The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Tyson Yunkaporta. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Tyson Yunkaporta. Tyson is an academic, an art critic and a researcher. He was a member of the Apalech Clan in far North Queensland, Australia. He’s the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Let me just insert here, if you haven’t read Sand Talk, go read it. It probably ranks in the 10 best books I have ever read. And to put that in context, I read more than 5,000 books, so if you haven’t read Sand Talk, go read it. Jim Rutt says this is a must read. In addition to researching, writing, and raising in hell, Tyson also carves traditional tools and weapons from wood, and he works as a senior research fellow in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University. If I believe the book that we’re going to be talking about today, beyond working in wood, he, at least for a spell, pounded on metal and made artifacts from metal, as well. Always good to chat with somebody that’s grounded in the real world.
Welcome, Tyson.
Tyson: I tried being a blacksmith for a minute.
Jim: Hard work, huh?
Tyson: Didn’t work out, but I learned a lot. You can’t mess around talking about other people’s cultures unless you’re going to try it out. You got to know what you’re talking about.
Tyson’s one of my very favorite folks, and this is the fifth time he’s been on the Jim Rutt Show. Back in EP 65 and 66, we went in depth on Sand Talk. Those were some amazing chats. And then back in current 032, Tyson and I chatted about spirits, Game B, and protopias. Then back in current 10, we talked about humans as custodial species. So if you want to hear more me and Tyson raising hell, go check it out. And as always links to that and everything else we talk about, we’ll be on the episode page at Jimruttshow.com.
Since then, you’ve got me flirting with skeptical kind of rationalism. I’ve been taking a stab at that since I was blacksmithing.
Jim: And for better or worse, I’m creeping towards considering the sacred. How about that?
Tyson: Well, everybody is.
Jim: Though I have my own enlightenment man view of the sacred, but we’ll probably talk about that later. It is interesting. I mean, the truth is there is one reality and all the various stories are ways to try to make sense of that reality. So not surprising that people who seriously invest in narrative end up sort of converging, but providing parallax that adds a lot of value.
Tyson: Yeah. Yeah. That’s it.
Jim: Today though, we’re going to talk about Tyson’s book, which came out a couple of years ago, but it’s just being released on Kindle, at least in the United States on, what, next week. So make sure you get that one too. It’s also very good. I held off doing it because in the survey I did, the majority of my listenership reads their books electronically, and I want Tyson to become rich in addition to famous from this podcast episode.
Tyson: Yeah, yeah, make me rich.
Jim: Yeah. And then you can spend half those royalties and buy me a cup of coffee when I come to Australia.
Tyson: That’s it.
Jim: Goodness. Before we jump into the book though, I do want to revisit a little bit from our yarn back in the day. One of the oddest things in my life was, not long before I talked to you, a emu showed up at our farm deep in Appalachia, and I mean real deep in Appalachia. We lived in one of the most remote counties in the eastern part of the United States, and we were gone on vacation and our neighbor comes by and checks on the place every few days. She reported to my wife that she had seen an ostrich in our field, and when did we get an ostrich? And I go, we didn’t get no ostrich. And we drove back in after being gone for a couple of weeks, looked in our big field, known as the Big Buck Field, and sure enough, there’s something that looks like a little ostrich.
And I said, “That’s no ostrich, that’s an emu.” And went back and looked in the book to make sure, and sure enough. And Mr. Emu, even though I don’t know his gender, somehow he just seemed to give off a dude vibe, hung out in the woods around the Big Buck Field for at least four weeks after we got back. And deer would come out when he was out there and he’d look them in the eye and they’d turn around and run off. They were similar in weight probably, but the biggest deer, maybe 50 pounds heavier, but nobody wanted to mess with Mr. Emu, I can tell you that. And then after he’d been there about four weeks, and we read up on him and said, you don’t want to mess with Mr. Emu either. He will kick your ass if you get too close to him. On a day, kind of like today with snow on the ground, he comes walking by. The only time it came near our house, maybe 30 meters away, and just kept on going, looking really pissed off with the world, plodding through six inches of snow and then headed off into the woods, and I never saw him again.
We talked about this at some length and Tyson promised to ponder the symbol of the emu. And I’m curious to, first, for our audience, you maybe tell us a little bit about the emu’s problematic nature and what you, as a sage, might say about all that.
Tyson: I can layer in some of my ponderings-
Jim: Yeah, let’s do it.
Tyson: … since then. This is how right story happens, Jim. Wrong story is just what comes out unilaterally in the moment. Right story, it takes time. You got to sit and talk to lots of people about it and arrive at things together. First of all, I want to claim either credit or accountability for potentially precipitating your slide, your descent into considering spiritual realms as a real thing because that might’ve been it. Yeah, because we’d just finished talking about the story when you went, oh my God, and now he’s shown up on my doorstep in the mountains. And the story we were talking about was about female emu actually. But now in our mythical world of Tyson and Jim, it’s Mr. Emu now. So that gender thing is important, but we’ll get to that. But yeah, so we were talking about Mrs. Emu there, and she’s bad in the old stories, especially if you are, I have that Brolgar totem, and Emu and Brolgar are always enemies.
So emu is a narcissist at the start of creation. Emu’s running around trying to boss everybody and proclaim himself as supreme. I am. I’m the best. I’m the fastest. I can do anything and makes a lot of trouble for everybody. Breaks up the meeting kind of thing, tries to be boss for themselves. Anyway, so I guess all of that story was all about, we were talking about that narcissism as a bit of a plague on the earth, and it’s always been there since the start of creation, but we’ve always held it in check. We always find ways to insulate the complete destruction of a system from these ones who come in and try and bend reality towards their own egos.
Anyway, so we talked about that a lot. But Mr. Emu is a different proposition, Jim, because he’s a nurturer and he’s very responsible. So when Mrs. Emu lays the eggs, she pretty much just takes off. She gone and Mr. Emu is the one who sits on the eggs. Mr. Emu is the one that raises all the chicks. So I thought about that quite a bit, that sort of nurturing capacity and that commitment of Mr. Emu. Look, I’ve just seen this here. My son’s been playing with these, so they’re here on my desk. It’s my clap-
Jim: [inaudible 00:07:51] wooden sticks.
Tyson: That’s my clap sticks. So that’s for music, ceremony stuff and all that kind of thing. But yeah, just when I saw them now, I just remembered one time I killed a Mr. Emu with these clap sticks. I wasn’t even really hunting. I didn’t have any weapons with me, but there was one on the side of the road coming back from when we’d just done all this ceremony out in Western New South Wales and we’re driving back. And yeah, I seen this big emu there and I went, I’m going to get that emu. So I grabbed my clap sticks and jumped out. And so one of them was the fatter one, this one here. Yeah, I threw this one and dinged him in the head with that. And so he is stunned and lying down, and so then I ran up and finished him off with the other one, and that’s why we were eating for the next two days. A lot of really good meat, a lot of good fat on a emu. I think I still got some of his feathers out the back. Anyway, I just thought you’d appreciate that, like a hunting story.
Jim: As regular listeners know, I’m a hunting dude. I do my deer hunting every year. Wouldn’t want the Rutt babies to starve.
Tyson: Yeah, I don’t think I’d like to eat any of your deer meat. It’d just be full of AR bullets, peppered from head to toe. It’d just be like-
Jim: You don’t use an AR for hunting animals, only for an annoying two-legged creatures. We use a good bolt-action precision rifle. Single shot, one shot, one shot only.
Tyson: It’s weird. I’ve actually bought an AR one time, we can’t have them here in Australia.
Jim: Yeah, they took them away a few years back, as I recall.
Tyson: They did. They did. They had one mass shooting and just went, “Nah, okay, that’s not for us.” And that was the most conservative prime minister ever that did that. So yeah, we got a different conservatism here, brand. But I did buy, I bought an AR for a friend in Alaska. Or bought it back. I got a friend, a native Alaskan [inaudible 00:09:52]. He called me up one day. He was in strife. He’d had to pawn his guns, but he really needed his AR and said, “Oh brother, can you send me a couple hundred bucks so I can buy my AR back?” Yeah. So I’ve technically armed-
Jim: Virtually.
Tyson: Yeah, an indigenous insurrectionist somewhere in Alaska at some stage. So I don’t know, I’m probably on some kind of list now.
Jim: Well now, you’re in the golden culture. People, as we say, the gun nuts say, a man without a gun is a subject. A man with a gun is a citizen.
Tyson: A citizen.
Jim: He’s a citizen.
Tyson: I don’t think I’m either of those things. We occupy a strange liminal space.
Jim: Clearly, citizen is a very western concept. And literally, it’s citizen, right? It goes back to the Romans and the Civitas and all that stuff.
Tyson: Starship Troopers, you know, that movie and book. I remember there was-
Jim: Never saw the movie-
Tyson: … a difference between-
Jim: … but I did read the book.
Tyson: There were civilians. Civilians and citizens were the classification.
