The Other Others

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 ar...

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 comm...

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 engagin...

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), sea...

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 e...

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 Universit...

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...

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 ve...

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, ou...

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 some...

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....

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. W...

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 Pal...

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...

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 M...

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 attem...

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 c...