Simon Waller (00:00.642)
Hey, welcome to episode five of the Future with Friends. Today I’m being joined by a very dear friend of mine, the incredible Mr Mykel Dixon. Cue the applause, cue the applause. That’s right, what was next to happen? The clapping. Now, as I said, I like to start these shows by proving that the friendship is real. I have a very vivid memory of how we met. And I’m not sure if it’s something that I’ve made up in my head or whether you share this experience. And so I’m just gonna ask

Cue applause.

Simon Waller (00:30.348)
What your memory is of our first meeting?

It was… It was… It was super memorable.

Mykel Dixon (00:47.948)
Remind me again?

Here’s my memory of it. So you had just joined thought leaders, which I’ve been in for a little bit of time. We were at an event in like the the in the city in the CBD in Melbourne and I’d been out for dinner that night and I was out with Amy Scott and Lisa O’Neill and I think some of that might be an Adrian Medhurst and we’d gone out for dumplings and I remember it being a wet night and the streets were wet and we kind of come out and then in the alleyway

We saw, it was like, it was like two gangs from West Side Story meeting.

Remember this.

And you were there with your gang and I’m guessing in your gang would have been Jason Fox maybe Patrick Hollingworth. And it was like these two gangs kind of met across the street. I remember you from that day because you were the very much the coolest addition to the thought leaders program that we’d seen. And I was like, my God, there he is. And we kind of locked eyes and the rest is.

Mykel Dixon (01:30.38)
Patrick Hollingway.

Mykel Dixon (01:47.598)
Let’s drill down on that and just for the listeners at home, talk about how cool I am.

Let’s not.

Anyway, that’s my memory. And obviously, since then, we’ve done some amazingly cool things together. We’ve hiked through New Zealand. Most recently, you hosted an emceed with your band, My Wife’s 50th birthday party, which was absolutely epic. And along the way, though, what I’ve noticed is that you have developed, maybe always had a very deep interest in, I suppose, a form of like, shamanism and kind of indigenous knowledge.

Where does that stem from for you?

Well, I would say it’s original wisdom as opposed to just merely indigenous because that might lead us down a particular path of thinking.

Mykel Dixon (02:37.55)
of a contemporary version of what Indigenous means, but thinking about wisdom or intelligence or a knowledge and a knowing that is instinctual and innate into all of us as human beings that perhaps in modern contemporary Western life we’ve forgotten. And so I’ve always been fascinated by things that maybe can’t be explained by reason or logic or science or et cetera, et cetera. It’s certainly served me well in terms of the arts, my background in the arts entertainment

So being in that, you know, space where magical, mystical things happen and you can’t quite articulate it, but that’s perfectly fine on a bandstand or that’s perfectly fine when you’re creating art with people or with yourself. It comes with the territory. So I guess through that and then bleeding out into everyday life.

It’s just always been there for me. I’ve always had a deeper connection to something more vast and more vibrant than merely what is in front of my face at any one time.

And so even if you can’t kind of articulate, like you said, it’s always been there. So it’s always been something that you have noticed or kind of can think of in the background. it’s certain somewhere along the way, though, you’ve certainly brought it more into the foreground of your life. Like you spent some time working on this aspect of your being. that a fair enough? Yeah.

And you could even say that maybe I brought it in or maybe it brought itself to me in that in that that’s this. love to say it’s this mystical dance between choice and chance where is it me bringing these things closer to me or is it me allowing the world that has been screaming at me and I think screaming at all of us when we’re kids and we’re just in that beautiful, lucid state and we’re playing and we’re we’re talking to trees and we’re we’re so much more attuned to

Mykel Dixon (04:31.182)
a richer experience of existence and I managed to retain that as I grew up. think because of my background in the arts and spending a lot of time in nature that I just never really put it in a box and put it aside and grew up essentially and now it’s become it’s become really foundational to the work that I do and the life that I live and

More recently, the joy that I’m feeling even in amidst this very difficult, challenging, uncertain time.

And so what I like the practical things like that you have done in terms of that exploration, like how have you kind of really tapped into that, I suppose, that experience and that knowledge?

My mother was pretty good at putting the right books in front of me and finding alternative ways of perceiving the world and interesting thinkers and stuff like that. Again, the arts, anyone involved in the arts, music, dance, theatre, culture, there’s always an undertone and undercurrent of that, of something more. And I travelled an awful lot through my 20s and early 30s. And I think that there’s something powerful and magical that happens when you are…

on voyaging around the world and just the mystical, the mythical seems to show up when we’re outside of just the daily routine of modern contemporary life. And then more recently in the last four years, I’ve been working with a woman in the States called Dr Marty Spiegelman who has been working with indigenous cultures around the world for the last 40 odd years. And she works a lot more recently with the Quechua in Peru and…

Mykel Dixon (06:14.178)
And a beautiful crew of people, Kaspong, I can see is online with us. She’s in a group with me and we get pretty deep and pretty out there into accessing and learning about these technologies that Marty would say are original wisdom. Yes, a lot of indigenous cultures around the world are still using these and a lot of Western science is starting to, well, for a long time now, but particularly it’s getting more and more in…

the general public this idea of wow there might be more to this that we’ve known. There might be stuff that we don’t need to keep discovering maybe it’s about reclaiming and reawakening to and remembering things that we perhaps have already known and so that’s where we’ve come to this idea of the future of the past.