Jim: Another one of Heinlein’s books that’s really worth reading if you like this kind of crazy shit is Beyond this Horizon. It’s a very obscure novel. And in that, he makes the distinction between citizens who have all rights and are always armed and then everybody else who have to get off the sidewalk when a citizen comes by. It’s really quite-
Tyson: Oh man, it sounds like he was into that.
Jim: A little nutty.
Tyson: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: Anyway, let’s get into things a little bit. But before we get down and dirty into the book, specifically, one of the things that I really thought was interesting, got me thinking again, God damn it, I hate when that happens is in the intro to the book, you talk about your interesting collective pronouns, us two, us only, and us all. I think we’re three that I recall. And of course, I can’t help myself being kind of a linguistics nerd. I found you use us two, 43 times.
Tyson: [inaudible 00:11:56]
Jim: I did the search. Us only, three times and us all, three times. And if you’re not paying attention, if you get the wrong one, you won’t read the thing correctly. So for the ignorant folks who listen to the show, maybe you could just give them a quick rundown on those three pronouns and why they’re quite meaningful, actually.
Tyson: First of all, just before everybody switches off and starts shouting at their phone, yeah, I’m not going to force you to use my indigenous pronouns. In fact, I prefer it if you didn’t. Hey, yeah. So all of our pronouns, there’s heaps of them because they have to describe your relationship because your identity isn’t just you, it’s your relationships, and it shifts the context from moment to moment. So our language has to reflect that. So you and me in this sibling relationship that we’ve developed over the years, we’re an us two, if we’re talking about us. But I don’t know if I was talking about if we went hunting together and we would just like men with AR-15s, then we’d refer to that group as us only. And I don’t know, us only, that implies us, but not them. We’re more males who like guns here, there’s that kind of thing.
But then, us all is a larger group and can refer to everybody. But yeah, there’s more layers though, because for all of those, there’s lots of different forms like us two, belonging to him. So your dad or your uncle or who you related to there but not belong to her because we don’t have male and female pronouns at all. It’s just nil if you’re referring to like him or her there. So anyway, there’s heaps of pronouns and it’s very complex because the relation is the important thing. You can’t refer to yourself. If you are saying nah, it’s usually there’s something else appended to that or in the context of the sentence where you’re talking about yourself in relation to somebody, something. It’s I belonging to, kind of that sense. But you can emu it up, you can, if you say I twice, then you’re declaring separation from a relationship. It can’t last long. It’s only temporary because it’s a very destructive state to be in. But yeah, you declare that and that’s a signal to everybody that you want to start a fight. If you say I, I. And that’s all you have to say, I, I. And then it’s on. Someone will step up and you get some stuff off your chest.
Jim: Sometimes that’s just what you got to do. English has a paucity of good pronouns. Famously, it lacks a plural form of you. And so here in the south, we’ve invented one called y’all, you all.
Tyson: That’s it.
Jim: And it’s why the hell doesn’t English have, y’all? It should be. I’m telling the Oxford English dictionary, got to insert it as a real word.
Tyson: But they used to have it. So that was the classic higher forms of English had heaps more pronouns, and then suddenly it became only poor people and uneducated people use all those pronouns. It’s weird, isn’t it?
Jim: The other thing, and this is later in my notes, let’s pull it forward since we’re talking about this, is there is a kind of big perspectival difference between English pronouns and your people’s pronouns in that ours are always egocentric or ego defined. While as I’ve learned from reading your books and talking to you, and really shines out in this book, is that in this culture, your culture, the words are deeply and inherently relational, and that’s a completely different worldview. Maybe you could talk to that a little bit.
Tyson: Yeah, completely relational. So I guess with indigenous systems thinking and indigenous systems knowledge, you’re not looking at the nodes in the system. So your ecology or society, you’re not looking at all the nodes and groups in that way. You’re more looking at a pattern of relations. So as the relation between two people is more important than those two people, than either of them, so that’s what you see. But then they’re not coming as individuals to that either. Nothing is seen as an individual thing. So us two talking here, you are a web of relationships that’s unique on the planet, and I’m a web of relationships unique on the planet, and we’re bringing those together and we’re in each other’s webs. So yeah, it really gets away from this.
It’s hard to do the hyper individualism thing when your language and your culture does that to you. There’s interesting pronouns in English. Some stuff has survived. You still have a residual subjunctive mood that’s sometimes used, like, I demand that he be punished, kind of thing. There’s a little bit of subjective mood there, which is pretty cool. We still have that. What else did I see the other day that made me ponder? All right, here, fill in the pronoun. When I say blank, you tell me what pronoun goes there. All right, so if somebody comes up to me talking about pronouns, then I’m going to punch blank in the face. What’s the pronoun for the person who came up to me?
Jim: Him.
Tyson: Just him automatically? No.
Jim: Probabilistically. Well, unfortunately in English, him is the one that includes him and her. That’s in the official English, him is the neutral pronoun.
Tyson: Yeah, but if we’re talking about a hypothetical scenario, if somebody come in this room right now, blank would have to sit in this chair.
Jim: He would have to sit in this chair, or she would have to-
Tyson: You’re so Mediterranean. That’s how they do it in Italian and Spanish and Portuguese and French, they just default to that. But in English, they don’t. They say they, it’s always been a they thing.
Jim: Well, they is supposed to be for plural.
Tyson: I thought about it like that, I was like, I thought that was a new thing that came out of Twitter two years ago. But no, it’s actually a thing. So I don’t know. There’s interesting residual stuff floating around in English that’s exciting.
Jim: There’s some controversy about that one, whether they should be used for singulars. And of course, it’s become very popular around gender politics to use they in a singular sense, but strict grammarians argue that that may not be proper.
Tyson: In the late ’80s doing English at uni, the early subjects in undergraduate, yeah, style guide always said, if the gender is uncertain, you go they, which I don’t know.
Jim: I’m old enough to remember when it was, use the masculine form if the gender is uncertain. That was in the book.
Tyson: That’s so exciting.
Jim: In the grammar books. That’s interesting, look at the history of that.
Tyson: I wonder if that’s like people reading their classics and that, but in the original romance languages and stuff like that. Hey, which I’ve done, which I’ve done. I read Dante. I had to learn the Florentine dialect to do it too. Yeah, that was like-
Jim: You read it in the Italian?
Tyson: Yeah, but that was decades ago. I can’t remember any Italian anymore.
Jim: There was a huge number of references to Dante throughout the book.
Tyson: It was. It was just Inferno. The whole book was Inferno. My ultimate fantasy is that one day a Dante scholar is going to read that book and find all my Easter eggs in there full of Dante Easter eggs.
Jim: I saw some of them, but I read Inferno and the other ones, too, the whole trilogy when I was a freshman in college. I don’t remember much, but my wife and I occasionally joke that we really should endow a statue of Virgil where you come out of LAX airport in LA. Only classic scholars would get the joke, right?
Tyson: Yeah, yeah. What’s the conspiracy theory airport? The one where there’s the horse of the apocalypse and stuff like that, where they reckon there’s all kids in the underground tunnels under the airport. Should put it there.
Jim: I missed that one. No, LA. Welcome to LA, Virgil: Your Guide to Hell.
Tyson: Somebody will tell you what it was after the thing. I can’t remember the name of the airport, but it’s like a massive thing in conspiracy circles. Everyone’s always talking about that.
Jim: Hit me up on it. Somebody hit me up on Jim_Rutt at Twitter.
Tyson: And they look at all, there’s heaps of content online, has been for 20 years or something. They look at all the artwork in the place and they’re finding all these messages from the global elites, the globalists and the Satanists and the people who are taking over the world, messages of what their plans are for destroying humanity and all that sort of stuff. And there’s all these stories about the tunnels under the airport and that they’re trafficking white children down there or something like that. Yeah, that’s full on. Now, I want a commission a sculpture of Virgil out the front of that one so they can imagine all the underground circles of hell that are under the airport.
Jim: That would be pretty funny. That’d be pretty funny. Oh, another question I got to ask before we get really into it. You mentioned in the book that you believe there’ve been people misusing Sand Talk, or some of the things in Sand Talk, in a bad way. And I was curious about that because Sand Talk is one of the most beautiful, ethereal books I have ever read. That’s hard for me to imagine how somebody could misuse it. What have you been seeing out there? Of course, humans are weird, so anything could happen.
Tyson: This is what got me down the rabbit hole for right story, wrong story, and for starting to research disinformation, misinformation, and cult indoctrination and all this sort of stuff, because I was getting a lot of messages from people in compounds and stuff who were saying, “Yeah, thanks very much for Sand Talk. We’re using it in our compound to keep the ladies in line. A lot of the 12-year-old wives trying to escape on us and we implemented the governance structure from Aboriginal Australia, and that’s kept them in line good. Thank you very much.” And I’m like, “What the hell’s going on here?”
