This episode features a compelling dialogue with BCIT's Indigenous-Storyteller-in-Residence Robert Jago, also a distinguished journalist and historian, who delves into the complex interplay between identity, perception, and societal expectations. In a thought-provoking analysis of modern communication, the speakers examine the implications of evolving media and technology on interpersonal relationships and societal dynamics. Drawing from the theories of renowned thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, the conversation highlights the transformative nature of communication mediums and their capacity to shape perceptions and narratives. Concerns are expressed about the increasing polarization, exacerbated by curated digital interactions. Through their insights, they advocate for a return to empathetic engagement and active listening as antidotes to divisiveness. Ultimately, freedom lies in understanding and being true to oneself, thereby igniting a transformative journey of self-discovery and empowerment.

Takeaways:

• The conversation emphasizes the importance of embracing one's authenticity and understanding one's character, which cultivates freedom and allows for genuine self-expression in a world filled with societal expectations.
• Throughout the episode, the speakers explore the concept that the journey of life is not merely about striving for control, but rather about recognizing and playing the role assigned to us with sincerity and integrity.
• The discussion touches on the notion of identity and perception, highlighting the fluidity of identity based on context, particularly for individuals from diverse backgrounds, such as indigenous cultures.

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So if you understand that about yourself, and this is true for basically everybody, that's why bankruptcy exists, is, you know, spend all your money, do whatever you want, max your cards, whatever does, it doesn't matter. It's all fake.

So. Robert Jago is a journalist, a podcaster, a historian and governance consultant.

Oh, wow.

Robert is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation and the Nooksack Indian tribe. And he's someone who's lived just about everywhere, from Egypt to the streets and back again.

He speaks four languages that we know of, has built his life from scratch more than once, and sees the world through a fascinating lens. Where time isn't linear, identity is fluid, and freedom begins the moment you realize it's all fake.

And from the influence of Marshall McLuhan to the coast Salish and Buddhist view of destiny, Robert reminds us that the mission isn't to control your life, it's to understand your character and play it well.

This is a conversation about perception, freedom, and the power of being true to who you are. Even when the world tells you to perform another role.

Does one have to present oneself differently as an indigenous person from Kwanlin versus somebody from Western roots? Yes. And I notice it when I go to Mexico.

Okay, interesting.

Because when I go to Mexico, I'm not anything. So I disappear into the crowd and I just exist. And when I'm not in a place like that, then I am basically living my life in church clothes.

For example, I recently lived in Quebec and every second person in Quebec who is a male has a very scruffy beard. And I just could never do that. I could grow it, but I couldn't do it because then people would treat me like I'm homeless. Really? Yes.

Because if you have this complexion and a scruffy beard to non native minds that reads homeless and you treat it like shit. That's sort of what you have to do. You have to walk around in church clothes. You have to.

A lot of black writers, black male writers talk about this a lot. Is that you have to soften your voice and not react in certain ways. My wife is a very petite, blonde French woman, just my current wife.

But for her, she can get aggressive at restaurants, aggressive in shops, and yell and shout and be whatever and gets away with it because she's a tiny Blonde French woman, it's acceptable for her. She has that latitude.

It's the same thing if you're a 6 foot 8, wife, white dude, even like with tats and whatever, you can't get loud, you're not allowed to. And that sort of extends to basically all native people. As soon as you do that, you lose all your rights.

And you've seen a lot of examples of this in the news or if you look on social media where you'll see native people getting in trouble in public, it's them acting as if they were a tiny blonde French woman. So that's kind of the way that you have to present yourself. You sort of have to walk around in church clothes.

But then the second you get to Mexico, I'm like, oh, I could be trash now. And it's really liberating. I'm not trash. But it's nice to have that option.

You can be who you are. You can be authentic to who you.

Are to an extent. Yeah. I mean just who I am is just conditioned to be quite reserved because of that. But yes, I could be drunk in public.

Not that I would be drunk in public because I, I don't believe in. I don't want to get a hangover ever. I just don't know why people would voluntarily invite pain.

That's a filter you feel you constantly wear in day to day life then I guess, is it?

Yes.

And it's also like a verbal filter as well too, that you soften your language and you color it so you can't be quite as strident, which is a really difficult thing in journalism because every editor is asking you to be a lot harder because they want you to perform that angry Indian that they have the stereotype of.

But of course, if you do that, that really destroys your career because as soon as you get typecast as that, you don't have a career anymore, you won't be able to do anything serious because they'll just call you in when they want somebody to be mad.

Right. Stereotypes build a big Persona around what's expected, don't they?