Yes, and so obviously through your work with Marty, I got introduced to her and I spent a year and a half or so working with Marty as well. And I remember the way, well, the way that she almost framed it was that, you know, there are these kind of these technologies, these ancient technologies, these ways of being. you know, but the real struggle is a lot of the, you know, the tribes that still practice these in their original form.

struggle to understand necessarily how they be reapplied in the modern context. And in some ways, I see that’s what the focus of your scenario is. It’s kind of like, what would it actually mean and what would it actually be like if we were to embrace some of these technologies and apply it in day-to-day work and life at some point in the future? Is that fair enough?

Absolutely, it’s something that we talk about a lot and perhaps without giving too much away before I read this scenario is what we can get, we can trip ourselves up a little bit in thinking.

Mykel Dixon (08:03.446)
it’s about going back. It’s about becoming a Luddite. It’s about it’s anti technology or it’s anti, you know, the future. But really it’s about an integration. It’s about how we can, how we can access the best parts of the past and bring them into the now to shape tomorrow and you know, 10, 15, a hundred years from now.

as a beautiful way of widening the palette in which we can paint this masterpiece called humanity as opposed to going, no, that’s not relevant anymore, that’s too old or we need to throw out everything that we’re doing right now and start again and go back to living in farms and, you know, sitting around campfires. That’s cool, but…

It’s also cool that we can use technology right now to talk to people all around the world on LinkedIn. you know, so it’s about, it’s really about integration.

Yeah, well, let’s dive into that a little bit more, obviously, after you’ve shared your scenario. One last question before you jump into it. What time frame are we looking at here? Where is your

When is your scenario coming out? 2049.

Simon Waller (09:15.778)
And is there any particular significance around the timeframe or the day? did you choose that particular?

It was one year before 2050.

Think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just, yeah, that’s what I came up with.

Perfect. Well, I’m going to hand over to you, Myke, your opportunity to read from start to the end, your scenario about the future of

Can I set a little context for people just by doing this for a second?

Mykel Dixon (10:00.374)
Bye.

Yes, of course you can.

you

Mykel Dixon (10:09.646)
the future of the past. It’s 2049 and Melbourne doesn’t look smarter, it feels wiser. The rooftops are gardens now. Tram stops double as listening stations and on clear nights the city breathes in rhythm with the Yarra. People don’t rush so much anymore, not because we’ve slowed down, but because we’ve tuned in.

The shift began seven years ago in 2042 when the global synesthetic census shocked the world. Over 60 % of the population tested positive for what science used to call non-ordinary perception. Suddenly, things long dismissed as fantasy, plant telepathy, ancestral memory retrieval, navigating by stars in the broad daylight were being documented in peer-reviewed journals. What followed wasn’t panic, it was possibility.

governments for the first time began legislating for consciousness. And in 2045, the World Wisdom Accord ratified what would become a turning point for human culture, the rewilding mandate. From then on, every child on earth was required to be fluent in at least three ancestral intelligences by the age of 12. Things like dream dialogue, emotional resonance sculpting, soil-based storytelling, Skysong navigation, or multi-species diplomacy.

School changed, work changed, but more importantly, reality changed. This wasn’t a move backwards. It wasn’t regression. It was reintegration. As Nikola Tesla now quoted in official policy documents once said, the day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. This is that decade. The challenge now isn’t climate or war or runaway AI. Those systems have found new balance through relational thinking.

The real tension of our time is ontology. What is real when science validates the metaphysical, when telepathy is measurable, when intention shapes crop yields and your dreams send memos before your inbox does. Which brings us to Juno Hale. She’s 38, lives in the greater bio region of Birrung, Werribee, which used to be called Northcutt. She was once a high performing strategist in a global consultancy.

Mykel Dixon (12:25.506)
Decoding systems and forecasting complexity. Now she works as a patent listener at the Sensory Intelligence Bureau. She builds operating models based on the blooming cycles of native flora. Consults on policy using lunar data, designs meetings that begin with scent, including bird calls and close in poetry. She’s not a mystic, though her colleagues might say otherwise. She’s a systems thinker, but her primary instrument is perception.

She says she owes everything to two things, the rewilding curriculum and a strange little podcast she found from 20 years ago called The Telepathy Tapes. Nod to anyone, go and check out The Telepathy Tapes. It features nonverbal autistic children who could communicate in Thai languages through presence alone. That podcast broke something open in her or maybe it reconnected something. In late May, Juno walked barefoot across her team’s open air studio, which was formerly a co-working space, now a lush

research garden. She carries a jar of rain infused myrtle oil for the morning’s alignment session. Her clients are a group of AI ethicists from an agricultural tech firm. Their drones are flawless, their senses pristine, but something strange is happening. The plants have stopped coordinating. They’ve run the diagnostics. It’s not a code issue. It’s a relational breakdown. Juno breathes in the oil. She places her hand on the soil grown map laid out before them. A vision flashes.

fences, scarred land, generational trauma till deep into the earth. One of the engineers begins to cry, this isn’t about tech, it’s about trust. They recalibrate the drones, not for speed or accuracy, but for tone. They adjust the hover frequencies to something more harmonious with root song. Within weeks, the yield returns stronger, sweeter, synchronous.