I had all kinds of weird people contacting me with their weird ideologies. I feel like, have you ever seen one of those Steiner dolls in Steiner education?
Jim: No.
Tyson: And I’ll get like, I don’t know, it’ll just be some formless, shapeless thing like a little bag with a string around to sort of form a rough kind of head and a body. And their idea is that children will project the image of whoever they want that doll to be on the doll. I feel like Sand Talk was a Steiner doll for some people. People keep saying to me, I remember when you said in Sand Talk, X, Y, Z? And I’m like, no, I don’t remember that. Yeah, it is an ethereal book in some ways.
Jim: It’s a really ethereal book. It pushes, at least for me, it pushed me into weird, far out fucking places. But in a good way.
Tyson: Yeah, I had a whole just running, for several months, just running an in-depth analysis on one chapter from Sand Talk just to try and figure out what I was doing there.
Jim: You didn’t know. Yeah, yeah.
Tyson: I was bipolar, like I told you, I wrote it in two weeks because I got bipolar. I get these manic episodes and I’m-
Tyson: Because I’ve got bipolar, I get these manic episodes, and I can do anything. Like I’m a superhero for two weeks. Yeah. So, I banged that book out real fast there. And then now, I’ve spent the intervening years trying to figure out what the hell I said.
Jim: That’s amazing.
Tyson: Because I’ve got a lab, Indigenous Systems Knowledge Lab, at Deakin University, since the last time I talked to you. And so, I had the whole team analyzing this chapter, to figure out what the hell I was doing in there, and how it was that… Looking to see if I was manipulating people, and then trying to figure out if I was doing it consciously.
But then trying to figure out, “Well, what’s my responsibility now?” Because we looked, there’s a lot of weaponized fallacies. A lot of logic that was kind of used, and a lot of weird techniques, like to sort of produce a dissociative state in the reader, to sort of confuse them a bit, and then slap them with whatever message I wanted to sell.
Jim: Good work.
Tyson: Whatever radical crap I wanted to shove down their throats. And the us-two thing, is they were really questioning that for a while, to figure out if I was overusing it, to try and create an illusion of an intimate bond with the reader, and then jujitsu that into a trauma bond, and then give you heaps of love.
But then, all of a sudden, slap you and tell you your civilization is rubbish, and pull the rug out from under your feet, and then love you up again, like I’m some kind of abusive husband.
So, I don’t know. I started looking into how I was speaking and writing, and wondering how much of that had been… I had just kind of absorbed it through watching too many YouTube videos, or something.
Jim: I’m going to turn the anti-reductionist knob here.
Tyson: Oh, nice.
Jim: And I’m going to say, your team was wasting their time, because they were making a category error. Sand Talk is not a polemic, even though it has some polemic attributes to it. Sand Talk is first and foremost, a object of high art. It is an artistic accomplishment. And if you approach it as art, it all makes sense.
Tyson: Yes. All right. Nice.
Jim: I’ve read that book twice, and deeply. It moved me very deeply. But not for its polemic, because we pretty much agree on all the polemical stuff, but rather the artistry, and the use of the two, was certainly part of the spell. A good artist, it puts you in a magic spell. You were putting a spell on the reader. You were taking them to places they’d never been. You were saying, as you said, the logic didn’t always parse, but does Cubism parse? No.
Tyson: That’s it. No. It was intensely illogical. And leaning into the illogic. And it is literature, I’ll grant you that.
Jim: Even higher art, art.
Tyson: Does art have to have a degree of self-awareness, though, in order to be art?
Jim: Hell no. Hell no.
Tyson: All right, then. It’s art.
Jim: Hell no. Jackson Pollack?
Tyson: So maybe the next one. So, I busted my ass trying to do actual art for Right Story, Wrong Story. But maybe it isn’t art, because maybe I was too self-aware. Maybe an artist needs to not have their head up their ass.
Jim: I will just say, as much as I did enjoy the book, but there were places where you were trying too hard. I could see it. You were trying too hard to use fancy things that just came naturally in Sand Talk, but they were much simpler. I could see you were stretching a little bit to do a little fancy stuff, but it didn’t detract from the book. But, I noticed it.
Tyson: Yeah. And structurally. I really worked hard to be as clever as I could be for that book. But that’s not what art does though, is it? I really leaned into that, and leaned into it hard. And it is technically, it’s better writing, and it is more literate than the other one was.
But there’s something about the naivety of Sand Talk, and that general, I had that trusting feeling for the world, of like, “Yeah. No, I’ll talk to the flat-Earthers. Flat-Earthers are great.” All that kind of thing. There was that kind of naive trust. And I guess, Right Story, Wrong Story was like going, “Oh, no. That trust is really bad. You give them a hand, they take the arm. Oh no, the weld’s on fire. What are we going to do?” Anyway.
Jim: I’ll put it this way. Comparing the two, I bet there’s a lot more semicolons in Right Story, Wrong Story.
Tyson: I believe there’s a couple of colons in there. Never used a colon before. Yep.
Jim: And my good friend, now departed-
Tyson: Full colon.
Jim: Full colon. Yeah. My good friend Cormac McCarthy, who recently died, great American novelist, he famously never used a semicolon in his life.
Tyson: Nice. Nice.
Jim: And his work also has this high, ethereal art. Even when he is talking about the most depraved shit, like his probably most famous book, Blood Meridian, you can’t find a more depraved, crazed, bloody book. But there’s no semicolons in it.
Tyson: I never used to do semicolons. I learned semicolons from editors. Yeah.
Jim: Don’t pay attention to those people.
Tyson: Full colons in this one. You know how you run your search for keywords on a text? You should do a search just for colons. See how many come up. I can get a colonoscopy from Jim Rutt.
Jim: Can’t do it today, but I will do it and send it to you.
Tyson: A literary colonoscopy. I’d be interested.
Jim: The first time I got a colonoscopy, when you turn 50, you’re supposed to get one, came back with a perfect score. “Come back and see us in 10 years.” I immediately went on and said, “Finally. I have proof that I’m a perfect asshole.”
Tyson: Oh, my God.
Jim: One final thing about art. In Sand Talk, there’s a lot of beautiful but simple illustrations. In this one, you decided not to have any illustrations. What was your thinking about that?
Tyson: Well, Sand Talk was sharing, like right story. So, a story that’s like old, tested, true, still standing the test of time. Things that we all hold together, that collective good wisdom. So, Sand Talk was all right story. But Right Story, Wrong Story, it was looking at the world, and looking at the wrong stories that are happening out there.
And the wrong stories I was finding inside myself, as a pathology. And the more I saw these pathologies in myself, the more I was seeing them in the world. So, those wrong stories that you come to believe, the stories that move fast and break things, and that are unilateral, singular stories.
So, every time, I still made objects for every chapter to reflect the story. But I had to make wrong things. And then at the end, I had to burn all of those, because it’s like bringing a curse into the world if you do something with an image in our culture, of something that’s not true, or not right, then that’s a curse. That’s how you curse people.
Because a curse is about, and I mentioned this in Sand Talk, too, a curse is about creating an illusion, and then trying to have that illusion influence reality. So, you create this illusion, this image and idea of somebody being sick, and then you present that to them in subtle ways, to suggest to them that they’re sick. And then they get sick. You know what I mean? It’s that curse.
So, if I’d made images, in our culture, an image is the same as the word for spirit, because spirit’s the signal. And an image is a signal. So, if I’d made images, permanent images, for the wrong stories I was telling, then that would be a curse in the world, if that makes any sense.
Jim: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I can see that.
Tyson: I didn’t even get to keep the things. I had to burn most of the objects. I got in trouble. You might’ve noticed that the book sort of ends quite abruptly. My old people told me, “You’ve got to stop right now.”
Jim: You’re getting too weird, right? You’re getting too strange.
Tyson: Yeah. They were just like, “Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you going so deep into all this wrong stuff? It’s killing you. Stop.”
Jim: Sometimes that’s the right answer. That’s sometimes right. Well, let’s actually get into the book a little bit, but I’m sure we’ll hop around and do our usual thing. Why don’t you tell the story about wrong canoe, and how you meant that to communicate as the first story, the idea of wrong story and right story?
Tyson: Well, that’s in the intro, like I tell a bit of a story. I indent it, because it’s true. Yeah. So, I tell a story of the last time I recall making a canoe with family, and with my clan. There must’ve been like 50 people all involved in that. And we’re all making it together. And there were all different stages, and different things that different groups and specialists had to do to make it happen.
And so, the knowledge of making a canoe is something that sits with community. And the act of making it, it has to have teaching and learning in there, where you’re passing on different aspects of knowledge to the next generation. It’s multidisciplinary, and it’s connecting up a whole heap of different places and stories together. It’s a unifying kind of experience.
So, the wrong canoe I made was, at my university, three and a half thousand kilometers away from where canoes are made like that. So, it was out of place and out of time. And I made it myself, unilaterally, as a special person who has special knowledge. Like, “Here, look at my amazing, unique knowledge. I know how to make a dugout canoe.”