I'm going to extend on that first question though and try and reverse it. So we're exploring the filter that you as an individual feel when you present yourself to the world. What about viewing others?

So me, tall white guy, do you sense a filter? Likewise, when you see me, I just go default.

And what's the default in what respect? Like security.

Whatever internally happens for you, I guess is what we're interested in.

So you sense that filter in Yourself presenting out. Can you describe any filter viewing and accepting in?

Well, what I could say is I will see a filter. What I will look for is people who I see that I would be simpatical with. When I see people like that, then I gravitate towards those people.

And that's not a racial thing, it's just a situational thing, I guess. So I'm looking for people who seem to be at the same intellectual level and probably economic level, or maybe even not that.

Can you tell that through body language, through eye contact, through the way someone speaks to you?

Honestly, I almost never look at people. I never do. It's just. I don't know why, but I very seldom do. It's something that my wife points out a lot, is she says, did you see that person?

I said, no. Or did you see that person staring at you or saying, looking at this? And again, it's no. I very, very rarely look at people.

I take in everything, but I just don't really focus. Bringing people together in certain ways, I find is more impactful work than a lot of other things you can do.

So you could be a solo person and create wonderful things. A lot of artists do that, but I find they're generally sad people.

And the people that I've seen who are the most successful and the happiest and have the most freedom are the ones that could bring people and connect people together. So that's partly, I guess, why I've sort of gone that direction in my career. My career was a real conscious choice.

What I decided very early on is, okay, so when I was homeless, I had literally nothing. Everything I owned was in a very small backpack. And then within, like, two years from that, I had a very lovely apartment and tons of stuff.

And then I moved to Africa after my first divorce, and I had nothing but a backpack. And then I had a lot of really nice stuff a month or two later.

What I've learned is that no matter what you do, it's really easy if you don't have, like, systemic addiction issues or whatever, whatever, to totally rebuild your life from scratch whenever you want. If you understand that, then you could just basically do whatever you want.

And if it doesn't work out, then you could just fix it over a month or two. Right. If you understand that about yourself. And this is true for basically everybody, that's why bankruptcy exists.

Spend all your money, do whatever you want, Max your cards, whatever. Doesn't matter. It's all fake. So, sure. So what that essentially means is you have a lot More freedom than you think you do.

And if you understand that, then you just do whatever you want. And if you just do whatever you want, then you tend to gravitate. Whatever gives you the most freedom.

So these sorts of positions give me the most freedom. Buddhists are right about possessions being like just slavery.

I was thinking we had this huge house, like four bedrooms, many thousands of square feet, a huge front yard, a huge backyard. But we also had neighbors. And it was just constant anxiety.

The biggest anxiety of my life was whether somebody would come and tear up my wife's flower garden in the front because people would do it all the time. We had neighborhood kids come and pick all her tulips before they bloomed and stuff.

That's not nice.

Neighbors. I know. And then people are harassing the raccoons and everything. And there was a rat in the raspberries. It was a nice rat. We gave him a name.

But it was just so much anxiety about the possessiveness over it. And then we just says, fudge this, and we move to a condo.

That stress completely eliminated and evaporated because there's no possessions to worry about. And you just to be as narrow and refined as possible just is that extra amount of freedom.

And so living, ditching it for a backpack is much more freeing than. I mean, it's always nice to have the option to buy whatever you want, but to not actually have to live around all that crap is very happy.

I mean, for God's sakes. I mean, if you watch that TV show Hoarders, it's not about happy people.

Robert, in my class the other day, trying to explain the heritage of and connection to the land, you know, trying to explain people that date back 14,000 years in this particular location in the world perceive things a particular way versus those that didn't have the same background.

And so for me, and perhaps for the students, it's trying to process the structure that you have been constructed in is part of who you are and how you see the world. Can you see outside of that? And I watch the students struggle with that, which makes me think about where the world is right now.

Makes me think about polarization, sides not talking to each other. And so I'm running it through that awareness. Can we ever talk, you know, in our polarization world, is there negotiation? Is there compromise?

What's your view on that as you see the world going through what it's going through right now?

I think that people have forgotten a lot about Marshall McLuhan and probably need to come back to it, because it's not so much he talks about the medium being the message and that was a big thing through the 80s and 90s, but as soon as smartphones came out, people forgot about it. But it's probably when they probably should have thought about it the most.

If the medium communications is entirely personal in your hand, it's a different thing when you move on to the next stage of evolution, technology, and you go more towards wearables like your watch and the new glasses, your meta glasses that have a heads up display of the world around you.

