The Other Others

Nicholas Gruen from Lateral Economics joins us to discuss his latest essays exposing the pseudo-science of wellbeing indexes in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Dead air warning - sometimes we need a few moments to think before we speak. Those silences are not dead, but full of life, so we didn't edit them out. Also some explicit language so earmuffs for the bubs. A 'think tank' session with some of the mob at the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, beginning the process of how we might engage with financial instruments, how we might navigate the economic system in our work while maintaining a firm grounding in Lore and Law, and what The Big Lebowski might have to do with all this, because Nanna Davis was watching the movie in the background throughout. Also some interesting robot translations of JD singing in Aboriginal language at the start. Our first public sharing of our yarns and opening protocols when we begin exploring a potential research topic. Rough as guts, but right as rain.

Arlo Davis, our Native Alaskan conscience regulator, calls in to growl me ('scolding' they call it there) about avoiding the colonial trap of vicarious trauma. He has good story from an Elder for 'taking that out of you'. We also devote a lot of time to applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to solving the riddle of steel. Speaking as Conan the Barbarian fanboys, we feel it's appropriate for us to do that.

Jeremy Lent, recovering tech start-up whizz and author of books including "The Web of Meaning" joins us for a true mad deep yarn, and we connect in authentic relation, in a really beautiful way. He makes me begin to waver in my assertion that there is no way Indigenous Knowledge can save the world. This fella is magic - if he can make me happy, he can make anyone happy. Get some. It's good.

Michael Garfield is the host of 'Complexity', the Santa Fe Institute's podcast, as well as his own podcast 'Future Fossils'. In this yarn he's off the leash in a yarn without boundaries, in which we cover consciousness studies, psi research, discarnate entities in cyberspace, psycheldelics, Jurassic Park, hubris, hormones, rage, the contagion of conspiracy logic and truckloads of other wild ideas that might be described as speculative non-fiction. 

Prof Michael Running Wolf is a software engineer and artificial intelligence ethicist who is deeply committed to Indigenous data sovereignty and cultural revitalistion. We yarn about his work at the intersection between Indigenous languages and AI.

Leonard Hoon is a senior research fellow at Deakin University and we did a few AI projects together before Covid. Been trying to get him on for a yarn for ages, and today he finally gave in. He has some great insight into the way the landscape has changed in Artificial Intelligence over the last couple of years, so we take a brief but deep dive into human agency and the best take I've heard about "signal and noise" which offers a more sober and useful way of navigating the theatre of information warfare.

Vanessa Lemm, Executive Dean at Deakin University and secret Nietzsche scholar, explains how Will to Power is really Will to Relation, and how a 'return to nature' is not evolutionary regression. And how she tells my knife-fighting stories to her children as bed-time stories. Prepare to knock the misogyny and fascism off your Friedrich fetish. 

We want Nicholas Gruen to make a killing on his substack, so we continue with our marketing strategy of trying to get him cancelled to drive more traffic his way. A mixed bag yarning up everything from Russian disinformation to the shortest (and greatest) political career in history. Lots of provocations to try and get Nicholas to say something terrible, but he can't quite shake off his decency and intelligence to get the job done.

Josh Waters, the Kid Laroi of Indigenous complexity science, is one to watch over the next five years. He's doing his post-grad and has remarkable insight into systems and complexity, drawing on his traditional Lore to bring competing narratives together. We talk about scale, co-evolutionary fitness, positive and negative feedback loops, and the maximum power principle. And emus.