The Other Others

Best yarn ever with Katherine Collins who is a sustainable investment guru and chair of the Santa Fe Institute. We mostly talk about bees, and the weird way people project the best and worst fantasies about reality onto those insects, and then spend the second half of the yarn trying not to do exactly the same as we riff on economics and complexity.

A sedate and deep river of a yarn, no rapids today I'm afraid. Kianga Ford, a healer working with the walking wounded from gender skirmishes in the culture wars, yarns with me about cults, settler sexualities, relatedness, masculinity and femininity. We work together on the notion of "Will to Relation" as an Indigenous alternative to Nietzsche's "Will to Power". 

Australian economist Nicholas Gruen, working at the dangerous space in between economics and policy, puts my pop-science brain through boot camp, which I always appreciate, and tells me why complexity science and systems thinking are policy fads that won't last beyond the next election cycle. He talks me through a paper of his that I really love. Only problem is he hasn't published it yet, so if you want to get a preview, you have to ask him nicely like I did. The password is "We need the eggs". [email protected]

Adah Parris is a cyborg shaman who will redefine what you mean when you say "technology". I won't spoil it. Except - The Matrix, Wonder Woman, gurus and cults. And what kind of ancestor do you want to be? 

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...