Later Juno will teach a master class at the university called Embodied Cognition and Non-Human Feedback Systems. But right now she’s watching the wind stir and the magpies wondering if their flight pattern carries the next message. Because in this world, messages don’t just come in words, they come in rhythms and in resonance. This is the future of the past. Not nostalgic, remembered. Not mythical, measurable. Not backtracking, but reawakening.

Mykel Dixon (14:41.312)
A future where the tools of the past, sensation, rhythm, story, intuition are no longer dismissed as soft skills, but recognised as the primary instruments of societal design. Where we don’t accelerate, we expand. Where we don’t scale, we deepen. Where we don’t just solve, we speak with the world, not at it. From cognition to communion, from noise to nuance, from the myth of control to the music of participation. Simon, this isn’t utopia.

It’s the next natural step and all we had to do was rem-

Simon Waller (15:21.719)
Wow.

Hahaha.

There is so much in this and not just because it was two pages long. Like there is just an incredible amount of content for us to dissect in there. Before we do that, I’m curious just a little bit about the process of writing this. How did you go about it? What was what was the inspirations that you kind of came across along the way? What were perhaps even the challenges of kind of trying to articulate

something like this, you know, 24 years in future.

I spent a good few hours just going deep into this and I sent it through to you and you said it’s too long. So that was the first… Started. I thought about, I found this is quite a beautiful process because I will admit when you first said, jump on the podcast and let’s do this scenario thing, I was like, I don’t wanna…

Simon Waller (16:09.41)
That’s where it

Mykel Dixon (16:24.014)
create a scenario for the future. don’t feel I just couldn’t see past this idea of we need to focus on now. I don’t want to talk about the future. There’s so much happening now. I’m more interested in now. Why are we always inventing these future scenarios?

It seems pointless and useless. Duh, what? Nah, Simon. And I actually really struggled with it. And I stalled and I stalled and I stalled. And it wasn’t until you gave me a very gentle nudge saying, dude, we need to do this next week, that I thought, okay, I’m going to have to sit down. And I sat down and started writing and something really beautiful happened. Actually, I started remembering how wonderful it is to have a vision of the future. And I started

just getting lost in, well, how cool would it be to live into this big, beautiful, bold future? Like, why does it have to be a future that’s, I don’t know, war-torn and dystopian and all kinds of trouble? It was such a beautiful process because the more I started writing, the more it started, the more excited I got about the future. And the more I started realizing,

Wow, without a vision of the future, we’re pretty lost in the present, actually. My choices, my behaviors right now are really driven by having a future that inspires and kind of empowers me to make different choices now. So I found the process quite amazing.

think that’s again, that’s a really beautiful insight around futurism is that often it kind of can be super inspiring. And in fact, one of the things I kind of picked up in this, because I have struggled, I think with probably some of the same questions that you have struggled with over the years, which is there is this probably on one hand, a really deep need for this type of integration of ancient knowledge to happen. And yet at the same time, having no real clarity about how that’s actually going to occur.

Mykel Dixon (18:27.19)
Yeah, well, if we want to talk about the specifics of what that scenario is, I think it is very, very exciting time to be alive now. And I would say even doing this scenario helped me get excited again in that I’ve been thinking, I’ve been stuck inside a narrative, inside a story for quite a long time that we aren’t, we’re always fighting against something.

and that where the people just aren’t ready or that the systems that we live in are too entrenched and we’re too far and collapse and social, economic, it’s all going to fall in a big heap and err and even doing this process actually helped me go, that’s right. They’re just stories that I’m attached to. And what about all the wonderful things that I want for the world? Well, why couldn’t they come true?

And why couldn’t we start to bring through, start to bring through or reawaken to these powerful, powerful technologies and powerful intelligences that have been here all along. And the more that we do that, the more we start to see them and the more they start to filter into our life. And I actually wrote a newsletter about this inspired by this process and sent it out yesterday. And what I came to

through writing that newsletter was, you know, we need a vision of the future to live into. but underneath that vision or that dream, if we don’t believe it’s possible, then we stop visioning and we stop dreaming. And so then we stopped seeing not just the big visions, the big scenarios, we actually stop all these little signals and stop seeing all these, these love notes and signposts on the way to that potential becoming.

And so I can see how important it is to do this scenario stuff to help us not just have a big vision of the future, but actually then to bring our awareness back into the present to start to look for and notice things you could say in your workplace, et cetera, et cetera. But in the context of this conversation today, start to notice these mythical, mystical, magical, emerging, unfolding mysteries that

Mykel Dixon (20:44.642)
that might take you back to childhood or might take you to those moments you’ve had when you’re looking out at the ocean and you’re thinking, God, there’s just something beautiful about this. Or you think of someone and then they call or you’re at a music festival and the band seems to play this thing and you look around and you catch eyes with someone who’s 50 meters away and you both you’ve never met and you’re, we’re having a moment together, man. Whoa. And there’s this electricity.

and this collective effervescence as it’s known, there’s just so many powerful, exciting, dynamic things that are always there and always available to us, but without believing that they’re possible, then you miss them. So this process helped me, even though we’re talking about the future, it actually is starting to really shape the now.

One the things that came up for me when I first read it was, it starts at this point of 20-42 when you talk about the global synthesis.

Synesthetic.

census, right? And my immediate question was, I wonder what happened before that? Like, you know, this concept of, you know, what are those signposts? What were the things that happened over the kind of next 15 years or so, that allowed us to go from this current position that we’re in, where certainly there are some kind of weak signals around the value of kind of ancient knowledge and indigenous wisdom.

