Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Indigenous Woo-Woo or Wisdom?" with Tyson Yunkaporta

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"Indigenous Woo-Woo or Wisdom?" with Tyson Yunkaporta · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas and few things are more dangerous
• 0:07
  than a white colonial settler bloke sitting down with an indigenous fella.
• 0:13
  And trying to talk in a fearless and no-holds-barred way about race and western civilization and
• 0:21
  indigenous knowledge and the current fetish that we may have in Australia and the United
• 0:26
  States and elsewhere for deep, timeless wisdom as imparted by indigenous elders.
• 0:31
  One of her most opposed is Tyson Young Caporta.
• 0:34
  He's an academic, he's an arts critic, he's a researcher, he's from a clan in North Queensland,
• 0:40
  found North Queensland.
• 0:41
  On the side, he calves traditional tools and weapons, but his main gig is the works as
• 0:47
  a senior lecturer in indigenous knowledge at a university in Melbourne called Deacon University.
• 0:53
  And his latest book is Amazing, he's been on the show before to talk about the book,
• 0:58
  before that, which was called Sand Talk.
• 1:00
  This one's called Right Story, Wrong Story.
• 1:03
  Adventures in indigenous thinking, I love Tyson, he has an amazing ability to straddle
• 1:12
  the two worlds of the West and the indigenous in a way that doesn't pander to our clichés
• 1:18
  about the majesty of traditional ways of doing things.
• 1:22
  I always get something out of the conversation, I loved this conversation, he really opens
• 1:27
  up in a way that was unexpected and I'm grateful for it.
• 1:30
  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
• 1:32
  The one I'll only leave Tyson Young Caporta.
• 1:38
  What's that again?
• 1:39
  Yeah, what's that?
• 1:41
  Mate, I am so, I'm almost star-stacked because you're in my years all the time,
• 1:46
  because I'm listening to the audio book version of your latest book.
• 1:49
  Oh, so entertaining.
• 1:51
  You are such an entertaining narrator.
• 1:53
  It's for people who might only have read Tyson or who might not even have read that.
• 1:58
  You must listen to the audio book of Tyson's latest book because you do,
• 2:02
  you've got your voices of the old white colonialists, you've got your impersonations.
• 2:07
  The abridging is a lot, mate.
• 2:11
  And even your friends who are like, you know, I don't know, Danish anthropologist
• 2:17
  or something, you'll like to do a mildly offensive Scandinavian accent.
• 2:22
  I just love, I love the people that, like, you're allowed to do their accent.
• 2:28
  If they were Chinese, you couldn't do it.
• 2:31
  Like, I can't help myself sometimes.
• 2:34
  You're allowed to do them.
• 2:37
  Yeah, well, you're also allowed, but I mean, because you can do that.
• 2:40
  I can't.
• 2:41
  But you're not a white guy.
• 2:42
  So you're also, you also have a little bit more latitude.
• 2:44
  You could do that for cons things.
• 2:46
  I could, I could do a little bit of African cons.
• 2:48
  You could do that.
• 2:49
  Yes.
• 2:50
  So much fun.
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  It's so much fun.
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  And there's at least a 50 year embargo before it comes offensive.
• 2:56
  Yes, that's right.
• 2:57
  Exactly.
• 2:58
  You're going to pay their Jews.
• 2:59
  Yeah, that's exactly.
• 3:00
  You only get to be racist for so many decades or centuries before you are.
• 3:05
  You have it coming to you.
• 3:06
  But there's always someone.
• 3:07
  And I love my Vikings.
• 3:09
  Yep.
• 3:10
  And they're very patient with Vikings.
• 3:12
  You do love these Vikings.
• 3:13
  So one thing that's interesting in the book, and I wasn't going to start here,
• 3:17
  but we might as well, since we're talking about Vikings,
• 3:19
  is the kind of commonality that you express between all Indigenous cultures across the world,
• 3:25
  which a lot of people might not think of.
• 3:27
  I hadn't really thought about it.
• 3:28
  But the fact that there are these trends that you will see regardless of how disparate the community is,
• 3:33
  you might be talking about a Scandinavian elk farm, elk hunting in Indigenous community,
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  or you might be talking about some First Nations community in the desert in Australia.
• 3:43
  But they're going to fundamentally have something in common that neither of them has in common
• 3:48
  with the way that we're living our lives in the West right now.
• 3:51
  What is that?
• 3:52
  Yeah, hugely diverse.
• 3:53
  I just think it's ways of being human.
• 3:57
  But you say diverse, but I'm sort of saying the opposite,
• 4:00
  which is that you're saying that there are commonalities.
• 4:02
  No, there's diversities, but then there's commonalities.
• 4:04
  But I find a lot of those commonalities with my Viking mates too, you know?
• 4:11
  Yeah.
• 4:12
  Actually, I was just looking at the levels and making sure that I'm not quite.
• 4:16
  I might be a bit...
• 4:17
  You can hear me okay, right?
• 4:18
  Yeah, yeah.
• 4:19
  Yeah, all right.
• 4:20
  Good.
• 4:21
  Sorry.
• 4:22
  I find those commonalities with...
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  Anybody who's, you know, reconnecting with the law of their culture,
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  the folklore law, whatever you want to call it,
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  and in a way that's where the land is speaking to them,
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  and they're speaking from the land.
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  You know, not just about the land,
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  and you find this as much with Danish animists, you know?
• 4:45
  I mean, the ones that aren't getting, you know,
• 4:48
  changing the runes into Nazi tattoos.
• 4:51
  Let's explain what you're talking about.
• 4:54
  Explain what you're talking about, explain what you're talking about, whatever.
• 4:56
  So, well, okay, so my mate, Rune Rasmussen,
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  I was like in this situation where I'm in,
• 5:02
  to meet her between him and Tyco Wattiti's office.
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  You know, he did the Thor movies.
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  Yeah, Tyco is a great, great New Zealand director and actor and company comedian.
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  So, and this Danish guy is going,
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  no, no, no, he's appropriate in my culture and he's getting it all wrong.
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  That's, you know what I mean?
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  So, I had this situation where, you know,
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  there's a Viking like, you know,
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  challenging a Maori on misrepresenting his culture.
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  And that just, that tickled me pink,
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  just being in that.
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  And the stuff you're saying about white supremacists,
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  I hadn't really realized, but there's a,
• 5:43
  I guess there's a trend of neo-Nazis or far writers
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  to kind of co-opt like ancient Viking traditions.
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  And say, like, this is sort of the natural way of things
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  and we're getting back to our heritage or something.
• 5:57
  Yeah, and I don't know this, you know,
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  this good common story across all,
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  like originating cultures on the planet
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  and every continent, every culture has it, you know?
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  And you know when it's right because you see those commonalities
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  and you know when it's wrong story because you don't see that,
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  you see departure from that
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  and departure from ways of getting along, you know?
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  Or ways of making embassy with other people.
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  So, I mean, that's one of them.
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  You see, everybody's looking for something like origins.
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  They're looking for something to return to
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  because nobody particularly likes where we are right now.
