“Somewhere between action and reaction there is an interaction, and that’s where all the magic and fun lies” So says author Tyson Yunkaporta, in his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, my guest for this conversation.
Towards the end of the book, Tyson is explaining the meaning of Ngak Lokath, an Aboriginal word for the brackish water that forms in the wet season when freshwater floods into the sea...an example of what the Yolngu Tribe calls Ganma, a phenomenon of dynamic interaction when opposite forces meet and create something new…
...many pages later he picks up this thread saying:
“There are a lot of opportunities for sustainable innovation through the dialogue of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living...the problem with this communication so far has been asymmetry - when power relations are so skewed that most communication is one way, there is not much opportunity for the brackish waters of hybridity to stew up something exciting.”
This is a powerful image, to have a real, two-way conversation, as equals, between modern and indigenous ways of thinking, and to allow something new to emerge from the turbid, brackish waters…
I see all conversations in this way, too: as flowing, tidal forces. We can push and pull the waters, like the moon, to exert force on it, but the conversation still sloshes around with its own inertia. Power can form, transform or deform conversations, and the historical power disparity between so-called mainstream culture and indigenous cultures has prevented a great deal of potential insight and transformation, the opportunity to live and work in accordance with a natural order, rather than against it.
Tyson’s book does an extraordinary job of grounding ideas in physical reality. Tyson offers us a thought experiment: Risk, viewed through an indigenous lens.
If you cross a river once, there’s a risk of being taken by a crocodile. The first time, the risk is minimal, but if you do it twice, the risk is greater.
Non-Aboriginal statistics and risk calculation would take the risk and multiply it - It assumes that the risk is random each time. But it’s not.
As Tyson says “The crocodile is not an abstract factor in an algorithm, but a sentient being who observed you the first time and will be waiting for you the second time” (emphasis mine). The risk goes up exponentially.
So what? Tyson asks us to think about the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, when non-Aboriginal thinkers insured bets against losses, and then bet on the outcomes of those insurance bets. As he says,
“In a cross-cultural dialogue, we might see that the problem with this model is that every time you create a new layer of derivatives...you double the size of the system, you do not merely double the risk...you multiply it exponentially”
I learned a lot from Tyson’s book, most notably, about Yarning, the Aboriginal approach to group dialogue, knowledge creation, sharing and decision making. Also, the Indigenous notions (or lack thereof!) of safety… Aboriginal Australians don’t have a word for safety. Instead, I learned that protocols of protection are more critical than trusting an abstract system to provide safety.
Also: Yarning about Yarning is fun, informative and oh-so-meta!
Yarning, in Aboriginal culture, is based on sharing stories and coming to decisions through mutual respect, active listening and humor. There is no talking stick in Australian Aboriginal Yarning (That’s something the Iroquois created), just an organic back-and-forth and the creation of a space without a stage to share experiences, to draw on the ground and sketch ideas out to illustrate a point.
Yarning is a rich and powerful tradition for anyone to transform their gatherings to be more deeply human. Sand Talk, the drawings on the ground that are a natural part of these conversations - roots the dialog in the land and makes the complex clear, if not simple.
Tyson’s book suggests that Indigenous thinking can save the world, and I agree. Our meetings and gatherings could use some more Sand Talk: More listening, more visuals, more mutual respect, more conversation.
In the opening quote, Tyson points to the idea that human cognition is rooted in navigation, spatial thinking and relatedness...all bound up in a place and a story. Modern living and modern work has resulted in a deep sense of disorientation and disconnection...and working online, remotely, has only made this sense even more acute.
Indigenous thinking, grounded in relatedness, rooted in and within a specific landscape, is deeply orientating and connecting.
I believe it is a leader’s job to create a sense of orientation where there is disorientation, and connection where there is disconnection, always pointing towards the north star, or your southern cross. Especially when leading through a transformation. Change is disorientating. Moving to a new place, a new land is strange and painful. For more on that, it's worth checking out my conversation with Bree Groff about the 6 types of grief and loss in organizational change.
My conversation with Tyson is non-linear and complex...like any good yarn, it wanders a fair bit...so, I hope you’ll take the time to read his book and absorb the fullness of his message directly and understand all of the ways in which a conversation with Indigenous thinking can save the world! In fact, Tyson’s whole approach is to be complexity-conscious. The world and all of its interactions are complex - the alligator sees you coming the next time, and together, a system is formed. There are no simple solutions to complex problems, and Tyson isn’t selling a simple approach...he’s offering an embrace of complexity.
LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES AND RESOURCES
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Beer with Bella: Tyson Yunkaporta
Tyson Yunkaporta looking at the world through an indigenous lens
Minute 11
Cognitive diversity just means that just the amazing difference between each mind and each web of relations that people has it. It's you meet with someone like we are now and it's two universes coming together. I got annoyed about the term cognitively diverse now, and I forgot the question. You see what happens when you're in an antagonistic relation with the world, your memory doesn't work properly.
Minute 14
We have to have a narrative and spatial framework, that we agree what a door is, what a wall is, what a floor is, just so that we don't fall through the floor in the house and end up being like, I don't know, the EA for a demon in hell or something like that. Although that reality is going to be constructed by story as well. You need that. You need quite a bit of a collective, organic emergent agreement on what the reality is in order for anything to be tangible, and therefore measurable and knowable in that way. And it all starts with a story.
Minute 16
Okay. It's living within a specific landscape. So you're a neuroscientist and you're a cognitive scientist and all this sort of thing, trying to figure out the patterns of how people think. It's just most human cognition is spatial and navigational. Your memory is built on these. But all that is tied together with story. There is something in your mind that is the storyteller, that weaves together all this random information into a narrative of your life. Where you're the character in the story, and you're going through it. It gives it coherence, it gives it some structure. And so it's stories and story maps really, because these are all grounded in a relationship with place, and an awareness of your locatedness in the world. And without that awareness, your cognitive function, well it doesn't function. It's just not there.
