here is how we can still
live a connected life, or a life that has meaning,
or a life that has purpose when everything seems like
there is no purpose.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's one of the first questions
I get asked, apart from how long do we have?
And will I die?
Speaker 2 (35:44):
And also should we keep having kids and procreating?
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And should I have a bunker? You know, I should
I be moving off to Dale's Fit or something and
building a puncer. Yeah. I've been in this space for
three years researching it and you know, going to the conferences,
and I think, you know, I'm aware that I can
sound like a conspiration theorist. You know that there's no
conspiracy going on. All of this information is out there
and the modeling is being done by the top institutes
(36:08):
and universities around the world. But you make a really
good point. It's been dealt with in isolation. Very few
people are seeing it as part of systemic collapse, partly
because we live in a world where we think about
things as linear, you know, a beginning and an end.
If you could just stop the problem somewhere in the middle,
then you have a good outcome exactly. But complexity theory,
which is the theory that governs how our bodies work,
(36:30):
you know, the knee bones connected to the thigh bone,
all of that kind of thing, the way that we
interact with nature. It actually sees this as a whole
range of dominoing cascading systems that once one goes, all
the others start to tip. And anyone who understands the
climate crisis knows that, Yeah, the implications for the food system,
for for biodiversity, yeah, you get it. So how do
(36:53):
I live through all of this? Well, it's really funny
my mother, who finds this way too hard to cope with.
My dad gets it and he's fully into it, and
he's read the book and he, yeah, just really understands it.
But my mother says to me, like, you know, when
I visited it over Easter, she said, I don't understand it. Sarah.
You've been in this space. You think and talk about
(37:14):
it all day, but you see the happiest you've ever been.
And I said, well, that's because I am. And I
think what it is is that and I write about
in the first two chapters of the book which are free,
by the way, if anyone wants to go onto my substack.
There's a couple of the chapters that are free because
they're the ones that I think people could just get
a taste of it, So can go and check that out.
(37:35):
But the first two chaps to care hope and then relief,
and then the next one's called truth. And what I
say is I've no longer got hope. We've been thinking, oh,
but there's still hope. If we just all get solar
panels and recycle properly, will make it. The point is,
we will no longer make it okay, And it depends
what you mean by make it, but we'll no longer
be returning to a place of the comfort that we've
(37:56):
known previously. And this has happened all throughout history. You
have times of opulence and then it comes back down
the other side and it's going to go into deep
decline and very very fast. So what happens when I
tell people this and going to the details of it,
people tell me they feel a relief. The reason they
feel a relief is there's this cognitive congruence that happens
(38:17):
because finally it's like, yeah, we've been told we can
still make it, and you know the Paris Accords and
you know it'll all be fine, but we're seeing headlines
coming in going we've reached another planetary boundary. You know,
another couple of thousands of species have died off that
are critical to our food ball system.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Well, I think as well with it is that there's
so much emphasis on the small changes that we as
people can make that's going to move and shift the dial.
And realistically, it's not the themes that we're doing on
a day to day level personally that is creating the
greater problem, especially when it comes to climate, you know,
the climate change and where we're at in the world.
And I mean, yeah, what was there documentary that we
(38:57):
were talking about recently around fast fashion, Yes and all
of like.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Shirt shop now by now.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Yeah, by now, I mean anyone who watched that doctor,
I highly recommend it. But it was like the horrifying
things that you don't normally see, like beaches in Africa
that are aligned with clothes in Ghana because there's nowhere
else for it to go. And we're shipping all of
the stuff we don't want to people who are quote
unquote in need, and it is like kilometers of beach
(39:24):
that is just full of clothing.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, being discribed. They see that and you realize you're
still shopping and playing into that, and you feel powerless.
This incongruency happens in your brain and it's creating what
I refer to as a moral injury amongst people. And
I think the pain, Like I start talking about this
and people go, oh my god, that's exactly how I feel,
and that deep despair. I look at the way people,
(39:47):
young people are depressed. I look at adhd rates, I
look at so many things, and I go, I think
there is a deep sense amongst all of us that
all is not right, that the center can hold this
idea of infinite growth on a finite planet that does
not stack up right. And we know it. We know it.
We're not stupid. Humans have a visceral connection to nature,
(40:09):
and we know we're not in attunement. And so when
you start talking about the truth, people do feel this relief.
And for me, now that I'm just like being perfectly
honest about what is happening, I can actually then start
to reframe the way that I live my life. And
so the piece of advice that I give to everybody
you know. People want to know what can we do?
What can we do? The first thing is live your
(40:31):
fullest life now, even just sitting here now, we don't
know how long we've got. We don't know if we
walk outside and get hit by a bust. Humans have
never known when they're going to die, and that has
not changed. But we do know that the existential situation
is pretty bad. So live your fullest life now. Now,
what does fullest life mean? It doesn't seem me to
(40:52):
go into a mall. It doesn't mean raping and extracting
the planet. It means being our full human self, which
is loving, It is contributing, It is attending to a
greater good. At times like this throughout history, we are
programmed to collectivise, to form communities. So I advise people
(41:14):
get to know your neighbors, the greatest survival trick. And like,
you might not think any of this is going to happen. Cool,
but you might actually like the ways that we're going
to need to live. If it does happen, you might
like to do it anyway. That is, form communities. You
don't have to go off to a bunker in New Zealand.
Form the communities around where you are now, bake muffins
for the neighbor you've never met, invite their kids over.
(41:35):
It's called pro social prepping. It is the only thing
we can do if shit goes down, So form communities
and it's kind of a fun thing to do anyway.
Send your kids to Scouts or there's people I know
doing bush survival skills. We're going to need to know
this because it's only a matter of Eco Musk having
a bad mood and turning off eighty percent of the
satellites up there. We will not have ATM machines, we
(41:57):
will not have technology, will will not have mobile phones.
So in Europe, four hundred and fifty million citizens are
being told over the summer to prepare a survival kit
in the event of World War three.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Do you know what's interesting, and it's we live in
such a world here where we are so sheltered from
it in Australia. But my fiancee lives in Europe and
his teammates are from all over Europe. He plays football.
They're all from all over And when I was there recently,
there were some from Estonia, some from Ukraine, all over
and they had just received in the mail and it
(42:30):
sounds like a movie. They received a pamphlet of what
to prepare from the government. This is not like a
little woo woo underground thing.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
There is European Commission yep.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
They received it saying this is what you guys need
to get ready because the world is getting ready for
impending doom, whether that's another world war or whatever it is.
