The Other Others: Recent Episodes
Tyson Yunkaporta
Through the Deakin University Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, we have unlikely, borderline seditious and kind of inappropriate yarns with surprising people about how an Indigenous complexity science lens can be applied to solving the world's most wicked problems. There's gold at the margins, but almost no trigger warnings, so enter at your peril. Podcast artwork "Blackfulla Ratatouille" by Baradha woman Eden Thomas. Intro music by The Murri Ghibli Fangirls.
Rishikes Siva takes biomimicry to the next level with Lunar Punk rhizomatic riffs, and we weave through arboretal IK at the margins of regenerative sexiness, while the brains of Elders are uploaded to the clouds and we wait to see what that rain will look like (while a tiny part of me dies inside). If more than half of that didn't make sense to you, the yarn won't either! Nerds!
Wanted to yarn with Roma, Scots, Native American, Aboriginal, queer, neuro-divergent, unhoused and trans folks about fluid border work facilitating norms of access, and about finding identity in ancestral paths rather than homelands, since global populations are becoming increasingly itinerant. But that panel would be complicated and boring, as most panels and webinars are, so we got all those people in the body of one pluriversal non-binary mongrel sibling who embodies deep time embassy for real-time contexts, Oliver Grove.
Emily McAvan queers up our ongoing narratives of embassy and quarantine as kin making rather than exclusion, as we dig deep into the foundational spiritual narratives of Purity, Toxicity, Pollution and Contagion that dominate all policy and practice around the most explosive issues of our time - immigration, medicine and wellness, environmental issues, free speech and media, marriage equality, and those pesky trans kids who think they have a right to piss and play sport.
They say leap and the net appears, but Jack Manning Bancroft at the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab is riffing on some emergent para-financial systems that offer something better to splash into, a soft landing for everyone. It's so crazy it just might work. While there may be no Apple sweat-shop safety nets here, we can all return to identities and investments grounded in place and kin, if we really want to.
Thought experiment: what would it take to naturalise money in the biosphere, in the same way that invasive plants and animals can come into harmony with ecosystems over time and with good custodianship of land? Indigenous folks and allies of The Indigenous Commons, from around the globe: Parul Punjabi Jagdish, Nawi Flores, Abdul Semakula, Suzanna Bowles, Lydia Campbell, Paul Kearney.
Sorry siblings, it's been a while, but I been falling in love again, with my woman. Dougald Hine from the Dark Mountain on how love and ritual are not soft skills in the business of growing seeds of right story from the ruins of empire.
Paul Kearney from the Kearney group and Jack Manning Bancroft from AIME and IKSLab, who for 3 years have funded and worked on research for a mega-project to resolve multiple catastrophic risks, yarn here to unveil an ambitious plan.
IKSLab setting circle for Wanjau (collective sense-making yarn) around the possibility for global serpent Lores from every continent to inform common agreements on reality and embassy protocols in a post-truth world, sidelining bad faith discourse and holding creation together, together. Hat man snake painted by JMB.
Need an outlet for rage, so I can avoid freaking out and finishing up in handcuffs. So new short segment, angry words and not much thinking.
This one by Quan Yeomans has to get past three hurdles. 1 Spotify AI. 2 You. 3 The blak women who sing the current intro.
Laresa Koslof, an artist with one foot in the Arctic and the other in the Antarctic, and only elusive migratory sandpipers to tell her what is real, makes sense of multipolar unrealities, as truth becomes real and real becomes truth in our new abnormal, forging two video works soon to be exhibited in Benalla Arts in rural Victoria.
Disinformation webinar hosted by the Grata Fund 29 November 2023, with Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, Victoria Fielding, Jackie Turner, and the prick amongst the roses, Tyson Yunkaporta.
https://www.gratafund.org.au/misinformation_webinar
A Samurai, a Viking and an Aboriginal fella walk into a bar... and talk about Conan the Barbarian and the West's longing for a homeland mythology.
In the wake of the Australian referendum on a Voice to parliament, Ken from the Anthopocene Transitions Network yarns about the rise of ultra-right disinformation and the potential silver linings of the new abnormal, and the 9 million people who might make a difference if they were half as active as the enemies of the biosphere.
A peek into our wanjau process of collective sense making, applying the Ko-design methodology we've been working on for a couple of years to a textual analysis of medical disinformation.
I've recorded more on this topic (medical disinformation) this month, but the platform AI keeps taking it down - probably because of keywords and the incapacity of machines to know the difference between bunk and debunk. Anyway, my recent research has led me to believe that those radicalised online may be experiencing a similar ontological and psychological condition to displaced Indigenous people, and may benefit from the same treatment protocols Tracey Westerman devised for Aboriginal patients who are heartsick for Country.
Sara Kian Judge, Yuin woman and artist, discusses how autism helps her work with bats and sharks and see things as the Upside Down People do. We decide it's no longer 'too soon' to take the piss out of Steve Irwin, and reflect on taking responsibility for our more destructive batshit behaviours, while allowing Country to nurture our gifts.
Brother Arpad Maksay catches up to reflect on our yarn in my new book, and see where we've grown to since then when in comes to violence, public violence, and what it means to train for violence in service of a community, and whether it is possible to do this without ableism and a little bit of soft eugenics. Brother Arlo Davis drops by at the end to add some more to this, on Native storytelling and governance, and some knowledge he picked up at the latest Alaskan Federation of Natives gathering.
(Double Interrupted) So my friend Tammi Jonas from the Food Sovereignty mob has helped me start reading again and to work on my interrupting problem. I did okay here, and managed to record a whole episode without stepping all over another person's tongue. We talk about peasants and Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, because she might be coming on our crappy little podcast soon.
Kisani Upward, Gamilaroi woman, is doing some research on Indigenous responses to natural disasters, specifically bushfires, while I work on my bad habit of interrupting (mostly by excusing it as a 'cultural thing')... Kisani convinces me that the feeling of being homesick while you're at home is not a first world problem, but a 'coping with ontological fluidity' thing.
Guy Ritani (Permaqueer activist, Maori science communicator) asks me, "Any whale stuff coming up for you lately?" Hell yes! A hard yarn about radioactive whales, skepticism vs cultural knowledge, what is real vs what is true, trauma, making sense, and discerning between spirit and bullshit. There are conflicts, maintaining both identity and intellectual rigor in this howling red-faced modernity. No apologies for sound quality - don't be such a spoiled techno-brat! Suck it up and pretend it's the 70's again....
There is more to the disinformation being deployed in Australia's referendum (for an Indigenous voice to parliament) than meets the eye. This episode is something of a diatribe. I'm tying together all our true stories of resistance and putting a firewall between them and the fantasies of white supremacists and disgruntled settlers who are co-opting the language and Lore of our ongoing occupation and struggle, to secure our support in extreme libertarian radicalisation and stochastic terrorism in Australia and abroad. These things have been under-reported, and you can't imagine how extensive and pervasive these networks of chaos are.