Yeah. So, I chipped away at that bloody thing. I made it out of wood that was way too hard, as well. So, it took heaps longer than it should have, too. But I made this amazing canoe. And it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s been exhibited in different art exhibitions and stuff down here in Melbourne, but it’s all wrong.
It’s actually, it kills the economy that it comes from, because it changes something that is really just the knowledge of a whole heap of people being preserved in the action and connection and relation of community, and then their passing on of knowledge to the next generation, and that longevity of knowledge, it’s kind of the opposite of that.
It’s one person making something that’s special. And because it’s made by one person who is like this singular genius, then it has this kind of value. It becomes an object. It becomes art. And so, if we talk about art, which we started talking about before, art is one of those three things that you park your capital in.
You know that European aristocracy idea that you put your money into land, and precious metals, and art. You’ve got to have a certain percentage of your wealth goes into that, because that’s what survives world wars, and that’s how you can rebuild your fortune if you lose your shirt in business.
So, I’d made something that sort of became a sink for somebody’s capital, that became something that somebody could invest in and keep. I kind of told that story, and just the wrong story that I’d made, and that I’d stepped into when I made this canoe, because art has to be rare and limitable.
If you’ve got a whole community of people who can make a canoe whenever they want, and they make heaps of them, then they’re not worth much at all, are they? But if that knowledge is lost forever, if it’s gone, and nobody’s making them anymore, which is now the reality, because I haven’t seen anyone make a canoe since I was very young.
So, it’s rare now. So, this item has value, because it’s rare. It is limitable and excludable, and therefore it could be priced highly. It can store a lot of value. It is essentially that limitability and excludability that’s essential for being able to have a growth-based economy, where your demand exceeds supply.
Which then requires a caste system, so that you can identify people who are going to be the ones who will miss out to create the demand, from whom you can limit the supply. So, it’s kind of all that wrong story all woven together in one horrendous canoe.
And I guess the whole book is, there’s that metaphor all the way through of us two are taking a canoe trip through hell. But we’re never really crossing. But I’m the ferryman. I’m not Virgil, I’m the ferryman. But you never get off the ferry. You just keep going round and round the river in a spiral.
Jim: And down the River Styx, or whatever it is, right?
Tyson: Yeah. Suddenly the Styx turns into a whirlpool that goes down through all this different layers of hell, like an open cut mine. Oh, it’s a terrifying journey.
Jim: It is interesting. I just don’t have a taste for it. But I do know lots of people that do, of art as a positional good. “The reason I have this art is because you can’t.” It just creeps me out, I must say.
We lived in Santa Fe for 10 years, a very intense art scene there. And everybody collects art and all this stuff. I would intentionally annoy them, make them think I was the worst Philistine ever, which says, “Oh yeah, when I go out to the art galleries over on Canyon Road, this year, yeah, pretty good year. I’m willing to pay $800 a square foot.”
And they go, “What?” I go, “Yeah, there’s things I want to put on the wall that I like to look at. And this year’s value to me is $800 a square foot.” And then they say, “Oh, but what about,” blah, blah, blah. And they said, “Well, you know what? Wouldn’t you ever buy really fine art?” And I said, “Yeah, for 50 grand. I’d pay 50 grand for a Vermeer, who is my favorite painter.”
I think they’re worth like a hundred million dollars, or something. But I said, “Yeah, I’d pay 50 grand for a Vermeer. He’s my favorite painter ever.” And they look at me like, “Oh my God, you’re a heathen.”
Tyson: There’s something in that, that parallels with spirit, though. With that idea of scarcity equals value. This is an interesting thing. So, with my family, my culture, if you have a sacred object, it’s a very powerful object. So, we do sculptures, and there’s a sacred sculpture that you’d only use in ceremony traditionally.
But there’s a market for these things now. So, we make many of them. And as a result, and we all know this, and the old people assert it all the time, is that that ceremony object, the original one, is no longer very powerful. Because every time you replicate it, image, mind, image, that means spirit and image. It’s like part of the spirit of that thing is taken away with the image, with the copy, with the replica.
Yeah. And this is what happens, but also happens with us. So, that old trope of the Aborigines believed that the camera flash would take their soul away. That was about if someone took your photo, that that image of you is part of your spirit.
So, imagine this. I keep talking to my community about it. “Why are you all on Facebook? Do you know how many times your image is being replicated in the cloud? If you really believe this, then you should be blurring your face, and not doing any biometrics anywhere, ever.”
My cousin right now, he’s gone viral, Eric Yunkaporta, they’re calling him FaceTime Prank Guy. And there he’s currently got, well, as of a few days ago, he had 11 million. I haven’t checked. But on TikTok, he’s got 11 million views of this one video he did, where he was trying to figure out how to use his camera.
Because he just started up on TikTok, and he was just, so, it’s just two minutes of him looking at the screen and not doing anything, just slightly moving. He didn’t say anything. Anyway, someone found that, and started using it as a filter to prank call people. So, you get a call from your daughter, open your phone, and there’s…
Jim: There’s your cousin, right?
Tyson: There’s this swarthy guy, just staring at you. And you’re going, “Hello? Hello?” And he’s just staring at you. And so, they recorded people’s reactions. “What have you done with my daughter? What have you done with my daughter? I’m calling the police.”
Anyway, we were all horrified about this, and we were contacting the E-commissioner and stuff. We wanted to get this taken down, all these. And it turns out, maybe he’s not too upset about that. So, at the moment, he’s looking, “Wow, there’s millions of people looking my face.”
And it’s like, “Yeah.” But look, yeah, there’s people here, have a look at this, AI people are using his face for face swap AI things, where they’re creating these videos of my cousin as a serial killer, going around abducting white people and tying them up in his basement, or somewheres. Are you sure you want this cousin? Oh. Anyway.
But I think about that. And I think about 11 million people using his image at least. And then how many times that’s being replicated and shared and multiplied in cyberspace, and then what that’s going to do to his spirit? That’s a bit like what we were talking about with the art. You look at the Mona Lisa, I imagine that was object of great power when the fellow was carrying it around for how long, what was it? 30 years he was carrying it around in his backpack?
Jim: Working on it.
Tyson: Doing a little bit more here and there. If you imagine that object the first time it went up, how much power it had. But now, it’s like on 40 million screensavers and posters, and joke memes, and stuff all around the planet. I imagine that it’s lost its power a little bit, that one. And I wonder if it, I don’t know, loses value, the more copies there are of a thing.
Jim: Yeah, if you’re talking about positional goods. And again, turning into totally Western reductionist economics. Yeah, if there’s lots of them, maybe it’s lost its value. I don’t know. Maybe not lost its financial value, but it’s certainly lost its, because at some level, it’s increased its value, because every place you go, there’s a postcard with Mona Lisa on it. So, hermetics are winning. But perhaps in some deeper sense…
Tyson: I guess, I don’t know. It’s like the Harry Potter thing with the Voldemort’s got all his Horcruxes where he splits his soul up, and puts them into objects and hides them around the place, so he can regenerate himself. Maybe it’s like Horcruxes. I don’t know. It’s terrifying, though.
So, does art in general get devalued as well, with the speed of replication? So, if someone can make in five minutes an AI movie about my cousin being a serial killer, if he came up to me and said, “Hey, let’s make a short film about me being a serial killer.” That would take me six months to do. And it probably wouldn’t even be as good as the AI one that I saw that someone generated in like five minutes with a face swap.
I don’t know. I think art, or maybe it’ll be more valued as we go along. Like, “Hey, this is a real piece of art that a human did. That’s really rare now.”
Jim: Yeah, but soon you can’t tell, right? Today you can still tell. There’s usually some artifact. But give it another two, three years, one of the things that’s going to really break down our sense-making, is the inability to tell what is a simulation from an AI, versus something that was created by a human.
Tyson: Yeah.
Jim: I mean, it’s right on the border now.
Tyson: Yeah, reality and truth get mixed up. And for ages, I thought Donald Trump had six fingers.
Jim: And wore a diaper, right?
Tyson: This problem like the ontology and epistemology sort of gets out of step. And that’s kind of what I explore in the book, is this idea that there’s a difference between what is true, and what is real. And your Venn diagram personally for that, needs to very closely resemble a circle. What’s the truth and the real.
Because you can’t really come into good dialogue with other people, unless your truth, your perception, approximates, nine times out of 10, your reality. You know what I mean? Otherwise, you’ve got nothing to exchange in good faith. So, there are a lot of people, they’re talking a truth that they’ve either come to believe reflects the reality, or they wish it reflected that. Or they’re deliberately lying about the reality.
And these people, that’s the bad faith actors, when they come to the table and share a story with you, they have other agendas. And the truth is not aligning with the reality in any way that can give us any kind of predictive certainty about anything.