We have too much control resting in very few people
like you just said, like Elon Musk, and for me
to hear that, I was like, this sounds like armageddon.
Like to have the government be sending you these pamphlets
saying this is what you need to go out and
(43:00):
buy as every household was why.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
You're not alone. Australians listen to me talk about this
and they're like, what so, realizing that over in Europe
we're talking about this. My friends have got We're getting
together paper maps and learning how to read maps. I
can read a map, but I would suspect your generation
probably can't. Well, well, I think you aged me down
too much.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
I moved to your I was on the last cast
for the McGregor's Don't Worry Gregory is Gregory's Map.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
But yeah, so we're reading, learning how to read maps,
we're getting together, radios with batteries, were getting you know,
this is real and it's happened throughout history. It's just
a rude shock because most of us have only grown
up with life getting so called better, but growth and abundance,
it actually runs out and it goes back down the
other side. And that's what we're heading for.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
How do you think building communities? And this is something
we actually had a conversation about this recently about how
traditional community is something that we've really lost and like
even from like a motherhood perspective, like having your tribe
around you with something that's very different these days. How
do you think that this is something that we do
create for ourselves now?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
And what does a modern community look like to you?
A modern community? And I use this phrase, it's a
Pema children phrase. Start where you are. You don't have
to go to a intentional farming community somewhere, Just start
wherever you are. If you're in a block of apartments,
get to know the people all around you, invite them over,
you know, invite them over for afternoon drink sometime. Be
(44:28):
the proactive one to do this. Look out for Facebook
groups before Facebook implodes, where you can actually join up
with people who are doing similar kind of things. Also
talk about sharing skills. So I speak to people who've
got like they do it under the auspices of having,
you know, a sort of a book club or whatever
it is. Use those kinds of groups that you might
(44:50):
already be forming to start talking about these kinds of things.
So I grew up going, oh, community, is that really
what we've got to do? And it sort of all
sounds a bit tween a ineffectual. It's not. It's what's
kept us as humans human but also surviving threats throughout
the ages. It is the number one thing that works,
(45:10):
and we're going to have to return to it. I
think most of us know how to reconnect. We're craving it.
That is the gift of collapse. That is the gift
of all of this is we're going to be returned
to our most human selves, and we ache for it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
It's also something that is completely in our control. You
can go and put those a lot of things that
are your control, but this is Sarah. We could talk
to you about this for so long. If you guys
want to go and continue these discussions go to Sarah's substack.
We're going to link that in the show notes. We're
also going to link our first episode we did with
you a few years ago. I love talking to you.
It's always interesting, I always learned something and it's always
(45:45):
thought provoking. So thank you so.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Much for thank you for giving me the time. I
love these kinds of conversations. Thank you. Thanks Sarah. Kababegabaa
bay kababeo
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life
on Cut. I'm Brittany, I'm Laura, and today we have
a guest that has appeared on the podcast before a
few years ago. But I absolutely loved the chat, Sarah Wilson. Now, Laura,
you weren't on that episode. I think you were away
or unwell or something.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I don't knows. It was years ago. We're not keeping track.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
But Sarah Wilson, for anyone who doesn't know who she is,
she is the absolute superstar behind I Quit Sugar, which
is how she kind of came into the world of
publications at the time.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yep, she's the best selling author, She's an international keynote speaker, minimalist.
She edited Cosmo magazine actually at twenty nine years old,
which is really interesting because it's in stark contrast to
what she believes in the way she lives her life.
The other thing that I loved in our last chat,
Sarah was talking about dating younger man. I obviously say
(01:00):
that because I'm about to marry a younger man. But
today is a little bit different. We're going to touch
on all of those things again, but I think it's
really interesting how you've serialized.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Your new book.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
It's all about collapse. We're going to touch on climate
change and different political climates in the world. So that's
a little bit later in the chat.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Sarah Wilson, Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's so nice to have you in the flesh this time.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yes, I was over the phone, wasn't it. I think
I was in Paris. Yeah, it sounds awful. Yeah, I
think so having.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
A horrible time. Well, I actually wasn't on the episode.
It was Britt and Keisha that time. So this is
a real treat for me. We I mean, I'm sure
last time you told your embarrassing story, but like, now
that you're back, there's been a bit of time in between.
What else has been happening to you? What is and
do you have a more recent embarrassing story.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Well, I've got so many years of embarrassing stories, and
in fact, my friends whenever they see me when I
come back, they're like, right, what's happened now? But look,
the embarrassing story that I thought about, because I know
you guys are always after one is actually from a
while back, and I hope no one's eating their breakfast.
But I and it's sort of a time before the
internet and mobile phones. Most of you weren't born. But
(02:03):
I went to Vietnam with to join one of my brothers.
He was living over there, and we do lots of
mountain bike riding together. That's what we do as a family,
is just take off on mountain bikes. And he built
me a bike. He'd traveled overnight on a bus to
this remote town in Vietnam. I had eaten an ice
cream from the street and there is a moral to
this story, and it's this, do not eat an ice
cream for the street in Vietnam. They've had the same
(02:25):
thing in India cool fee.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
It's called like a chai ice cream and put me
in hospital for four d what's the bike link?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I was four to a So I am then just
excreeting out of all orifices overnight and my brother arrives
with two bikes, so he's had to ride with an
extra bike on his shoulder to meet me at five
in the morning, and I'm just a mess. Plus I'm innstruating,
and I don't know if anyone's been to Vietnam or
it went what twenty years ago or so, But they
(02:53):
don't have tampons. They only have sanitary pads. And I
don't know if any of you have ridden long distance
in bike shorts, you cannot wear a sanitary pad. They
kind of just go back out the back, you know
what I mean. And so I, you know, arrive, Oh
my brother arrives, and I'm like, oh, we've got a
head off. We have got a head off, and basically
(03:14):
it gets worse and worse, and I've got blood, I've
got everything coming out of all the holes of my body.
But we had to ride like nine hours up into
this mountain village through a communist area, so you're not
allowed to stop. So I'm just riding, riding, riding. I
gave up on protecting myself with anything, and I've just
it's just all running down my legs. Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
So interesting to me that you still committed to the ride,
like it wasn't a marathon you've been training for. It
was just your brother. Surely you could have postponed.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Oh no, no, no, I've got four brothers, and there
is we say things to each other like confidence is
king and this kind of thing, like there is no
giving up. So I rode and he was riding next
to me, getting coconut orders from the side of the
road and coming up to me and pouring it down
my throat as I kept riding, and I knew that
if I stopped peddling, I would out, so I just
(04:01):
pedaled and pedaled. Got to the mountain town called Du Lat,
which is beautiful. He walked in and they're like, we
don't want you. I literally got off my bike and
passed out, so my brother to carry up me upstairs.