Tammi Jonas from the Australian Food Sovereignty Network despairs with me a while as we try to figure out why half our friends went crazy over Covid lockdowns and are now marching with white supremacists, promoting soft-eugenics and even calling vaccinated Aboriginal people 'pharma-colonists' who are pursuing genocidal policies against 'heterodox' settlers.
AFSA: https://www.pozible.com/project/eating-democracy/comments
Thought experiment as data collection for a research project conducted by expert on digital writing and AI, Lucinda McKnight. I said I'd only give her my qualitative data in yarn form, on a podcast, and she was keen. It was a good idea, but as usual I ruin everything for everybody with my relentless blakpilling...
Date night we go to see a French film that is billed as a queer feminist response to Conan the Barbarian. Conann. It's our yarns in the car, before and after.
The sacred feminine in landscapes rendered profane by moral prudery - we walk these storied paths fearlessly with Manchan Magan in a mythical relation across hemispheres, a vibrant embassy between Ireland and Aboriginal Australia, grieving the loss of Sinead together and celebrating what is emergent in our deadly relation. https://www.instagram.com/p/CvvD9r7tLxn/
Big mixed up yarn with Steph Beck and Ben Knight, Indigenous views on relational economics and logical fallacies, and where the two meet in cults and guru-generated content. How can we tell the difference between good faith and bad faith claims, and who has the right to be heard in this world? (Spoiler: we arrive at the idea that maybe bad faith discourse comes from people who have figured out they can skip meaning-making and go straight to change-making/decision-making by extracting authority from nothing, using logical fallacies as discursive technologies of despair...)
Pete McCurley, Gumbayngiir wood carver and reluctant blacksmith, makes sense of the cautionary tales we need to find in the Dreaming of metals.
Groovy de-colonial yarn with exo-ethno-botanist Cobi Calyx. Everything from Terra Nullius to Matt Damon.
You're in a proper yarn here, involving you, me, Beckett Carmody, a giant frog, wild cats and a robot. Beckett is finding adaptive Lore to bring cats and weeds into proper relation with place. There may even be room for AI fetuses like language model bots if somebody can tinker with the decision trees a bit. Best yarn ever if you want to learn about proper time, place, story and relation.
Yolande Brown and me are doing voice-work and writing for an animated film, and decided to yarn for a vocal warm-up before studio time. Recorded it just in case we said anything worth sharing. For me it's back-catalogue content, so skip my bits, but Yo says some calming and measured things that are a soothing balm in the world of thinkers and changemakers, that roiling sea of panic and doom and frantic hope.
Carol Sanford drops some pearls for me, you and the world, and offers teasers for her upcoming book, No More Gold Stars.
Warning: Suicide and libertarianism themes.
Deconstructing something I wrote in an altered state, which I don't remember writing, and wondering about the benefits and dangers of altered states. Sure, there are moments of genius that have utility, but you should never make decisions from that state, because you have no discernment. I believe that's why ceremony is secret and separate from daily reality, in our culture. Spiritual and secular realities need boundaries, when it comes to cognition and governance.
Anarchists behaving badly. Apologies to the good regen folks who tried to interview Yin Paradies and myself while we belligerently wrecked the joint. Decided to upload it because failures are instructive, and we're in the business of growing knowledge, not followers. Worst parts edited out (incitement, stuff like that). Another way to look at it is that we could kick down the fences settlers build around us, in interviews, debate, real estate, governance - all of it. We just wake up every day and decide not to, for some reason. So, sorry, but also RAAAAGH!
Stuart Cowan from the Buckminster Fuller Institute gives us a master-class yarn on global complexity.
Zina Saro Wiwa from the Niger Delta is remarkable. An intensely personal piece of a series of yarns we've been having, about loss, continuity, masks, gin, ceremony, mental illness and diasporic indigeneity, mapping the journeys of us and the sentient objects we make.
Gratitude to friend and mentor Rabbi Or Rose, for providing strategies for moving through landscapes of wrong story while remaining grounded in right story.
I did a mystery box yarn, when a friend set me up with somebody I knew nothing about. He spoke a different language, some kind of solar punk creole, but we found ways to communicate and become friends.
A Native Alaskan, an Indigenous Australian and a Confician philosopher walk into a bar...
Rune Rasmussen returns for a messy yarn about the problematics and desperate need for rites of passage and a return to land-based culture for the Peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. Is it too late? Is it even possible to think about these things while speaking modern languages? Is dialogue and embassy between north and south possible while we are trapped in global economies of extraction?
Intimate yarn between two friends from two different families, cultures and online communities who ended up in... let's say incompatible algorithms, during Covid lockdowns, resulting in horrendously oppositional worldviews. Nothing we can't sort out with a good yarn. Because a yarn is almost like a 'conversation' but without the bullshit. Nobody is 'just asking questions' in a yarn, because you talk from your relation, not your position. The end result is not a resolution, compromise or any of that crap. It's... nah I'll let you listen through and find out for yourself.
An unlikely group of allies get together to resolve the housing crisis, Airbnb's bourgeois morality issues, and biodiversity loss all in one audacious action involving lots of tiny homes.
Jeff Yeo https://www.bigtiny.com.sg/
Mallika Robinson https://www.guardiansofearth.io/
Johny Mair https://www.ethic.com/
Yau! JD, Chels, JMB, Josh and Tyson from the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, live yarn at the Human Kind Festival in Sydney as we work through and develop a Ko-design methodology in which Aboriginal and non-Aborginal people can work better in complexity through nature-informed processes.
Ahmed Buasallay is working on a place-based dialogue process grounded in Arab customary logics, but is struggling in communities on the peninsula where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access nature. He is also finding it challenging to access communities of practice in the Systems Thinking space, and so we also yarn about those often invisible obstacles to change makers and sense makers far removed from the center of the Anglosphere.
David Finnigan is an actor, playwright and game designer raised by climate scientists, here to tell us the story of that time Alex Jones and a million maniacs came after him about a play he wrote about the assassination of climate deniers.
Chaura Chigovanyika is doing his thesis on sustainable development, and we yarn on the question "Are Indigenous People Really the Best Conservationists?"
Enough is enough. I've had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane. (Samuel Jackson) Parul Punjabi Jagdish, a CEO at AIME Inc, is one of the most accomplished and wise young people I've ever met. We connected last year over serpent Lore from our respective cultures, and in a big yarn by a camp fire in New York, came to agree that snakes may be the foundation of living spirit across the earth, and probably the universe. We yarn about the way they set in motion the phenomenon of regenerative disruption (often mistaken for destruction) in our creation stories, and try to understand pathways to healing and understanding death through the metaphors and learnings that can be found in snake Lore.
Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam and We'll Play Til We Die, brings a friend to dinner - Lucia Sorbera, chair of Arabic studies at The University of Sydney. I don't know either of them, but that's what yarns are for. Some unlikely connections here, finding common cause around developing better methodologies for co-design. A weird and wonderful yarn that kind of dropped out of the sky on us at the last minute.
Great yarn across the drink with proper deadly Irish thinker Manchan Magan, as we continue the Irish-Aboriginal Australian tradition of yarning together about Lore and other important things. I am advised perfectly on my one-off shilalagh-making effort (and how to avoid cultural appropriation in the process). We end up agreeing on a mechanism for keeping bastards away from our business - you know, those ones who come sniffing around because they want to find some bronze-age or neolithic ancestral precedents for their muscular Christianity or blood and soil madness. Really good yarn, made me feel like I got some mojo back.
Arlo Davis, regular on the pod and my Coriolis Effectbrother, talks through his misgivings about his new job, and what it's like for a Native Alaskan to be the diversity and inclusion officer in a US university, in an open-carry state. But brother Arlo got rope, he'll be okay! Arlo's hot tip for Land Acknowledgements: never go higher in a building than the length of rope you have in your backpack in case you have to climb down again. We also talk about the content minorities secretly prefer to consume, and his new book Snow Talk, which mostly only settlers will ever read. Arlo asserts that Indigenous knowledge probably will not save the world, but it will certainly save him, and he's fine with that.
Triple A rated change-maker guru Carol Sanford delivers parting shots at the machinery of mass coercion, via good yarns and a final (probably best-selling again) book "No More Gold Stars". ALS well that ends well, and Aunty seems to be riding the terminal horse of her mortality better than most. I'm struggling with it more than she is, it seems, so try to distract myself with Val Kilmer stories. But still, she insists that there is work for us to do.
Twitter is not the front line in the culture wars - education is. Top pedagogy scholar James Ladwig and I yarn up about the last two decades of our struggle at the chalk face from the time when things got weird after 9/11, when curriculum became a weapon and students became collateral damage in the culture wars. Those battles were, and still are, a proxy war fought on behalf of billionaires who seek to deregulate all protections for nature and communities, increase extraction and never pay taxes on their hoards of stolen wealth. Education is a site of struggle, and pedagogy is the leverage point for change.
I guess in the end riches are made of stored relational energy from unequal exchanges. True wealth may be best described as an increase in relations, rather than growth in the surplus energy produced by them. This would be the difference between a growth-based and increase-based economy. We cautiously find ways in this yarn to imagine a pricing mechanism for nature. Dams may be evil, but the water in them is just water. Maybe money is the same way. JD, JMB, Chels 2Deadly Marshall, me and Josh the Gamilaroi bandit awkwardly grapple with fire-side economics and there's not a lot of answers, except to the troubling problem of rich people freezing their heads.
Jason Twill, expert in sustainable urbanism, creative city making, housing affordability and green building economics, in dialogue with Ishnie Dayara Kavindri Dahanayake, PhD candidate in ecology and urban design, working through the messy problems of planning a survivable future. It's hard when an extractive economic model must underpin all you build, and when the powerful cannot think beyond the idea of human societies residing separately from 'nature' areas.
Veteran of many asymmetrical skirmishes to save forests around the world, John Seed (founder of the Rainforest Information Centre) joins our yarns to share some pretty damn exciting stories about a legal victory that sets some world-changing precedents for the right of nature to exist.
Elephant film
PNG wokabout somil
Ecuador Rights of Nature and https://www.rainforestinformationcentre.org/ecuador_endangered
Terania Creek film
Working with adivasis (tribals) in India
Good yarn with lots of laughs with Jon Alexander, British author of CITIZENS, about some of the wrong stories emerging from his island home and the potential of harnessing a bit of that Brexiteer energy towards more distributed sovereignties. And a sober cold-take on succession in the monarchy.
Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez, film makers and hosts of the podcast Death In The Garden share an intimate peek at what it's like to be a millennial in Utah at this moment in history.
Jason Fox and Ishnie Dayara Kavindra Dahanayake having a good yarn/induction into the vibrant space of Regen movements and refi, beautifully balancing the WOW with the WHAT?!
Bro talk with Native Alaskan thinkers Warren Jones and Arlo Davis, considering Indigenous solutions to the global issue of lost boys becoming radicalized into proto-fascist networks of 'brown-shorts' gangs online and in the streets. Warren and Arlo are seeking support to revive their community's tradition of men's houses and believe such traditions could be useful anywhere in the world.
Sweet yarn with my friend Euvie Ivanova from Future Thinkers, an intentional community/metamodern/heterodox/sensemaking organisation. http://euvieivanova.substack.com/ She has interviewed everyone from Jordan Peterson to me, and shares with us her experience of a largely male complexity science community encountering females being... well, complex... at the Emerge Conference in Austin, Texas (where good ideas go to die).
Yarn with Dennis Foley, veteran Australian Indigenous scholar, iconoclast, thinker. Brother Dennis reminisces about a lifetime of cultural embassy and inquiry with Native Peoples from around the world, from New Zealand to Taiwan and even Korea. He touches on a controversial paper he wrote a few years back about "the McDonaldisation of Indigenous research". McDonaldisation occurs when an institution adopts the characteristics of fast food chains - efficiency, calculability, predictability and standardization, and control. Foley once made the case that a lot of Indigenous research has come to reflect these traits, and revisits this critique. Turns out there's more to Indigenous Standpoint Theory than simply claiming an Indigenous standpoint...
The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab team in our third yarn about impact investing in land-based systems of bio-cultural integrity. We're still struggling with this, but we know this is far more useful than struggling against it. John Davis sings us in - Chels Marshall, Josh Waters, Jack Manning Bancroft and Tyson Yunkaporta.
Jack and I, fresh from the lab, yarn with renowned evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. We figure out why, if Robyn arrived on a donkey, Jack would of course assist Robyn (as Jack's senior) off the donkey. But then, if the roles were reversed, would Robyn be obliged to help Jack off a donkey? Stick around for all these ancient lessons and more, from why a reputation-based economy might be a bad idea, to how come I cried when Dolph Lundgren passed away, when I hadn't seen the fella since Rocky 4? And of course, the ultimate question of civilisation - can anything ever be good again after being scaled beyond the local? It's all in the numbers.
Fresh yarn with Ferananda Ibarra from The Commons Engine, which sits in the Holochain 'ecosystem'. Is it possible to live by the patterns of creation in land, community and online all at once? Ferananda works in economics, governance and the commons, informed by living systems, the feminine and indigenous wisdom. Can truly distributed wealth and governance stand against imperialism and 'the mother of all DAOs?"