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  And, you know, so you get like a lot of,
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  a lot of your sort of neo-Nazis
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  they're digging back into a Viking heritage, you know?
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  And they're kind of co-opting
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  runes and runic symbols and things like that, you know,
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  to, you know, tattoo on their forehead or whatever.
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  And, you know, just by...
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  It's better than a swastika if you're going through an important security.
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  It's better to have a rune on your forehead.
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  Yeah, but the proper...
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  It doesn't pull you over as much.
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  Your proper Vikings, like the ones who actually do this scholarship
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  and do the cultural practice
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  and the ritual practice, the ones who are, you know,
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  really working at the right way there,
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  they're really upset about that.
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  Of course.
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  They get really upset when they lose another rune.
• 7:15
  Ah, okay, that one's gone.
• 7:17
  Being appropriated by that.
• 7:19
  Yeah.
• 7:20
  That one means kill all the Jews now.
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  Oh, damn it.
• 7:24
  Another simple guy.
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  But you can, in some ways, I mean,
• 7:28
  if you were being maximally empathetic,
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  you could, you can understand the quest that people feel in modern society
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  to connect themselves to some kind of ancient heritage,
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  like to some source of meaning that,
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  that grounds them in a way that...
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  Yeah.
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  It's increasingly disorienting.
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  But there's people who want to, you know,
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  rediscover their foundations and you
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  and change and grow from that.
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  And then there's people who just want to reach back into the past
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  and cherry pick a few bits and pieces
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  that will justify the current position.
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  And, you know, and I guess that's the difference.
• 8:03
  We all cherry picking a bit.
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  I mean, you know, it becomes clear to...
• 8:07
  Yeah.
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  I mean, even in terms of your culture,
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  the number of people who identify as first nations
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  or tripled in the past 10 or 20 years,
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  some of them you wouldn't necessarily pick as being black fellows.
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  They might just look white,
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  but they're finding meaning.
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  You know, there might be one eighth or something,
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  but they're finding meaning in their heritage.
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  And so, you know, they are turning up the volume intentionally
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  on a particular type of ancestry
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  and they're deploying it for their own narrative purposes.
• 8:31
  Well, that's happening a lot.
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  And it's not just with people who are returning to an identity,
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  although that happens,
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  it's fairly rare in terms of numbers.
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  But it's... I don't know.
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  So, if you... I don't know if you know about standpoint theory.
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  Talk to me.
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  standpoint theory.
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  It's one of those kind of post-structuralist post-modernist
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  decolonal little kind of thing.
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  You know, a lot of it came out of post-structuralist feminism.
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  So, it's part of that.
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  You know, that's all my favorite sphere of philosophy times.
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  General raft of...
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  You're like...
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  You're anti-work sort of boogie men.
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  You know, it's in there.
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  You know, as one of those.
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  And I don't know.
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  The whole idea of Indigenous standpoint theory
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  is that it puts you in a kind of accountability system
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  within your culture,
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  so that you're not just speaking for yourself.
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  You can't just throw anything out there,
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  but you have to speak from your community,
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  from your law.
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  And you're accountable to that big ancient kind of peer review system,
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  where you can't just spout out your opinions.
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  That has to be like, you know, a crowdsourced over deep time.
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  You know, and...
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  You know, you have your elders and all your knowledge keepers
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  who, you know, all your ideas have to filter through them
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  before they can be sort of claimed.
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  But it kind of...
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  I don't know, when the world sort of shifted towards individuality,
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  you know, an individual like, you know,
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  like, you know, like, dentitarian kind of ways of looking at yourself.
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  You know, when you're branding yourself online
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  and you're selling your brand, building your brand,
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  it kind of shifted.
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  So standpoint became your demographic profile,
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  and like, you know, speaking as a such and such.
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  You know, and this happened on the left and on the right.
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  You know, people just speaking from their own
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  identity and positions.
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  So, you standpoint became more individualized
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  rather than a collective thing, which, you know,
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  that's what it was intended for, particularly with
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  Indigenous standpoint theory.
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  So, you have a lot of people, if they, you know,
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  end up being a pundit or a commentator
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  or they just write opinion pieces for the guardian or whatever,
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  start speaking more from their own fabulous sort of identity.
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  You know, we're all kind of, I don't know, moved towards that.
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  When you do that, you're more likely to cherry pick.
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  But it's kind of where the politics and where the patterns
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  of discourse have shifted for everybody, you know,
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  since, like, around 2015 or so.
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  Yeah.
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  And so, that's interesting.
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  You're couching or these people are not you.
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  These people are couching themselves in a cloak of community,
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  identity, tribe, and what they're actually trying to do
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  is a self aggrand, it's a self aggrandizing individualistic move
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  of anointing myself as a spokesperson for something or other.
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  So, as a gay man, I, you know, feel deeply offended by bloody blah,
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  or, you know, as a Muslim Australia, you know,
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  whatever might be.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  It's actually-
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  Most of us are pretty staunch on this.
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  But, um, and the narratives that get picked up
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  are the more narcissistic sort of discourses, you know what I mean?
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  So, um, you know, these get out there.
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  These are real easy things to make memes about.
• 11:56
  So, you know, that's the message often that's elevated, you know.
• 12:01
  But, you know, most of us are still pretty staunch about that.
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  We speak as we.
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  You're always a we, even when you're doing something yourself,
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  you're a self in relation, and that's who you are.
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  But, you know, that, I don't know, that's tedious to get through
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  if you're reading it.
• 12:18
  I know.
• 12:19
  Well, I mean, you, you have a, you have a good go at it.
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  And I mean, you make the point that there is,
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  there is only, you know, you sort of, you have a funny passage
• 12:29
  where you're, where you're getting stuck into the sort of
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  Americanized self-help style of self-actualization,
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  where it teaches us that there are infinite depths within us.
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  If only we will be brave enough to find, to reach inside ourselves
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  and find the universe that resides within.
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  And you're basically like, that's bullshit.
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  There's not much there.
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  There's not much in you.
• 12:51
  There's not enough in me.
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  Not in you.
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  Not in me.
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  What we are is connected to each other.
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  You remove us from other people.
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  All of a sudden, it's a completely different kettle of fish.
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  Everything is relationships, basically.
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  So, stop focusing on yourself.
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  You sanctumoney yourself, the door of the household.
• 13:06
  That's it.
• 13:07
  That's it.
• 13:08
  Stop fetishizing your biology and, and getting a DNA test
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  and finding out you came from either Siberia or Native American,
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  because that's where most of those things land when you send them off.
• 13:20
  You can send them in dog hair, and they'll send back one of those results.
• 13:24
  You know, you know, and then getting all excited about that.
• 13:28
  You know, like I know actual, you know, you know,
• 13:32
  Siberian descended people who's like grandparents like had to flee,
• 13:37
  you know, down here.
• 13:39
  And they, they, they're properly connected, you know.
• 13:42
  But there's a sandpiper bird that comes down to here on, you know,
• 13:48
  a bun or wrong, bun or wrong or injury land here around Melbourne.
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  It migrates from Siberia and comes here periodically.
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  And so, you know, you Siberian descend of people who are really doing it right.
