The Other Others

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 Maya and I talk up Kingfisher ceremony on Wurundjeri land, in a feedback loop of crazy. It may be crazy, but both of us agree that if settlers cannot come back under the Law of the land soon, everything and everyone will die. No pressure.

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 attempting to apply marriage Law in Aboriginal kinship systems as an algorithm to solve the biggest problem in genetic computing.

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 can talk his way into any room on the planet, so what happens when a man like this takes a deep dive into complexity science and decides to tackle global power systems in non-linear ways?

Best podcast yet. Maori complexity voyager Guy Ritani explains Queering as a generative praxis rather than a mere instrument of critique. It is not even a lens, but a relational embodiment within a landscape rich with Mana. Guy inhabits this way of being perfectly while sparking innovation in science, permaculture, and many other fields, leaving those fields richer from the encounter.

Jason Twill is an expert in sustainable urbanism, creative city making, housing affordability and green building economics. I know he's from the US, but I'm not sure where his home is. Right now he's on lockdown in Qatar as four different Covid mutations ravage the population there. Jason applies training he received from Gumbayngirr people in Australia to systems thinking approaches in all his projects, and he has a very different take on First Principles thinking.

Greg Morris is a Samoan knowledge industry professional who takes a deep dive with me into the relational nature of knowledge, the joys and dangers of intercultural knowledge translation/production, and the thousand-year-long tail/tale each of us is dragging. We examine the vital role of Indigenous Knowledge processes (not content) in forming collective thinking practices for truth-seeking, rather than arguing over which facts represent truth.