Lucky dip yarn this week where I close my eyes and pick a random stranger from my inbox. Jackpot! We pulled Martin Henke who is working on human marine habitats. We coin together an interesting term - 'The Underview Effect', and wonder about how learning from this project might inform change on the shore.
In the tradition of cultural exchange and embassy between Ireland and Aboriginal Australia ('proper deadly!'), here is a very exciting yarn with criminologist and surveillance expert Diarmaid Harkin about our shared experiences of colonial violence. The yarn follows a through-line of historical surveillance and oppression under English rule to today's post-covid escalation of dodgy tech applications in policing globally. There is also a bit of a book review of Irvine Welsh's Filth. Dr Diarmaid Harkin is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author of the book Private Security and Domestic Violence: The Risks and Benefits of Private Security Companies Working with Victims of Domestic Violence. He has also researched the Consumer Spyware Industry and worked with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner on a project examining National responses to technology-facilitated abuse in the context of domestic and family violence.
A great yarn with one of Australia’s most respected Aboriginal educationalists. Professor Lester Irabinna Rigney is a Narungga / Kaurna / Ngarrindjeri man who has been generous enough to sing my family into country around Adelaide over the past few weeks while I complete a residency at The University of South Australia. He is Professor of Education in the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, and was previously a Distinguished Fellow at Kings College, London. Mostly, he's one of the holy trinity in Indigenous scholarship that you always cite when justifying using an Indigenous Standpoint in your research. I'm privileged to be writing a paper with him now on education futures, and here we share some of the foundational thinking and yarning we've been doing, the collective sense-making that always must be taken care of before you even begin identifying a specific research question in our field.
A different kind of string theory here, with two geniuses Siena Stubbs and David Turnbull, running some thought experiments and yarns to answer the question, 'What is real?' Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs is a photographer, a young Yolŋu woman of the Gumatj clan of the Yirritja moiety. Her homeland is Buwaka. David Turnbull is a retired scholar whose work has been an inspiration for a lot of thinking around spatial cognition in our lab. He says that science is an Atlas. Yeah, it's like that. Get ready for a fast ride around the universe. If you want more of David's work, check out this generous online publication: http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/
Second public sharing of an Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab think-tank session, in which we grapple with our ongoing thought experiment about Extinction Offsets.
Strange, strange yarn with Aboriginal thinkers Lily McKnight and Claire G Coleman (sci fi author of Terra Nullius and The Old Lie) about whether stories without heroes are possible or even desirable, science fiction, and a deep dive into some thought experiments about the metaphysics of identity.
Naomi Moran and Ella Bancroft from the Koori Mail yarn about the emergency response to massive flooding in coastal New South Wales, a rescue operation led by Indigenous women who continue to organise community around ongoing management of the greatest disaster of all - settlements that have been built in the wrong bloody place. Donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/koori-mail-rebuild
We play with a fable, that might become Story if enough people and place can work on it, with Daniel Schmachtenberger, founding member of The Consilience Project. https://consilienceproject.org/ Daniel is a thinker/doer who works on catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
Big yarn with Daniel Christian Wahl, the expert of experts when it comes to intentional communities and cultural systems emergence. We talk about our discomfort when people use our work for purposes we're not really aligned with, why intentional communities fail and why so many people are into it at this moment in history.
A beautiful unlikely connection - Carol Sanford doesn't like introductions - all the books, all the MIT's and the rest. If you Google her you'll find a lot of promo material on her work in regenerative entrepreneurship, corporate consultancy and a misleading headshot. She's calling in from an aged care facility where she lives, and she is wonderful. She has written a great book on the toxicity of feedback, and is currently working on a new one about the horrors of behavioural psychology.
Nicholas Gruen from Lateral Economics joins us to discuss his latest essays exposing the pseudo-science of wellbeing indexes in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Dead air warning - sometimes we need a few moments to think before we speak. Those silences are not dead, but full of life, so we didn't edit them out. Also some explicit language so earmuffs for the bubs. A 'think tank' session with some of the mob at the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, beginning the process of how we might engage with financial instruments, how we might navigate the economic system in our work while maintaining a firm grounding in Lore and Law, and what The Big Lebowski might have to do with all this, because Nanna Davis was watching the movie in the background throughout. Also some interesting robot translations of JD singing in Aboriginal language at the start. Our first public sharing of our yarns and opening protocols when we begin exploring a potential research topic. Rough as guts, but right as rain.
Arlo Davis, our Native Alaskan conscience regulator, calls in to growl me ('scolding' they call it there) about avoiding the colonial trap of vicarious trauma. He has good story from an Elder for 'taking that out of you'. We also devote a lot of time to applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to solving the riddle of steel. Speaking as Conan the Barbarian fanboys, we feel it's appropriate for us to do that.
Jeremy Lent, recovering tech start-up whizz and author of books including "The Web of Meaning" joins us for a true mad deep yarn, and we connect in authentic relation, in a really beautiful way. He makes me begin to waver in my assertion that there is no way Indigenous Knowledge can save the world. This fella is magic - if he can make me happy, he can make anyone happy. Get some. It's good.
Michael Garfield is the host of 'Complexity', the Santa Fe Institute's podcast, as well as his own podcast 'Future Fossils'. In this yarn he's off the leash in a yarn without boundaries, in which we cover consciousness studies, psi research, discarnate entities in cyberspace, psycheldelics, Jurassic Park, hubris, hormones, rage, the contagion of conspiracy logic and truckloads of other wild ideas that might be described as speculative non-fiction.
Prof Michael Running Wolf is a software engineer and artificial intelligence ethicist who is deeply committed to Indigenous data sovereignty and cultural revitalistion. We yarn about his work at the intersection between Indigenous languages and AI.
Leonard Hoon is a senior research fellow at Deakin University and we did a few AI projects together before Covid. Been trying to get him on for a yarn for ages, and today he finally gave in. He has some great insight into the way the landscape has changed in Artificial Intelligence over the last couple of years, so we take a brief but deep dive into human agency and the best take I've heard about "signal and noise" which offers a more sober and useful way of navigating the theatre of information warfare.
Vanessa Lemm, Executive Dean at Deakin University and secret Nietzsche scholar, explains how Will to Power is really Will to Relation, and how a 'return to nature' is not evolutionary regression. And how she tells my knife-fighting stories to her children as bed-time stories. Prepare to knock the misogyny and fascism off your Friedrich fetish.
We want Nicholas Gruen to make a killing on his substack, so we continue with our marketing strategy of trying to get him cancelled to drive more traffic his way. A mixed bag yarning up everything from Russian disinformation to the shortest (and greatest) political career in history. Lots of provocations to try and get Nicholas to say something terrible, but he can't quite shake off his decency and intelligence to get the job done.