Jim: And our society is full of that right now. Amazingly, this is something that’s front and center in my own thinking right now. I’m trying to get my head straight. Since I’ve got the man himself, I’m going to run it by him.
One of the things that’s been torturing me, and I’m trying to get it straight in my head, is, what should we think about Plato’s noble lie? Which you actually reference in the book, as I recall, right? For the audience who may not know the ins and outs of ancient white dude philosophy, the idea of the noble lie, is that there are lies that the elites should be willing to tell the little people, to make them happier and behave better.
One example I like to give, just to kind of make fun of the whole idea, is Santa Claus. Santa Claus definitely does make four-year-olds act better for about two months every year. On a more profound basis, the guy in the sky with the beard and the lightning bolts, or whatever, who knows every sin that you do, whether anybody else does or not, might be a less expensive way to police bad behavior, than actually having a bunch of cops and what have you.
And even if you knew it was absolutely false, which I think it is, but even if you did think it’s absolutely false, if one was willing to play the game of the noble lie, and you are an elite, you could propagate that story and think you were doing good. In fact, and this has been the last week of going down this rabbit hole.
I said, now what would happen if the Pope, when he ascended to the papacy, opened the file in his desk, the letter in his desk that’s always left by the predecessor, and the letter said, “It’s all bullshit. Jesus was an eccentric Jewish rabbi. He didn’t even think he was God. He certainly wasn’t. He just made all that stuff up. I mean, his followers later made all that stuff up.
“Constantine converted to the [inaudible 00:46:57] Catholicism as a corrupt deal to do X, Y, and Z. However, Catholicism makes people good, so, kindly jolly the folks along.” What do you think about that? The idea that a lie, absolutely told in total first degree intent, could sometimes be good.
Tyson: Well, yeah. Because a lie that’s part of your perception of truth that you are mapping accurately onto reality. A noble lie is, well, I understand the complex system of this place. And that if I drop this, if I answer this question truthfully, and drop this truth on everybody, that’s going to cause a butterfly effect of disasters. It’s going to end up seeing a whole bunch of people killed, and panicked, et cetera.
So, yeah, I’m going to do the noble lie. I think that’s fine. And look, this is the reason for that us-only pronoun, that none, that exclusive First-person, plural pronoun, is because in our cultures in Australia, Aboriginal Australia, knowledge is restricted. A lot of knowledge is restrict-
Tyson: Knowledge is restricted, a lot of knowledge is restricted. So women’s groups, they have things that we can’t even know about. In men’s business, we have our own secret things. The older people, they have things that only they can know because it would be damaging for other people to be knowing those things and using them. But I guess the difference is it’s not all held by one elite, the power with that secret knowledge. Everybody belongs to some kind of group that has in-group knowledge that’s restricted for anybody outside of that group. So yeah, I’ve got no problem with noble lying. Noble Lying’s a great idea. What’s your agenda? Are you coming in good faith? Is your truth mapping accurately to your reality? Noble lie, everybody’s saying, “Man, there’s no way Trump’s going to do this.” He just said he was going to do it. Of course he’s not going to do it. Of course he’s not going to.
There was about eight things that everybody swore black and blue around him that he wasn’t going to do, and then he did them. So that wasn’t a noble lie. That wasn’t to prevent damage and harm in the society. It was to mask it so it could be executed. And I’ve been following over the last week looking at some of the things that have been happening there. I don’t want to go into any detail, but yeah, the stuff that the day before they were swearing black and blue wasn’t going to happen, then next day it happened. It’s like, oh my goodness. So that’s not a noble lie, and so I would say that’s wrong story. But I’d say if you’re truly doing a noble lie and it’s based on restricted knowledge for the benefit of everybody, then I reckon that’s the right story. That’s good.
Jim: Interesting. Now you talk fair bit about men’s business, women’s business, elders, in this territory they have these stories they don’t share with anybody outside, but at the same time, you criticize the idea of the guru who has all the answers for somebody, and I’m with you there. In fact, one of the things that I will react very badly to is somebody playing what I call is the guru game. I am some dude and I know so much and I can’t tell you because you’re not ready for it. Can you distinguish carefully between the bad idea of someone playing a guru game and say an elder of a geographically situated clan who he and his aunts and his uncles, and just a few people keep this knowledge alive and pass it on? What’s the difference between that and the California guru preying on bored housewives?
Tyson: Persuasion. You’ll never hear an elder doing persuasive rhetoric or trying to convince somebody of anything. That’s the only difference.
Jim: I like that. I like that.
Tyson: My friend Parule, I’m always really offending him when I use the word guru. And I do a disclaimer, I say, “No, no, I mean small G guru.” And he says, “There’s no small G guru. Guru is a sacred thing. You can’t use that word like that.” Anyway, but I keep doing it anyway. I really got to get my tongue under control with just loosely saying shit to offend people when it’s sacred to them. I do that all the time. At least I didn’t say anything bad about guns to you today, so I must be learning some kind of fricking restraint. Who needs guns when you’re so deadly you can throw a musical instrument at an emu and-
Jim: Kill them dead.
Tyson: …and kill it dead? Hey.
Jim: That’s pretty cool.
Tyson: Somehow I think a bullet would be more efficient though, you know.
Jim: You probably lose less meat also.
Tyson: Yeah.
Jim: Particularly with an emu, you’d shoot them in the head if you were any good, right, and then you wouldn’t lose any meat at all. That would be the thing to do.
Tyson: Well, I mean, there’s every chance that was a fluke, and I wouldn’t be able to replicate that shot again.
Jim: Yeah, that’s cool.
Tyson: Although I did kill one of your deer in New York state with a rock, so we have some pretty damn good hunting skills here. We got very bouncy, very fast megafauna here.
Jim: Oh, yeah. Chasing the ruse.
Tyson: Yeah.
Jim: Chasing the ruse that’ll give you [inaudible 00:52:04].
Tyson: Yeah. It’s like I’m like John Carter, I’m going on the planet and I’ve just got this super… Because of the gravity difference, I can jump for miles and I’m super strong when I go to America. I’m just, I’m just, roar. I’m Crocodile Dundee. I’m Tarzan. I’m like John Carter. Yeah, yeah. I got super powers.
Jim: That’s because you’re right side up and all the blood hasn’t gone to your head. You get it down under, upside down, no wonder you’re so strange. Right.
Tyson: Coriolis effect though, my water is spinning the other way.
Jim: Indeed. That is true.
Tyson: Yeah. I do feel the difference when I change hemispheres. And you know what? Last year I went to Uganda, right? And there’s a place like right there on the equator, and they’ve got three bowls with a hole in the end, and there’s water flowing into the bowls there, and they’ve got a hole in the bottom of the bowl so that the water’s going down through the hole in a kind of whirlpool, and they’ve found the exact spot on the equator. So they’ve got the one on one side, it’s spinning one way and then just half a meter away, there’s another bowl there, and it’s spinning in the opposite direction. But the one in the middle, it’s just dropping straight through. It’s not swirling at all because they found the exact millimeter there right on the equator where nothing spins at all. So I’m standing there and stepping in the different spots and just feeling my whole body just completely freak out. There were so many tourists there taking photos. They didn’t seem to be experiencing the same problem though. So I wonder if that was just me, I don’t know. I was just projecting that onto myself and feeling something that wasn’t really happening. But anyway, but I certainly did feel very different standing in each of those three spots.
Jim: Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, it makes sense. Never been to the equator. Did I ever go past the equator? No, not yet. Not yet.
Tyson: I went a bit crazy there too. So I feel like I cross the equator. I go a bit crazy for a while. But I did shout the C word at somebody outside of a Buddhist temple there, so I imagine, yeah, I think that’s a data point that I look at that and then I put it all together and I can analyze, yes, I think something does happen to me when I cross the equator. I will have a period of disruption. It might just be jet lag too though, so, you know.
Jim: One of these days, we’re going to get you up here to the rut farm, put you on the porch for a couple of days till you de jet lag, keep you well lubricated.
Tyson: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: Then I’ll get out my meters and ESG, you know, what the hell are the things that do the brainwaves?
Tyson: Yeah, yeah. You can get me out of my reduction is sort of obsession at the moment. Ever since I met you, I became obsessed with verification and falsification out of our early yarns. And so I’m just, I’m doing that all the time. Everything that happens, I’m sitting there trying to triangulate fricking everything to try and figure out if I’m thinking the right way about this thing or not. I’m thinking too much since I’m met you, Jim.
Jim: Let’s turn it the other way on how maybe-
Tyson: Hyper-rational, and now you’re the one that’s going to flip me back into an artist again, fricking the world’s upside down. What’s going on?
Jim: There’s something going on. I’m sure you were at a significant effect. I’m now prepared, people don’t have a heart attack out there in Rutland, to acknowledge the utility of the concept of the sacred. How about that?
Tyson: It’s a concept of a plan, the utility of the concept of the spirit.
Jim: Oh, of the sacred.
