Here's a recording of one of the most-fun events on my Australia tour: a talk and singer-songwriter-storyteller set performed and recorded in Sydney at Backyard Network on 2017-02-09. I play a few new tunes and talk about the pivotal moments in my life when I had key insights into the evolutionary process – insights that bumped me off the lifelong academic track I'd been on, and set me off on an adventure of discovery and creativity that just might change the way you see the world, as well...

Notes on the talk:

- The message that I’m inspired to deliver.

- A bit of autobiography about falling out of academia.

- Student of Ernst Haeckel, Alfred Russell Wallace, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Bakker.

“There is no point. It is a field.”

- We still have all of the ecological niches that dinosaurs invented.

- Flowers were a catastrophe. Photosynthesis was a catastrophe. Both were ultimately “improvements” to Earth’s diverse/antifragile ecosystems by producing new metabolisms in response to new pollutants.

- Widen your definition of life to include all self-organizing systems on this planet – including mobile computing platforms, digital technologies, new forms of industrial metabolisms.

- Living on the world? No, living IN it. Air plankton. The atmosphere is less-dense ocean. Fluid.

- Every catastrophe precipitates a new synthesis.

- Martin Nowak and the chaotic social/memory crisis origins of syntax.

- The creative reasoning for sex. Why it exists.

- Cultural Trap Hypothesis for the Maintenance of Vocal Learning.
(and the critical learning period stays open longer in birds and humans that have more cultural complexity - culture takes longer to “download,” favoring more youthful brains and more childlike behavioral patterns).

- Future Shock as the crisis point at the convergence of increasing social complexity and the increasing tempo of historical change.

- The Anthropocene: Weaving the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human into the next transcendental category, which includes the made and the born.

- What this all means for interpersonal relationships.

- We’re made out of drugs. The self as a field of interactions, not a particle.

- The confusion of the city and wilderness and the advent of a new wilderness.

“The reason you hear voices when you go out into the desert is because you hear voices all the time! Because you’re a human being, you’re made out of voices.”

- Technology has revived jungle mysticism of a densely populated, speciose indigenous spirituality and has crowded out the ecologically spare Abrahamic monotheism.

- How we can walk this tightrope of paradox into a world we actually want to inhabit…