The Other Others

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, the Indigenous response and the future of Covid.

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 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.