• 14:00
  They're, they're noting that and they're feeling that, you know,
• 14:04
  they're tracking that connection from northern to southern hemispheres
• 14:07
  and making meaning that way of being in this different place.
• 14:10
  You know, there are things that bind.
• 14:15
  You know, there is a global north and there's a global south.
• 14:19
  But there's been so much movement and embassy and, you know,
• 14:23
  disruption and displacement that, you know, half the south is in the north and half the north is in the south.
• 14:28
  And there are still, you know, species carrying that law, carrying that good story
• 14:33
  and that those connections, you know, from whales to birds, everything else.
• 14:37
  You know, am I grading around?
• 14:40
  No, you sound in woohoo, Tyson, you don't like sounding woohoo.
• 14:43
  No, it's just, it's just something, it just helps you make meaning.
• 14:46
  Where you think, you know, hey, there's always movement across between these systems.
• 14:51
  There's no idea of what God put these people here and God put this species there.
• 14:56
  It's like, no, there's always exchange across between systems.
• 15:01
  And I guess if you are grounded in those natural systems
• 15:05
  to find the patterns of your ways of being, then you will be making good embassy with other people
• 15:10
  because a closed system is a dead system.
• 15:14
  Yeah.
• 15:15
  You've mentioned a couple of times, good stories or right stories and wrong stories,
• 15:20
  which is the title of your latest book, what are good or right stories and what are wrong ones?
• 15:25
  Yeah.
• 15:26
  Well, like wrong, wrong stories, usually something that someone or some group
• 15:31
  has sort of unilaterally devised, you know, for some kind of like a gender
• 15:41
  that it's not stated in the story.
• 15:44
  It's, you know, like traditionally you'd think of it as gossip, you know, things like this.
• 15:52
  False witness, that kind of thing.
• 15:55
  So that's your wrong story.
• 15:57
  The right story is something that comes from, you know, a lot of different, well, you know,
• 16:02
  the uncomfortable conversations had comfortably, you know, people sitting around the fire.
• 16:09
  I don't know, have you ever heard the phrase sitting in front of the fire?
• 16:13
  Yeah.
• 16:14
  You know, so if you've got a half in a wall, you can only sit in front of the fire.
• 16:17
  But if you're sitting around the fire, where's the front?
• 16:20
  You know, you think you're in front of it, but then the follow on the other side is in front of a two.
• 16:25
  And it just kind of evens things out.
• 16:27
  So you have every idea, every story, it goes through that peer review process of, you know, consensus building,
• 16:33
  and it takes its time, you know.
• 16:36
  So the right story happens over time, you know, considering all the points of view,
• 16:41
  and you know, weeding out what is wrong story there.
• 16:45
  It's interesting that you say, like the kind of process, or what did you just use?
• 16:50
  It's an academic term that is escaping me for the moment, sort of like a peer review set.
• 16:56
  Yeah.
• 16:57
  And, you know, in the book, you talk about maybe the concept of a thought experiment might be the most useful Western,
• 17:05
  sort of rationalist analog to the sorts of communication and conversations that you're talking about.
• 17:11
  First nations Australians have a concept called yarning, which is now very kind of popular in OFA,
• 17:17
  like academia, if you propose a thesis about how you're going to use yarning modalities to deconstruct
• 17:24
  and analyze modern conceptual structures, or something like that, everyone's going to go,
• 17:29
  oh, that must be so profound, you know, they're bringing yarning to it.
• 17:32
  And yet it's a concept that is worth teasing out.
• 17:36
  What is it?
• 17:38
  Yeah, well, that's why I find that the closest, you know, contemporary thing in the sort of global,
• 17:47
  sort of Anglo-Western culture that pretty much everybody must learn if they want to participate in the world.
• 17:56
  Yeah, the closest thing is thought experiment, you know, because thought experiment is always a story.
• 18:03
  You run a tram and you're heading towards like an old man, and if you keep going, you're going to kill your old man,
• 18:08
  but if you're, if you're dodged, then you're going to kill like 20 people. What do you do?
• 18:13
  Tyson, I'd always confuse myself because Americans use the word trolley to talk about a tram.
• 18:18
  Yeah, and so that, you know, the trolley, that's right, the trolley.
• 18:21
  I never understood it.
• 18:22
  For the first 30 years of my life, I was like, yeah, fucks a trolley in Australian and English English,
• 18:26
  a trolley is a shopping cart.
• 18:28
  Yeah.
• 18:29
  It's a shopping cart going to kill a bunch of people, but that's a street cart.
• 18:34
  It's a story.
• 18:35
  You know, it's always narrative-based.
• 18:37
  You know, the ship's sinking.
• 18:38
  There's one life boat, so I only go room for 20 people, but there's 100 people drowning.
• 18:42
  Do you save the poet?
• 18:44
  You know, who do you kill?
• 18:45
  No.
• 18:46
  A lot of them are really weird.
• 18:48
  I don't know.
• 18:49
  I think some of those ones are like wrong story because really it's sort of nudging people towards eugenics.
• 18:56
  Who has more value?
• 19:00
  Who should live?
• 19:01
  Yeah.
• 19:02
  And I know it's really bad, but if you're forced to choose...
• 19:05
  But isn't it useful?
• 19:06
  I mean, I quite like those sorts of thought experiments because it is useful for me to put...
• 19:10
  And people always hate it when I do it because they take it the wrong way.
• 19:14
  They misunderstand the point of an analogy.
• 19:17
  People aren't very good at understanding analogies or metaphors.
• 19:21
  I think they don't...
• 19:22
  They often think that you're being literal.
• 19:25
  But in order to test the edges of why you...
• 19:28
  In order to understand why you believe what you believe, you need to be able to defend it in extremists.
• 19:33
  So starting to think about, well, okay, if you believe that it's wrong to kill,
• 19:38
  then would it still be wrong to kill in X scenario in which it seems, you know, crazy not to do the killing?
• 19:46
  It's Hitler.
• 19:48
  He's about to pull the trigger on a million.
• 19:50
  You know, Jews being incinerated.
• 19:52
  Do you still not want to kill him or whatever?
• 19:54
  And I think it is helpful to tease out why you think what you think when you would stop thinking it.
• 20:01
  Yeah, I think so.
• 20:03
  But this is the beauty of thought experiments is that there's no wrong answer.
• 20:09
  And everybody gets to finish the story with like a thousand,
• 20:15
  fifty thousand different alternative endings.
• 20:18
  And it's a sort of general consensus building thing done by our community.
• 20:23
  It's a sort of inquiry and you know, things are discovered in there, you know.
• 20:28
  I sometimes it could be bad things like utilitarian bioethics or something like that.
• 20:34
  And you know, they're sort of, wow, we should strangle these ones of birth.
• 20:39
  You know, that's the problem.
• 20:42
  Like it's, you know, the only problem with thought experiments is that the story has to be good.
• 20:49
  It's going to be a right story to start with because your originating seed is going to produce, you know, malignant or, you know, benevolent sort of fruit down the track.
• 21:01
  Yeah, so it's kind of like yawning in that sort of, you know, you see heaps of different points of view.
