The Other Others

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,...

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 t...

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 w...

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 sti...

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...

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 influ...

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" a...

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  giv...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 y...

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 th...

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 prog...