Josh Waters, the Kid Laroi of Indigenous complexity science, is one to watch over the next five years. He's doing his post-grad and has remarkable insight into systems and complexity, drawing on his traditional Lore to bring competing narratives together. We talk about scale, co-evolutionary fitness, positive and negative feedback loops, and the maximum power principle. And emus.
Associate Professor Duane Hamacher, astronomer and co-author of the new book The First Astronomers, in a yarn about why dialogue between Indigenous Knowledge and Western science is not cross-cultural, but interdisciplinary. We also explore the difficulties of writing and scholarship in an era of global information warfare.
Two hefty fellas yarning about canoes and heretical notions of prehistorical ocean-going travelers and trade in Asia. Messing with some pivotal timelines. Victor Briggs is an Aboriginal scholar whose book on this topic is coming out in June - my hot pick for 2022 in igniting the next round of culture wars. He also gives us a bit of shake-spear from that time he played Othello.
Nice yarn with a Mum, Kylie Cooper, who is embarking on the increasingly perilous journey of homeschooling her son. She asked if we could help out with some advice on how to develop her curriculum to be responsive to her context, which includes relationships with land and community, but also inevitably with government, marketplace and institutions.
Big yarn with Prof Des Gorman, Maori thinker in public health systems and more, former Head of the School of Medicine at Auckland university. A former Naval Officer (submariner and diving officer), he has a no-nonsense approach that gets people clutching pearls and running sobbing from conference rooms from time to time. A challenging yarn about James Bond, large-scale public health interventions, the Indigenous response and the future of Covid.
An honor to check in with Aunty Munya Andrews - Aboriginal Elder, barrister and author. Nice free-range organic yarn on totems, kinship, the hero's journey and optimal team size (we agree with Bezos' 2 pizza formula).
Arlo Davis is a Native Alaskan living through the big thaw. He has journeyed through university life and even tried his hand at being a guru for a while. He eventually went down a three-year YouTube rabbit hole starting with Jordan Peterson (with some occasional Joe-caine from Rogan's show) and then touring all the usual suspects, trying to sense-make the apocalypse. He arrived at the conclusion that there's nothing much to be done except focusing on our relationships, and contacted me to try and convince me to quit my work, because nothing will turn this crisis of civilisation around. True community connectedness is the the only Ark that will float, and the only prepping that matters is coming into good relation with people and land.
Jack's back! Jack Manning-Bancroft from AIME, Indigenous CEO (a real one, not just one of these people who start a dog-washing business and put CEO on their LinkedIn profile) has the hard yarns about taking the woo-woo out of innovation, creativity and imagination, while still retaining a shred of hope and wonder.
Deen Sanders OAM has been assigned the cultural role of mitigating the risks that come with my work - the damage I might do the world and the damage the world might do to me. Culturally this is like a HR meeting, a bit personal too, but we decided to record it after half an hour because there were good governance messages that might benefit a lot of people. We deal with my problematic encounters with the Californian ideology and my addiction to yarning with Americans, and above all the slow untethering of my spirit from land and community in the inquiry role I've taken on in the last couple of years, while examining global systems of influence during the anthropocene.
Jordan Hall is our Christmas gift for 2021 - tech entrepreneur and sense-making guru in the lab with a high level briefing on Web 3, bringing that xmas spirit with tales of Moloch, Mammon, Satan and Steve Jobs. Mind blowing yarn. Seriously. Best Christmas ever.
This is pretty much Nicholas Gruen's podcast now, he's in here so regular. The episode is named after one of his glorious rhetorical arrows aimed at somebody who isn't me, so I'm loving it. We still have business with the dialectic, so we finally put that to bed today, as well as reconciling our troubled relationship with the Age of Reason and the problem of where to keep a Magna Carta message stick.
Jamie Wheal helps me work through my issues with the Age of Reason, as I complete my audit of the Enlightenment. He is a peak performance expert and founder of the Flow Genome Project. His latest book Recapture the Rapture will probably not sell as much as his famous Pulitzer-nominated bestseller Stealing Fire, because it says a lot of things that are quite upsetting to oligarchs. Jamie knows the old narratives and institutions are finished, and is looking toward what comes next, as well as wondering what is worth retrieving forward from the grand experiment of the Enlightenment. As usual, we attempt dialogue without romanticizing our respective cultural traditions and seeking moral high ground, and we almost succeed this time.
Joe Lightfoot is the author of the 2020 game changer, A Collective Blooming: The Rise Of The Mutual Aid Community. He recently dubbed the complexity/sense-making/meta-modern/decentralised tech community "The Liminal Web" and the idea has had quite an impact in the space. We talk through our misgivings and excitement about being liminally involved with this community that seems to be gaining influence and leverage in the world. And about our fear of losing the most unspeakable parts of our male privilege. And we do speak it. And it helps us get to the heart of why change-making has never worked yet.
This is not a comfortable yarn, but Felicity Chapman says it's a healing one. I don't like to "go there" but there we go. Felicity is an Aboriginal woman who uses weaving to facilitate neuroplasticity in her own recovery following a brain aneurysm. I'm interested in this cultural practice of memory that occurs in the objects that we make. She refers to her life post-aneurysm as "after the bleed" and this comes to mean much more in our yarn, which mostly explores loss, particularly loss of memory at the personal and community level following historical trauma and the greater bleed of genocide. Lost ancestral memory, lost story, lost family memory. And the darker side of colonial amnesia. And how to "look after yourself" in the fallout, after the bleed.
Fritjof Capra in dialogue with fellows from the IK Systems Lab, Jack Manning Bancroft and Tyson Yunkaporta. Fritjof shares his accessible translation of a systems view of life - a four-part logic sequence that sits well in dynamic relation with Indigenous Knowledge. Creation is not just about patterns and replication, but the inevitable pattern-breakers that give rise to mutation, elaboration and emergence. What is intelligence, sentience, creativity and imagination? And magic? Well, that is simply what science might refer to as non-linearity. Wonderful yarn.
Friend of the pod, Nicholas Gruen, tries to help me get to the bottom of my theories about supply and demand. Turns out economics as a discipline is so opaque that it's turtles all the way down and there's no proof to be found - just interesting perspectives through stories about property auction smoking ceremonies and Mafia internships.
Ahmed Best and Dr Lonny Brooks yarn about everything from Civil Rights to democratizing the future through radical gaming, while my 4 year old daughter gets busy wrecking the house around me. We don't talk about Star Wars, because I figure Ahmed must be sick of answering Jar Jar questions by now. In the AfroRithms Futures group, Lonny and Ahmed are doing some time-traveling magic as they seek not to change the future from a point in the past, but instead ground themselves in a preferred future to change the present.