• 21:07
  And it's a problem that people are working on together to come up with consensus.
• 21:11
  You know, prisoners dilemma, that kind of thing, all the famous ones.
• 21:17
  Yeah.
• 21:18
  I mean, you're straddling these two, I was going to say worlds, but maybe like conceptual frames is a better way of putting it in the sense that you're in academia.
• 21:28
  You live in a Western liberal democracy.
• 21:31
  You're talking to people like me who are old-fashioned, small, old, liberal, you know, the people who speak like the cartoon voice that you put on.
• 21:38
  And when you're talking about the colonialists who are steeped in a certain way of kind of old Ivy League, sandstone building, university, enlightenment thinking.
• 21:49
  And yet you've got one foot in the other camp where well, what is the other camp?
• 21:54
  Because I think your book does a good job of trying to articulate this, I don't want to say schizophrenia, but this, I guess, this, you know,
• 22:02
  sophistication or dichotomy of the two ways of approaching the world, the logic, conversation.
• 22:09
  A, a, a cultureation is the key there is, you know, like I don't live in two worlds, it's none of us get to live in two worlds.
• 22:17
  You know, there's a world that's been imposed, mapped, just dumped right on top of us, you know, and we have to live in that world.
• 22:26
  And I don't know, you can visit your own culture for kind of like conjugal visits from time to time.
• 22:33
  But, you know, none of us can live completely in our culture.
• 22:37
  You just have to become a master of our cultureation, which is, you know, being able to inhabit and master the, the dominant culture, you know, but still maintain, you know,
• 22:50
  your own community and who you are. And that's, that's always the struggle.
• 22:55
  You know, most of us are kind of fringe dwellers in these sort of halfway camps, where we're not doing particularly well in either culture.
• 23:03
  You know, and that's been me for a long time.
• 23:06
  There's actually a mental illness profile that comes with that, which is really interesting.
• 23:11
  Coming out of the Westerman Institute, you know, you get dissociative, fugue states and all kinds of things happening.
• 23:18
  There's a, you know, a whole thing there, which is interestingly really similar to the, the pathology, you know, the neurological pathology profile of people who've been radicalized online.
• 23:33
  Because they're no longer inhabiting their, their former reality.
• 23:38
  They don't trust their institutions, they don't trust their community, their kids don't want them to come to Christmas dinner.
• 23:45
  Because they're talking, you know, in a whole different language that's really offensive or whatever.
• 23:51
  So they're like, they're not in their community anymore, but they're not in inhabiting the reality either.
• 23:57
  So they're in this kind of marginalized, you know, marginal fringe camp kind of way.
• 24:04
  So if you've been read-a-pilled, it's sort of like it's sort of like a displace to black fellow.
• 24:12
  Well, it's the same psychological profile anyway.
• 24:15
  So our cultureation is the treatment protocol for that, and that's just doing I guess what you've already mastered as a secular Jew.
• 24:25
  Right. Yeah, it's the same sort of thing.
• 24:28
  I mean, you wouldn't feel yourself to be walking in both worlds.
• 24:31
  You know, you're, you know, you are, you are you.
• 24:37
  And you are, you know, part of both communities.
• 24:41
  Yeah.
• 24:42
  But that's where the, that's where the success of the Jewish diaspora and that massive, you know, massive diversity.
• 24:51
  But still with, you know, a commonality and a strong community this managed to hold itself together and, you know,
• 24:57
  keep the language and everything else for not just 200 years, but like 2000 of them.
• 25:03
  5000, eight, five years.
• 25:04
  Yeah.
• 25:05
  Yeah.
• 25:06
  But yeah, I mean, that's an interesting analogy in the sense that my, but I'm very conflicted about it.
• 25:11
  I mean, I'm, I'm like what I enjoy and the reason I do the job that I do is to wrestle with that liminal space between being a Jew and not being a Jew, you know, being a Jew and being an atheist,
• 25:29
  being married to a guy and not being, you know, a card carrying member of the gay community, being, you know, a white guy who, you know, doesn't believe in all of the things that white people have claimed to do on behalf of white people.
• 25:44
  Yeah.
• 25:45
  And being a man who is, you know, concerned about misogyny, like wrestling with the, with the gray zone is sort of the, I think the job of the person.
• 25:58
  So, I mean, not that that's coming from a person who's instinctively, like, antithetical to the concept of tribe and community because I'm a contrarian.
• 26:09
  And being a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who's a man who
• 26:39
  is a man who is a man who is a man taking this burden?
• 26:41
  Take today's mission
• 27:00
  The one who we are with with a two boy
• 27:08
  and way of being that's often, you know, way out of step with things in terms of the speed of stuff and the focus of stuff and just the implicit values of everything happening around you, and just trying to, I don't know, so I'm turning like this big wheel and then this one's going real fast over here, you know, and I got to somehow keep syncing in with that in some kind of weird elliptical law, but, you know, it's a struggle.
• 27:37
  You know, but it's about the struggle is with your own denial, you know, your own denial of the reality and, you know, and how much you're holding into how things should be and, you know,
• 27:50
  against what is, and then what do you do about that, you know, so, you know, like, I don't know, so I can't stop struggling against mining and extraction, but then I've got, you know, family members and a lot of, you know, heroes of mine too, who are like, well, you know, we've got to be, we've got to be in the meeting, you know, we can't just fight that because for what, you think you're going to stop it, you know, leave it.
• 28:20
  I'm going to place this way if I'm, you know, in the company, you know, then I'm in the meeting and then there's like, well, but then beyond that, how much of the meeting is in you, you know, when you walk away, you know, what are you losing of yourself, what are you losing of us and, you know, as a leader, what, you know, what changes.
• 28:40
  You know, just there's always good and bad coming in late and dark right and wrong, and, you know, it's always a mixed bag, you know, whichever way you go, it's a wrong step.
• 28:52
  But it's everyone in the world right now, there's no way to be on a position to occupy that isn't fraught.
• 28:58
  Yeah, I mean, you know, quite apart from indigenous people attending the mining meeting and perhaps compromising part of themselves in so doing, there's the fact that when I entered this room to have this conversation, I considered whether or not to turn the fan on and it's a hot day in Sydney, so I turned the fan on and that's burning coal.
• 29:18
  Yeah, which we mine, which is creating a chaotic climate.
• 29:24
  Yeah, and like I do that because I want to be slightly more comfortable while I'm talking to you.
• 29:29
  Yeah, so we're all in it, like we're all in the system.
• 29:32
  That's it.
• 29:33
  Doing a thing to some extent.
• 29:35
  Yeah, and this, you know, there's that struggle because it's, you know, what you do individually doesn't really make much difference.
• 29:41
  I mean, or, you know, like your selfish, like, eating and bathing and sheltering yourself, you know, it's like, I do have a purely Western fascination with cleaning my genitals and making sure I'm not covered in shit.
• 29:57
  Yeah, but that's that's why I mean, we're all policing our individual actions and profiles and everything, but it's like that doesn't do anything.
• 30:05
  You know, that's not the system.
• 30:07
  People think the system is an aggregate of, you know, behaviors, actions and attitudes, but that would only work if you were, you know, genuinely in a democratic system.