Minute 51
It's just yarns are an entanglement. And once you're entangled with somebody, then that's it, you're always entangled. If something happens to you, then I'll feel it on some level over here. It's hard when you end up with like 100,000 people you're entangled with, but hey. But you must get that through the podcast, when you make relationships with people and you can't track them, you feel things coming through you every day, because there is an entanglement and their failures are really bound up with yours. And the things that happened to them, that are cataclysmic enough to affect their energetics. One of them goes through a breakup and bloody nearly kills himself or something like that, that's going to hit you. You're going to have a bad day, and you won't even know why.
Minute 58
But for me, with my infant point of view on that story, infant point of view, there's a lifetime of things to explore in there for me, but particularly around fixed viewpoints, and multiple pluralistic viewpoints. So if you're standing on the beach, and you're seeing that moon, the way the shine of the moon is, that's not there. It's not where you're seeing it. And somebody 20 meters further up the beach is seeing it in a different place. And as you move and walk up and down the beach, it's moving as well in relation to where you are. So you get 1000 people right up and down that coast, all reporting on the location of where the moon reflection is. Every single one of these stories will be wrong and right at the same time.
But the aggregate story, the big meta story, the big narrative there would be the moon shines on every part of the ocean at once. Which is something that's approximating the truth. It's approximating enough of the truth that you could make some accurate predictions and models based on that.
MORE ABOUT TYSON
Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Daniel Stillman:
Well, then I'll officially welcome you to the Conversation Factory. Well just thanks for being here, Tyson. It's awesome to have you.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. It's great to be here.
Daniel Stillman:
I feel like we should just say, first of all, your book is electric. It crackles, it's funny, and it's super weird, so I'm really excited.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, that's one conversation didn't come off of production line. It went through the usual supply chains, but it was a very different production line. I'm assuming Conversation Factory is ironic.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. Thank you for picking that up. It is tongue and cheek. I mean, it's a double entendre. We are manufacturing them in our lives, but yeah, the first version of the logo for this was like little voice bubbles coming out of a factory. And my friend was like, "So talking is pollution, is that what you're saying?" And I was like, "No." So we changed it. I mean, there's so many places to start the conversation but-
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I think most discourse is pollution at the moment. As they say, there's a lot of noise and not a lot of signal in there.
Daniel Stillman:
I agree.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Most discourse is pollution, and I think that's a very apt metaphor.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, yeah. I mean, I guess my thesis is, it's worth being reflective and intentional about the way that we design our conversations.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah, that's it. And the truth isn't your main driving force, is it? Because I mean, you have an understanding that that's the truth about a lot of the discourse in the world right now, and you showed it with smoke coming out of a factory. And it's true. It's a true metaphor, and a good metaphor. But in relation with your friend who didn't like that very much, you respectfully changed it. It's not too hard to do. You're not a bloody like this unfiltered torrent of truth in the world.
Daniel Stillman:
I am not.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Truth needs to be used judiciously and with great discernment, I believe.
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, there's a lot of ways to take this, but I feel like I want to set the stage a little bit. And it's traditional in your land, it's much less traditional in my land, to do a land recognition and just to acknowledge the land that you and I are both standing on. I think one of the things that as a "Westerner" that's challenging is this idea of being a custodian. I love the phrase in the land acknowledgments to acknowledge the custodians of the land, past and present. It pulls at something in my heart, and you use this idea of being a custodian of the land in your book. Can you help a non-Aboriginal person, like what it means to be a custodian of the land?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Well, look. I mean, we acknowledge country we call it here, in that way. But that's something that's done around settlers. I find when there's no settlers around, and we're in our own kind of ritual or community context is this, there's no acknowledgement of country, because you're in that. That's your context, that's your lived context, you're embedded in it. It would be weird to say, "Well, before we go and hunt this [inaudible 00:03:55], I'd like to acknowledge that..." But I mean you do that in a way like you're walking into a place where it's a different family member, or clan member or clan group who holds the story for that place. Or maybe even if you're coming in another part of your place, where your ancestors are, you're acknowledging you're calling out, but you're calling out to those ancestors.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
You're like, "Oh, people, oh. I'm just coming in here. I'm just chasing that [inaudible 00:04:31]. We're getting there." Because you call out to let them know you're there, so you don't disturb them. And there's a whole heap of stuff. I don't know. With a lot of places you might put your body smell on any of the kids or any of the children or anything that's around, or people from other groups who are with you, visitors. You put your smell on them so the ancestors know them from the smell, and they don't like... or the spirits of the place don't go, "I used to see you walking through here." Because there's little things even like there's like this little devil things that they'll be there in the long grass, in a story, and they might get a piece of that grass, a stem of grass, and spear you with it. And you'll just be like, "Ow."
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And it's just there's no mark there yet, but it's just like a sore there, and then in a couple of days there's a big ulcer there. And it kind of spreads and you end up with a big infection there, and it's, "That little one got me there." So I mean, there are entities in the landscape that are there, kind of protecting it anyway, or regulating your movement in that place. And you as a custodial species, you're not that spirit in the landscape, although you will graduate to that at the end of your life's journey. You'll be in there, and people will be calling out for you. But what you are in the meantime, is you're an organism, so you're occupying an ecological niche. And a unique ecological niche, which is somebody who looks out for the entire system and has ritual technologies and psychological technologies, and learning technologies that allow you to be able to work holistically with that system, and understand it and care for it, and all the entities of spirit and everything else within that landscape. And that's what it is.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And mostly, it's just about attention and observation, and collective group thought and action within that landscape in both ritual, but then just in how you live your lives, the patterns of your lives. Because your pattern within that landscape should do good things to it. How a lion moves through a grassland doesn't damage the grassland. Although an antelope might have a different idea, but it doesn't damage that... The way he moves through, everything he does is perfect for there.
Daniel Stillman:
It's funny. [crosstalk 00:07:16]. The system looks different according to the relational context of the entity.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah, yeah. Well, here's where perception comes through. You can get too caught up with perception. Sometimes we think we can check [inaudible 00:07:35] economic, social, political, ecological landscape, by changing perceptions, by increasing awareness. "Oh, man. So much energy goes in increasing awareness of things by changing attitudes and stuff like that. But dude, that's not it."