He carried my bike up. He rang my parents and go,
what do I do with her? And I said, shower
her and feed her. So he showered me. The poor guy,
Oh this is wild. And then he took me downstairs
(04:24):
and there was this little hole in the wall place
with a cauldron, massive cauldron, and it was just full
of this Vietnamese It's of red curry chicken with potatoes
and served with a baguette because it's got this weird
French kind of overlay. And so I had the first
spoonful of this and it was like electricity going through
my body like it was it was like no drug
(04:45):
could produce this experience, and I could feel it snapping
in all of my sign NATSes, So I mean, that's
an embarrassing experience. I suppose, look, the stakes eat longer
and gets worse the next day, but that's probably maybe
for another episode.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You'll come back for like episode three, and then we
can get the update.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
That's you know.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
I feel like, at least, if it's going to happen somewhere,
it needs to be in a foreign country where you
know you're never going to see these people again.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And like if that was.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Down like Bondai Promenade, you'd probably feel a bit differently
about the story. You know.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
The difference I think the biggest difference because that makes
me think back to all my traveling times and I
just thought to myself, well, thank god, Like this makes
me sound old too. But iPhones weren't really a thing then.
But that's the difference. If you did that now, you'd
be going direl Someone would have filmed you writing, shitting, vomiting,
and but you would have been like a sensation online.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Except that the person I was with, my brother, he
has a nock here. He has not upgraded, so there
was no documenting probably going on. But he's told everybody
we know the story. That's all right, So of you exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
The last time we spoke to you, you were living
in Paris, you were having a wonderful time. We spoke
a lot about and I love this chat so much.
We spoke a lot about you just living your best life.
You were dating a lot of younger men. You were
really living the dream. Are you still in Paris now?
Are you still in the dating scene? Talk to us
about what's happen happening the last couple of years.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, Well, you know what, I've got a funny story
about that, because I live in Paris and I've been
there writing a book. So it's a really interesting process.
You probably know, the publishing industry, like so many industries,
going through lots of flux. So I wrote this book.
I've been researching it for two years, and I wrote
it on substack. Do you guys, Yes, we're all across
(06:20):
you know substack. So I wrote it on substack, serializing
it chapter by chapter, so each week a new chapter
was posted, and this community built around it. And it's
not a cheerful topic. It's called It's about collapse. It's
about civilizational collapse and systems collapse and why everything's happening
at the moment, including Trump. So it was sort of
off the back of the last election, the last Trump election,
(06:41):
that I was like, things are not right. And I'd
written a book on the climate crisis, et cetera, and I went,
this is bigger than that. Now it's AI, it's nuclear threat,
it's fragmentation, it's all of this kind of thing. What's
happening between men and women. This happened in civilizations all
throughout history. All complex civilizations go through this process of decline,
and we're in the middle of it. So the Roman Empire,
(07:02):
the Mayan Empire, the Xing Dynasty, all of these civilizations
there is about a three hundred of them collapse and
around about the three hundred year mark and our civilizations
at two seventy years. So I was watching all this.
I've written this book, serializing it on substack, and I
was doing a podcast where I was interviewing people for
the book, and then it got picked up by the
(07:23):
biggest publisher in the world, Penguin US, because Trump came
into power again and so they were like, shit, we
need a book about this. So that's what I've been doing.
Dating wise. The week I met this or started writing
this book, I met a guy on a beach down
at a party down the south of France, and he's
(07:43):
Corsican and his how can I put it beautiful?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, the most beautiful man I ever met was my husband,
and then after that when I was a Corsican y.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Yeah, it's very very dark, a very dark past because
most Corsicans men are involved in the mafia over there
and they've all got guns and all of this kind
of thing. So he's and he was a motorcycle champion
as well, so and he now builds cards, so that's
what he does. But anyway, we ended up dating for
the six months that I wrote the book, and then
the week that I was finishing the book, just before Christmas,
(08:18):
we broke up. But we're still still together. He was
out here with me in Australia, so you've sort of
in a relationship situation share, situation share, that's what That's
what the younger people call it, don't they. He's also younger,
So this is the theme. Right, So last time we
talked about younger guy. That seems to be where I land.
But this is the funny thing. I was in Greece,
so while I'm in Europe, I travel around a bit.
(08:38):
I'm about to go back and seat of travel around
Greece again and just write my next book. And I
was on I was in this market square, had to
catch the bus down to the port to catch another ferry,
you know, and this girl came up to me and said, oh,
is this the bus I need to catch? And she
was Australian. So we sat next to each other on
the bus and she started talking about men and this
guy that she met in some other Greek island does
(09:00):
know what to do. I don't know. I have a
face that says, tell me all your problems.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yeah, you're also a talker, and probably in the reflection
of that is like being a very good question asker,
and that's how those stories flow out of people.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, and look, I've lived on the road since I
was twenty one. I've lived out of two bags of
belongings for thirty years. So this is my natural habitat
is around strangers. Like put me in at a barbecue
full of my friends with kids in suburban Australia and
I can't last five minutes. I become mute. But out
(09:34):
in the world talking to people I don't know, like
it's just a beautiful dance for me. I'm actually really
shy elsewhere, but in the world like that, especially if
it's a young woman that comes up to me, Like,
I'm fascinated by younger women. I just want to learn
everything about them.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Travelers also talk as well, Like travelers are known for
time them and by themselves.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And everyone's open, you know. So she sits down next
to me on the bus and tells me all her woes,
and she said, look, but I listened to his podcast
just before I set out traveling. It really inspired me.
It was this woman called Sarah Wilson, and she'd been
talking about how she just has these relationships with younger
men and she doesn't feel she needs to settle down
and she's much old. And I said, oh, I'm Sarah Wilison.