• 30:16
  It's not like that.
• 30:18
  These, you know, the bigger systems are way beyond our control and, you know, way beyond even our capacity to do anything about.
• 30:26
  I mean, unless you want to go full revolution, but we know where revolutions go.
• 30:32
  They're called a revolution for a reason. They just, they keep coming round.
• 30:36
  You just end up with the same ourselves on top of just with a different name and different face.
• 30:43
  You know, I don't think the system cares who's in charge of it as long as they're, you know, they're going.
• 30:50
  But then that's describing sentience, sentience to a, to a non-human entity, which, you know, is getting a bit weird.
• 30:59
  You say something, the book you say something like that the Aboriginal way of living is the best way ever devised in his life.
• 31:06
  Yeah.
• 31:07
  Yeah.
• 31:09
  I think that there's more to that part as I, as I recall.
• 31:13
  Like I also, the sentence ends, but I don't really care.
• 31:18
  I don't need to put that off onto anybody else. I don't really care if you agree with that or are interested in that or not.
• 31:26
  I'm interested in it.
• 31:28
  Yeah.
• 31:29
  Well, it's, it's just the way we build our, like, we build the negative feedback loops, the regulatory feedback loops into the affordances of all our technology.
• 31:42
  So every bit of technology, whether it's social or psychotechnology or material technology, it always has limits built into it.
• 31:52
  Because it's, we do this over deep time with right story.
• 31:57
  But anything, like, if I show you this massive boomerang, this huge wall boomerang, to people who are listening to the podcast, Tyson is holding out a new,
• 32:08
  yeah.
• 32:09
  The massive boomerang.
• 32:10
  Cut a man in half.
• 32:11
  Which you can see on the YouTube.
• 32:13
  Cut a man in half.
• 32:14
  And we have these things.
• 32:16
  We have them, you know, massive, hardwood swords and things.
• 32:22
  You could cut a man in half.
• 32:24
  But only one man.
• 32:26
  Because the, like, we always make the handle really small.
• 32:31
  Oh, we make the, make the handle weak or another part of it weak.
• 32:34
  So you can't go and doing imperialism with a bunch of these weapons.
• 32:40
  What you're saying.
• 32:41
  So, I mean, that may not have been the reason.
• 32:43
  You can't do this before.
• 32:44
  No, no, this, it's in the law.
• 32:46
  Like, you can, you can have a magnificent battle with these huge things.
• 32:49
  And it's really demonstrative.
• 32:51
  And, you know, it gets it all out of your system.
• 32:53
  But you can't go on then to go, okay, let's wipe out all these people
• 32:56
  and take their land next door.
• 32:58
  So that's why they have no map of Australia looks like it looks.
• 33:01
  It's a patchwork quilt of so many different tribes.
• 33:04
  You're not seeing, you know, one big one enveloping a whole heap of others.
• 33:08
  You know, we build affordances in.
• 33:11
  I mean, the governor's models, a governor system that I explain in the book
• 33:16
  is also built to limit that.
• 33:19
  It sort of forces interdependence and embassy where it becomes impossible
• 33:25
  to destroy other tribes without destroying itself.
• 33:29
  Yeah.
• 33:30
  So we have those things built in.
• 33:32
  So, you know, in that way, it is the best way ever devised.
• 33:36
  You know, to learn.
• 33:37
  There was no tribal warfare for the tens of thousands of years.
• 33:41
  Yeah.
• 33:42
  Highly ritualized, very rule-governed battles, heaps of battles, no warfare.
• 33:49
  Battles are, battles are needed.
• 33:51
  Battles are freaking heaps of fun.
• 33:54
  And you got to give your young men somewhere to put all that stuff they got.
• 34:01
  You know, people, you know, we got to bust that nut as men.
• 34:05
  That's got to happen.
• 34:06
  And you got to channel that into something, you know.
• 34:10
  But so, you know, you have martial arts systems that's modeled on the fights
• 34:16
  that male kangaroos have with each other, you know.
• 34:19
  And, you know, you have things that limit.
• 34:22
  And then rules as well.
• 34:24
  So like, if you injure somebody, then you're responsible for gathering food for them
• 34:30
  until they get better.
• 34:31
  Like, you know, and there's sort of built in, there's built in limits.
• 34:37
  There's always regulatory feedback loops built in, you know, to all the rule-governed stuff that happens.
• 34:43
  You don't just have a massive battle where you go, oh, let's choose this ground.
• 34:48
  So that when they march towards us in their heavy armor, they'll all get stuck in the mud.
• 34:53
  And then we can beat disappear numbers.
• 34:55
  And then, I don't know, take over their castle or whatever I do.
• 35:01
  Take their women and all their wine.
• 35:03
  Yeah.
• 35:04
  But I mean, of course, the Westerner would say that this model of battle is not warfare
• 35:12
  and having the bummerang for just one hand, it is great until the British Navy shows up,
• 35:20
  at which point, you know, so there's a virtue in that model because it had longevity.
• 35:28
  But what it didn't have, the West does have, is this arrow of progress that goes from bummerang to gunship,
• 35:36
  to, you know, space laser, to walking on the moon, vaccines, whatever else it might be that you want,
• 35:44
  that do have, I mean, those things do have merit to some people's lives.
• 35:49
  I mean, it's good that we live in a world, isn't it, where there are vaccines and planes or not?
• 35:55
  Yeah, I know.
• 35:59
  It's not good for all of that.
• 36:01
  The problem that's always highlighted is that our ways don't scale, which they did continentally
• 36:09
  and also with, you know, the very long tradition of trade that we had up through the Torah Straits,
• 36:15
  Sintanyu Guinea and then into Indonesia, even what's called Indonesian now.
• 36:19
  You know, these protocols did work, you know, with others who are living under that and would respect that.
• 36:27
  The problem is, you know, everybody has to be doing it or it doesn't work.
• 36:33
  So if you've got suddenly this global culture where you can mobilize many thousands really quickly from one place to another,
• 36:41
  you got trouble there, you know, because that technology didn't evolve slowly enough
• 36:48
  and thoughtfully enough with the limits that were needed to prevent it from becoming, you know, a really horrible way to bloody live.
• 36:58
  Which, you know, arguably a lot of that was caused by climate change.
• 37:02
  You know, the end of the last ice age and, you know, some continents trying out, some of them getting wet,
• 37:09
  sea levels rising, you know, holy provikings got no land anymore that, you know, is going to support their life.
• 37:19
  You know, you got to go out and raid some fellas.
• 37:22
  You know, so these things happen, you know, and we deal with them.
• 37:27
  I guess it's just life's two big questions is, you know, how do you cope with change?
• 37:33
  How do you deal with change and how do you deal with ourselves?
• 37:37
  I think it's life's two big questions.
• 37:40
  Do you have an answer?
• 37:43
  No, that's just ongoing inquiry. Maybe my grandkids will figure it out.
• 37:49
  I mean, in addition to how do you cope with change, there's the question of do you instigate change?