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. So it seems like we can get to the first diagram in the book that I thought was worth starting with. I've been telling my wife the stories that I've been learning from your stories, and this idea that our great grandmothers are also our niece, that the cyclicality of time. Time is one of the most fundamental ways that I feel like inside of corporate America, inside of product design innovation. We use time and journeys to orient and to delimit, but here's the beginning of the end of the user journey. And you make it clear that time doesn't go in a straight line, and that we're not living in a closed system. And so I feel like the idea that Aboriginal thinking can change the world and save the world, this is one fundamentally different idea that time is a set of ripples that fall back on itself.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Right. That's sweet. Well, look. I mean, all I can think is my experience there recent. So just a couple of weeks ago, I got a new auntie. A new auntie was born for me, because my niece's daughter had a baby. So my niece's daughter, she's my granddaughter. You know what I mean?
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And then, so my granddaughter's daughter who was born the other day, she's my auntie. Because it comes back around where your great grandchildren, that parental line sort of role for you in that kinship way, how it goes around like that.
Daniel Stillman:
And it breaks the brain. This breaks my brain. Because I think when we are talking, we talk about time and we think about linear time.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well it breaks the wheel, I guess in a Game of thrones sense.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes, it does. I mean, how does that view of time change how we talk and how we gather? Because it seems like yarning is a place without time.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, I mean, it really just shifts your focus on what's important, and where your attention goes. And really, that's the only... There's so much diverse cognition. There's so much cognitive diversity in the world. And I hate it that cognitively diverse now is the term for a brain damaged person. It's annoying because I already was using that term for something else like, "Fine. Your own term. All right."
Daniel Stillman:
What does it mean to you?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Cognitive diversity just means that just the amazing difference between each mind and each web of relations that people has it. It's you meet with someone like we are now and it's two universes coming together. I got annoyed about the term cognitively diverse now, and I forgot the question. You see what happens when you're in an antagonistic relation with the world, your memory doesn't work properly.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, it connects to embodied cognition, because there's different ways of thinking. There's different ways of thinking about time and there's different ways of... I mean, you have this quote, where you're talking about composing a chapter by carving a club. That's a different way of looking at writing as carving a piece of wood.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
But I mean it's not really. I've met like, I don't know, Latvian quilt makers, and when they start telling you about their practice, it's the same thing. You got, I don't know, Japanese flower arrangers. And you got some people in some cultures who just every single task they perform throughout the day is like that, it's like what I describe in that cultural activity. When they're sweeping the floor, they're doing that. I'm probably doing that when I sweep the floor, my attention hasn't gone to that. That's what I was saying. The cognitive diversity, it's about where your attention is directed.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I mean, if it's where it's supposed to go, then like water it will find its way back, like this little conversational piece has. But I know it's going to get [inaudible 00:12:55]. But it's about where your attention is directed. And that's the only thing that makes the difference between people with their cognition. And that's what's beautiful, because that means that you can really only try to find a semi-accurate idea of what's going on by having many different points of view or many different stories. Because your unique cognition is directing you to focus on certain things. And it's where your attention goes, that that's your part of the story. That's your story that you're contributing to the aggregate of stories.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And once you're doing that together with a collective kind of meta narrative, I guess, all those stories are coming together. If you're doing that, then you're doing that collective sense making, you're... If you're not doing it, you're just in a quantum soup. You know what I mean? Because all this shit is just atoms and such. It's like electrons spinning around, and they don't make any sense.
Daniel Stillman:
Except for the stories we tell.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah, exactly. We have to have a narrative and spatial framework, that we agree what a door is, what a wall is, what a floor is, just so that we don't fall through the floor in the house and end up being like, I don't know, the EA for a demon in hell or something like that. Although that reality is going to be constructed by story as well. You need that. You need quite a bit of a collective, organic emergent agreement on what the reality is in order for anything to be tangible, and therefore measurable and knowable in that way. And it all starts with a story.
Daniel Stillman:
So let's unpack this because I've got a couple of quotes here, which I'm going to read, which I think can spring off our next conversation. Which is because I love these, yarning is a structured cultural activity that is valid, rigorous method for producing transiting and inquiring around knowledge. And there's this other quote you had that said, "All things that last must be a group effort aligned with the patterns of creation discerned from living within a specific landscape." So this idea of people coming together in a time and place to have an intentional conversation, to come to a decision. What ought we to know about ways to do that? To tell stories together, to learn together and to decide together?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, I mean, you could just backwards map from some fairly obvious stuff. That's how that works. What was the last thing you said, again?
Daniel Stillman:
Which one? The quote, or just deciding, yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
The [crosstalk 00:15:55] from the book.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, yeah. All things that last must be a group effort aligned with the patterns of creation discerned from living within a specific landscape.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Okay. It's living within a specific landscape. So you're a neuroscientist and you're a cognitive scientist and all this sort of thing, trying to figure out the patterns of how people think. It's just most human cognition is spatial and navigational. Your memory is built on these. But all that is tied together with story. There is something in your mind that is the storyteller, that weaves together all this random information into a narrative of your life. Where you're the character in the story, and you're going through it. It gives it coherence, it gives it some structure. And so it's stories and story maps really, because these are all grounded in a relationship with place, and an awareness of your locatedness in the world. And without that awareness, your cognitive function, well it doesn't function. It's just not there.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I mean, there's been a lot of science which isn't really science, it's been speculation about imagining what Palaeolithic life must have been like, and it's like, "Well, I wonder what I'd be. Wait. What'd I do if I got thrown back and there was no police, and I was just able to do whatever I wanted roaming across the landscape? Well, I'd probably rape everybody." So therefore, human history has been mostly rape and murder, and at least a third of all human deaths were homicides in the Stone Age. Like, what the hell is getting that from any proper data, proper interpolation, extrapolation, anything? You're not really analyzing things properly. But if you think about what I just told you before, about that spatial and narrative relations forming the core of human cognitive capacity, and everything we think and remember and do, then I mean, it doesn't take much to reverse engineer that back, to understand what kind of lifestyle has led to that, what kind of patterning of human activity and interaction has led to that.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
You throw in the necessary kind of, your brain can't be healthy unless you're in a state of profound relatedness with other people as well, otherwise I mean, there's certain chemical things that just won't happen in your brain. You'll be like the Romanian babies, you just won't function. So you throw those things together, that relationship, that place and space or mappings and that narrative, and then you've got your cornerstones of what it is to be human, and how it is you go about occupying your ecological niche as a custodial species. It's not that hard to find it in there, that big story.
