Emily M. Bender (ChatGPT expert) is a linguist, a scholar of the societal impact of language AI and a professor at the University of Washington where she’s director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She recently became internet-famous for her no-nonsense, almost comical, papers that criticise the hype around large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT. Her message is: Don’t believe the tech bro’ hype; it’s spin!In this chat we cover whether AI can take over the world; the real motives behind Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s excited calls for an “AI pause”; where longtermism, the singularity, effective altruism, pro-natalism and transhumanism (I’ve covered these in previous eps and on my Substack) all fit into the palaver; plus what we really should be terrified about. This is a thoroughly important and correcting conversation.I flag this explainer that I wrote on my Substack: Say it isn’t so: Human EugenicsYou can read Emily’s papers “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” and the “Octopus Paper” Here’s the Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letterEmily also wanted to point everyone to this paper on AI Safety vs. AI EthicsAnd if you want to do more of a deep dive into all this, check out her podcastIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ian Leslie (British journalist, curiosity expert) is worried the world has become too fixated on absolutes and predictability just as our life circumstances are swinging the other way. The fix, he says, is to cultivate curiosity. He got curious about curiosity and wrote a book called, yep, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It and we met in London at the WeAre8 offices to talk about why some people are incurious, what’s stopping us from being more curious, the role of cities and travel and the need to engage in mysteries instead of puzzles. In this conversation we get quite urgently to this very wild point: To survive going forward we need to reclaim our curiosity. And we share ways to go about this.You can get hold of Ian’s book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on ItFollow Ian’s curious ramblings on his Substack The RuffianHere’s the Wild episode with Dr. Jud Brewer on curiosity as the fix for anxietyI mention my chat with the poet David Whyte about asking beautiful questionsIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Gladys McGarey (102 years old, founder of the “holistic” medicine movement) has lived a big, wild life and joins me to chat through her secrets for doing it (life) like you really only have one of them. Recognised as *the* pioneer of alternative medicine, Dr Gladys is a founding diplomat of the American Board of Holistic Medicine and cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association. In her long life, Gladys practiced as a general practitioner for seven decades, had six kids, lived with dyslexia (before it was a supported thing) and almost died twice. At 86 she went to Afghanistan to work in a war zone; at 94 she says she finally “found her voice”; and at 100 she did her first TED talk. Today, nudging 103, she’s still a practicing doctor and has just published a new book, The Well Lived Life. We talk through her daily step count, recovering from divorce at 70 and hone in on her #1 tip for living longer – “Spend your energy wildly”.The Well Lived Life is available hereYou can follow Glady on Instagram You might like to listen to the interviews with Julia Cameron, Margaret Atwood and Sister Helen Prejean If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Rowson (chess Grandmaster, metamodernist philosopher) is one of Britain’s biggest minds and I have invited him onto Wild to talk, well, what’s been dubbed the “meta-crisis” – the fundamental “meaning” crisis at the heart of “all the things” going on in the world today.Jonathan is a theoretical psychologist with degrees from Oxford and Harvard and a Ph.D on what it means to become wiser. He has worked on “complex collective action” problem solving, was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and has run events with David Attenborough and Jordan Peterson (not on the same stage!). Jonathan now runs Perspectiva, a research institute that seeks to understand the relationship between systems, souls, and society.This is a big chat, but I think you’ll find this new and wild idea a helpful navigational tool for, well, “all the things”.As I flag, my UK friends can preorder This One Wild and Precious Life here.Follow the Perspectiva community and their various events here.Jonathan is also on Substack and Twitter.His latest book The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is out now.I mention a bunch of previous wild episodes that you might like to listen to:Sensemaking with David Fuller, Indigenous Knowledge Systems with Tyson Yankaporta and the Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor episode.If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gaya Herrington (Club of Rome adviser, “global collapse” expert) hit headlines when she showed that a world-stopping 1972 MIT study and bestselling book predicting the collapse of civilisation by 2040 was…right on track. She was a KPMG economist and financial advisor to the Dutch government when she released the report in 2021. I read it and was left speechless. Gaya’s now just published a book, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse, which sets out a bunch of surprising ways we might be able to save ourselves in time. Gaya’s message is stark: Economic growth must stop now! We are hitting the global limits of our more-more-more approach and the decline will be fast. What does the data tell us that can save us? The answer won’t be what you’re expecting. In this chat we flesh out how systems theory works, why we’re obsessed with growth and why rich white men resist change the most.Get hold of the book Five Insights for Avoiding Global CollapseFeel free to read the now-famous 1972 paper The Limits to GrowthI mention the chat about the indigenous knowledge system with Tyson Yunkaporta, you can listen to it hereIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet’s connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.