Simon Waller (22:13.58)
And now even within an Australian context, even just a broader acknowledgement of how incredible it is that a society could live in harmony with an environment for 50,000 years. there has to be something we can learn from that. just has to be. So the growing acknowledgement of just that as a concept. how do we get from this point now to the point in 2042 where this has blossomed to this point?

And again, I don’t know whether that’s something that you thought about, but it made me start to kind of touch on questions around. It would really require us to, you know, maybe there’s actually a really positive role for things like AI in this space where it becomes smart enough to almost point out to people to go, yeah, yeah, I know, but you know, the whole problems that you’re having was really about is the stuff that you’ve forgotten.

absolutely. And Steph’s made a good comment that I want to feed into what you’ve just asked as well. I find this topic so interesting. There’s such a tension because there’s a face palming reality that these technologies and wisdoms need to be validated by white Western science before they’re accepted. Absolutely. And in capitals for those listening on the podcast, there’s also the layer that some of these ways of understanding can be taken by bad actors and either completely misappropriated or commercialized and or used in the wrong way and cause harm to people.

And that’s very true too. And if we were to consider what happened up until 2042, I think an acceleration of what Steph is talking about there in that, yeah, we’re probably gonna see even more horrible abuse of technology and even more horrible abuse of the environment and more division and more, and it’s just gonna crescendo into this beautiful collapse.

And that collapse might not be in a dystopian type of way. It might be in the regenerative sense of a bushfire going through a landscape in which at face value, you my God, this is horrible. A bushfire is terrible. We want to avoid bushfires at all costs. And yet now many of us know, wait a second, Indigenous Aussies have been working with fire for tens of thousands of years. It’s actually a tool for regeneration.

Mykel Dixon (24:33.294)
And there are some types of trees. was in the Southwest of WA earlier this year. You’re from WA, Simon. think it’s the cowrie trees, the big, big, big ones. They only grow in the ash after a fire. And these become, you know, I don’t know, three, 400 year old trees. Check me on that AI. I’m cherry picking details here, but I know that there are some those big massive trees that grow forever. They only grow after a fire.

So you could say, metaphorically speaking, we might be entering into a beautiful period of bushfire in which the science just, or our attachment and our addiction to logic and reason and science just can’t hold anymore. It’s so brittle that it breaks. And eventually everyone goes, you know what? I’ve known this all along.

I mean, the only way forward is actually to surrender to love and light and beauty and inside of the ash, the phoenix rises. And so maybe leading up to 2042, it might be a pretty dicey time, but after that will be the most glorious time humanity has ever known.

Yeah, this is something we when we very, very first spoke about doing the podcast, and we touched on this topic. And we talked about that, like, you know, what were the timeframes required for something like this to come into reality? And, you know, we discussed about that, like, if you’re talking about cultural changes, they often happen over very long periods of time. And, you know, it might have been that we was required for us to talk about this in a timeframe that was more like, you know, 2100 or

2149 if you wanted to choose a number that wasn’t around number. But you know, like the alternative to that is there is a some form of a collapse that happens that leads us to this kind of more like a realization faster. And I actually really like about this because I went when we first talked about my my version of the collapse included include a lot more preppers basically.

Mykel Dixon (26:41.806)
Well, they’re there. They’re there. They’re happening. I don’t think it’s going to take 100 years. I think it’s going to be in the next five to seven. My personal belief is I was pretty dark the last couple of years because I went way too deep into doomsday, end of the world, climate, economic, political, Trump again, all of this stuff. And it’s playing out as all of the experts that I listened to for years off the back of COVID and just got obsessed in that space. Everything is

kind of rolling out exactly as they said it might. But what I find now really important is to think, okay, we might have a dicey few years, but what’s on the other side of that? And what we largely get fed through Hollywood or through even getting stuck in the doomsday Preppers conversation is that

Well, after that will be horrible, scorched earth, terminated to, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what if after that, it’s just astonishing? What if after that, we find some incredible technologies that are both harnessed through our, you know, this deeper human knowing, fused with modern, you know, tactile technologies that then we can regenerate old growth forests in

five years as opposed to 500. And I’m not saying that we put all our eggs in technology, but I’m saying if we had more of a conscious awareness, if we were tapping into intelligences like those of an old growth forest, integrating that into the kind of technologies that we’re working with now and building things and blah, blah, then the future looks astonishing. It looks absolutely incredible to think, wow,

we could have this beautiful, fertile, inclusive, creative, dynamic way of being. And I think I talked about it in that final edit as well, where it brings us to a place where we get to completely redefine what it is to be human and to be alive. And it’s not about going back to, yeah, living around campfires. It’s about,

Mykel Dixon (29:04.472)
We just, yeah, I don’t know. I find this incredibly inspiring, I don’t want to sound like a YouTube conspiracy person. But when you do look back and you try and put aside all of the noise, just look at the pyramids. know, like it’s pretty astonishing what happened way back then. We still don’t know how. You got Christmas Island and these big amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

Easter Island, sorry, you’ve got, know, you just all the Mayan stuff, the Incan stuff you’ve got in the Amazon, all that these plant medicines that have to be, you know, roots cooked at a particular temperature for this particular amount of time blended with these leaves from another part that have to then wait for a seeding thing to do. There is the intricacies of the recipe.