Tyson: I like that.
Jim: Not necessarily a spirit I still would say-
Tyson: Of the sacred, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: …this is it, and I think you’ll like this.
Tyson: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim: You sort of alluded to in the book, and I came up with this a week before I read the book, which is kind of also eerie, which is, and this is some conversations I’ve been having with some friends and they’ve been guiding me in the wrong or the right direction, we will figure out what, which is the sacred may be an excellent way for us as humans to deal with systems that are way too complex for us to deal with analytically. Right? And one of the examples I used in something I wrote recently is, what’s the right relationship between humanity and nature? Right? Western man in particular has defined themselves as separate from nature. And if you go back and read stuff from say, early modern and just pre-modern period, people hated nature. Nature was a scary, bad thing. And to the degree we tried to annihilate nature, fortunately they didn’t have really powerful tools.
But now we do, right? And we’ve been doing this on the flip side. And that’s kind of analytical, yes, I can cut down all the trees, plant one crop, hit it with poison, basically run my big tractor, collect the corn, sell to ConAgra, and then barely be able to make the payment on my land and my tractor. And that’s a reductionist system. On the other hand, but it’s tractable to the analytical left brain mind. On the other hand, if we take a sacred stance towards nature and look at the long arc of the evolution of the universe, biological world of nature is the most complex, amazing, intricate, interwoven thing that as far as we know exists in the universe, and often we take a sacred stance towards nature and then try to get a simple heuristic out of that, which is whatever you do, do not reduce bio complexity. Everything you do on a net basis, be at least neutral and hopefully positive with respect to biodiversity. And I find that actually to be a good and relatively powerful use of the word sacred without having to bring any woo bullshit in.
Tyson: Yeah. Yeah. I keep sort of really questioning the idea that what we have is a religion or even spirituality in our way. Because it’s real. Everyone else is wrong, and this one’s real. No. But because the spirit is just part of biology, you know, and we don’t use the word spirit. We don’t even have an abstract noun for just spirit or spirituality. You know what I mean? There’s nouns for things like spirits, like our spirit, the spirit of a thing, but there’s no big general abstract noun. We don’t have it. It’s just part of, it’s just in everything. And here’s a good way to do it, Jim this might appeal to your rationalist sort of side, and so I’ll allow you to come to it as well, is that in a natural system, in any system, it could be a fricking financial system even, it’s not a system of things like species and predator, prey, bloody commensal and parasitic, et cetera, relationships, it’s not just that. It’s a system of signals, and that signals is the spirit. Okay.
So you only need one thing to change. So a migratory bird arrives and its call is a signal in a place. Other animals hear that call and know that it’s a change of a season, and that’s time to signal different behaviors. So these other animals behave in different ways. The plants respond to that. You’ve got all the mycelia signals happening, but then there’s arboreal fungi as well that are reflecting that. Above your head those signals are going through. There are a million signals happening at once. And the ants behave differently. And in the aggregate of all those signals and changing behaviors, it even shifts the microclimate of that forest and then something else will happen. And you might get long warm still nights, and then that’s a signal for all the ants to mutate and grow wings and fly out around the place and mate, you know? And then the smells of that and all the pheromones going around, that triggers a million other things happening. It’s a signal system.
And in our culture, like our rituals, our rituals and ceremony, these are things that are performed at specific times to signal changes in the system. So we’re actually able to, because of the complexity knowledge that we have of the system, we can insert a signal into that natural system and change what’s happening. So we can cause the ants to mate sooner, or we can cause different things to happen that will signal to bring these birds in. So if you do that bird call before the bird arrives, then the system will start behaving as if that bird’s there. You know what I mean? Signal is a really good way of understanding spirit, that it’s the communications, it’s the comms network that’s unseen of the system that you’re looking at. And I guess this is, I guess, what people are alluding to when they’re talking about entire cultures or social systems or economic systems or a monetary system behaving like an egregore, a self-organizing sentient entity. Which okay, if we acknowledge that this entity is, then maybe we can call it a demon and then go, well, so if there’s a demon, then maybe there’s an angel, and if there’s an angel, then maybe there’s a God, there’s an Adonai or something, and then, you know, next minute you’ve converted publicly.
Jim: You got to be careful of all this stuff. You have to keep your metaphors straight from your reality. You know, egregore-
Tyson: This is an intervention Jim, I’m giving you this idea of a signal system because it’s a slippery slope, a slippery slope. I don’t want to see you on Fox News next week talking about how you’ve converted to some weird religion or something. That would be terrifying. I’d be like, “No, that’s it.”
Jim: I’m a convert to the religion of the complexity lens. Right? And we talked about this on our very first call. And right now interestingly, because when you were talking about how you intervene in the complex system, do little nudges and such, there’s a new field coming out of the Santa Fe Institute right now called emergent engineering or emergence engineering. Which is, how do you think about a complex system knowing that you can’t actually calculate how to build a bridge that has a ability to hold a 250,000 pound truck? And complex systems is not nearly as straight of that, but it’s basically doing nudges and probes and seeing what happens and seeing if you get a result that seems positive. If so, do a little more, but be careful because you might be in a transition zone where good suddenly becomes bad, et cetera. And they’re out there developing a quite interesting body of knowledge on emergence engineering, which sounds very similar. And if that’s religion, then I’m happy to say, sure, I belong to that church.
Tyson: I’ll have to send you the section from, I’ve already finished the manuscript from a next book, which is called Snake Talk. I’m talking about the serpent stories where you were saying myths before and the utility that they have, especially for doing analysis where the data sets are incomplete. I’ll send you the section on that where I’m looking at that. I just use the example of the formula and theorems that they use to locate underground water from incomplete geospatial data sets. Then, so I compare that. I compare and contrast that with the indigenous method of finding groundwater. That’s pretty interesting. And how much utility the rainbow snake story has for modeling, for creating a storied imaginal model of the landscape and determining where the flows in the past and predictive modeling where the flows will be in the future on there. So determining over a deep time focus with that mythical lens where that water will be located under the ground, where it would’ve gone to, which is pretty cool. Anyway, I’ll have to send you that section.
Jim: That sounds very cool. Of course, here in Appalachia, we have something called dowsers or water witches. Even the most hardheaded atheistic farmer, before they pay $15,000 to have a well drill, they’ll generally hire, for a couple of hundred dollars, a water witch or a dowser to come out and walk around with their sticks. And these are pretty hardheaded people. I don’t know. I haven’t done any controlled double-blind experiment, but-
Tyson: Yeah, but they’re using the metaphor and the mythology of dowsing as a practice and even just the symbols of the rods, which have no power, and neither do they. I guess they’re walking around and they’re picking up on a trillion different data points all at once, and they’re doing some kind of dark data processing deep in their subconscious, which is the only place that can happen. But they’re actually using the myth, the story, the mythology, the body of law around dowsing. They’re using that as a metaphor to process all of this dark data and actually lead them to the spot where the water is maybe. Anyway, I feel like I’m Jim here, I feel like I’m being Jim and you are being Tyson. This is terrible and pretty cool actually. I like being here.
Jim: It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. If people thought I was Tyson, that’d be quite a compliment. Tyson’s the coolest dude around. Right?
Tyson: I swap with you in a heartbeat. I’d swap you. I want to be on a mountain with a bunch of guns. That sounds deadly.
Jim: Yeah, one of these days, we’ll get you up here. Now, you mentioned lore, and this is something I really would like to dig into a little bit. In the book, in various places, you talk about both lore and law, and the two seem to be related, but they’re not at all the same thing. And particularly we’re talking about law in the sense of the aboriginal sense of law. Maybe you could start with law and then add in lore, and then how they’re related, but how they’re distinct. How does that sound, like a good professorial [inaudible 01:06:38]?
Tyson: Yeah. Oh, well, it’s a tricky one.
Jim: Professor [inaudible 01:06:40].
Tyson: And there’s no total agreement on that because they are English words. So there’s a lot of back and forth in our community about some people saying we shouldn’t use L-A-W at all, and that it should all be about lore, L-O-R-E, because all of it is narrative based, not just narrative, but ceremony and place and season. So it’s all like what we were just talking about. It’s that big bodies of knowledge and what you call mythology. But it’s real because it’s in a place, it’s a story that is located. And there’s so many layers in that narrative, which is basically, the story itself is just a mnemonic because there are lots of layers of restricted knowledge that are built into that so that you can have terabytes of knowledge stored in that. And I guess that’s the L-O-R-E, that lore, that story for keeping all of that knowledge. But the law, L-A-W, it’s a really sort of thing, and it’s actually, we see it as having substance in the landscape of our hero ancestors, totemic ancestors. Their bodies being in the landscape and their sacred essences being in the ground, in the air and all around in a place. You know? And so the law is something that’s just ineffable and permanent and stored in the landscape. I mean, I guess some knowledge is RAM and some knowledge is ROM, I guess.
