The Other Others

Rune Rasmussen returns for a messy yarn about the problematics and desperate need for rites of passage and a return to land-based culture for the Peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. Is it too late? Is it even possible to think about these things while speaking modern languages? Is dialogue and embassy between north and south possible while we are trapped in global economies of extraction?

Intimate yarn between two friends from two different families, cultures and online communities who ended up in... let's say incompatible algorithms, during Covid lockdowns, resulting in horrendously oppositional worldviews. Nothing we can't sort out with a good yarn. Because a yarn is almost like a 'conversation' but without the bullshit. Nobody is 'just asking questions' in a yarn, because you talk from your relation, not your position. The end result is not a resolution, compromise or any of that crap. It's... nah I'll let you listen through and find out for yourself.

An unlikely group of allies get together to resolve the housing crisis, Airbnb's bourgeois morality issues, and biodiversity loss all in one audacious action involving lots of tiny homes. Jeff Yeo https://www.bigtiny.com.sg/ Mallika Robinson https://www.guardiansofearth.io/ Johny Mair https://www.ethic.com/

Yau! JD, Chels, JMB, Josh and Tyson from the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, live yarn at the Human Kind Festival in Sydney as we work through and develop a Ko-design methodology in which Aboriginal and non-Aborginal people can work better in complexity through nature-informed processes.

Ahmed Buasallay is working on a place-based dialogue process grounded in Arab customary logics, but is struggling in communities on the peninsula where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access nature. He is also finding it challenging to access communities of practice in the Systems Thinking space, and so we also yarn about those often invisible obstacles to change makers and sense makers far removed from the center of the Anglosphere.

David Finnigan is an actor, playwright and game designer raised by climate scientists, here to tell us the story of that time Alex Jones and a million maniacs came after him about a play he wrote about the assassination of climate deniers.

Chaura Chigovanyika is doing his thesis on sustainable development, and we yarn on the question "Are Indigenous People Really the Best Conservationists?"

Enough is enough. I've had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane. (Samuel Jackson)  Parul Punjabi Jagdish, a CEO at AIME Inc, is one of the most accomplished and wise young people I've ever met. We connected last year over serpent Lore from our respective cultures, and in a big yarn by a camp fire in New York, came to agree that snakes may be the foundation of living spirit across the earth, and probably the universe. We yarn about the way they set in motion the phenomenon of regenerative disruption (often mistaken for destruction) in our creation stories, and try to understand pathways to healing and understanding death through the metaphors and learnings that can be found in snake Lore. 

Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam and We'll Play Til We Die, brings a friend to dinner - Lucia Sorbera, chair of Arabic studies at The University of Sydney. I don't know either of them, but that's what yarns are for. Some unlikely connections here, finding common cause around developing better methodologies for co-design. A weird and wonderful yarn that kind of dropped out of the sky on us at the last minute. Opening music is Ankh by Egyptian death metal band Scarab.

Great yarn across the drink with proper deadly Irish thinker Manchan Magan, as we continue the Irish-Aboriginal Australian tradition of yarning together about Lore and other important things. I am advised perfectly on my one-off shilalagh-making effort (and how to avoid cultural appropriation in the process). We end up agreeing on a mechanism for keeping bastards away from our business - you know, those ones who come sniffing around because they want to find some bronze-age or neolithic ancestral precedents for their muscular Christianity or blood and soil madness. Really good yarn, made me feel like I got some mojo back.