• 37:55
  I mean, isn't the, you know, because it's like the Scottish Enlightenment and the industrial revolution
• 38:00
  happened and ever since then we've been living in a world in which move fast and break things is the ethos.
• 38:10
  And that has had tremendous upsides in reducing infant mortality and increasing life expectancy and increasing the range of foods that we get to eat
• 38:20
  and the number of diseases that we can treat and the number of places that we can explore and the amount of entertainment that we can consume.
• 38:27
  It also has downsides because move fast and break things means you break a lot of things.
• 38:33
  Yeah. Well, you know, the people who want to make change is like conservatives they hold onto story and they try to, you know,
• 38:42
  limit and slow down change and be more thoughtful about it.
• 38:45
  Well, that's what conservatives used to be until they became fricking radicals, which is just break things quickly.
• 38:53
  Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the problem I guess with that, I don't know that kind of, it's not really the world we live in anymore,
• 39:03
  but it's all the systems and institutions as they still have that pattern, you know, this kind of, you know,
• 39:12
  like everything else to be research based and secular and, you know, considered.
• 39:19
  So we try and make decisions based on these things.
• 39:24
  But there's no story with that.
• 39:27
  You know, it's always exposition and facts and reasoning and that doesn't grab people.
• 39:34
  And that makes room for people to come in who do have narratives, which is what grabs people.
• 39:40
  You know, if you've got narratives that, you know, what's going on in the world is a struggle between angels and demons,
• 39:47
  the light and the dark, you know, civilization and uncivilization.
• 39:53
  Oh, my goodness, you know, that's a narrative that'll grab people where they live.
• 39:58
  You know, you can mobilize armies like that. You can, you can get people doing street violence and then hold that over everybody else's head.
• 40:09
  You know, and when you dox someone, which is, you know, you can make like a list of liberal professors and like dox them and you'll know,
• 40:17
  then that there will be multiple bomb threats and death threats, which will continue until that person has to be let go or has to move town.
• 40:26
  You know, you can, the story is powerful, you know, whether it's right or wrong story.
• 40:31
  You know, and yeah, it's, I don't know, like the kind of progressive liberal consensus that was the reality before they didn't really have good story.
• 40:47
  And, or if they did, they didn't use it right. You know, people get disenchanted with, you know, too much rationality.
• 40:57
  You got to have, you got to have a mythology, you got to have a folklore, you got to have a unifying narrative.
• 41:04
  Well, that's how I'm going to round out the trilogy anyway.
• 41:07
  Yeah, with these three books.
• 41:09
  What's the next one?
• 41:10
  Try and get a sort of a unifying narrative.
• 41:14
  You know, not unifying like everyone's the same one, but you know, compatible narratives.
• 41:19
  Yeah, right.
• 41:20
  Yeah, we're looking into like serpent, serpent lore around the globe.
• 41:25
  You know, from like dragons to, you know, the midgard serpent and rainbow snake and all these ones.
• 41:33
  And we're kind of looking at it.
• 41:35
  It's always a foundational mythology and a sense that this thing was here before, you know, this world.
• 41:43
  And that, you know, it's not really good or bad.
• 41:46
  It's, it's, it's the thing that, you know, is around creation and destruction.
• 41:52
  And, you know, that struggle towards, you know, negative entropy, I guess physicists would call it, but, you know, holding, holding the world together.
• 42:02
  Getting homeostasis or stability in the systems and, and becoming a better person and then help be trying to be more.
• 42:12
  More of a, a good person than an asshole and just answers that how to deal with ourselves question.
• 42:18
  I mean, because there's values that come with this all the time, like whether you're sent George who has to slay the dragon or whatever there are.
• 42:26
  There are cultural sort of norms and, and sort of rules for decent behavior and, and decent speech and, you know, a decent term.
• 42:39
  What is it that there's the right speech? It's a Buddhism thing.
• 42:43
  It's also within Zoroastrianism, right speech, right thought and right action.
• 42:48
  You know, it's, um, this sort of tends to come through in this serpent law from all over.
• 42:53
  So I'm imagining, you know, so I mean to be in people for like my and my and Africa and all around the world.
• 43:00
  Of course, my Viking mates too, because I love my Vikings.
• 43:03
  And, uh, yeah, I'm doing this one with my, with my partner, Megan, Keller, and we're, you know, so I'm not doing this one solo, which is the other thing.
• 43:14
  Yeah, right. You know, if you do something unilaterally like the last two books, it's, that's just your random words coming out.
• 43:21
  It's, you know, unless you're really solidly in your standpoint, then, um, you know, it's just going to be like, uh, unilateral stuff coming out.
• 43:30
  So this one's going to try and be more consensus building and more, uh, bringing people together, rather than just going, hey, where the best and you all suck.
• 43:40
  You don't do that. Yeah, you don't do that. But what, but there is a phenomenon that you put your finger on, which I'm sure the listener has noticed too, which is in our quest for mythology and floor.
• 43:53
  The, the, the ones that sound, um, traditional and indigenous are given a pass if they're nonsensical in a way that traditional western woo-woo doesn't, right?
• 44:09
  You talk about the majesty of the serpent and everyone's like, oh my goodness, this is so filled with ancient wisdom.
• 44:15
  You talk about Adam and Eve, which you spoke disparagingly about the moment ago and everyone apart from Christians is like, that's just a silly book.
• 44:23
  You know, why would you believe such nonsense? But then you start talking to them about the indigenous lore and their eyes go wide and they're like, wow, I'm getting in touch with something that's deeply meaningful.
• 44:33
  I mean, isn't, isn't ancient nonsense, just ancient nonsense, regardless of which tradition it comes from?
• 44:39
  Yeah, it's just, here's the problem. Damn, you know, I got to use big words like epistemology and ontology, but, you know, but your epistemology is how you make sense of reality, like what stories you're going to tell yourself, you know.
• 44:54
  You know, you're inquiry and investigation into reality and how you conduct that, that's your epistemology, ontology is just, you know, what's real, what you know to be real.
• 45:04
  And that there's, you know, this, of course, there has to be a common ontology, everyone's going to have some basic agreement about what's real.
• 45:12
  You know, there is gravity, that's the real thing.
• 45:16
  Yeah, so the problem is, is getting all that mixed up. If you get the stories mixed up as like you try to be like a, what do they call it in the erantism with, with, with, with Bible scholars who say, no, no, no, every single word is exactly perfect and inviolable and it happened exactly like that.
• 45:38
  You know, so if you're using it as that, rather than as a road map, you know, for how you make sense of the world, you know, then you tip things up.
• 45:46
  So if we say like this, like the epistemology, that's what's true, you know, for how you make your truth.
• 45:55
  Ontology, that's what's real.
• 45:57
  Now, if you get truth and real mixed up, and especially in a post truth world now, everybody's truth is, is what they're thinking is the reality.
• 46:08
  So there's been this like polar shift, you know, where the truth has become the real, you know, and.
• 46:17
  But you're using progress in a, in a slightly slippery way there aren't you?
• 46:21
  So talking about my, if you're approaching my lived truth.
• 46:24
  Yeah, I mean, so our story is, that's the law L.O.R.E.