to access these particular enzymes in these particular combination of plants. And then you’ll talk to a shaman and none of this is woo woo. This is literally like Western, you know, anthropologist scientists will talk to the shaman and say, how did you come up with this? the plants told me as a matter of fact. And up until very recently, lot of, you know, colonial Western blah, blah, blah would say, that’s just so naive. You know, the plant talks to you. Okay. But there’s

There’s a lot of wisdom in that. We just can’t hear the plants we’ve forgotten. And if we can start to return to that kind of intelligence, that kind of relationship and awareness and perception of the world around us. Wow. And I’d even say while you’re resetting again, I access a lot of this stuff intuitively. And I think we all do. We just don’t have a name for it. So in the work that I do, I love bringing groups of people together and shifting an energetic state going from the start.

Mykel Dixon (30:57.254)
of an experience and to the end and helping create a space where people get to come to their own moments of epiphany or moments of connectedness or they’re remembering things or they’re visioning into things. there’s practical ways of doing that in terms of like the onboarding of the event or this or that, or how we set it up, how we set the room up. But a lot of it also is this intelligence, this field that I’ve…

learned how to access. And I think I had it naturally, but I never lost it. And now I get to bring a whole new lens to this. And that’s the thing that’s making the difference. It’s not doing courses on how to speak effectively from stage and how to at every seven minutes, make sure that people share amongst themselves. It’s none of that. It’s a completely attuned awareness.

and a partnership with the unfolding present that enables me to create these kinds of spaces. So I know I’m drawing on this intelligence as it is, as I’m sure many people out there listening are doing things that they that if others will, how do you do that? And they try and explain how they do it. It might be difficult for them right now, but there’s this intuitive knowing there’s a relationship that they’ve built in some way with another kind of intelligence that’s giving them an edge or giving them a unique way of adding value to the world. Very exciting.

One of the things that I said when I started working with Marty as well, one of my kind of, suppose, precursors to that was this feeling of I can understand the sense of us getting further away from our understanding of nature. And for me, it was when we started thinking, looking through things like the metaverse and digital representations of of the natural world that by definition an approximation and really quite a poor approximation.

in terms of the richness of the colors, but the vibrancy of the scent and all these other things. So I was very aware that we could move further away from it. It only also makes sense that we could move further into it. know, and I do believe that we all at some point in our past, and as you said, you brought up when we’re kids, we spend more time in nature outside, and we kind of, you know, forgot a little bit of what we already had. So I do completely buy into what you’re talking about, this idea that there is a deeper knowing.

Simon Waller (33:19.416)
What I loved about this scenario was almost like we accept that there are limitations to our technology and rather than seek to answer that with more technology, we do actually open ourselves up to a, hey, are there other avenues that we could potentially pursue to resolve this issue that we have around our crops? And I think that that’s really lovely. Like it’s a symbiotic relationship that you describe, which again,

I think is not what people normally think about when they talk about re-embracing the past. They do think of it through the lens of what we would have to lose as opposed to what do we have to gain from that exchange.

Yeah, and even seeing evolution as this linear pathway moving from less conscious or less evolved to this magical. So we’ve always got to be looking forward to finding the answers. Maybe there was a little glitch in the system and somewhere along the way we forgot we disconnected from a vast source of wisdom and intelligence that we need to go and reconnect with that and start to source from that again in order to move forward in a new dynamic exciting way.

So tell us like, within what were the ones that you’ve kind of seen that you go like, wow, that that actually really feeds into this narrative that we’re creating.

I saw, I did an event on Tuesday and for hundred farmers up in Albury and you might, I certainly had an idea, a stereotype of farmers and I apologize to any farms out there for my stereotypical view, my presumption that perhaps they were hanging on to.

Mykel Dixon (35:00.222)
older ways of doing things that perhaps they were a little closed. No, this is we need to extract as much value from the land and we need to, you know, blah, blah, blah. And no one in the city understands us. And what surprised me being there was, was everyone was talking about regenerative farming. Everyone was talking about

I’ve a deep, you know, I’ve always had a deep spiritual connection to my country and you know, I’ll have moments out there that, you know, I can’t put into words, you know, and I want my kids to have that. And I was so taken aback by by people working the land using language that you might say is very inner city, hipster, progressive, cool, woke. And these are salt of the earth types that were

were really attuned to their, they were saying we’re custodians of country. And they were saying, know, we want to help people rediscover their connection with the land through food and through farming and through getting their hands in the soil and all this. And I was like, whoa, that’s a big signal that things are changing. I mentioned the telepathy tapes, you know, a moment ago. I mean, stuff like this that I’m on the edge. So I’m always.

looking at this stuff and reading this stuff. But what I love is that a pop culture podcast can make it into the hearts and minds of so many people that maybe have not come across this stuff before. And for those, you do, I thoroughly recommend checking out the podcast, but.