Jim: Oh, RAM and ROM. Oh, okay. That’s interesting.
Tyson: Read only memory. What’s interesting, what’s really cool is we were talking the other day, me and my partner, and you’ll know people up in the Northern Territory, like the word for law, L-A-W, which they stress really strongly, “No, it’s L-A-W.” Their word for that is ROM.
Jim: Interesting.
Tyson: That’s in the language. And I’m like, ah, yeah, we were joking and going, “It’s like read only memory.” And it’s like, yeah, well, that’s what it is. That’s the law that has to be kept. That’s the law that’s kept forever. And I guess the story, like the L-O-R-E, it does reflect and contain all the information about the law, L-A-W, but the law is very ceremonial and very much it holds you, it holds you in every aspect of your identity and behavior and movement every day. So everything that you do is a right action, right thought, right deed. It’s very much about you being embedded in this L-A-W, law. And if you come out of that relatedness and you step back out of your relationships and you do that, I think for too much and I’m going to fight you, then you’re out of the law and you might find punishment coming your way with that. Yeah.
Jim: Now, you also said, and I thought this was very interesting, that in the cultures you’re familiar with in Australia, L-A-W is not written down, it’s in a dynamic relationship with reality. So how do we have it both be everlasting or long-lasting, but also be dynamic? How does that work?
Tyson: Actually, I yearned about a rabbi with this. I was trying to find a way to describe that, and after a couple of hours he said, “Ah, it’s like the written Torah and the oral Torah.” So the written Torah, that must be the word, and that is kept, and that’s how they maintain their language and culture and spiritual knowledge for a couple of millennia on the run. You know? They kept it wherever they went, they’ve maintained that, and because they have that L-A-W, the law of the written Torah. “But,” he said, “aha, we also have the oral Torah. And the oral Torah is our interpretations, our embellishments, our intellectual development and scholarly work. That’s the oral Torah. That’s how we do our innovation so our culture is still a living culture, so our law is still living law and not just…” So, I guess it’s the L-O-R-E that invigorates and revitalizes and is not afraid to break the pattern every now and then in order to stop the pattern from stagnating. You know what I mean?
Jim: This might be a tough question, but this little conversation triggered it, can you think of examples where the encounter with the Western invasion caused adaptation around the L-A-W, perhaps with L-O-R-E, in a way to at least be able to survive? It’s got to be a tough topic, a very painful one, but.
Tyson: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s tricky. Before anybody even saw a European over most of the continent, all the elders died, or most of them, because the plagues sort of swept across the continent. So-
Tyson: The plagues sort of swept across the continent. So as fast as the message could be delivered from one group to the next, “Hey, there’s these weird people arriving on the shore and they’re weird. They’re like living ghosts. They don’t have any spirit. They’re weird, and hang on, all right, I’ll run off to the next drive and tell them,” and then two days later, everyone’s sick and the children and the old people are all dying. So yeah, before we even met any of these people, it’s like the whole, half the continent had been wiped out. But the elders, that was really important because a lot of that really deep sacred knowledge went with them. And as the keepers of the law in places, things became really disrupted right from the start. So I guess, where we had to lean into some of the fail-safe devices that we’ve had forever, which is, we have an interdependent layer of governance that’s in this kind of sunrise, sunset dreaming thing.
There’s different layers of law like Wunan and [inaudible 01:13:15] kind of things, what they call. But the big law, the continental common law, which there’s rainbow snake sort of binds all that together and all the serpent stories, and we think around the world too. But at that level of law, all of your culture and language and most sacred knowledge can’t just be kept with your people. You’ve got to have people in other distant communities who are keeping that as well in case there’s a freaking volcano or a red tide or an earthquake or bloody something and everyone’s killed. It’s got to be repopulated, not just with people, that land, but it has to be repopulated with people who know the story of that land and know all the knowledge and the language of the land.
So a lot of those things had to kick in, and a lot of younger people had to step up as knowledge keepers. Yeah, we kind of had to break it to keep it in a lot of senses because a lot of the restricted knowledge suddenly became accessible and had to be accessible in order to be kept. And in some places, people refused to do that, and then it just died there. But you start to see now there are people coming forward who’ve kept it in distant places for a time when it can be returned safely. So I guess, there’s kind of a doomsday protocol there that sort of had to come into place.
Jim: The Aboriginal NORADs survived the nukes and now will come forth and repopulate or something, right?
Tyson: Yeah, exactly. And we did take on board a certain spirit of parochialism that we learned from Europe, which actually kind of helped a lot of groups survive as well. People sort of withdrew into their local and regional identities and blocked off others, which kind of killed trade and exchange in the continental common law framework. But then as you come down into that regional level of law, that was still kind of there, but then where it was kept in the places that it’s been kept, it’s been kept through a real insular, local level of law.
So when I talk about law, if you see three concentric circles there, you’ve got, it’s a bit like local, state, and federal government, if that makes any sense. We have those same levels of law, but it’s different stories and different L-O-R-E law that defines those things. Like I said, the serpent, the serpent law is often the thing that binds right across the continent and traditionally for our trade, international trade up into Asia over the millennia. So that’s a long way to answer that question, but you’re asking something really, like you’re asking me, “Hey, can you just quickly do a thesis for me on our…”
Jim: Yeah. Well, I understood this was a…
Tyson: Really naughty question.
Jim: It was intentionally a deep question, right?
Tyson: Yeah. Well, people have got to have fun in this podcast, Jim. Anyway, I’ll try and put more jokes in the next one.
Jim: Yeah, this one was a little darker for sure, and for good reason. Let’s move towards a topic that’s oddly enough, perhaps more fun, which is something we talked about before, but you hit it pretty heavily in this book, which is the importance, usages, styles and customs around violence in the Aboriginal cultures.
Tyson: Yeah. This one, we reprised a chapter, ’cause in Sand Talk, we had that chapter on… There was that chapter on fighting and violence and rule-governed violence and how you actually have to have full expressions of this. And you know what, Jim? I’ve had a lot of yarns with proto-bees, what do you call proto-bees? Different intentional communities all around the world. Even that, I can never pronounce it right, Findhorn, Findhorn.
Jim: Oh yeah, Findhorn up in…
Tyson: That one.
Jim: Scotland or something?
Tyson: And I’ve always, I’ve heard about that for decades, and it’s like the gold standard of intentional communities. But even they were talking to me and I was consulting with them because they had a problem. Some fellow was running around burning down all their houses. So one of their community members just started burning down everyone’s houses. And I said like, ah, well, when was the last time somebody punched that guy in the face? And he says, oh, no, we’re nonviolent. And I’m like, well, there’s your problem. When he first started getting a bee in his bonnet, somebody needed to call him out on the street and punch on. And it wouldn’t matter if they won or lost the fight. It doesn’t matter. You have to have ritualized, public, transparent violence, that is invigilated and adjudicated by all the communities standing around. Anyway, well, that chapter, that chapter that got a lot of people asking me about that, about how to do ritualized violence, there was a problem with it.
You know when you say something and it’s empowering and it’s good, but the converse of that, what it implies is kind of crappy? Like you know how it’s really exciting, the idea that your positive thoughts can improve your health, right? And that’s empowering. And it’s like, wow, okay, I can be healthier by thinking healthy thoughts. That’s exciting. But the converse of that is like, well, kids with leukemia are just little bastards who had too many negative thoughts. That was the problem with that chapter because we did a whole female empowerment thing. We were talking about, you know, women aren’t these weak little things. They’ve just been turned into that over a few centuries in a weird part of the world. It’s like, no, no, no, women have always been formidable, strong fighting women. But then, I don’t know. So me and Kelly Menzel who were doing that thinking and telling those stories together, we thought about that and there was a lot of feedback we got where we started to started to think, oh man, what do we do?
So basically what we’re saying there is that if white ladies get beat up or bloody pestered or molested and it’s their own fault, ’cause they didn’t learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You know what I mean? They need to train up more if they don’t want to be victims of these awful men. It’s like, nah, okay, so we went back to the drawing board. And we actually did a whole big research project about, because I’d been in this research team where we were looking at, it was like non-Aboriginal researchers, and I was the only Aboriginal researcher on the team, and they were researching Aboriginal fight videos on YouTube. And yeah, so I’d been in that research project, left me with a lot of uncomfortable feelings. Anyway, me and Kelly, we did the same thing, but we looked at, we were like, okay, we’re going to look at settler fight videos.
Jim: Yeah, I love that section. I love that section.
Tyson: And we’re going to judge it by our protocols for public violence and see if…
Jim: Yeah, let me stick in here if you don’t mind. We talked about this a little bit once before, is your protocols are remarkably similar to the ones in my hometown. We had, no one ever wrote them down. I, after the fact, called it the Code of Adelphi. And everyone, except for a few kind of bizarre people understood, the list is ridiculously similar, that’s in the book. And I have offended many a millennial mother by saying the reason there’s so much, there’s a thing called school shootings, ’cause you’re not letting the 13 and 14 and 15-year-old boys in particular fight. Young mammals spar, right? And particularly if you have a code, worst case, you might get a tooth knockout. Oh, well, shit happens. But nobody dies, and you are a much better person for it.