When you move towards personalized content where you are the content creator now with different types of AI content creation, I think that you probably end up going towards a different type of separation between people, a different type of divisiveness. Because right now what we have is divisiveness born of curated content created by sometimes menacing outside parties.

And that's a product of the medium of communications, of absorbing it, which is a tiny screen that's in your hand all the time. But once you have this thing that's right in your mind that no one can even see and that you have total control of, then we go to this next level.

We take divisiveness to the nth degree.

And then it's not so much about big political divisiveness, it's us finding out that a whole bunch of people are hella basic and a whole bunch of people are super weirdos and having all of those things amplified to 11. I think the politics that comes out of that are incomprehensible compared to the politics we have now.

But I know, or at least I strongly suspect, if you would Defer back to McLuhan, that it's not going to be a continuation of this type of divisiveness. It's going to be a totally separate thing. And it's probably going to be a lot weirder than what we have at the moment.

And it's probably coming very soon, like five to 10 years, I would suspect, given the pace of development of those things and the amount of money being put into them.

So the medium guides the culture to a great extent and we have no way out. How much individual agency do we have in that world?

Well, if you remember, during the class I was talking about Socrates and the Socrates thing, and Socrates is the first person that said the medium is the message, essentially when he was complaining about the written language and how that destroys meaning because it crystallizes it and you can no longer inquire about what the idea means anymore. And so if you don't understand it, then you just continue to misunderstand it and pass the misunderstanding on three years and have it amplify.

So if that was true, what is that, 3,000 years ago? If that was true 3,000 years ago, then why would it be different 3,000 years from now or 50 years from now?

So I'm curious. It doesn't provide us individuals with a whole lot of agency in there. And it perhaps could be quite dark with that knowledge.

How do you feel day to day?

So returning to those, those screens that you hold in your hand, these screens are proof that you do not have agency, because these screens have GPS in them. And how does GPS work? GPS works by satellites that orbit the Earth at very high speeds. What happens when a satellite orbits the Earth at high speeds?

Well, according to the theory of relativity, because it's moving so fast, its perception through space time is different from that on the Earth. Right? So you have to have a compensator in your phone that adjusts the readings from GPS to bring it back into our time.

Because if you don't do that, then the readings for GPS go off by kilometers every day. So it has to adjust it to get back into our type of time because they're traveling like 30,000 miles an hour or something like that relative to us.

So their perception of time is said faster is slower or faster is faster. I think faster is slower anyways, so they're moving through time at a different rate. So that's proof of the theory of relativity.

That's like concrete proof in your hand every single day. Well, another consequence of the concept of relativity is the block universe.

And the block universe is the most accepted, weirdly, it's the most accepted conception of how spacetime works. And the block universe is an eternal. It says that the past, the present and the future are all exactly the same. They all already exist.

All the choices have been made, all the consequences happen. You're both alive and dead all at the same time.

That means every single day when you reboot, your consciousness starts up as a physical process in your brain and it inherits all of these past memories that are in there. It's not a continuation of consciousness, it's a brand new consciousness.

It has all these continuation of all the past has those perceptions of future, it perceives the present. But all of those are just an artifact. That's just how the system works. It's just this total, complete false artifact.

Every day is exactly the same as every other day. The fact that you are perceiving this as now is irrelevant because you perceive 10 years ago as now.

If you pop into that memory at the same time, they're all happening. No, not in your memory. It's just happening there. They're all happening simultaneously.

So that this is now is just random, because every single day is now. And that's just a side effect of the block universe and the thing in your phone and GPS and general relativity and all that kind of thing.

So if you understand that, then the mission isn't so much to take control of your life. Right. In the Christian sense. And that is a very Christian way of thinking, very Western way of thinking. I take control of my life.

I start with original sin, but then I have to find redemption and whatever that's wrong. So in the Coast Salish conception, which is very similar to the Buddhist conception, you don't do those things. You don't strive in that way.

You let what comes to you come to you, and you pursue those opportunities as you need to, which is what happens with eternalism. And your mission, then, isn't that sort of accomplishment? It is to understand your character, essentially in a play. Understand who your character is.

That's what you have to do.

Figure out who your character is, understand it, be true to that character, but not worry too much about what's going to happen a year from now or 10 years from now, because it's already happened and it's happening now, and it happened 10 years ago. And it's all the same. The role for most of us is NPCs. So most of us are NPCs.

NPC?

Oh, you don't know the kid talk?

No, apparently not.

Non playable character.

Oh, yeah.