(10:13):
So on the other part of the world on a
bus somewhere in Greece.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
That is so funny.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Was she so toughed? Yeah, she took a photo and
sent it to her friends or something, you know. So, yeah,
I don't know where that photo turned up, but it's
probably out there somewhere. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
And this is from the first episode that you guys
did to Yeah, so this is like a Life Uncut episode,
So there was a life of somewhere in Greece that
was traveling around.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
There was ground zero for this. I mean.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Something I found so interesting from the conversation that you
guys had last time was, and you just mentioned it,
living out of two bags, this minimalist lifestyle that you've
been attracted to, which seems ironically in contradiction for someone
who worked for some of the biggest women's magazines of
the country. I mean, firstly, how did you come to
this lifestyle? How do you navigate what a minimalist lifestyle
looks for you now? And then I would love to
(11:00):
know what that push and pull was like when you
were working in a magazine that's predominantly for consumerism.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
It's to sell stuff, sell shit to women that they
don't need, but we don't need to use my job. Yeah,
I can say that now that the magazine's folded back,
it's been re ignited, it has it has got back.
I saw it the other day. So yes, I grew
up this way. I grew up in a subsistence living farm,
which doesn't mean much other than my parents were broke
and had too many kids and so we we just
(11:27):
wore secondhand stuff and anything that came into the property,
we had to do something with it because there's no
garbage collection and there wasn't enough petrol to go into town.
So we just weren't around consumerism. And my dad was
anti capitalist. So I did grow up with all of this,
and I was known as the little capitalist because I
had a job from the age of eleven, a business
at age twelve, and I was essentially, you know, I'm
(11:48):
going to move beyond this and dot dot dot. The
age of twenty nine, I've become the edit of Cosmo,
which is very funny. However, all of my clothes were secondhand.
I refused to be given a handbag, which was a thing,
you know with editors, so I've never owned a handbag
in my life. This is something that I've said a
few times. The Daily Mail has scoured like twenty years
of my life trying to find a picture of me
(12:10):
with a ham trying to catch you out in a lie,
and they did a sort of a story with all
of these pictures, and I just had to go through it.
I wrote a response and just said, that's a Byron
Bay Market tote that somebody gave me, and literally I'm
carrying Celery in it in that photo.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Like, not having a handbag doesn't mean that you don't
ever use a vessel to Gary.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Shite, I think when we say handbag we mean of
the Gucci design leather.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, at least you're still needed something to get things
from point A to point Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah, that's it. Although I was going to say, yeah,
how else do you do it? Generally per the minimalist concept,
I put a lot of things down my bra I'll
see you. Yeah, I just picture you lifting your shirt up.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
You've got your baby beans and stuff taped your stomach.
You're like got your grocery estate selery down the back anyway.
So yeah, I've been like that. When I was at Cosmo,
a lot of my stuff was secondhand. I wrote bike
to work, which was, you know, people just thought was ridiculous,
and then I'd ride my bike to you know, red
carpet events and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
And in some ways, I've got to admit I kind
of knew the gimmick, and I knew that it was
a talking point, and I loved it because it got
people thinking about the fact they'd just driven their full
drive and spent twenty minutes trying to park. I've always
been a little bit like that, if I'm to be honest,
you know, like I like making that statement because I
think it's a good statement to make. And I think
(13:29):
normalizing a different way of doing things that's better for
the planet and better for your mental health and just
better is a responsible thing to do. So back then,
that's how I did it. And look after I left Cosmo,
I just didn't go shopping so progressively. Progressively, when you
don't shop, you just use up everything else. And in fact,
yesterday I went hiking and I've got a really small
(13:49):
storage shed, like it's a third of a single garage
out in the Northern Suburbs and it's just got you know,
my school books from when I was little, and you know,
school reports and photos and a couple of boxes of clothes.
And so I went out there yesterday with a friend
and just like went shopping. And this is what I
do eas the time I come back to Australia. I
just go out to my boxes and I just find things.
(14:11):
Stop it out. Yeah, and this is stuff from when
I was eighteen or twenty one, or a lot of
it's from when I was doing Master chef. So it's
you know, ten, fifteen, sometimes thirty years old, and I go, oh,
I haven't worn that for a decade, and so I
kind of comes yeah, and so I've got now got
a new wardrobe to take back to Paris.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
I mean when you talk about minimalism, because we are
sort of victims to the world in which we live
in and everything is geared to sell to us now,
and when you're a businesswoman yourself, I mean, in some
ways were trying to sell whatever it is, whether it's books.
I guess now everything's online and people can listen to audiobooks,
so that is definitely a way that's more beneficial. But
you know, I mean I'm a small business owner, I'm
(14:49):
a dury designer, so there's always like the thought process
is always the strategy of how do you sell more?
And I mean deeply, people don't need anything. They don't
need jewelry.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I want to argue pieces of high quality jewelry totally, ah,
things that humans need. And so this is something even
with my book that I'm writing at the moment about collapse,
people go, well, should we be having children? Should we
be creating art? And I'm like, yes, there are some
things that are fundamentally human and having a small number
of very special things is the secret, right, it's our
(15:21):
sweet spot.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
It's interesting about jewelry because it's like the one thing
that we've had throughout generations and all of history. This
like totem type, like having something that is of meaning
and like you know, people will wear it as a
second skin. But then we have like on the flip
side of that, fast fashion. But do you think it
is a result of us as consumers or are we
victims of the businesses that are pushing this on us?
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Oh, it's totally two way. I mean, this is also
what I write about in my book. There's this concept
of molok and it's people find this really interesting and
it's a quick one for me to explain. Essentially, it
shows that none of this is anyone's fault and it's
all our fault totally. So molok is this game theory,
like poker game theory, and it's a zero sum sort
of result that we find ourselves in. And what we do.
(16:05):
Imagine a concert and everyone's sitting down and one person
at the front decides to stand up to get a
better view. Then everyone behind them has to stand up
and then before you know it, the entire theater is
standing up.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Because of that one person.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, and the net result is everybody loses because everybody
has to stand. So the atomic race is like that,
like we've all racing to get the bigger atomic bomb.
But if any one person drops that bomb, we're all stuffed, right.
And it's the same with shopping, like and the keeping
up with the joneses. So one person does it and
(16:39):
then everyone needs to do it. Now, what's really interesting.
I live in Paris, where there is not that imperative.
Minimalism is a much more respected thing. It's considered de
class a, like, not elegant to have vast amounts of fashion.
And I sit there with French people and they go, oh,
I can tell they're Australian, or I can tell they're American.
And it's because they're wearing too much contemporary fashion rather
(17:01):
than just classic pieces. So you know, I live in
a tiny apartment thirty five square meters. Most Parisians live
in small apartments. You have a very small wardrobe, so
you have maybe three pairs of shoes in total, one
winter coat, you know, one pair of jeans. This is
how everyone lives there and there is not that imperative.
