Gordon White

This week I talk to Gordon White, former "weird kid", proprietor of the popular Rune Soup podcast and blog. Gordon is also a documentarian, world traveler, digital strategist and practicing magician. He's the author of three books that came out in the last year or so: Star.Ships, which we discuss in this podcast; The Chaos Protocols, which takes a heterodox view of how to handle the post-financial crash economy; and Pieces of Eight, a personal history of the Chaos Magic movement.

This interview has a twin over on Gordon's podcast, where he interviews me about the Bruno books.You can listen to that over on Rune Soup or on iTunes.

Episode Outline, Notes and Links

Being part of a traveling family, returning home to Australia"You don't go to London for the snorkeling.""A lot of people recycling Seth Godin's slides at conferences."Why podcasting is the new blogging: "It's a return to the real."Why "Were you a weird kid?" is a great first interview question.Being weird is the only way to break even in the global monoculture.Star.Ships discusses the prehistory of magical/religious/astronomical thoughtThe Flood myth as a reflection of Southeast Asian post-ice age culturesHow did they build Nan Madol on Pohnpei without modern technology?Materialism vs. IdealismAncient aliens as a cultural mistakeGobekli Tepe as a "stone guitar" and early star templeIs it fair to compare modern animist hunter-gatherers to prehistoric ones? Yes, if prehistoric people were not stupid, which they weren't."Everything in a hunter-gatherer culture is valuable; they don't accumulate junk."Great Man Theory vs. Steam Engine TimeKenneth Ruthven, Critical Assumptions, on influence:Our understanding of literary ‘influence’ is obstructed by the grammar of our language, which puts things back to front in obliging us to speak in passive terms of the one who is the active partner in the relationship: to say that Keats influenced Wilde is not only to credit Keats with an activity of which he was innocent, but also to misrepresent Wilde by suggesting he merely submitted to something he obviously went out of his way to acquire. In matters of influence, it is the receptor who takes the initiative, not the emitter. When we say that Keats had a strong influence on Wilde, what we really mean is that Wilde was an assiduous reader of Keats, an inquisitive reader in the service of an acquisitive writer.

Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance theory

Gordon's website

Gordon on Twitter

Michael Witzel's The Origin of the World's Mythologies 

Graham Hancock Fingerprints of the Gods 

Alien megastructures (or just a dimming star)

Kardasheff II civilization signal (or just a local one?)