Okay. Most of us are NPCs. And if you're an NPC, you have so much freedom. You do whatever you want because it doesn't matter.

That's interesting because I want meaning in my life. I want to contribute something before I go off to wherever I go.

But you're not going anywhere. You're already there. Yes. Okay.

So in this space and time, I thought I had agency to contribute. Am I out of whack here?

You just need to think about who your character is and discover your character. What is their motivation and just be at peace with that and play that role.

How do you discover what your motivation is? How do you discover your character? I'm an actor. I'm always reading lines, right.

And I'm looking for cues in the script to understand how my character is reacting.

But I don't have in my life right Now I don't have the lines or somebody else has them and they're not giving them to me to read, so I don't know where I'm going.

Unlike with that character, you have access to this full monologue and all the backstory. You have all that there. So you just have to think what felt good and what didn't and what left voices in my head and what didn't.

What am I happy to tell people about and what I. What don't I want to tell people about? And then that's who you are.

So I'm the playwright?

No, no, you are the character.

Okay.

Just think of your subconscious as your soul or whatever, as the actor. Although it's all been written, it's physics. It's like nobody pays attention to this in the arts.

How did you get to be who you are? Because you're so fascinating. You've got so many levels within our discussion. I just want to know more about you.

Oh, well, my job is to tell stories about other people.

He doesn't want to go there.

So ask me a story about another person, I'll happily tell you lots of stories. People.

Here's where I'm stuck going back to climate change. Here's where I'm stuck looking out as the world unfolds before me. I have young children. I want the world to be here when they get old.

I want in our greater political process, somebody's got to do something about what's happening. And so I find the npc. So I'm a non playable character. So I just accept.

What, climate change?

Yeah.

Why would you just accept? You don't have. I mean, that's fatalism, but I mean, if that's who your character is, I'm.

Trying to get underneath that a little bit.

I don't think you can bake agency into it. You can't bake agency in that sense. You could just decide if you're a responsible person or not. Is your character a responsible person?

And if I say yes, then do.

The responsible person things. So, for example, my wife and I, I have many jobs. I have three jobs, my wife has one. And we have more money than 99% of people.

And as a consequence, we decide that under those circumstances, we're going to tell our child, do not apply for any scholarships, leave them for other people. We'll just pay for it. Because that is where responsible people, that's the kind of people we are, we'll just do that.

And when we go to the market, we don't buy the Cheap stuff. We go and buy the free range organic whatever, the $45 chicken, because someone has to. We have the luxury to be ethical.

Not everybody has that luxury, so we should be extra ethical for them. And we are rid of our car for kind of the same reason. We have the luxury to be ethical.

So we travel around on vehicles which are powered through hydroelectric power, one of the least environmentally damaging forms of power. Least not, not, not damaging, but anyhow. So we have all these freedoms and luxuries and stuff like that.

We consider ourselves responsible people, but we also are aware that we have no actual free will. But still, we need to act as if, because, I mean, what else are you going to do?

Hmm.

Well, that's such an interesting concept about free will, because it's already been written. We believe we have free will. Act as if we have free will, but it's already been written. But be responsible to the character in your script.

Okay, so what if you're a bad character? What if you decide you're a bad, terrible person? That's what you want to be? Oh, my gosh.

I mean, I have to think that there's something in our DNA that prevents most people from being what we would consider to be bad people. Because the things which we consider to be bad, we're biologically encoded to think are bad.

And the things which we consider to be good, we're biologically encoded to think are good. I don't think they're objectively good or bad in most cases, probably.

I mean, it's not objectively bad for a cat to eat kittens sometimes, which they do occasionally. It's just a thing that they do. It's part of their species. And if. So you went and ate your child as a human, it's bad because we've decided that.

But for other animals, we haven't. So if we want to be a bad person, I think that those genetic restraints or those cultural restraints, whatever, are what hold us in.

So to go beyond that, I mean, that's a choice.

There's a lot of cultural restraints, aren't there, when you think about it, like you mentioned Christianity, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yes. Be good to your neighbor. Are those constraints that we've grown up with, are they real constraints? Do we need those constraints?

Is this appropriate?

No, those are deep primate practices.

So there's a lot of experiments with animals and stuff where you'll see that if they're given something, they'll immediately share it, or if one of them gets something and the other gets something less. They get angry because they sense the unfairness of it. Because that's like way deep in the culture.

I mean, you've probably seen those YouTube videos of like a turtle gets knocked over and all the other turtles come around and flip it over and stuff. So those sense of like fairness and justice are probably like really deep in. For, deep in the DNA for, you know, just things to survive and carry on.