And what's really interesting is if you're not shopping, you
(17:23):
don't see the billboards. Yeah, you don't see the billboards,
So then you're not getting fed those messages and that
cycle gets disrupted.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
But you do see the social media side of things.
You might not see the billboards if you're walking in.
But like, I think it's for me, I mean, and
I guess like for most people who spend their lives online.
It is the constantness of advertising that kind of filters
through now that it's hard to it's hard to disassociate
yourself if you're not even walking into a shop.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
That I would say that if you don't even go
shopping online, Like my feed's got no shopping, no fashion
on it because they're not dropped, that the algorithms work, right,
So yeah, shopping begets shopping, like consumerism begets more consumerism.
And if you dial it back, it all dials back.
That's a great thing about the momentum of the algorithms.
(18:10):
Once you actually make a statement, it starts to actually
work the other way for you. So it is a
two way thing. We do live in a society, particularly
in Australia. Australia is the most consumerist society. We are
the biggest consumers of fast fashion. We have such a
high disposable income, even though there's a cost of living
crisis going on for a lot of people. The gap
(18:30):
between the have nots and have and have nots is
getting bigger and bigger. So there's two different worlds going on,
and the have nots as still been influenced by the
haves who are wearing all of this stuff and displaying it. So,
you know, one thing that I do is I wear
the same thing over and over again. It's not so
much a statement as a necessity. But I try to
normalize not giving a fuck about this stuff, you know, yeah,
(18:54):
and having a wonderful, full life without it. Like I
can get on with a great life, you know, doing
my public speaking, doing television, whatever it is. I can
be part of the system. But I do not buy
into that, and I think more young women need to
see that that is a choice that they can make.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
It is interesting. I will say that I have way
too much stuff, Like my wardrobe is huge, but most
of it is stuff that I have held on to
for like ten or fifteen years, and I wear the
same thing constantly. And not that long ago, I went
to a red carpet event and I wore a dress
I had already worn before, and there was like this
gotcha moment where someone wrote, Oh, didn't you wear that
(19:30):
to such and such?
Speaker 1 (19:31):
And I was like, yeah, isn't it cool?
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, it's a beautiful.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Dremone night, I wore it twice. Why wouldn't I wear
it again?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
And I was like, that's really interesting that it's almost
like a stroke car if you're in the media to
have ever been seen to wear something twice. But like
Laura and I and any listeners will know when you
watch all of our podcast videos, we constantly wear the
same thing.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
But I mean, have a look at any sort of
like media cycles through the Daily Mail, like they love
to go through women's fashion and pick out all of
the repeat outfits or like how.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Embarrassing, like this, how much it costs you? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
And I guess like the lens that we have on
female fashion is very different to male fashion. I mean,
we all know the anecdote around Obama wearing the same
suit to everything and no one realized or cough him out.
Carl Stefanovic did the same thing on the morning show. Yeah,
no one ever noticed. But you know, if anyone's female,
you know, counterpart did the same thing, we would notice
it within a week. And I guess like the standard
is just very different between female expectation and male expectation.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Look, I'm older, and so I don't cop it as much.
You know, you're becoming visible post fifty. But I can
say that I have been dressing in the same stuff
and after a while, no one notices. I promise you,
no one notices that I've never done my nails. No
one notices that I haven't got the latest this or that.
Like no one cares. And once you start to create
that energy in yourself, you can then glide through life
(20:44):
without spending time at all and doing shopping regret and
having decision fatigue. You can bypass that whole mess, I mean,
and have a great life. Sarah.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
I'm thirty nine, and I can't tell you the last
time I hadn't my nails done. Can't tell you last
time I blow dried my hair. And I would say
I already recognize that no one you know, And I
think that that maybe it's something that also comes with
like age and confidence this like feeling of acceptance in yourself.
But I don't think that age is necessarily given to that,
you know, I don't think that it's like always correlative.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
I got my nails on last night and I loved it.
You just said something interesting. So you hit fifty and
you're invisible. Do you really find that? Have you found
like a market difference from thirties to forties?
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Fifties? Dare I say it again? And it's terrible that
I've come back to Australia and you know, make these comparisons,
But it's a comparison that a lot of people, you know,
friends of mine, there's a lot of Australian creatives in Paris,
and we notice the same thing. So in Australia it's
a very young person's culture. The blotox, the collagen, the this,
the that, Like it's unbelievable. I got off the plane
(21:49):
and was just blown away by just these faces that
look so different.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Useful quote unquote like direct done done.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah, yeah, I would say that in Paris it's a
place where women are coming to their own in their fifties.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
You're more celebrated, aren't You're celebrated?
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Yeah? If I'm waiting in a queue at a cafe,
the waiter will come and pick me out to seat me.
You know, and you are super hot, though.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
He'd probably listened to the podcast where you talked about
dating younger men.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yes, french Men do live up to that reputation of
being very charming, but no, I think there's just culturally
a respect for sheer years on the planet. They assume
that you might actually have something to say. And look,
there's an adage in France if you get invited to
a dinner party, bring a good bottle of wine and
a good argument. And that's for men and women. I
mean that is bliss for me. So I think there's
(22:43):
just a different set of values, and it's not as consumers.
It's still quite a socialist country. The government makes fast
fashion very difficult. There's a twelve percent extra tax on
fast fashion, right, so if you buy a fascinating ten
euro single, it your pain and euro twenty extra, right,
So they just don't do as well. Repair shops are subsidized,
(23:04):
so if you want to go and get something mended
or you know whatever, part of its subsidized by the government.
So there's a whole range of things. Secondhand shops are
given extra support so they get shop frontage at discount rates.
There's all of these kinds of measures to steer the
population away from crass consumerism and from one of these items.
(23:24):
So yeah, so if you're a woman who's just dressing
simply and everything, you're not getting drowned out by lips
and eyelashes and all of that kind of thing. I
suppose there is a really big difference. Yeah, And it
is hard being back here, you know, for that reason,
because I see young women struggling with all of this.
(23:45):
And I wrote a blog post about this, and I
think you may have seen it. I think Kakeisha saw it,
the blog post about beauty ideals during times of economic austerity.
Because you're just about to ask you about it, I
did your own prompt. But yeah, well, yeah, what did
you find?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Well, I mean, firstly, I find it very interesting how
you're putting your work out at the moment and using substack.