Tyson: I said that in the chapter. I said, if you think this sounds weird, ask your grandfather.
Jim: Yeah, exactly.
Tyson: Wherever you’re from in the world, ask your grandfather about fighting sort of rules from when they were…
Jim: Yeah, and everyone knew it. And one that you mentioned is no weapons. I still remember vividly, probably no more, I was just a little young to actually be in the fight culture, but I was in the circle, you know the circle, right? That forms around. And somebody who was just not a normal person was standing up, facing off another guy, and he reached in his pocket and he pulled out a pocket knife, and cheap-ass little folding pocket knife. But it was such a violation that instantly two big dudes grabbed him by the elbows. A third guy come up, took the knife away from him, threw it on the ground, and the three of them beat the shit out of the guy, right? Because it was like an unthinkable thing.
Tyson: Violation. Yeah. You broke the law.
Jim: Utter, sacrilege.
Tyson: Plus also, I mean, your generation, they didn’t roll around on the ground trying to choke each other out.
Jim: No, no, no.
Tyson: You know what I mean? They didn’t lie on top of each other trying to smother each other. What’s with all these MMA cucks running around like, oh, every fight ends on the ground. It’s like, no, no, no. When someone’s on the ground, you stop. You step back and you wait for them to get up. You don’t do that.
Jim: Exactly. In fact, our rule was the same, which was if someone’s down, you do not kick them. You don’t, and they give them the chance to get up. But if they don’t want to get up, fights over. And there was…
Tyson: There’s honor in the loser who keeps getting up. Steve McQueen, Steve McQueen. Well, nobody remembers Steve, Cool Hand Luke, Jesus Christ. Anyway.
Jim: Exactly. And actually, it’s one of the things you didn’t explicitly say, but I heard you actually say it earlier in the podcast, so I think you obviously know it. In our culture, losing was no dishonor. In fact, your honor could go up if you lost. As long as you fought the way you were supposed to fight and got your ass kicked by somebody who was better fighting than you were. Oh, well. But in fact, your status could go up more than his could, might. It’s like chess if…
Tyson: Fair fight is about not just maintaining, but restoring the dignity of everyone present. Because the wrong doer, even if the wrong doer wins, he’s had to really think about that. And he’s had to really face that other person and face their dignity and really face what they’ve done. So everybody learns from this, and it’s not that Viking idea of like, oh, well, we will fight to the death, and if he dies, then that’s because I was right and he was wrong. It’s not that at all.
Jim: Trial by combat kind of thing.
Tyson: Yeah, trial by combat. It’s something that’s supposed to restore dignity and good relations to everyone present. And if it doesn’t, then it’s rubbish.
Jim: In our hometown, at least, it was a cliche that guys that fought had a very high probability of becoming really good friends.
Tyson: Yeah.
Jim: Not always.
Tyson: And millennials don’t get it, even in our community. It’s weird because they think that that’s disgusting, that violence is terrible and what we’re talking about, but the violence that they’re doing is fricking awful. They’re like stomping on each other’s heads and stuff.
Jim: Weapons and…
Tyson: So I had somebody, I don’t know, someone was criticizing me on the internet somewhere. I’m not on the social media, so I don’t know. But yeah, my niece apparently contacted the man and called them out online and she said, “I’ll fucking skull drag you bitch.” And I’m like, what the hell is skull drag? And I looked it up online.
Jim: I did see that in the book. What the hell is it?
Tyson: It is fricking awful. I had to mention it because it just blew my mind. And I’m like, they’re criticizing us for doing fair fight. Put your dukes up and that’s violent. But I tell you, this generation, their violence is terrible. They do awful things to each other. So don’t lecture me, Gen Z, you don’t know.
Jim: Yeah. I wonder if there’ll be a turn back away from this. I don’t know, ’cause it does not seem like it leads to healthy society. You read about the mental health epidemic, school shootings, in the US at least, I don’t remember anybody that was nuts. Well, a few people are a little nuts when I was say a high school kid. But most people seemed to be happy and relatively normal. And yeah, we got in fights from time to time. We drank too much beer from time to time. But life was good. Even though we were relatively impecunious as a community, half the parents were high school dropouts.
Tyson: You have these little enclave cultures, economies, communities every now and then where things, some kind of horrendous violence has to be done to establish a massive abundance of those resources in the first place. And then there’s a time where everybody can just sort of chill out and coast along in abundance. And it doesn’t matter if you drop out of high school, you’re still going to make enough money to have a house and have enough to eat, sending the kids to college, all that sort of thing. Yeah.
Jim: That’s how it’s ought to be. And there’s obviously something deeply, deeply wrong with late stage game A, that it’s essentially impossible for a person who does the right and honorable thing to prosper. And the fucking liars, cheaters and scammers are the ones that are the winners today. And we got, roar. One last topic. This is probably the deepest question I’ll ask you, which is you obviously are in touch with your Native spirituality, your Indigenous spirituality, your culture. You think seriously about these things. You relate to it deeply as a person. And yet late in the book you say, surprise, I’m a skeptical atheist, just like Jim Rutt. And yet I suspect that all of the above…
Tyson: And then I flew back around that again.
Jim: And as I know that in some sense, all these things are true simultaneously. So for our audience, I read the book, but for our audience, do the riff on how you can be a genuinely, genuinely spiritual person, deeply embedded in your culture and be an atheistic, self-labeled atheistic skeptic all at the same time.
Tyson: Well, it’s like working in an office, where the HR policy on sexual harassment is not like your entire identity, and it’s not something that you are living as your core truth, but it helps to have it there because you hurt less people in the office. You know what I mean? So I think my atheism is a bit like that. It’s a bit like a spiritual HR policy for my life. It also stops me from overstepping. I’ve lived a very intense spiritual cultural life, and I got to the stage where I knew a lot of things, so I was doing a lot of things. Sometimes acting out of my freaking pay grade, ’cause there was no one else around to do it when stuff was needed to be done in our community, spiritual stuff. And I needed to be able to vet stuff because there were too many people who should have been holding me back who were green lighting me and even asking me to do things that I shouldn’t have been doing.
So when you’re at the stage where you can’t outsource your checks and balances to a HR department, culturally, like if your elders have suddenly been completely freaking radicalized on YouTube and they’re screaming about Jewish aliens coming to eat us. And saying, yeah, boy, you do that, you do that sacred song today. You do that there. You can lead that ceremony. I can’t, I can’t trust some people for that anymore. So you got to have a vetting policy. So for me, the skeptical atheism is a really good thing that I have to confirm and confirm and confirm, and then I have to go to peer review and I need to make sure that I can find people I can trust to verify whether or not that emu that popped up in Jim Rutt’s backyard was a sign, a message, or whether it was just a coincidence. You know what I mean?
Yeah, so I find that skeptical atheism is a good thing that stops me rushing headlong into, oh, that’s a sign from Baiame that I have to go and do this now. And then charging into it and then doing God knows what damage in the world, which is about half of Sand Talk. It was me charging headlong in going, this is real. Which a lot of it certainly was, but my truth and reality Venn diagram was sort of, I don’t know, it wasn’t quite a figure of eight, but it wasn’t a circle either when I wrote that. The good stuff is in the overlap there in the middle, but there’s some weird shit out on the margins, I tell you. Not that the next book was much better, but I’m getting there. This one, the next one, next year, the serpent book, that’s going to be the, yeah, that’ll be the one that’s a more balanced perspective, I think.
Jim: Yeah. Let’s make sure we get timing on that, so I can do the podcast right before the book comes out. Authors have told me that it actually helps. It helps game the Amazon algorithm if you get an episode of the Jim Rutt Show in the first couple of days that the book’s available.
Tyson: People kept saying, you shouldn’t be talking about this. You shouldn’t be sharing all the yarns you have for that book until it comes out. And I’m like, well, why not? Now that’s important. Okay, you want to know the biggest difference between Aboriginal knowledge and non-Aboriginal knowledge is that our peer review happens, it goes all the way through, and it starts at the start. The peer review doesn’t happen after you finish the story. Peer review happens before you start it, before you start your investigation. You’ve got peer review happening all the way through. And that’s the only difference, I think. So anyway, I share stuff. I do spoilers all the time and just share my thinking. And people say, oh, what if someone steals your intellectual property, I’d say, that’s not my property. That’s the truth that’s in the world. I can’t say that belongs to me. I’m not going to copyright this. I’ll talk to anybody about this. Why not?
Jim: There, another amazing yarn, yarning session with my good guy, Tyson Yunkaporta. And don’t forget, buy that book, Right Story, Wrong Story. It’ll be on Kindle by the time you hear this episode.
Tyson: Yo.