Daniel Stillman:
It seems like, one of the things that sparked me in the book as when I advise people on having better collaborative discourse, embodied cognition and also spatial cognition, like drawing on surfaces, getting the thoughts out of our head and on to other places. I know that it helps. And it seems like this is built into an Aboriginal way of discourse as well, like drawing on the floor, carving on objects. Like that is part of the discourse. It's not just all in our heads and in our voices. It's in the space. It's embedded in the space around us.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Well, you see a lot of research out there that's sort of, I don't know, framing this as kind of supersizing the mind. Almost like this is a hack, like you found a hack in our biology that you can exploit and actually improve the human mind to more than what it's ever been before. Like, "Oh, we can do this embodiment stuff. We can do distributed cognition. This is a technology we're inventing." And it's like, "Really?" I mean, it's not. It's your natural cognition, your actual patterning of thought ancestrally that you've just lost over the last century or so. And it hasn't been long, it's mostly industrial civilization that's done it that's to remove that capacity for embodiment.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I mean, read any diary from a century ago, and the way people, normal people, referring to their tools, in their sewing with a knee, sewing with an O, etc. All of that. Whatever their tools were, the way they refer to that and their relation with the place and with each other, and everything else, you can see it was a very different way of thinking about things, and some very irregular spelling.
Daniel Stillman:
People were a little bit more flexible with their spelling, especially when they got paid by the letter.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. That's it.
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, let's talk about stories, because the idea of a meta-yarn. It seems like gathering together with a group of people, where there's no stage or audience, there's no inside or outside of the circle. And what we're doing is we're exchanging stories. And it sounds like in a way, we're using other people's brains to test our stories. It's like I'm telling my story of how I see the universe, and then you tell. And then it sort of bounces off. The idea of including and respecting all points of view, it does not seem like it's not a crazy idea, but but it's rare nevertheless.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Well, look any organic tensions that might exist between those stories and different versions of truth, I mean, they would only serve to strengthen each other, strengthen the stories. The idea is not a rivalrous dynamic, where you're seeking to conquer the other story, or anything like that. You can have competing truths and even contradictions sitting quite comfortably alongside each other. I mean, it's funny, but that particular hack, that particular natural hack and that ability to know things as completely true, that are contradicting each other at the same time, and that has recently been exploited with not just disinformation, but more the kind of cults that have arisen out of disinformation. So there are kind of cultish behaviors that have happened with things like QAnon and things like that. People are able to believe completely like... I mean, the dates past and there's people who still believe in the storm. They still believe the prophecies and all that sort of stuff.
Daniel Stillman:
I'm sketching some... I'm trying to get good at your... When I saw this I first thought this was what my dad used to tell me that you have two ears and one mouth, but it's two people around a space telling stories.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. But that's a good message too from your dad, and that's in there. That's in that one that I've got there. That's the idea of wisdom being about having a big ear. This Aboriginal language is where big ear literally means wise. And most of the words for cognition, for deep understanding, knowledge acquisition, transmission, they all involve phrases about the ear or hearing. Even things like intelligence. The word for a person who would today be referred to as cognitively diverse, I guess is [inaudible 00:24:26] in my family's language. And [inaudible 00:24:32] just means deaf. So there's this idea that you could have such profound brain damage that your inability to have executive function is a direct connection to your incapacity to hear.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
So whether you're mechanically deaf or not, that's not the point. So a really stubborn and narcissistic person, or a sociopath would also be referred to as [inaudible 00:25:02]? It's just that that's a deaf person. That's a person who can't hear. But then it's funny because I mean an actual hearing impaired person who's really astute and has amazing cognitive skills would not be referred to in that way. You'd have to be referred to otherwise, I guess.
Daniel Stillman:
I'm trying to connect this, and this may be wrong. But this drawing of... I mean, what I took from this was the real, the land and the metaphor, maybe the difference between story and practice. Because we're talking about like yeah, there's I have my story, you have your story, QAnon has their story, and then there's the flat earthers have their story. And we're living in a moment where it's terrifying that people can have their own story for some people, and liberating for others.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Really, that's just showing a feedback loop. And I guess that's a meta story, like between heaven and earth kind of thing. It's just basically showing the feedback, the narrative feedback loop between reality and story, and then back into reality again, the way that feeds back in in this sort of endless cycle. It is a feedback loop. And it's damaging to break that loop and just sit in an abstract space. Just to sit in theory, or spirit or something like that. But then it's also bad to just be sitting in a tangible reality and go, "Oh, just thought is real." You can't do that. You got to have that flow going around.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
But also, I mean, that can be hijacked by bad metaphors. You can have feedback loops that, like what I mentioned before, with QAnon, is this amazing, somebody's tinkered that system. Somebody has sort of used that feedback loop that I just mentioned as a hack to create this sort of self-sustaining auto poetic system that just keeps generating new narratives that have an immediate impact in the world. Someone will go and open fire on these people over here or bloody start building gallows. Just like, immediate effect. So that's that feedback loop in motion. It's an amazing thing about creation and part of our role as a custodial species. But I tell you, you got bad actors misusing it and it's more devastating than a nuclear bomb. Story is powerful. And there's good story and bad story. Bad story will kill you, and good story will heal you. And that's it.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, so I want to unpack that because you talk about narcissists in the book a fair bunch which I love. When we're in this, we're trying to create a space for real, mutual respect, silence, multiple overlapping stories. Narcissists can take advantage of that. So what is the way? What is an indigenous way of dealing with assholes? What are we to do with people who use those systems to-
Tyson Yunkaporta:
First of all, to recognize that everyone's an asshole from time to time. I don't know. This is the first time I'm saying this, but I feel like you're worthy of this little Easter egg, this little cheat code. But the way I wrote that bit about the narcissism, it was like I wanted to see how many people would be going, "Yes. Yes, that's true. These fucking narcissists." And when I'm writing it, I'm like, "Okay." So when people talk back to me about this, if they're like punching in the air and high fiving over there, then they are narcissists. So if that gave you like a massive thrill to read, then you're a narcissist. But I only know that because it gave me a massive thrill to write it and expose to me the absolute.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I know I'm a narcissist, but I didn't know how bad it was. It's pretty fucking bad. And the act of writing that and just the dopamine hit I got off saying it, that just made me go, "All right. Okay. There's a lot going on here." And that makes you dig deep into the stories and go, "Okay. Well, there's a reason for this. There's a seed of narcissism in everybody." And this great and revered being, ancestral being of the Emu, this is a revered entity. But in a lot of our stories, it's the harbinger of narcissism coming into creation. But it's a revered entity. So it just means that you have to have an asshole from time to time, otherwise, your institutions, your ways will just keep replicating in the same way over and over. And then entropy will ensue. You need mutations.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And your narcissists help you mutate a little bit, because you've got to really evolve some very adaptive mutations to be able to survive them, and to be able to contain them. And it's just basically you have to have a sustainable system that's in place that can deal with for all eternity when the narcissism arises, in yourself and in others around you. And if you've got that, then you've got something that allows for a bit.
