The Other Others

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' i...

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 f...

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 eart...

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...

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,...

Arlo Davis, regular on the pod and my Coriolis Effect brother, 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 hav...

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. B...

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 se...

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...

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...

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...

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.

Originally recorded by her for a different project, a sweet yarn with my friend Euvie Ivanova from Future Thinkers, an intentional community/metamodern/heterodox/sensemaking organisation. But I ended up asking most of the questions, and kinda stole the yarn away. Still you can find uninterrupted Euvie on her substack. http://euvieivanova.substack.com/ She has interviewed everyone from Jordan Peter...