The Other Others

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 institutio...

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...

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 m...

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 applicatio...

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 a...

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 thinkin...

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...

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...

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 s...

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...

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...

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...

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 an...

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.