She does it so well in that she starts with very look, I’m going to do this and you know, we’re doing it all scientifically and prove it and then you get towards the end and it’s just all bets are off. Let’s just go there and start talking about really what’s going on. So she’s she’s done it very well in terms of like, I’m to meet you where you are and then take you where perhaps we can all start to go. And I’m seeing that a lot in the conversations I’m having even with clients or when I go and listen to other speakers, the language that maybe

Mykel Dixon (37:04.906)
eight years ago might have been, no, that’s a bit out there for us. That’s now common. And we’re really moving to quite a, yeah, I’m quite inspired and sometimes challenged because I think, man, wow, I like to think I’m always on the edge and pushing it. But now, wow, maybe now is not the time necessarily to push, it’s to double down on all these things and just make it so accessible and so matter of fact.

that this is the time, know, reconnecting with one another, reconnecting with our relationship with the planet, love and beauty matters, you know, how you feel at work is just as important as, well, it’s not just as important as what you get done at work. It’s actually the source of your work. I’m about to relaunch my new brand and website and stuff like this. And one of the core premises, the core premise that I talk about now,

is that we often think that this idea of coming alive, of feeling vibrant and alive and lit up is something that happens after we’ve attained a certain level of success, or it’s the result, or it’s an outcome of all our efforts, but actually it’s the source. And if we can shift from getting ahead and hitting this destination and achieving something to actually feeling that sense of aliveness first, that’s the power.

That’s the propulsion forward. That is the thing that actually then delivers the success or whatever it is that you’re looking for. And I see this coming up more and more too. I see these signals everywhere, but where people are starting to choose work that it’s not as obvious as just, want flex working or I wanna work four days, not five, or I don’t wanna come into the office so much. It’s deeper than that. I don’t wanna be around people that diminish my value. I don’t want to…

I don’t mind wearing a suit, but I don’t want to wear it all the time because that’s not who I am. Or I want my company to care about its supply chain. Not because of whatever, because I deeply care about the supply chain. And so they’re making decisions about where they choose to work as a result of that. And I think you can go on one hand, they’re hugely personal decisions people are making, but ultimately they’re very universal.

Mykel Dixon (39:29.036)
Decisions they’re they’re kind of saying I’m not gonna do this because I believe in us and I believe in a bigger future for all of us and so I’m gonna actually say no to that and Start to find and forge a new way Which is very cool

Yeah, I’m not a big fan of like, you know, the generational segregation of, know, XYZ millennial, etc. But I do believe that younger people in society have grown up with a much stronger sense and understanding of the environmental and climatic challenges that we face.

and are less willing to enter into the existing corporate contract that many people, perhaps even of our generation, almost find themselves a little bit stuck in. Like there’s a system that’s been in the existence that kind of has led us almost to the point where we are. I suppose that’s my, you know, like to challenge a little bit around your scenario. Or almost like not to challenge, but maybe to find where is the friction going to exist? Where’s the

pushback gonna come from? How is it that we actually fight back against a bigger social system that’s kind of taken us so far in some ways off track relative to what you’re putting forward?

I would play devil’s advocate to your devil’s advocate.

Mykel Dixon (40:58.336)
and say that I think every generation, the older I get, the more I realize, huh, every younger generation is very aspirational and we’re going to change things and then you got to get a mortgage and then you get kids or then you think about the future and then you start to, know, life becomes a little bit more layered and textures and you’re starting to make choices and hang on, maybe I’m understanding what my dad or mother or, you

next generation said to a certain degree. So I feel like, I feel like the, the everyone not sells out or, or that, we get kind of get beaten down a little bit because yeah, this system is, is pretty heavily entrenched. But in saying that, I don’t think it’s the fight. I don’t actually think it’s fighting that system as Marty would say, it’s, it’s about

new seeds, it’s letting that old stuff die. This old system is not gonna be around for much longer. It just can’t. And that’s not me, that’s historians. That’s people that have studied social, you know, collapse. That’s civilizational collapse. These people are yeah, cool. All the telltale signs are here. It’s not the end of the world for humanity. We will continue. But yes, the culture we’ve built, whether it’s capitalism or whatever, you know, it is going to…

break down and there will be something new. So our focus would be less about trying to fight or fix capitalism and actually starting to sow the seeds for something new, something that we don’t know yet, which is this integration piece, which is super exciting and somewhat terrifying. But I think as a full circle moment, if we learn to trust

and rebuild that connection with something greater than ourselves, thinking that we’ve got to figure it out in a boardroom somewhere and strategize and come up with scenarios. If we actually tune into a bigger, wilder intelligence, I think we’re going to be…

Mykel Dixon (43:00.238)
just fine. I’ll tell you a quick little story if I can. I’ve got some beautiful friends up in Mangala country, which is the Kimberley and Naraya Jedi, who is my queen of the desert. She’s a dear friend of mine. And we got to some time up there last year out on country with her mob and her mom and all the crew. And it was awesome. And there was a night on the last, the last night we out there for a week or so, a couple of weeks. And there was a moment where there was, there was quite a kind of

A few known personalities came.

towards the end of the time on country. And I think it was their way of saying, you know, thanks, I’m being here and, and one of them was a very famous musician. And so they got the guitar out and started playing a few tunes and that was cool. And we were all there. There’s probably about eight white folk and maybe about 15 to 20 of the mob. And we’re all sitting around one big fire and the song, you one song’s been played and then a second where, this is great. And then a third, my God, I can’t believe we’re getting a private concert under the stars from this famous musician. And then.

another song and then another and you know the guy at the party that maybe plays one or two songs too many that was starting to creep in and I remember poking my head up and thinking where’s all the mob there was like a lot that we were all focused on this one thing and then I looked around and I realized 10 meters away they had all got up and left and just started to build another fire and so they were sitting there with a bigger better fire while all the white folk were sitting here

you know, listening to this musician. And at that moment, I think it dawned on everyone and we went, we’ve been briefed pretty heavily when when we come out on country. It’s not about us talking. We’re there to listen. And if we’re quiet enough, we might get to hear the old people and the old people could be ancestors or it could be.