Daniel Stillman:
So this is what's really interesting about this, because I noticed you talk about this a couple of times. You love the outsider narrative. And I think there's a reason. If you look, going back to the first idea of there's no closed system here, this is an infinite system. I want to see if I can loop this back because often people ask me like, "How do I deal with difficult people and challenging stakeholders?" And I say, "Well, they're not difficult people, there's difficult behaviors, or they're just expressing an unmet need. They may be speaking for something that needs to be heard in the system."
Daniel Stillman:
And it seems like there's something fundamental about stepping back and looking at a larger circle and saying, "Well, what's good about this? What are they protecting? What are they standing for?" Rather than just excluding them and being like, "You're being a narcissist. Stop being a narcissist. We all want to have this inclusive conversation, but you're excluded from our inclusive conversation." But this is really hard to do. People have a hard time welcoming dissent and welcoming difficulty. What is it about the yarning perspective that allows that to be included?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I think there's better people than me to answer that question. But what is it about it specifically? I guess, mostly it's about our patterning as people who are embedded within a landscape and within an ecology, and within a lore, which is a living substance in the land, a lore which is running through the land all the time, and is understood. And the pattern of that lore is fractalized from your tiniest, tiniest relationship. And even before that, it's fractalized from the sort of tunis within you, as your first relation almost. And then that pattern is replicated out through all of your relations and webs of relations. So in the same way as the governance of just a pair of people that comes out to groups, and it's always something that demands the balance of autonomy and collectivism over time.
Daniel Stillman:
Is that the tunis? Is that what you mean when you say the tunis of us?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. There is that struggle between the individual and the group, which is just one of those human drama things. I guess in western literature, it's one of those unsolvable, who knows kind of thing. But at least in Australian Aboriginal culture, I can assert that that's something that's been resolved. In that you don't have to come down on one side or the other. There is a lore in the land that makes sure they're balanced, and that both of those two things are happening at once. And that then each collective in itself is an autonomous collective that is syndicated with other collectives. And then they form groups, which are autonomous, which are then syndicated with larger groups. So you see what I mean about the fractal structure?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And that ends up covering the whole continent, that ends up going up into Asia, as you're trading up into Asia there. So it's a governance system that comes down from it. It's exactly the same in the parts as in the hall. And that's how you manage to get a New Guinea that has the richest linguistic and cultural diversity on the planet in quite a small landmass. And so it's just basically, you just reverse engineer that. How the hell would you have a tiny place with more languages than anyone's got on the planet?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And you reverse engineer that, where you know there's no imperialism going on there. You know there's no large scale warfare going on there. You also know there has to be some kind of system whereby women are really honored and have agency and taken care of, because nothing can... No community can survive that doesn't do that. No community can survive longer than 1000 years with mistreating women. So you know there's a whole heap of different stuff that you can not out logically or you can actually go and talk to the people as well.
Daniel Stillman:
I want to roll back to, there's this, I think it was Whitman who said, "I contain multitudes." This idea that you've got parts that you're acknowledging and accepting. I had this quote here, the Aboriginal pronouns. Often in facilitation, we talk about me time and we time and balancing them. And I know that it transforms a conversation to allow some silent thinking time. That it can't all just be talking nonstop, there has to be introspection, and there has to be quiet. And it blew my mind that there was this, I, myself, we too, us too, we but not others, we all together, to acknowledge like a much greater diversity of defining a collective. It seems like that would have... It's a non-binary view of a collective of how we create a collective. I don't even know what my question is there. It seems like in the process of a group dialoguing and trying to come to an agreement, there's a lot of fluidity.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, you can see the structure of that fractal that I was talking about before, you can see it there as you just go through the conjugation. I guess, as you're going through those pronouns, and you're seeing that fractal pattern there. Right there from me to us, to us but not them, all of us, us belonging to him, us belonging to them. It's like all your relations are encoded in how you describe yourself. And that is the focus of the [inaudible 00:37:40] mission. Your language directs you to that. It doesn't direct us to structure our society, not a society, but to structure the relations.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Gender is not one of the broad categories to do that, which is interesting. In my home language anyway, that there's no separate pronouns for he and she, him and her. That's just [inaudible 00:38:09]. So it's like everybody, regardless of gender has the same pronoun to refer to them personally. Which I mean, you think about where the attention goes. And I mean, there are languages like your romance languages, like Spanish, Portuguese, French, all these ones. You can't speak them. You can't say any word without referencing its gender. That is the most important category, relational category. That is the most important division. So much so that it has to go into every single object in the universe, has to be masculine and feminine. It's, "Wow." So speaking that language, where is your cognition directed?