I think so many creatives are moving to substack, and
there's so many very interesting discussions that are coming off
the back of it, and we ourselves there's been so
many discussions that we've had on a Wednesday episode that
have been prompted by substack discussions. Ye, this article that
you wrote, which was women will wear this fascist turn
(24:22):
on their bodies all kind of surrounds how the way
in which we present ourselves during different political climates, things
that rise and fall on the social media trends. I'm
talking like tradwife, how that's just come out of nowhere
that a lot of it is tied into what is
happening in the political landscape.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Can you tell us a little.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Bit about like how this is something that you've come
to recognize and how people can be more aware of
how we're being influenced by what's happening in the world.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Super interesting, and I think when women read it, they
kind of get a different slant on how they buy
into fashion. I think. So, I don't think I'm telling
anyone here anything new. Like the political times are very
very precarious. There's politic shit going on, and America's collapsing.
You know, a lot of commentators are saying that it's
no longer a democracy and democracies declining. Worldwide population is
(25:09):
about to decline with peak energy, it's about to decline,
food water systems about to decline, like they're in decline
but they're about to speed up to a point where
we're really going to struggle to eat, Like has eyone
noticed chocolate prices that Istar is missing.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Every food price every for coffee, coffee beans.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, coffee, coffee, Well, no, coffee and chocolate are the
two things that go far beans. So the two things
are going. And this people think thats just a there'll
be a correction. It's not. This is what collapse looks like.
So the times are very volatile, as you say, and
what has happened throughout history is that women have dressed
to the times and been forced to dress to the time.
(25:48):
So I studied this in feminism studies back in the
early nineties. And you know, back then the look was
the waif look, you know, sort of heroin chic. And
it was the last time the world had a major recession,
sorry Australia had a major recession, because there's been a
recession in two thousand and we managed to skip it
here in Australia. But that austerity created a very streamlined,
(26:10):
androgynous look, sort of grunge was in women dressed like boys,
didn't wear makeup, all of that kind of thing. And
if you cast your mind back to between the war
eras another austere period of economic tough times. Women had
the flapper look. Moved to World War Two, it was pants.
Women started wearing pants and blazes, you know, Lauren Bacall,
(26:30):
that kind of thing. Women were getting the vote, So
it sort of comes in line with feminism. Women are
in the power laws exactly. But then when you have
times of opulence, swings back the other way. So the
nineteen fifties, governments pumped money into the economy. Women were
sent back to the suburbs to have children. What do
you know, big boobs, big hips, blonde, voluptuous hair, heaps
(26:51):
of makeup, women being constricted into cinched wastes, shoes that
they couldn't walk in, et cetera, et cetera, And they
all ended up having to take value to cope with
such imprisonment. That again happened in the eighties, another time
of austerity, off the back of sort of the oil
implosion in the US. So I think of the Texan
baywatch boobs and lips and you know, power suits. Even
(27:14):
though it wasn't a big time for women entering the workforce.
I mentioned the nineties, and so where are we today?
Right in Australia. We've had thirty years of uninterrupted economic growth,
unheard of for any other western country in the world.
So we sort of skipped the two thousand and eight recession. Yeah,
we really did. Yeah, And it's something that Australians don't
really recognize. It's because of the mining stuff. So body
(27:37):
shapes in Australia have become more voluptuous because it's a
time of opulence, right, the luptious. Your generation are having
far more children than my generation. Did you know getting married?
None of my friends got married right in the nineties
and early two thousands, but I think you know your
generation went back to the altar, so a lot of
traditional fews came in. And what we're seeing now though
(28:00):
we cut to our twenty twenty five, there's this weird
stuff going on. So on the one hand, we're seeing
the stock market dive, the American dollars plunging, and the
cost of living stuff is kind of really strange, like
strange things a kind of happening. We're seeing some people
getting mega rich and then others really struggling, and so
there is a return to the ultra thin and you
(28:21):
would have seen that on TikTok. There's another sort of
wave of anti woke, anti DEI really full on Thinness
and the conservative look, so the pulled back bun all
of that kind of thing. But at the same time,
there's this weird what's called Mara Lago face, you know,
the sort of full Dallas look, which is sort of
inspired by those Trump wives and the techbro wives that
(28:44):
were there at the inauguration with the big boobs and
the big hair, and you know, they all went off
to space. But I was watching it, going, hang on,
why have we got? These two got everything else? And
I think it reflects exactly what's going on in world.
Who can we got exactly? We're going through this incredible
time of flux where people are sort of the Trumpians
(29:07):
are trying to go this is amazing, We're having this
great time, and then other forces are going, oh, no,
things are not right. So as women, what I sort
of advise to women is do not buy into this.
There's this great phrase from somebody who's writing about tyranny
and this authoritarian creep that's happening into the world, and
it's Timothy Snyder. He says, do not obey in advance.
(29:29):
It's the number one rule to try to resist authoritarianism,
which is what's happening to the world at the moment.
More of the world is now in an authoritarian state
than a democracy.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
So subtle too that you don't even see that, correct,
which is why it's like as a creep exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So this is where if you're a woman who's like,
I am not going to be part of this. I
want to resist somehow, what can I do? My number
one advice would be, do not buy into fashion trends
and basically stop the algorithmic kind of you know, death
trap by literally not looking at these things, and you'll
see a matter of weeks it'll all back off. Do
(30:07):
not go to shopping malls, do buy jewelry, special pieces
of jewelry tony maum. Yeah. And just just you can
not obey in advance, right, you can just not buy
into these things because as you say, it creeps up, right,
these trends creep up and before you know it, you're
wearing cottage core. You know, like like, just don't do it,
(30:27):
Just don't buy shit. Don't like look in your wardrobe
from ten years ago and just wear that and just say, yep,
I'm wearing something I've worn before. How cool is that?
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Speaking about the confusion in the world right now, you
have taken a bit of a turn in your writing,
as we've been speaking about and you have been writing
about system collapse. You have decided to serialize this book,
which you haven't done in the past. And I feel
like we have seen authors in the past do this,
but it's not common. Why did you decide to serialize this?
And I guess what are the pros and cons of
(30:55):
doing it the way you've done it?
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, as you say, there is a legacy, and in fact,
a lot the top books that you know have been
written throughout history were serialized. So War and Peace Charles Dickens,
Charles Dickens exactly, if you'ar and loathing in Las Vegas,
all kinds of all of Virginia Wolf's books simoned Bovoire's books.