• 46:28
  It's also the law L.A.W.
• 46:30
  You know, because it's not, you know, it doesn't matter if it's bloody, you know, factually this is exactly how it happened.
• 46:37
  You know, it's actually carrying a whole heap of law and messages about behavior and like a universe of knowledge in there.
• 46:46
  Like as a mnemonic device, you know, in this sex and violence in these stories, and that's there for a reason because it helps you remember, you know,
• 46:53
  there's whole maps of land and meaning with all the ways that you have to be and interact.
• 46:59
  But then how you interact with the next people and the next people and the next people these songlines go right across.
• 47:05
  You know, these big stories, they carry, they carry the sort of rules and the norms of how to be, you know, and how to pursue.
• 47:15
  The truth, you know, so, you know, your truth might be that the Southern Cross is an immune foot.
• 47:21
  But it also, you know, the neighbors next door, they might think it's like the eyes of an old fellow and any young fellow got thrown up there in a tree.
• 47:34
  You know, and then there's a couple of galas of white cockatoo's chasing me. It might be different.
• 47:38
  It's not, it's, we sit around the fire with those people and it's not like, no, no, no.
• 47:43
  No, sure, but not what happens to the guy.
• 47:46
  Are you crazy?
• 47:47
  What happens to the guy who thinks that the Southern Cross is just the way that we perceive a few balls of flaming gas in the distant cosmos from our particular point in the galaxy?
• 47:59
  Yeah, well then he brings that story and there's got to be story for that.
• 48:05
  Is that the same kind of story?
• 48:08
  This is the problem I had before.
• 48:10
  Your secular sort of progressivism, it does not have good story.
• 48:16
  So you've got to have story for that, you know, and like, okay, so if you read Hawkins, you know, like you read his story about that, he will still tell a story of creation.
• 48:32
  And of how things came to be, you know, he'll map that out.
• 48:35
  So there is story there. It's just not very exciting.
• 48:38
  Well, I mean, this is the great challenge, though, of secular life, isn't it?
• 48:42
  Like, you know, Carl Sagan, when I was in my teens, I read Cosmos and Richard Dawkins has a book called Unleaving the Rainbow,
• 48:51
  which is about the sort of poetry and majesty of science.
• 48:56
  The magic of existence, I think, is another one of his books.
• 48:59
  There are people, Richard Feynman, the great physicist.
• 49:01
  Yeah, there are people who have sort of devoted their lives to trying to make the stories of what is factually true about the world as emotionally evocative as bullshit stories, no offense.
• 49:16
  And it's a tough, it's a tough ask.
• 49:19
  I still think it's a mission worth pursuing.
• 49:22
  But when you're doing it, you know, laterally like that, you know, it's no good.
• 49:26
  I mean, I think the, you know, the good stories in science, like the we get excited about the, you know, my granddaughter is staying with us now.
• 49:35
  She's moved from back up home and staying with us going to school here.
• 49:39
  Science is a favorite subject, you know, that there's good stories in there, those eureka moments, even if they're a little bit bullshit.
• 49:48
  You know, it probably didn't really happen that way.
• 49:50
  And you were probably a bit more of an asshole than everybody.
• 49:53
  Well, so it doesn't matter. The story's important.
• 49:56
  You know, well, the stories I want him to be under the apple tree.
• 49:59
  He's under the apple tree. The apple falls out.
• 50:02
  It's on the head.
• 50:03
  Check a little, you know, I need that story.
• 50:05
  You know, me and Chekey Tyson, you know, I need that story to be true for Newton's theory of gravity to be true.
• 50:12
  You don't need to have some cities to have actually jumped out of his bar.
• 50:15
  Exactly. It doesn't need to be true, but the story's got to be there, you know, because it's the story of inspiration.
• 50:21
  Because what's happening in that moment when you're learning about, you know, Newton and the theories of gravity, an apple is falling on your head.
• 50:29
  You know, and it doesn't have to be real, but the story is the thing that ties it.
• 50:35
  Well, I'd like it to be real, Tyson.
• 50:37
  I mean, don't get too epistemologyontology mixed up.
• 50:40
  It can be enough. It can be real. It's not being true.
• 50:43
  Here is an ontologically true thing that is epistemologically satisfying as a story, which is that if you go really, really fast, then time slows down.
• 50:54
  And you can, I was telling my kids about this the other day, you can get two clocks and you can sync them up perfectly.
• 51:00
  And you can put one on a spaceship and you can send it into space.
• 51:03
  And when it comes back, it'll actually be ticking slower than the one on Earth, not through some trick, but because it's actually experienced less time just because it was going fast.
• 51:13
  Like that, you should have seen my six year old son's eyes when I told him that.
• 51:17
  Yeah, that's a great story. It doesn't matter how a person found it out.
• 51:21
  It's woven into the fabric of reality.
• 51:23
  That's why Newton can't make your phone work.
• 51:29
  But I say that's the same thing. You've got to factor that in with the equations.
• 51:33
  But Newton helps me win money at the pub playing pool.
• 51:40
  Einstein helps me win money if I'm online sports gambling.
• 51:44
  So, you just shift your story.
• 51:48
  You move your story depending on where you are.
• 51:51
  It's the same as us. We'll sit around the fire.
• 51:54
  Very easy, good conversations with Western astrobiologists sitting around with an islander.
• 52:01
  Central desert fellow, all different stories for that.
• 52:04
  But, you know, if that happened earlier on, then, you know, people, you know, science would have discovered that, you know, creators are formed by asteroids, heaps faster than they did.
• 52:15
  If they'd been in dialogue with other cultures, you know, particularly ours, you know.
• 52:20
  There's lots of things there.
• 52:22
  And not just like, oh, you know, there's stories true.
• 52:25
  There was a giant dingo.
• 52:27
  Literally, you know, it's like, oh, well, you know, it's not about the facts in the story, but it's about, you know, all the things that come along with it.
• 52:36
  And sometimes there's facts that are interesting.
• 52:39
  For example, the markings on, you know, how there was like 12,000 years ago, there was giant lizards in Australia that could like eat a man.
• 52:49
  You know, we still got the stories for them.
• 52:52
  So even if on the fossil record, the fossil record can't tell you what color they wear or what the markings were on their skin, we can, because it's in our stories.
• 53:01
  You know, we have descriptions of those things in the stories.
• 53:04
  So there's, you know, there are fact-based things in there that you could, you know, that you could learn from.
• 53:10
  It is incredibly possible that I've been asking 40,000 years.
• 53:13
  There's been a little embellishment about the color of the skin of the lizard.
• 53:16
  Well, that's it.
• 53:17
  There's a name of telephone going on as well.
• 53:19
  Yes.
• 53:20
  There's some things that hold strong in there.
• 53:23
  It's like there's stuff that's memorized.
• 53:26
  The story's got different layers.
• 53:28
  So there's a big fantastical story, which is a big mnemonic device.
• 53:32
  And then there's subsets of knowledge in there that's room that's learned at different levels of, you know, initiation.
• 53:41
  So there's some stuff that's just has to be kept, absolutely solid.
• 53:45
  You know, Kuntakintae, Frickin, you know, was, was taken by these slavers.