Mykel Dixon (44:51.374)
country itself or it could be anything at all. But if you’re quiet enough and you’re present enough, you could hear things. so, a couple of songs. Sure. Great. Thanks. Appreciate it. But then we were so addicted to, oh my God, this is like, wow, we’re getting this thing. Oh yeah, that’s right. We’re supposed to shut up out here. But they didn’t say, hey guys, I just want to interrupt and let you know, you know, they didn’t rally against the system. They weren’t trying to fight against.

what was emerging or try to, you know, there was no conflict. They just got up, moved 10 meters, started another fire without any of us realizing. And then one by one, we all moved to their fire. And I thought that was, that was profound. And there’s a little story I might as well keep sharing. I saw this happen when I got back from Broom and I was in this house and my son, my eldest sonny, he’s always up to stuff.

And he kind of got adopted by the mob because he’s just so like them. He’s just always up to interesting things. And one morning he’s up to something and I was like, what’s he doing? He’s, well, I’ll leave him go. I went and had a shower and I came back and he was out. was like, where is this kid? We’ve got to go to school. And he was out on the driveway. He’d found a little table and a little chair and he’d taken himself out on the driveway, just where it meets the road. And he had his Weet-Bix, the honey, a little bowl. He was in his dressing gown.

and he was just eating breakfast on the driveway. And I was like, wow, that’s so cool. I the most gorgeous picture of this. And I thought, I don’t eat Weet-Bix, but it’s a mild morning in May. This is last year. That’s actually a really good idea. I think I’m have my breakfast out here too. And then his brother came out dusty and then Kate came out in her dressing gown. And then a few of the neighbors walking their dogs. They were like, this is a lovely, they stopped. And then a few people driving to school, they pulled in and he somehow built community.

by just taking a few steps that felt like the most natural thing he could do. He didn’t stop and say, hey, dad, would it be okay if we had our breakfast out on the street? And here’s my 10 point plan on why I think that’s a good idea. And I’ve actually strategized a few scenarios. if we were to look at the sunlight that coming in and we look at my performance at school, I think it’s probably gonna be a good, he just went and did it. And as a result, the people that were ready for it.

Mykel Dixon (47:13.28)
i.e. everyone in our house and everyone out on the street, we’re just naturally compelled to this glitch in the matrix to doing something differently. So that’s my long-winded story way of saying, I’m not sure we have to fight the system. I actually think the system is going to eat itself and our energy and focus and attention will be far better spent building another fire, having our brekkie on the driveway, following what feels most natural to us.

and sowing seeds for a future that we’re yet to, you know, we couldn’t possibly know what it is,

Yeah, it feels like in that there’s like a real tap. There’s almost like tapping into an intuitive idea of like, yeah, why wouldn’t I want to be just slightly more connected with the world and my neighbors and my tribe or my community?

Why would I want to hide myself away behind this door and the closed curtains? And, you know, like I think there, you know, in even the podcast episode last week with Cole, you know, he really talked a lot about the naturalness of tribal living and communal living and how we’ve almost forgotten that a little bit. And I kind of hear that a little bit in that story. It’s like even just in a very small way, how do I bring myself closer to my community?

You know, and I’d even say, bring it back to like a work context or events in which we spend a lot of our time. People will always say, my God, it was so amazing. I got to meet this person in the coffee line. Well, are we, we bumped into each other on the way to the event. And then it turns out we were in the same group and da da da da. If you go to an event and you’ve got an agenda, you’ve got your idea of what you want to get from the experience. And that can be a real blocker to what you could possibly get to the experience. But if you show up and you’re open,

Mykel Dixon (48:56.568)
you’re fully participating, you’re alive and you’re willing to give that energy, give that intention like I’m here to give, to contribute, to see what’s unfolding then no doubt every single time that serendipitous

you know, synchronicity of the universe will present itself in all kinds of surprising, delighting ways. And you will have conversations you could never possibly have had, met people you never thought to meet that will then go on to form something stunning that you couldn’t have even imagined on your agenda. So, you know, even in very real sense, this is available to us now in the smallest of ways is to just, is to start attuning the way we perceive the world.

and start believing that there is an intelligence. It’s not woo woo. It’s actually energy. It’s physics. It’s the way the weather moves and just allowing ourselves to be in that place. You know, trusting that we don’t have the answers, but we have the answers and they’ll come when we’re ready to finally hear them.

which kind of is a beautiful kind of segue into what I suppose, starting to, I suppose, close out the episode. But a question I really had for you was, this is such a beautiful and inspiring scenario. And it’s what I think that so many people would kind of like almost yearn for a little bit, like almost like, yeah, I could imagine that I could imagine wanting more of that in our life and in our society. What do you imagine that as like as individuals, people listening to this, what would be

I think you touched on a couple of them there, but like what would be the things that you could do or how you could be to kind of nudge the world just slightly more in this direction?