Nicholas Gruen is a white Kant philosopher who keeps talking to me about Western philosophers when I'm supposed to be working. We kick this one off with a Fidelio monologue I wrote for the Opera House this season, while I try to finish a chapter on the Enlightenment and Nicholas tells me the best bits of the Age of Reason that will be worth keeping after the global economic system collapses. And I get schooled on my "vulgar Marxist interpretation" of Hegel, which I completely deserve.
Precarious yarn with recovering comedian Nick Sun about the psychedelics community and its dodgy origins and deep influence across the interrelated fields of tech, coaching, business, sense-making, complexity science, design and more. Appropriation and dispossession. Civilisation and imperialism. This is a deep dark dive. Indigenous listeners are advised that this episode contains references to the effects of community spiritual violence and colonial desecration of sacred sites.
Monika Bielskyte the protopian futurist trickster is back, the second wokest person I know, to audit the yarns in our complex field here for everything from eugenics to Russian disinformation. She kills a couple of my babies here, including any lingering attachment I may have had to Gaddafi nostalgia, problematic sci fi and the weird genealogy of this podcast’s title.
Brother Deen Sanders preps me for a writing retreat as we yarn through the sticks we've made each other for Story about governance. He is on Country where the Tiddalik Lore resides, an old Story that provides a template for bloodless revolution that involves multiple truths, zero murder and lots of laughter.
Best yarn ever with Katherine Collins who is a sustainable investment guru and chair of the Santa Fe Institute. We mostly talk about bees, and the weird way people project the best and worst fantasies about reality onto those insects, and then spend the second half of the yarn trying not to do exactly the same as we riff on economics and complexity.
A sedate and deep river of a yarn, no rapids today I'm afraid. Kianga Ford, a healer working with the walking wounded from gender skirmishes in the culture wars, yarns with me about cults, settler sexualities, relatedness, masculinity and femininity. We work together on the notion of "Will to Relation" as an Indigenous alternative to Nietzsche's "Will to Power".
Australian economist Nicholas Gruen, working at the dangerous space in between economics and policy, puts my pop-science brain through boot camp, which I always appreciate, and tells me why complexity science and systems thinking are policy fads that won't last beyond the next election cycle. He talks me through a paper of his that I really love. Only problem is he hasn't published it yet, so if you want to get a preview, you have to ask him nicely like I did. The password is "We need the eggs". ngruen@lateraleconomics.com.au
Adah Parris is a cyborg shaman who will redefine what you mean when you say "technology". I won't spoil it. Except - The Matrix, Wonder Woman, gurus and cults. And what kind of ancestor do you want to be?
Luke Craven, complexitorian and Design Director at the Australian Taxation Office, yarns up about the fallacies and pitfalls of complexity theory and systems thinking. We decide the biggest fallacy is that it is culturally neutral, and take a deep dive into the dominant culture of the discipline. We talk about the ecosystem of the complexity community, and the particular niche that gurus occupy there. We agree that there is nothing natural about the psycho-technology that is systems thinking - you can't just magically arrive there through un-schooling. We discuss how to move from the feels and the thinks and into the more difficult sphere of action. https://pigontracks.substack.com/p/35-system-effects-update
Helluva yarn with Arpad Maksay, Hungarian/Tamil marketing, tech and Kendo guru, on rule governed violence, gendered violence and the weird intersection of martial arts, finance and tech. We give our cold-takes on NFT's and wonder about how crypto can be called a currency when it's obviously just another class of digital asset. We also come up with an unlikely marketing angle for girls in STEM programs. And of course, lots of stories about fighting with sticks...
Picking up the thread again of our most viral episode "Yarning with Vikings" with Rune Hjarno Rasmussen, a Danish animist who is flirting with the idea of a Nordic resurgence and revitalisation of land-based Scandinavian cultures. Some great yarns here, but also a lot of laughs and an unlikely bromance that is always entertaining.
Latest in a yarn that's been going for four years with Danie Mellor, an Indigenous artist from the volcanic jungle soil of far north Queensland. He might be called a landscape artist except he's also a time-traveller, which is tricky when your culture's view of time is indistinguishable from space (especially when you're interacting with a marketplace and society grounded in real estate and the arrow of time). We talk about the haptics of ancestral objects and archival images, and apply a snake-eye lens to rain forest country to see what might be revealed about the physics of our reality through infrared viewpoints. And of course, this means we have to spend at least half an hour talking about the film Predator and Big Arnie's rumble in the jungle with an alien who sees in infrared...
Friend of the pod, Frisian Indigenous man from the Netherlands, Michel Grobbe, returns for his third yarn with IKSLab. He shares Frisian burning practices and we find some startling parallels across hemispheres of experience.
Fionn Wright used to be Irish, then married in to a Chinese family in Shanghai, where he is an executive coach, World 2.0 & China Dream Advocate, Media Personality, Meditation Teacher, Metamodern and Integral theorist. Some really nuanced perspectives here on China's future and global systems. A lot to learn here and think on.
What does decolonisation even mean today, here in the master's nephew's house, and what will we do with the tools we find here? Motaung Thomas Mofolo is a futurist, a proud Mosotho, digital content creator, decolonial activist and media theorist leveraging the creative economy for social impact and sustainable development across the Afrikan continent. Our yarn here was authentically our first communication, and I think you'll like it. Particularly when we start whipping out our knobkerries...
Lynne Kelly, the 'memory whisperer' in beautiful dialogue with Tyson Yunkaporta (the 'settler whisperer') about embodied, place-based, storied memorisation techniques used the world over by cultures retaining pre-industrial traditions. Lynne is the author of The Memory Code and Memory Craft, and if you're interested in how your entire life and community of relations might be transformed by engaging with and recovering ancestral psycho-technologies, this yarn will blow you away.
Torres Webb is a proud Erubam man born on Darnley Island, who advocates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wellbeing through culture, language, music and education. He is an advisor at CSIRO and is establishing a national First Peoples' Science Centre. We talk about power laws and economies of scale, science as embassy, our historical contribution to the enlightenment (and global finance), seasonal knowledge cycles and more.
Dr Jason Fox, red-bearded, waistcoat-wearing, Melbourne settler-squatting complex systems hedge wizard, tries to help me make sense of the complexity theory community globally. We're both on the wrong side of the equator for this, and we struggle to understand our vigorous, confident US counterparts and our conflicted responses to them. I begin to unpack my racism towards orange people and Jason explores that annoying trope about westerners being uncomfortable with silences. Unfortunately I do way too much talking here and fall into my bad habit of indigi-splaining everything, so I will have to get Jason on again and try to honor my commitment to centering orange voices.