It was a really common thing that you would write
a chapter or two and you would publish it in
(31:18):
a journal or a magazine or a newspaper, and the
public would follow along. And then a few months six
months later, a publisher would go, well, there's interest in this,
will produce it as a book, and then it becomes
you know, a book that's now banned by Trump, but
dot dot dot now banned by Trump. But I was
watching what was happening to the publishing industry, and it's
(31:38):
really struggling. And I, you know, obviously am very fond
of the publisher industry because I've had wonderful experiences publishing
books in the past. But they were really struggling, and
I feared that this particular subject was going to be
too big and scary. Yeah, exactly for traditional publishing. But
I knew there was a community of people who needed
(31:58):
a space to talk about this stuff. So I was
quite an early adopter of substack. I think I was
one of the earlier first Australians on there. And you know,
this is sort of almost four years ago, I think now,
and so I figured, well, I'll just try it here
and just accumulated a bigger and bigger following, and little
did I know there were publishers around the world and
(32:19):
journalists who'd subscribed and were watching it and reading it.
So yeah, I managed to write a one hundred thousand
words book in six months, which I can't normally do.
But the deadline, you know, of a weekly deadline got
me there, and then I had this community giving me
feedback the whole way, so I was able to have
the confidence that I was on the right track, you know,
(32:40):
which is really hard as a writer to gauge when
you're you know, in the trenches with it, for sure.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
But I also find it so interesting because the stuff
that you're talking about is also happening in real time.
So when you're talking about things that are happening in
the world that might be politically good or environmentally gird
the process of publication where you might write something that
it takes a year and then you know there's processes
back and forth with an editor. It almost feels as
though then if you were to release it in a
(33:06):
traditional way, it would be it would have missed the
boat a little bit.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Yes, with some of these topics. That was another reason
why I decided to serialize it, because the world is
moving so fast. Now you've you've really got to write
in real time and publishing. As it turns out, Penguin
are going to be turning my book around faster than
they normally turn a book around. But it's not going
to be published until June next year. Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, So who knows where we are in June next year.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Look, I don't know if there'll be bookstores in the US.
You know so, And I say that legitimately, and my
book's about it, and I certainly won't be able to
go to the US. I'll be disappeared. Like I am
prime target for being disappeared. People like me are currently
being disappeared in the US.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Is your book actually banned by Trump? It was you
making a joke.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
It would invariably be banned if his minions could pay
attention to such things. But if I go through immigration,
Ice will stop me. I mean, I'll have to go
with a burn a phone. I encourage anyone going to
America to basically wipe your phone. But even anything you've
deleted recently, Ice can go through your phone and find it.
(34:11):
So take a burner phone to America. Number one, don't
go to America. In Europe, everyone's been advised not to.
It's a travel alert. Australia will issue it certainly very soon.
It's too dangerous. If you've got stuff that's about Palestine,
or about Trump or about the tech bros on your phone,
you have no rights. Once you land there, Ice can
take your phone.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
I mean Trump is showing us that with the people
who's deporting now with just completely fabricated lies on why
they're being deported.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
I've got no rights once they decide that you are
a problem. So yet, to your point, I don't know
what will happen to that effect, but I think the
publishing industry is going we've got to continue business as
usual and just hope the worst of this doesn't happen.
But yeah, the uncertainty is palpable here in Australia. It's
so strange people aren't talking about this. Yeah, but people
(34:56):
do talk about things in isolation.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
I think people are concerned about climate change, joy they're
concerned about wars, or they're concerned about and they're.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Not seeing that it's the same crisis.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Yeah, and this is something that you've spoken about. I
saw that you wrote about it in terms of like
being a better crisis. That it's that all of these
things that are happening across the world are in ways
connected to each other. My question for you is is
when it is placed like that, there is such a
doomsday way of looking at things, how do you cope
with that?
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Then?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
How do you process that in a way when it
seems like everything is so futile. How are you able
to go Okay, Well, here is how we can still
live a connected life, or a life that has meaning,
or a life that has purpose when everything seems like
there is no purpose.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's one of the first questions
I get asked, apart from how long do we have?
And will I die?
Speaker 2 (35:44):
And also should we keep having kids and procreating?
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And should I have a bunker? You know, I should
I be moving off to Dale's Fit or something and
building a puncer. Yeah. I've been in this space for
three years researching it and you know, going to the conferences,
and I think, you know, I'm aware that I can
sound like a conspiration theorist. You know that there's no
conspiracy going on. All of this information is out there
and the modeling is being done by the top institutes
(36:08):
and universities around the world. But you make a really
good point. It's been dealt with in isolation. Very few
people are seeing it as part of systemic collapse, partly
because we live in a world where we think about
things as linear, you know, a beginning and an end.
If you could just stop the problem somewhere in the middle,
then you have a good outcome exactly. But complexity theory,
which is the theory that governs how our bodies work,
(36:30):
you know, the knee bones connected to the thigh bone,
all of that kind of thing, the way that we
interact with nature. It actually sees this as a whole
range of dominoing cascading systems that once one goes, all
the others start to tip. And anyone who understands the
climate crisis knows that, Yeah, the implications for the food system,
for for biodiversity, yeah, you get it. So how do
(36:53):
I live through all of this? Well, it's really funny
my mother, who finds this way too hard to cope with.
My dad gets it and he's fully into it, and
he's read the book and he, yeah, just really understands it.
But my mother says to me, like, you know, when
I visited it over Easter, she said, I don't understand it. Sarah.
You've been in this space. You think and talk about
(37:14):
it all day, but you see the happiest you've ever been.
And I said, well, that's because I am. And I
think what it is is that and I write about
in the first two chapters of the book which are free,
by the way, if anyone wants to go onto my substack.
There's a couple of the chapters that are free because
they're the ones that I think people could just get
a taste of it, So can go and check that out.
(37:35):
But the first two chaps to care hope and then relief,
and then the next one's called truth. And what I
say is I've no longer got hope. We've been thinking, oh,
but there's still hope. If we just all get solar
panels and recycle properly, will make it. The point is,
we will no longer make it okay, And it depends
what you mean by make it, but we'll no longer
be returning to a place of the comfort that we've
(37:56):
known previously. And this has happened all throughout history. You
have times of opulence and then it comes back down
the other side and it's going to go into deep
decline and very very fast. So what happens when I
tell people this and going to the details of it,
people tell me they feel a relief. The reason they
feel a relief is there's this cognitive congruence that happens
(38:17):
because finally it's like, yeah, we've been told we can
still make it, and you know the Paris Accords and
you know it'll all be fine, but we're seeing headlines
coming in going we've reached another planetary boundary. You know,
another couple of thousands of species have died off that
are critical to our food ball system.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Well, I think as well with it is that there's
so much emphasis on the small changes that we as
people can make that's going to move and shift the dial.