Mykel Dixon (50:43.822)
Super simple yet profoundly powerful actions to take would be to get in nature as much as possible. You know, the science…

talks about this but you every great author or poet or musician or artist or thinker someone that’s evolved the world in whatever way they’d work for a few hours and then they were out they were walking they were swimming they were having beautiful dinners with friends drinking gin talking about their latest novel whatever it is

It’s not from grinding. You’re not going to, we’re not going to progress this thing from staying at our laptop even longer. It’s going to come from getting back into wild energies, from putting ourselves in places and spaces that are bigger than us. So that’s just going to the ocean as much as you can, getting walking down the street, sitting by a tree, finding a sit spot. What a simple. The second thing I’d say is

by putting yourself in place of larger forces, larger energies and just letting it swirl all over you. It’s why these farmers the other day blew me away. They’re so attuned to this stuff. They’re like, yeah, yeah, we’re on board with this. Cause they’re spending all day out in the bush. They got their hands in the soil. They’re looking at the stars every night. They’re not watching Netflix. So maybe they don’t have the eloquent language to frame up their experience, but they are absolutely present on country all the time, which counts for a lot.

The second thing I’d say is the arts. Like spend more time listening to music, spend more time reading novels, spend more time putting yourself in places that inspire you, that move you, that get you to feel something. It’s not gonna be reading more business books that is gonna help you.

Mykel Dixon (52:28.61)
progress. The Harvard Business Review, you know, Forbes magazine is not going to give you an edge. It’s actually going to be Chemical Brothers or it’s going to be Underworld Simon or it’s going to be, you know, a play that you saw. I’m looking forward to seeing another musical this, Hades Town, this Saturday night in Melbourne, which, is a new musical. All the rave reviews on Broadway. So it’s going to be cool. And then the third thing I’d say is to just, is to hang with people as much as you can to be in relationship.

COVID really affected us in a big way. And I think we’re seeing the long tail of that, particularly in Victoria, particularly in Melbourne. Getting together with people, whether it’s, but not for a quick coffee between meetings and not with an agenda, but a hang, where you just, you hang out.

Maybe you cook some food, maybe you have a wine, maybe you don’t, maybe you do something, being in relationship with others and letting time just unfurl, making the time for that. Again, we’ve been doing that for tens of thousands of years. It is just so vital. It is so important. And ultimately, if I can, I know a couple of minutes over here, which is fine.

is this is the best prescription I could ever give anyone. And I talk to this with executives that I work with. So you want your people to do their best work, help them live their best life. If we wanna not just move this planet into a more beautiful, inclusive, vibrant, fertile world, but even for your own life, your homework is to go and live a radical life, to fill it with art and nature and…

relationships and celebrations and you don’t have to learn how to do that. You know how to do that. And this remembering and this reclaiming and this allowing life to come through you and to bring your work and life alive, that’s, isn’t that just the best homework you could ever possibly have? So that’s my homework for everybody.

Simon Waller (54:31.534)
It just makes me want to get off this podcast and literally drive around the bay and just spend the rest of the afternoon hanging in your backyard drinking beer.

Let’s do that. Why not? And it will be more effective for our work. It’ll push the world, you know, that little bit closer to this new fertile possibility like this scenario. It won’t come from us sitting in a boardroom under fluorescent lights trying to battle out the future. It’s going to come through actually remembering how magical life is. And if we’re close to that every single day, if we wake up every single day and man.

what a gift this thing is and more and more people start doing that then the choices that we’ll make, the policies that we’ll put forward will legislate things that will be so much more attune to the world that we deserve because it’s like, why wouldn’t we? You know what I’m saying? Yeah.

100%. Yeah, this has been such a beautiful conversation. I know it’s been a little bit glitchy on my side, but you’ve been the consummate professional. You’ve kept the conversation rolling. It’s been just like old times. Yeah, man, I look forward to catching up and hanging whenever we get to do it next. One last question for you, Mark. I know you touched on this before anyway, but what did you learn out of this process?

I know you talked a couple of things earlier on about almost a sense of optimism that came from having this vision. Was there other things that came out of this though from spending some time almost like deeply in this space of the future around the past?

Mykel Dixon (56:12.608)
It’s so important for us to believe in dreams. We absolutely have to. Tim, Tim’s online. my man, sorry to interrupt there. We need to catch up. We were supposed to catch up a long time ago and we need to. So that is lovely seeing you there. He’d be good on you on this podcast. there you go. It’s so important for us to allow ourselves.

He’s on the list.

Mykel Dixon (56:41.942)
And I’d even say more than that, instead of allowing ourselves, I think there’s a responsibility on all of us to dream of a beautiful future. It’s vital and essential and…

It’s a real sign of maturity, I think, and leadership for every single one of us to dream a beautiful dream for humanity, to have the discipline to take in all of the, you know, yes, we’re going through some pretty horrible things right now, but have the discipline to believe in a bold, beautiful future, because that’s going to be the thing that gets us there.

focusing on that, focusing on the new shoots of growth, focusing on the beautiful seedlings that are growing in various ways. It’s not going to be looking back at the destruction or, you know, so really, yeah, have the discipline to dream is what I Beautiful. Yeah.

Thanks again, mate, for being on the podcast. It’s been absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for our audience who’s put up with all the glitchiness. If you listen to this online, it’s probably all been edited out and you won’t even know that it happened. But trust me, it’s been difficult at times today. Nothing to do with the guests though. Myke has been absolutely amazing. Thanks everyone for tuning in and we will be back with another episode in a couple of weeks.