The Other Others

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 there. We agree that there is nothing natural about the psycho-technology that is systems thinking - you can't just magically arrive there through un-schooling. We discuss how to move from the feels and the thinks and into the more difficult sphere of action. https://pigontracks.substack.com/p/35-system-effects-update

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 programs. And of course, lots of stories about fighting with sticks...

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 arrow of time). We talk about the haptics of ancestral objects and archival images, and apply a snake-eye lens to rain forest country to see what might be revealed about the physics of our reality through infrared viewpoints. And of course, this means we have to spend at least half an hour talking about the film Predator and Big Arnie's rumble in the jungle with an alien who sees in infrared...

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 communication, and I think you'll like it. Particularly when we start whipping out our knobkerries...  

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 engaging with and recovering ancestral psycho-technologies, this yarn will blow you away.

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), seasonal knowledge cycles and more.

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 explores that annoying trope about westerners being uncomfortable with silences. Unfortunately I do way too much talking here and fall into my bad habit of indigi-splaining everything, so I will have to get Jason on again and try to honor my commitment to centering orange voices.