The Other Others

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.

This is not a comfortable yarn, but Felicity Chapman says it's a healing one. I don't like to "go there" but there we go. Felicity is an Aboriginal woman who uses weaving to facilitate neuroplasticity in her own recovery following a brain aneurysm. I'm interested in this cultural practice of memory that occurs in the objects that we make. She refers to her life post-aneurysm as "after the bleed" and this comes to mean much more in our yarn, which mostly explores loss, particularly loss of memory at the personal and community level following historical trauma and the greater bleed of genocide. Lost ancestral memory, lost story, lost family memory. And the darker side of colonial amnesia. And how to "look after yourself" in the fallout, after the bleed.

Fritjof  Capra in dialogue with fellows from the IK Systems Lab, Jack Manning  Bancroft and Tyson Yunkaporta. Fritjof shares his accessible translation  of a systems view of life - a four-part logic sequence that sits well  in dynamic relation with Indigenous Knowledge. Creation is not just  about patterns and replication, but the inevitable pattern-breakers that  give rise to mutation, elaboration and emergence. What is intelligence,  sentience, creativity and imagination? And magic? Well, that is simply  what science might refer to as non-linearity. Wonderful yarn.

Friend of the pod, Nicholas Gruen, tries to help me get to the bottom of my theories about supply and demand. Turns out economics as a discipline is so opaque that it's turtles all the way down and there's no proof to be found - just interesting perspectives through stories about property auction smoking ceremonies and Mafia internships.

Ahmed Best and Dr Lonny Brooks yarn about everything from Civil Rights to democratizing the future through radical gaming, while my 4 year old daughter gets busy wrecking the house around me. We don't talk about Star Wars, because I figure Ahmed must be sick of answering Jar Jar questions by now. In the AfroRithms Futures group, Lonny and Ahmed are doing some time-traveling magic as they seek not to change the future from a point in the past, but instead ground themselves in a preferred future to change the present. 

Nicholas Gruen is a white Kant philosopher who keeps talking to me about Western philosophers when I'm supposed to be working. We kick this one off with a Fidelio monologue I wrote for the Opera House this season, while I try to finish a chapter on the Enlightenment and Nicholas tells me the best bits of the Age of Reason that will be worth keeping after the global economic system collapses. And I get schooled on my "vulgar Marxist interpretation" of Hegel, which I completely deserve.

Precarious yarn with recovering comedian Nick Sun about the psychedelics community and its dodgy origins and deep influence across the interrelated fields of tech, coaching, business, sense-making, complexity science, design and more. Appropriation and dispossession. Civilisation and imperialism. This is a deep dark dive. Indigenous listeners are advised that this episode contains references to the effects of community spiritual violence and colonial desecration of sacred sites. 

Monika Bielskyte the protopian futurist trickster is back, the second wokest person I know, to audit the yarns in our complex field here for everything from eugenics to Russian disinformation. She kills a couple of my babies here, including any lingering attachment I may have had to Gaddafi nostalgia, problematic sci fi and the weird genealogy of this podcast’s title. 

Brother Deen Sanders preps me for a writing retreat as we yarn through the sticks we've made each other for Story about governance. He is on Country where the Tiddalik Lore resides, an old Story that provides a template for bloodless revolution that involves multiple truths, zero murder and lots of laughter.