And realistically, it's not the themes that we're doing on
a day to day level personally that is creating the
greater problem, especially when it comes to climate, you know,
the climate change and where we're at in the world.
And I mean, yeah, what was there documentary that we
(38:57):
were talking about recently around fast fashion, Yes and all
of like.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Shirt shop now by now.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Yeah, by now, I mean anyone who watched that doctor,
I highly recommend it. But it was like the horrifying
things that you don't normally see, like beaches in Africa
that are aligned with clothes in Ghana because there's nowhere
else for it to go. And we're shipping all of
the stuff we don't want to people who are quote
unquote in need, and it is like kilometers of beach
(39:24):
that is just full of clothing.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, being discribed. They see that and you realize you're
still shopping and playing into that, and you feel powerless.
This incongruency happens in your brain and it's creating what
I refer to as a moral injury amongst people. And
I think the pain, Like I start talking about this
and people go, oh my god, that's exactly how I feel,
and that deep despair. I look at the way people,
(39:47):
young people are depressed. I look at adhd rates, I
look at so many things, and I go, I think
there is a deep sense amongst all of us that
all is not right, that the center can hold this
idea of infinite growth on a finite planet that does
not stack up right. And we know it. We know it.
We're not stupid. Humans have a visceral connection to nature,
(40:09):
and we know we're not in attunement. And so when
you start talking about the truth, people do feel this relief.
And for me, now that I'm just like being perfectly
honest about what is happening, I can actually then start
to reframe the way that I live my life. And
so the piece of advice that I give to everybody
you know. People want to know what can we do?
What can we do? The first thing is live your
(40:31):
fullest life now, even just sitting here now, we don't
know how long we've got. We don't know if we
walk outside and get hit by a bust. Humans have
never known when they're going to die, and that has
not changed. But we do know that the existential situation
is pretty bad. So live your fullest life now. Now,
what does fullest life mean? It doesn't seem me to
(40:52):
go into a mall. It doesn't mean raping and extracting
the planet. It means being our full human self, which
is loving, It is contributing, It is attending to a
greater good. At times like this throughout history, we are
programmed to collectivise, to form communities. So I advise people
(41:14):
get to know your neighbors, the greatest survival trick. And like,
you might not think any of this is going to happen. Cool,
but you might actually like the ways that we're going
to need to live. If it does happen, you might
like to do it anyway. That is, form communities. You
don't have to go off to a bunker in New Zealand.
Form the communities around where you are now, bake muffins
for the neighbor you've never met, invite their kids over.
(41:35):
It's called pro social prepping. It is the only thing
we can do if shit goes down, So form communities
and it's kind of a fun thing to do anyway.
Send your kids to Scouts or there's people I know
doing bush survival skills. We're going to need to know
this because it's only a matter of Eco Musk having
a bad mood and turning off eighty percent of the
satellites up there. We will not have ATM machines, we
(41:57):
will not have technology, will will not have mobile phones.
So in Europe, four hundred and fifty million citizens are
being told over the summer to prepare a survival kit
in the event of World War three.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Do you know what's interesting, and it's we live in
such a world here where we are so sheltered from
it in Australia. But my fiancee lives in Europe and
his teammates are from all over Europe. He plays football.
They're all from all over And when I was there recently,
there were some from Estonia, some from Ukraine, all over
and they had just received in the mail and it
(42:30):
sounds like a movie. They received a pamphlet of what
to prepare from the government. This is not like a
little woo woo underground thing.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
There is European Commission yep.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
They received it saying this is what you guys need
to get ready because the world is getting ready for
impending doom, whether that's another world war or whatever it is.
We have too much control resting in very few people
like you just said, like Elon Musk, and for me
to hear that, I was like, this sounds like armageddon.
Like to have the government be sending you these pamphlets
saying this is what you need to go out and
(43:00):
buy as every household was why.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
You're not alone. Australians listen to me talk about this
and they're like, what so, realizing that over in Europe
we're talking about this. My friends have got We're getting
together paper maps and learning how to read maps. I
can read a map, but I would suspect your generation
probably can't. Well, well, I think you aged me down
too much.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
I moved to your I was on the last cast
for the McGregor's Don't Worry Gregory is Gregory's Map.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
But yeah, so we're reading, learning how to read maps,
we're getting together, radios with batteries, were getting you know,
this is real and it's happened throughout history. It's just
a rude shock because most of us have only grown
up with life getting so called better, but growth and abundance,
it actually runs out and it goes back down the
other side. And that's what we're heading for.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
How do you think building communities? And this is something
we actually had a conversation about this recently about how
traditional community is something that we've really lost and like
even from like a motherhood perspective, like having your tribe
around you with something that's very different these days. How
do you think that this is something that we do
create for ourselves now?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
And what does a modern community look like to you?
A modern community? And I use this phrase, it's a
Pema children phrase. Start where you are. You don't have
to go to a intentional farming community somewhere, Just start
wherever you are. If you're in a block of apartments,
get to know the people all around you, invite them over,
you know, invite them over for afternoon drink sometime. Be
(44:28):
the proactive one to do this. Look out for Facebook
groups before Facebook implodes, where you can actually join up
with people who are doing similar kind of things. Also
talk about sharing skills. So I speak to people who've
got like they do it under the auspices of having,
you know, a sort of a book club or whatever
it is. Use those kinds of groups that you might
(44:50):
already be forming to start talking about these kinds of things.
So I grew up going, oh, community, is that really
what we've got to do? And it sort of all
sounds a bit tween a ineffectual. It's not. It's what's
kept us as humans human but also surviving threats throughout
the ages. It is the number one thing that works,
(45:10):
and we're going to have to return to it. I
think most of us know how to reconnect. We're craving it.
That is the gift of collapse. That is the gift
of all of this is we're going to be returned
to our most human selves, and we ache for it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
It's also something that is completely in our control. You
can go and put those a lot of things that
are your control, but this is Sarah. We could talk
to you about this for so long. If you guys
want to go and continue these discussions go to Sarah's substack.
We're going to link that in the show notes. We're
also going to link our first episode we did with
you a few years ago. I love talking to you.
It's always interesting, I always learned something and it's always
(45:45):
thought provoking. So thank you so.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Much for thank you for giving me the time. I
love these kinds of conversations. Thank you. Thanks Sarah. Kababegabaa
bay kababeo
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