Chels Marshall is a Gumbayngiirr woman, a marine biologist who works across multiple disciplines with Indigenous Knowledge Systems applied through a complexity/systems thinking lens. Her PhD was on Indigenous Knowledge Systems and climate change. We've worked together on the Regenerative Songlines project and will soon be working together in the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University.
Beckett Carmody is a Bundjalung/Lama Lama fella who is one of the most exciting thinkers I've met in a long time. His Indigenous process of inquiry is uncut, undomesticated, but he employs these oldways processes with complete rigor and integrity, utilising a kind of natural experimentation methodology, in which you can see him verifying and falsifying findings and running complex simulations that are non-digital and involve mapping data sets onto naturally occurring cyclic processes and then observing them in real time. His thinking and practice blow my mind.
A yarn from a couple of lockdowns ago (important to know about time lag because of the seasonal knowledge in the yarn). Victor Steffensen is an Indigenous musician, film-maker and expert in the ancient tradition of caring for land through the use of fire. He is the founder of the Firesticks Alliance and author of the book Fire Country: how Indigenous fire management could help save Australia. A very interesting idea to emerge from this yarn is Vic's notion of 'allowances' as opposed to the idea of 'affordances', based on the way plant species share resources with each other. I'm interested to frame future cybernetics yarns around how things change if we say 'allowance' instead of 'affordance'.
Yarning with Johny Mair, one of those rare beasts - an actual self-made man. An Australian ex-pat who went from casual labor in Brisbane for six dollars an hour to banking and investment magic in the US. He's the co-founder at Ethic - Sustainable & Impact Investing. I'm often rolling my eyes at the idea of sustainable finance gurus, but not this time. We yarn up about billionaires in space, our cold takes on Gamestop, and whether shareholder-centric market ideologies can be used to leverage change in the world. And Johny catches me stealing a joke from Bill Burr.
Angie Abdilla (Palawa), Megan Kelleher (Baradah), Rick Shaw (Gamilaroi) and Tyson Yunkaporta (Wik) tell the story of our work so far for Oldways New, in the IPAI (Indigenous Protocols in Artificial Intelligence) group. We share this work as part of our protocol of transparency and open collaboration, and invite suggestions as we reach a very sticky point in our project. We know how to develop something that could be groundbreaking, but now we must ask - should we do it? Is it even possible to be accountable for the externalities and knock-on effects of a new innovation?
Bruce Pascoe and I yarn up the blackfellas' futures market, the prisoner's dilemma, trust dynamics and the thinly veiled Daddy issues of settlement. We absolutely don't mention the culture war. Well, maybe once, but I think we get away with it. Bruce refuses to advise me on a writing project in which I need to make torture and dark ops just a little more up-beat to fit with a jolly musical score. But that's always been Bruce's problem, no moral flexibility.
I was in a bad mood so my mentor, Worimi man Deen Sanders, threw me a bone and ran a bit of a thought experiment on how the maximum power principle and pos/neg feedback loops apply to billionaires who own the supply chains. Is there potential for equilibrium? We didn't arrive at a solution, but we did come up with a kickass name for one. And we had a good laugh, too.
Free range research yarn with Dr John Davis, head of the Stronger Smarter Institute for many years, now moving into our Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab as a leader. We talk about Bunya nut story and interspecies communication as a methodology and economy, ranging through many topics, from solar panels in the Sahara to how to honor two conflicting conclusions at once and still remain productive. We'll figure out how Indigenous thinking can save the world yet!
Dr David Reser and I talk about our inter-cultural bromance that has grown out of memory science experiments over the last few years, starting with our initial meet-cute nerding out over cranial nerves, 3d printing, dot paintings and Hannibal Lecter. This bromance has survived two culture wars and a recent controversy in which our experimental research paper (comparing the Ancient Greek Memory Palace technique with Aboriginal memorisation techniques) was turned into divisive click-bait for culture warriors.
Prof Yin Paradies talks about his evolving research moving from anti-racism to a deeper intervention into the true causes of structural inequality. We also look into the usefulness of intentional communities as safe-to-fail experiments in generating distributed governance patterns that might be replicated fractally over time, as The Wheel grinds slowly to a halt. Yes, we talk about Game of Thrones too...
Outsourcing our biggest FAQ here. Maya Ward, author of "The Comfort of Water" is now receiving queries from settlers who are calling themselves "white" and asking how to come back into the spirit of place in rigorous and respectful ways that are not in extractive relation, not overstepping or appropriating. It is a space of nuance and intense discomfort and danger there, but it is generative, so Maya and I talk up Kingfisher ceremony on Wurundjeri land, in a feedback loop of crazy. It may be crazy, but both of us agree that if settlers cannot come back under the Law of the land soon, everything and everyone will die. No pressure.
Michel Grobbe (friend of the pod) is a Frisian Indigenous scholar from the Netherlands, and we yarn here about our complementary universes of tracking game, a pattern-thinking skill set that we believe is transferable across many disciplines and domains.
The uncancelable Dr Kelly Menzel, Indigenous thinker from the Adelaide Hills, jumps in with me through our ongoing research project that demands innovation of new methodologies just to grapple with the horrendous complexities of our topic.
Ben Ford from Commando Development applies his knowledge from the Royal Marines and a decade of software development to the tragedy of the commons, the scalability issues of distributed governance, what Waterloo and Gettysburg have in common, and the questionable impact of Vegemite on the Middle East.
Jim Rutt, former Director of the Santa Fe Institute and general complexity and tech guru, shares knowledge of his favourite field – consciousness research. We examine embodiment, external cognition, implications for AI and AGI, and even psi research. Then we apply his knowledge of neural nets and genetic algorithms to a project I have underway with Oldways New (Angie Abdilla) in which we are attempting to apply marriage Law in Aboriginal kinship systems as an algorithm to solve the biggest problem in genetic computing.
Executive coach, corporate trainer and Systema instructor Glenn Murphy yarns with me about distributed cognition, the utility of fluid self-other boundaries, how to connect with place when you are displaced and the possibility of generative violence in right relation, with right story. But first, you must get through 4 minutes of a Viking Metal song about Rasputin to light up your limbic system!
Jack Manning Bancroft is an Indigenous Australian change-maker who built the juggernaut organisation AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience) on the power of hope, trust falls, high fives and "follow your dream!" tropes. It worked. Many individuals were uplifted and empowered. But the one thing it didn't change was the system producing inequality in the first place. Jack is somebody who can talk his way into any room on the planet, so what happens when a man like this takes a deep dive into complexity science and decides to tackle global power systems in non-linear ways?
Best podcast yet. Maori complexity voyager Guy Ritani explains Queering as a generative praxis rather than a mere instrument of critique. It is not even a lens, but a relational embodiment within a landscape rich with Mana. Guy inhabits this way of being perfectly while sparking innovation in science, permaculture, and many other fields, leaving those fields richer from the encounter.
