The Other Others

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.