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, maybe this is the wrong question to ask, but I feel like in meeting rooms all across the world, people... And one of my primary concerns is how does a group of people come to a decision? And this me greater than all of you, is often the way that these decisions are made. One person says, "This is the way," and yet at some point, a group of people has to stop yarning and take an action, come out of metaphor and go into the real. I mean, it's like the question of like, "In what ways can you advise the world on making better organic out of that multiverse to the choice?" So I think it puzzles me sometimes.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I don't know. It's usually in the collective mind, it'll direct you to something that you couldn't otherwise see. It's seldom going to be one of the stories coming out on top and being, "No, that one's the most right, or the most likely to give us the best outcome, so we're going to go with that." And it's seldom about a consensus that is a compromise. It's like, "All right. We'll do a little bit of everyone's, and just cobble together just this monstrous, ridiculous, ineffective solution as well." It's in a way there's something a bit more magical about it. It's about all the stories come together, and, "Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, understood. Respected." And then it's like something else comes out of that.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And often, this will need the guidance and authority of elders, who will listen to everybody's input, but they're the ones with experience and with that highly focused skill of observation, to even be able to see the patterns and flows of spirit and knowledge in that situation, and all the rest. And everybody is getting together with a solution for, I don't know, how to rescue an animal that's trapped, maybe. And everybody's got a different story about that. And there's somebody who has that animals, that taught them and they've got a story for that. And there's somebody who has some tools that they reckon they could use to help untrap that animal. There's a whole heap of story goes around.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Everybody would talk about it, but then, I guess the elders job would be to look at, it would be in the aggregate of those stories. Which it can happen without an elder, but I mean, it's really good to have that relational technology of that big mind, sort of helping to arrange your meta narrative. Because they have that cultural authority and a deep time authority, which where it becomes more than just the people in the circle, but every person circle, the ancestors going back time out of memory, that that elder knows. And there's an aggregate of a lot of stories of wisdom and experience.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And the emergent solution might be completely different from any story that elder has, or any story that anybody that has. It might be, "You know what? That animal is supposed to die." And there's a tiny part of everybody's story and everybody's opinion, that ends up contributing to that. There's a clue in everyone's story that leads to the big conclusion that that animal is supposed to die. I think after it's dead, if we cut that animal open, we might find that we find something terrible in its belly, and we'll need to dispose of it carefully. There'll be something like that [inaudible 00:43:22]. That wasn't a very good... I'm usually better at cross-cultural sort of... That's why that makes sense to me [crosstalk 00:43:31].
Daniel Stillman:
No. It makes sense to me too.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
There's still a lot of people here, but-
Daniel Stillman:
Well, it's a crisis moment.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
See, I'm supposed to be... I had an elder the other day tell me my role in the world. As you said that I'm a settler whisperer, that I can come up with good metaphors to translate ideas [crosstalk 00:43:53].
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I'll tell you what. I talk about this is that sometimes something that's an emergency isn't an emergency, something that we're all up in arms about, maybe sometimes inaction is sometimes the best action. And what I heard from this is, in my mental model, there is a whole spectrum of conversations that are happening, potentially at once. There's each person's conversation with what they think, what they see. My conversation with your story, the group listening to all of them and there's much bigger... And what seems the value of respect for an elder's view, the longer time horizon, the cultural story. So all of these are, like the first diagram, the first lore, the ripples of circles coming outward, those are circles of conversation to consider. And the wagon is, we don't know.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
That's it. That's it. I think any knowledge tradition that is not a process, that is not a method of inquiry, it's not going to last. If that makes any sense.
Daniel Stillman:
Say more about that. Let's talk about the method of inquiry.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, this way where you end up with dogma and ideology and things like that, you end up with fixed bodies of knowledge, where there's these principles that are unassailable, and everything in the universe must be made to fit them, then that's ridiculous. Your knowledge system must be more than a collection of content. You can't have that. You can't have a Codex. You can't have a biblio. You can't have something that he is the rules. You just can't have it. It has to be a process. Your knowledge system has to be a process-oriented thing rather than a content-oriented thing. Once it becomes fixed content, it can only destroy itself and lots of other things as well. It has to be a method of inquiry not a body of information.
Daniel Stillman:
And I feel like, I'm like, "Where did I put that sticky note?" It's here someplace. Because you talk about discovery and synthesis. I was reading and I was like, "This sounds like design thinking to me." It's a process of digesting complexity but not into simplicity. It's a process of digesting complexity into complexity.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. And there isn't a set of steps that you can follow as an individual to do that. It's something that has to emerge collectively, organically and dramatically.
Daniel Stillman:
Euthydemus. I had to Google that when you used it. It makes perfect sense.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Yeah. I love it because it for me, I think of biotic, the term biotic. People are usually, it's pretty easy to jump from there to understand what emergence is, but they struggle if you say demotic. They know demos means human, but they trouble-
Daniel Stillman:
It sounds too much like demon.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
So think about how you feel about the word biotic. Okay. Now look, demotic there. That one. Our thing is patented on that. It follows the pattern, so that's the same thing. So there's the demotic. Can you see how the emergence would happen there? It's like, "Oh. Yes, I can."
Daniel Stillman:
And it's almost like demotic and biotic, I think in a Western mind, we'd put them in opposition. But maybe they're in conversation, their intention when you're thinking about forming a world.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, I mean, at the very least unified worldview, you have to think of them as being a stack in a stack on the landscape, an evolutionary stack. And I mean, the deeper you go into the layer, the more biotic you're going to get with the membranes closer to the top of the layer around things you can tinker with like economies and value systems. And disruptive innovation would be in this layer up here and all that sort of thing. I don't know. The deeper you go in the stack, you got to protect that though, because once you mess with things at the bottom, the whole Jenga tower falls.
Daniel Stillman:
This is why we have to slow down and pay close attention, and listen.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Yeah. But for me, it's not a stack. For me, it's not a stack. There aren't membranes. It's one thing. For me, there's no separation between the ecology and the economy, the governance system, anything else, culture.
Daniel Stillman:
I want to respect your time, Tyson and I'm really grateful for this. I had a quote here from the beginning of the book, where you talk about what sharing this knowledge has cost you and how it's... I appreciate your time and you holding space to share these ideas because I know they're important.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Well, thanks, man. I don't know if that was a question.
Daniel Stillman:
No, no. That was just a thank you.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Thanks, man.
Daniel Stillman:
The question is like, what haven't I asked you about yarning that I should have asked you? Is there anything that... What's left unsaid?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I think if it doesn't come out, then it doesn't come out. That's the other thing, you can't force it. You can't force the yarn. This year, this might be a yarn that takes us 12 years to finish.