Jason Twill is an expert in sustainable urbanism, creative city making, housing affordability and green building economics. I know he's from the US, but I'm not sure where his home is. Right now he's on lockdown in Qatar as four different Covid mutations ravage the population there. Jason applies training he received from Gumbayngirr people in Australia to systems thinking approaches in all his projects, and he has a very different take on First Principles thinking.
Greg Morris is a Samoan knowledge industry professional who takes a deep dive with me into the relational nature of knowledge, the joys and dangers of intercultural knowledge translation/production, and the thousand-year-long tail/tale each of us is dragging. We examine the vital role of Indigenous Knowledge processes (not content) in forming collective thinking practices for truth-seeking, rather than arguing over which facts represent truth.
Australian Indigenous Elders Anne Poelina and Mary Graham share with Megan Kelleher (my spouse) and I, about the Law of the land and First Peoples, as well as Songlines. Megs had to leave half way through for family biz, so we didn't get to some of the big stuff she was bringing about spatial relation and cognition, but we will come back to that yarn later. This is a good example of how messy and vibrant yarns can be - these Aunties hit the ground running and left no space for the niceties of introductions or explanations! Just try and keep up.
Listen through for one of the finest Jordan Peterson impressions you'll ever hear. Sound for this episode isn't great, but you know what? Stop being such an audio snob! When I was a kid we only had cassette tapes recorded off the radio and it was fine. Suck it up and have a listen. This is an intimate yarn reflecting on personal experiences of online radicalisation and the old rabbit-hole, with Jordan Price, a young Gunditjmara fella who has lived with chronic pain all his life and sought agency through self-reliance philosophies, largely curated through a YouTube algorithm. I've known him since he was a kid, watching him struggle bravely through his pain during hours of hard dancing in corroboree. He's found a defiant kind of inspiration in his culture, but also in Nietzche, Macchiavelli, Jesse Ventura, 9-11 truthers and Jordan Peterson. I haven't seen him in a few years, and we reflect on the carnage of the last decade, since our first innocent online encounters with big foot, the Kennedy assassination, flat earth theory and the Mayan calendar. There is a universe of raw and troubling stories to unravel in this hour.
What happens when you put two middle aged Aboriginal nerds with adult ADHD together on one zoom call? Nothing good. Rick Shaw is a Gamilaroi mathematician who works on algorithms for Deloitte, and spends quite a bit of his remaining hours slapping my brain around the room like a cat with a half-dead rat. He used to model and monitor extreme events like terrorism and hurricanes. Now he's monitoring me. Our yarn was interrupted by his daughter charging round on a horse and my spouse panic-buying ethereum in the background. According to Rick's bush-physicist's unified field theory, that's good chaos and we need to embrace it.
Jacqueline Jennings, mixed heritage Cree, Anishinaabe, Métis and settler descent, is 2nd generation residential school survivor from Canada - a self-made woman who started out with nothing but a turkey feather (not even an emerald mine to get the ball rolling). She has found herself in a very unique position as an entrepreneur and investor who is now navigating the world of Indigenous finance at Raven Capital, where her team brings the traditional role and protocols of The Intermediary to bear in a way that is seeding some interesting disruptive innovations, seeds intended to grow over seven generations. I was heartened to see that her work is neither Indigenised finance nor financialised indigeneity, but something else entirely. I gained some helpful clues about risk management and the issue of trading beyond spheres of trust at scale, but also some troubling wake-up calls about the impossibilities of allowing land to be anything but capital without sparking a global catastrophe. In the end, it's your body or your land as collateral, and you can have skin in the game or be somebody else's skin in the game. Maybe. As long as we remember that the house always wins.
Melanie Goodchild, Moose Clan, Anishinaabe (Ojibway or Chippewa) from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee, co-founder of the Turtle Island Institute, talks about her group's work in conducting traditional processes of inquiry in dialogue with Systems Thinking and Complexity science, mediated through a council of Elders. My family and I have been sitting in ritual yarns with Melanie and her family for a while now, and we are ready to share some of the knowledge that lives in the relational connection between us.
Heir to the silent fallout of multiple genocides, Monika Bielskyte is one of those ordinary people who has fallen through the cracks of industrial identities, gone through the fire, evolved some salamander traits and emerged to do extraordinary things. A denizen of liminal country, Monika's medium is cybernetics and intensive pluralist praxis in this area has produced some high level insights about global imperialism and its incursions into the realms of AR and VR. I once did a ceremony with Ainu people and I put myself in that headspace for this interview, to better connect with Monika's grandmother's people. Trigger warning - anti-woke folk might hear some things in here they won't like much. More on Monika's protopian future visioning here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZLLW2y4eo
Prof. Deen Sanders OAM is a Worimi man who has wandered the intrepid space between Western systems of corporate life, law, academia, psychology and government; and the Indigenous culture and knowledge systems that shape his relationship with the world.
Brother Deen always has a nuanced analysis of wicked problems, to which he applies an Indigenous complexity lens and a mastery of many disciplines. We point that weapon today at disinformation and bad faith discourse, which have migrated from the digital world and into our lives. Parts of this interview also appear in another podcast I do called Disconnect, a show about Indigenous engagement with IT.
This is startling and spontaneous yarn about economic transitions, imperialism, re-imagining value, colonial script, and much more. It's good and long, as yarns are when they're worth having. Join Mike New, founder of Smart Enterprise Villages and intentional community economy guru, his libertarian operative mate Frank (who might be Satoshi Nakamoto), and my spouse Megan Kelleher (Indigenous blockchain savant) in a free range and sometimes dangerous yarn about money and value. And Jack and the Beanstalk. And about how knocking someone out in a pub can be considered "proof of work" in a relational credit economy! We also perform a live lab experiment on the effects of microwaves on the Zoom signal.
Tina Ngata is a Maori activist, community legend and writer who has her finger on the pulse of a problem almost nobody is talking about - the radicalization of Indigenous communities through disinformation online. The thing is though, whose problem is this? Is disinformation a new thing or just a digital version of the classic colonial toolkit for nation-building on the lands of others? Is it becoming a self-organizing system that has achieved something of a singularity and decided to turn on its masters?
Non-Indigenous people are always wondering how (a) they can get access to Indigenous culture and knowledge, and (b) whether it is possible for them to return to this way of being. Well, yes and yes, but not in the way you think. The way into this world is through your own door. I talk to Frisian (Netherlands Indigenous) scholar Michel Gruber and Nordic animist Rune Hjarno Rasmussen, about the ancient Viking practice of Finnfaring - studying under Indigenous masters to increase knowledge of land and spirit, sustainable economies and governance, while remaining firmly planted in your own culture of origin and appropriating nothing. It's all in the yarns.