• 53:51
  And that's memorized by the guy who's got the memory board with the beads on it.
• 53:54
  You know, and then bloody Alex Haley goes back, you know, a century or more later.
• 54:02
  And, and that old fella can tell him that from the oral history.
• 54:05
  You know, there's stuff like that that's kept, you know, really solid.
• 54:09
  The story itself is a psychotechnology, you know, for organizing, you know, all of those things, but with the ethics embedded as well to keep that law strong.
• 54:21
  Also, it's evocative, you know, we learn best through story.
• 54:24
  We remember through story.
• 54:26
  So, you know, it doesn't have to be true story.
• 54:29
  You know, I don't care if Newton got hit in the head by an apple.
• 54:34
  I don't care whether that's true or not.
• 54:36
  That's irrelevant.
• 54:38
  But what that does to me in helping me remember those, those equations, that that's important.
• 54:46
  You know, you've got to have good story.
• 54:48
  If it wasn't for that story, there's no way I'd be interested in Newton.
• 54:52
  It would be important though in a science textbook to distinguish between the laws of gravity that are testable and the claim that he was on the head by an apple.
• 55:03
  I just, I just think nobody has ever had trouble separating those things until recently, you know, people.
• 55:12
  Hasn't the history of confusion and the fundamental history of civilization?
• 55:21
  But it's only become problematic, you know, recently, relatively recently with people just sort of, you know, I don't know, getting into a massive tribal war around whether two plus two equals five or, you know, some shit like that.
• 55:38
  So let me give you another example like the, there was a, I'm half Kiwi and I know that you've done what you've studied.
• 55:45
  And the, there was this ongoing debate in New Zealand about whether or not Maori science should be taught alongside Western science in science textbooks in the New Zealand curriculum.
• 55:56
  With a bunch of white science, mostly white science is saying, if, you know, when the Maori science works, then it's just science.
• 56:04
  So thank you and congratulations for finding out what the Westerners didn't.
• 56:08
  But if they're, you know, to transpose the example to Australia, if there are, if there are fire techniques that indigenous Australians know that work better than Westerners understand, that's great.
• 56:20
  That's great. That, that then is just part of the corpus of knowledge of science and that is then verifiable human knowledge.
• 56:26
  You don't have to define it as indigenous knowledge or Western knowledge or set up fake binaries.
• 56:31
  Like what is true should go in the, in the science textbook and what is mythology or law or story or Newton being popped on the head with an apple.
• 56:40
  You can't, you can't understand the complexities of caring for caring for country with fire, which it is very complex.
• 56:48
  You know, you can't just back burn or something like that.
• 56:51
  It's, it's constantly shifting and has to be responsive and you need to understand the whole system.
• 56:56
  You can't understand that without the law.
• 56:58
  So you need the story that goes with that because that's where all the knowledge is.
• 57:02
  You know, you don't have to believe like, oh yeah, there was a giant ancestor with a big foot drop there.
• 57:09
  Like, it doesn't matter if that's literally true or not.
• 57:13
  Same way, what was the example you just, you just give it, ah, the, the culpapa Maori, culpapa Maori is a, is a indigenous methodology.
• 57:22
  And, you know, a lot of white scientists and researchers, what do they call them?
• 57:28
  Pacquiao researchers, they, they've inflected their methodology with culpapa Maori because there is, there are really good ethical processes embedded in that.
• 57:39
  And so they can inflect their scientific methodology with culpapa Maori because it, it actually, you know, it shifts the focus and you see things that you wouldn't have seen before if you weren't doing that mixed methods approach.
• 57:53
  You know, these things all have value, but they only have value in embassy.
• 57:57
  They only have value when we sit around the fire and no one's at the front.
• 58:00
  You know, and I guess that's what, that's what the call is to write story is, that's how write story is built.
• 58:06
  You know, we need to build out, build our new stories of, you know, of what we all are and what we're supposed to be and how we can, how we can deal with the change and how we can deal with these ourselves together.
• 58:20
  We have to have a good story where we have a common ontology agreed.
• 58:25
  And it doesn't matter what the mystical parts of that, which, you know, might be true for you, but they're not really real.
• 58:32
  Universally, there are, you know, universal goals and desires that people have.
• 58:40
  Part of what impedes that it strikes me in people's quests for right or wrong or black or white or good or bad is the binary.
• 58:51
  Like I mean, when I was saying earlier about my eyes straddle a bunch of different communities and a bunch of different ways of thinking.
• 58:58
  You obviously do, that's your whole life's work really is to try to articulate a bridge between these two ways of being and ways of thinking.
• 59:06
  And you have an analogy in the book about your old Danish friend. Is he Danish or Dutch?
• 59:11
  He's Danish.
• 59:12
  Danish.
• 59:13
  And you say that over there they've got a sense of some tactics being either agricultural or non-agricultural, meaning like, you know, I don't know the pseudoscience of the indigenous.
• 59:27
  Or semi-agricultural, but then in Australia, we don't have a classification of semi-agricultural.
• 59:33
  We have to deem things to either be on one side or the other side of a bright white line of truth or fiction.
• 59:41
  All right. That wasn't the Danish fellow. That was the free scene fellow, that other kind of vibe from Netherlands.
• 59:46
  Yeah, yeah.
• 59:47
  Yeah, my Vikings mixed up my other options.
• 59:50
  Yeah, those kind of sex and Vikings.
• 59:55
  They're the free scene indigenous.
• 59:58
  And it was more about that there is, there's no, in their traditional farming that he inherited from his grandfather, there is not a clear line of democation between the natural systems.
• 1:00:13
  And harvest, there's not a clear line of democation between that and the domesticated, you know, agriculture and pastoralism, et cetera.
• 1:00:22
  You know, it's all tied in together, you know, with, you know, collecting the early spring bird eggs in the grassy meadow.
• 1:00:34
  And like, you know, burning that meadow, you know, to wake up the salamanders, you know, at the end of winter from their hibernation, you know, all of these things.
• 1:00:43
  And then mowing the meadow at another time and all of this stuff, it's all, it's all bound together, you know, up with the heathlands and the, you know, everything else in their waterways and wetlands, you know, these are all commons.
• 1:00:58
  And, and the edge of their farm, like the, you know, that there are, there are wild things that they care for, you know, within, you know, and amongst all the domesticated animals and crops.
• 1:01:12
  And, you know, these things kind of blend together traditionally.
• 1:01:16
  So, yeah, there, there, it was more about that, you know, there wasn't that line of demarcation between the domesticated in the wild.
• 1:01:24
  This fella talks about his work with, with his, with his horse and, you know, how informed he is by the sort of paleo stuff, you know, like a really old carving of a horse that has these weird sort of dots in various places on the horse's body.
• 1:01:39
  You know, and it's from like, ah, ancient, like cave, cave man kind of thing, like from thousands of years before the horse was domesticated anywhere in the world, this carving, but it has these spots.
• 1:01:51
  And the horse is standing in a real weird way, like with its legs out and kind of prone. And anyway, so he tried pushing those pressure points on this.
• 1:02:03
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