Daniel Stillman:
That would be epic.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. I mean, we might find ourself in the same refugee detention facility one day for climate refugees, and we'll sit down and finish it there.
Daniel Stillman:
It's possible.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I might call you next week and go, "Oh. Something else."
Daniel Stillman:
Please do.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
"Tell me about this." You know what I mean? It's just yarns are an entanglement. And once you're entangled with somebody, then that's it, you're always entangled. If something happens to you, then I'll feel it on some level over here. It's hard when you end up with like 100,000 people you're entangled with, but hey. But you must get that through the podcast, when you make relationships with people and you can't track them, you feel things coming through you every day, because there is an entanglement and their failures are really bound up with yours. And the things that happened to them, that are cataclysmic enough to affect their energetics. One of them goes through a breakup and bloody nearly kills himself or something like that, that's going to hit you. You're going to have a bad day, and you won't even know why.
Daniel Stillman:
That is what happens, actually.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Then you could just have that dream, have that dream about, "I need to call that person." Or, "What was the fellow's name? I need to get back and talk to him about aspects."
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, I think talking is maybe the most fundamental thing that we have, and that we do. And I guess, it's impossible to summarize it all, but what do you want us to know about how the world ought to be talking differently than we are today?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
What do you want to know? Man, I don't know. You kind of have an agenda. So you kind of have an agenda. If I had like a 10 point plan or something like that, I'm like, "Oh. People need to start doing this and this and this." And then I try and get followers and then [crosstalk 00:53:19].
Daniel Stillman:
But not having the agenda is actually a tremendously profound non-agenda agenda.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
That becomes a thing. And that's in the world. It's like you go, "People don't have an agenda. Agenda item number one, don't have an agenda. Agenda item number two, don't have an agenda. Oh, oh, oh. We're fight clubbing this." And it's just like, everything is branded. Everything's like that. Everything's ruined. So I try and wrestle with that. So like in the book, every now and then, I know there's kind of an Easter egg thing I do in there where I sort of set something up, like it might be a framework.
Daniel Stillman:
And then you destroy it five pages later.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And then like, "No." Then I just sort of undermine it. And then it's like, "Oh. So that's not a thing. What is it? Is it a thing? I don't know. I'm looking for the thing here. Can I have a thing?"
Daniel Stillman:
I was looking for the story about the moon sisters. I have a note about it, about not having a fixed perspective. And I couldn't find it. It's like you changed it. It's not in the book anymore. I looked through it like twice and I couldn't find it. You're playing tricks on me.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Isn't that cool? Look, maybe I didn't mention it in the book, but I've mentioned it in yarn. I think around the place, so you might have heard it somewhere.
Daniel Stillman:
Maybe.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Or maybe it was just coming up between the lines there somehow.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, since we're talking about not having-
Tyson Yunkaporta:
[crosstalk 00:54:53] fixed perspective.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I can't remember the story now. I just took a note and I set to ask... It was like my second point.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I was telling a story to my four-year-old daughter for the first time last night. But yes these two sisters who are after a bonefish. A bonefish is a beautiful big fish. And it's weird because it's got a dotted line like where to cut it.
Daniel Stillman:
That's handy.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I guess the best thing is to have the belly and there's a perfect spot where you can cut it, where you get the entire and it just ends up opening out to a plate of meat. You just chuck it on the coals. It's amazing. I love it. But you can only catch him at night. You can't catch him in the daytime, they only feed at night and they're attracted to light. So the moon sisters were having a bark canoe at nighttime, and they had soft tea tree bark torches smashed at the ends, for the fire to bring them up. And they were spearing big bonefish, bringing them in the canoe. And the canoe was full, like really full, and they were about to come back in, but then one of them said, "There's another. There's a really big one out there. Let's go after that."
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And so then, "All right. We'll have to go quick because it's time to go back. We don't want to like..." So they're heading for that big white shape on the water, but it's like, "We nearly had it. We nearly had it." But of course it moves. It keeps moving. And so in chasing that illusion of the full moon shining on the ocean, they fell into that trap of that illusion. And so the Moon Man had them then. Because in the southern hemisphere, the moon is male. I know where you are, it's probably female. A female thing and the sun is a man, a bold god of death kind of thing. But no, it's like the moon is male and the sun is female in the southern hemisphere.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
So anyway, the Moon Man abducted those sisters, and took them up. And so when you look anywhere where you are in the world, you look up there and you'll see two shadows. There's one like that that is on the top half coming down the side and another one is slightly lower. You see the two shadows in the moon, that's the two moon sisters. And that's a story about being careful of illusion of a fixed viewpoint. I mean, that's one interpretation. There's a lot more to that story, but I can't tell it because I'm not one of them older people who can hold that story. I can just kind of report parts of it.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
But for me, with my infant point of view on that story, infant point of view, there's a lifetime of things to explore in there for me, but particularly around fixed viewpoints, and multiple pluralistic viewpoints. So if you're standing on the beach, and you're seeing that moon, the way the shine of the moon is, that's not there. It's not where you're seeing it. And somebody 20 meters further up the beach is seeing it in a different place. And as you move and walk up and down the beach, it's moving as well in relation to where you are. So you get 1000 people right up and down that coast, all reporting on the location of where the moon reflection is. Every single one of these stories will be wrong and right at the same time.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
But the aggregate story, the big meta story, the big narrative there would be the moon shines on every part of the ocean at once. Which is something that's approximating the truth. It's approximating enough of the truth that you could make some accurate predictions and models based on that. And that's good enough for me. There are higher levels of that story that go into much deeper stuff where you could perform a lot more stuff, but I think there's enough on that for me to work on, just that level of the story for a lifetime.
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, I think that's wonderful. It says so much about what it is to sit in a circle and talk with other people about what is. And to have a point of view of respect for everybody's perspective.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah, exactly. Like, "No. The moon is fricking, the reflection is there. I can see it. Are you insane?" A person 20 meters away, "It's there. This person wants to ruin the world."
Daniel Stillman:
How dare they say the moon is 20 meters to the left? That is scorched earth.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Existential threat, this person's point of view. Anyway. God, things are funny. I'm terrified to talk to Americans at the moment. [inaudible 01:00:06].
