The Other Others

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.

Australian Indigenous Elders Anne Poelina and Mary Graham share with Megan Kelleher (my spouse) and I, about the Law of the land and First Peoples, as well as Songlines. Megs had to leave half way through for family biz, so we didn't get to some of the big stuff she was bringing about spatial relation and cognition, but we will come back to that yarn later. This is a good example of how messy and vibrant yarns can be - these Aunties hit the ground running and left no space for the niceties of introductions or explanations! Just try and keep up.

Listen through for one of the finest Jordan Peterson impressions you'll ever hear. Sound for this episode isn't great, but you know what? Stop being such an audio snob! When I was a kid we only had cassette tapes recorded off the radio and it was fine. Suck it up and have a listen. This is an intimate yarn reflecting on personal experiences of online radicalisation and the old rabbit-hole, with Jordan Price, a young Gunditjmara fella who has lived with chronic pain all his life and sought agency through self-reliance philosophies, largely curated through a YouTube algorithm. I've known him since he was a kid, watching him struggle bravely through his pain during hours of hard dancing in corroboree. He's found a defiant kind of inspiration in his culture, but also in Nietzche, Macchiavelli, Jesse Ventura, 9-11 truthers and Jordan Peterson. I haven't seen him in a few years, and we reflect on the carnage of the last decade, since our first innocent online encounters with big foot, the Kennedy assassination, flat earth theory and the Mayan calendar. There is a universe of raw and troubling stories to unravel in this hour.

What happens when you put two middle aged Aboriginal nerds with adult ADHD together on one zoom call? Nothing good. Rick Shaw is a Gamilaroi mathematician who works on algorithms for Deloitte, and spends quite a bit of his remaining hours slapping my brain around the room like a cat with a half-dead rat. He used to model and monitor extreme events like terrorism and hurricanes. Now he's monitoring me. Our yarn was interrupted by his daughter charging round on a horse and my spouse panic-buying ethereum in the background. According to Rick's bush-physicist's unified field theory, that's good chaos and we need to embrace it.

Jacqueline Jennings, mixed heritage Cree, Anishinaabe, Métis and settler descent, is 2nd generation residential school survivor from Canada - a self-made woman who started out with nothing but a turkey feather (not even an emerald mine to get the ball rolling). She has found herself in a very unique position as an entrepreneur and investor who is now navigating the world of Indigenous finance at Raven Capital, where her team brings the traditional role and protocols of The Intermediary to bear in a way that is seeding some interesting disruptive innovations, seeds intended to grow over seven generations. I was heartened to see that her work is neither Indigenised finance nor financialised indigeneity, but something else entirely. I gained some helpful clues about risk management and the issue of trading beyond spheres of trust at scale, but also some troubling wake-up calls about the impossibilities of allowing land to be anything but capital without sparking a global catastrophe. In the end, it's your body or your land as collateral, and you can have skin in the game or be somebody else's skin in the game. Maybe. As long as we remember that the house always wins.

Melanie Goodchild, Moose Clan, Anishinaabe (Ojibway or Chippewa) from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee, co-founder of the Turtle Island Institute, talks about her group's work in conducting traditional processes of inquiry in dialogue with Systems Thinking and Complexity science, mediated through a council of Elders. My family and I have been sitting in ritual yarns with Melanie and her family for a while now, and we are ready to share some of the knowledge that lives in the relational connection between us.