Daniel Stillman:
America is the best something. I'm not sure what it is but that's another story for another time.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. You just never know what you're going to get. You never know when someone's just going to lose their fricking mind at you.
Daniel Stillman:
But the deescalation...
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I've had to shut down a couple of things.
Daniel Stillman:
Really?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Weirdos and their real extreme reaction.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, some white people have a hard time imagining that they don't know everything about everything, because it's supposed to be what it's all about.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Well, that's their job.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. And I think what's really challenging is, you're challenging us, all of us to sit with not knowing.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
But without having to worry about the most important thing about that message is that you're evil. You know what I mean? It's got to be a bit funny, and it's got to be establishing relationships. If it's boring or angry, and about establishing barriers and boundaries between people, then I find that's not as productive.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. I think those people must not have-
Tyson Yunkaporta:
[crosstalk 01:01:45] be quite unproductive.
Daniel Stillman:
I think those people must not have actually read your book. Because I think-
Tyson Yunkaporta:
It's hard talking to people who haven't. There was one guy in this event. This guy hadn't read it and he just lost his mind. He was so angry. He was traumatized. He wrapped himself in a blanket and was rocking back and forth kind of thing. And just piping in the comments in all caps. And then I'm muting his mic and just screaming. It was full on, man.
Daniel Stillman:
That guy just needs to be held, I'm presuming.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Well, I mean he thought he was helping me I guess with my problematic stuff. And maybe he did help me, who knows? Because I can't get that image out of my mind. I've been rocking back and forth, and it makes me laugh about five times a day and that was months ago.
Daniel Stillman:
What do you do with that?
Tyson Yunkaporta:
He brought a bit of joy into in my life. I just laugh about it. But it's also feedback on like... because you come up with little bits you think are funny, and just about figuring out as autistic spectrum kind of guy how to try and read a context in a room to see if something was going to land.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. From 15,000 miles away. It's tough.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. Yeah. I was just doing this whole sort of joke about how for some reason white women are public enemy number one at the moment, and it's like just as feminism was sort of starting to land and become accepted. Now suddenly it's like, white women are getting the blame for everything and just getting smashed left, right and center. And they're being so patient. And I just said, "You've got to watch it though, because they can get angry." Usually at the moment, I mean all of the white females I know, at the moment when you're mansplaining and criticizing them and telling them everything that's wrong with them, if they go really quiet and they're agreeing with you, that's a bad sign.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
If you're a man who is seeing that signal and going, "Oh, good. She's listening." That's a bad idea. And so I was like, I don't know. And then I went, "Just imagine this whole sort of scene of all these ladies just losing it at the same time." And Greg and I grabbing a Glock and running out of the street. Just telling people, "Call me Karen again. Call me Karen again, motherfucker." Anyway, and I'm just like, I don't know, I'm just running with this ridiculous scenario that's offensive on so many levels. You can edit it out.
Daniel Stillman:
Sure.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
And just my, I don't know, my riffing on that, "Call me Becky. Say it." I was just, I don't know. I thought I was lightening the mood because it was [inaudible 01:05:21] it just catastrophized these hundreds of people. They were traumatized by it. And so that was good feedback for me. I mean, I could tell they were being nice about it. But I mean, it was you could see it upset them. And then because I was sort of going, it was like only a few days after the storming of the Capitol.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I was saying, "See. That was all ladies. They're at the front. They're the ones who organized. Men are useless. All they did was rub their poo on the wall. The women were in there and they were stealing Nancy Pelosi's computer, and looking for dudes to hang on the gallows they made at the front. They get shot in the face. They're right there. Hold the line, the center must hold." That was all girls doing that. Anyway, so I'm just riffing on that, and I'm just digging myself deeper and deeper. And I'm on Zoom and just not reading the room. But anyway, it just...
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, humor is a really important component of yarning in indigenous cultures, and you were trying to use humor for a purpose. That purpose backfired and I mean, that happens. I found that the easiest thing to make fun of is myself. That's always the safe thing to use humor for. I think you do that plenty.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I think that's great, but I'm running out of material. Only so many times I can accuse myself of having a small penis before people don't want to hear it anymore.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I think that's probably our sign to wrap up.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
You got it there.
Daniel Stillman:
I guess the final thing is, I mean everyone, I think should read your book. Is there any other place you would like to direct people on the internet to learn about more things about you? Because I know you do research and you teach and stuff.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I'm not here to promote anything. I'm just interested in the arts. I'm not really into branding, you probably got that impression. Although I wouldn't mind getting canceled, and so maybe this episode will contribute.
Daniel Stillman:
I'll do what I can, and I'm not that big of a deal so I can't-
Tyson Yunkaporta:
I want to be able to buy a house before I die sometime in the next couple of decades that my kids can live in when they grow up. And I think the quickest way to sell a whole heap of books is to get canceled.
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, because people will hate read your book.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
No, but all the people who hate, people who hate like...
Daniel Stillman:
oh, reverse hate reading your book.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
[crosstalk 01:08:22], they are only 15% of the population. But it seems like most of the people are horrendous dudes who will pretty much just read anything that a terrible person has written, or anything that somebody who is awful. So anyway, [crosstalk 01:08:39].
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, if they read it, they might actually learn something.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
... get canceled and sell 6 million books, and just buy a big mob of my family's land back, and just pretty much settle into a good life down the track, and have somewhere for my kids to go where they're not going to get shot or bulldozed.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I'll see what I can do. I don't think there's enough material in here to get you properly canceled.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
God dammit. All right.
Daniel Stillman:
We'll just have to do another... I don't think you get canceled on purpose. Because people can tell when you don't really mean it.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Because it's all about the intent, isn't it?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
All right. I'm going to have to work on my evil intentions. Thanks for the tip.
Daniel Stillman:
You got it, brother. I'm looking out for you.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
All right, man. I'm going to go and look after these babies.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Thank you so much for the time and for sharing these ideas, Tyson. I really appreciate it.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Yeah. No worries.
Daniel Stillman:
Good on you.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Thank you, man. See you later.
Daniel Stillman:
Take care.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Bye.