Things which we consider ethics and stuff. Like we are broadly speaking, the same age range, more or less within a 20 year range of it.

And I'm sure you remember from when we were in elementary school they said that humans were the only animals that made tools and humans were the only animals like the new right or wrong. And we know that's all false. We know tons of animals make tools now.

There's a literal Stone Age industry among certain primates in Africa right now where they're like making spear points and stuff. Well, not spear points, but they're making stuff with rocks.

So I think a lot of those sorts of rules are really like way, way, way, way, way deep in the DNA, even beyond the culture. There's a thing they say about the future. They say the futurist now, it's just not evenly distributed. Well, oppression and fascism is here and now.

It's just not evenly distributed. And in some communities they're already experiencing it and others you're just experiencing it now. And there is some schadenfreude in seeing that.

Well, it goes back to some of the things we've talked about in the past. And that is storytelling can be a bridge between the known to you and the unknown.

It's hard to make that leap to trying to perceive the world through other eyes that have a totally different structure than yours. I wonder sometimes we can ever do it. But story is the bridge to try to open up seeing the world differently, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I think if you have students who are trying to accomplish that, I would begin by giving them a debate piece and saying, okay, which side do you want? You have to take the other side now. And that's the first sort of step into understanding how other people see things.

I think that it's good to write out a story with a lot of other characters and then share it with them and see what you got wrong. And that's a good sort of way, that kind of like Marxist thing where like you have your thesis, they have their antithesis and then you have to.

So that's a good way of getting. Coming at it. That's how we do. How coastalish people do teachings, I guess.

Snoeyeth, like I said before, those sorts of, like, important cultural teachings that are passed on, that's how they work, is that we'll convene a group of people coming from four different directions, so they're not related and they have different perspectives. We want to figure out what the culture says about this issue. And so one person will come up with this very strong thesis.

This other person, this strong antithesis. This other person will say, what?

And this other person will just wait for lunch and they'll all argue until we get to the kernel of what the actual truth of it is. So when you're talking about storytelling and seeing through other people's eyes, you are the antithesis. So you're the antithesis.

And you're presenting that. You're seeing them. You're not really seeing them through their eyes.

You're seeing them through your eyes and compensating a little bit, but you're presenting that to them. Then you're reaching out, you're seeing what they say about themselves.

And then you come to some place where you actually understand what's actually there, if you know what I mean.

You can't really, really do it properly, but you can come to it and figure out what it is by interacting with other people, which is why when you do create that thing and you put it out there, it's important to listen to that feedback. And then from that, then that's where you get the actual story, the real story.

Yeah. I hear negotiation, I hear curiosity. All those ingredients need to be there, don't they, for that to work?

Yeah, I mean, that's. The great genius inventions of the 20th century is management, effective management. And one of the tools of effective management is listening.

That's baked into everything to listen properly.

And these can be learned behaviors, right?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's very trainable. What's that called? I don't know. It's just some sort of rubric where it's your own personal algorithm for processing it.

So if we can train that and we can help people and do debates and antithesis, then maybe there can be a connection to more understanding.

Yeah. And I think.

Do you know what's really a really good way of understanding it is there's an episode of south park where Randy says the N word on Wheel of Fortune and watch that.

And the conclusion to it is that the character Tolkien then called Tolkien, but Tolkien finally gets it across to Randy's kid Stan that, like, oh, I get it. I will never understand. But that's the point, is that you want people to understand what you will never understand.

You'll say, I will never understand what it feels like to be called the end as. As a black person. We call it the N word. I will never understand that. Just watch that episode, and that really gets to the point of storytelling.

And so it's acceptance at that Recognition.

Yeah. And if you know what you can't do, then you leave space for other people to come in and do that thing.

It's funny when you say that, what comes to mind is my dad. So my dad grew up sort of the World War II era, and the family had a farm in the Maritimes.

As he tells it, you know, on that farm, you've got no help. If the H Vac is broken, you take it apart and fix yourself because you have no other option. So it's interesting to run it through that.

What would my dad say to that?

I would suspect that he would probably illustrate it with an ethnic joke for... much the same reason.

Every day is now. That's how Robert Jago sees it. Not as a race to control the outcome, but as a call to live your character with awareness.

He challenges us to strip away the filters, to stop performing and start observing. Because when you do, you see that people are just people.

And whether you're scrolling through a screen or walking through a crowded street in Mexico, you're the author of your own perception.

And maybe that's the real freedom, understanding that you can always begin again.

And, you know, we're so grateful to you and our community of listeners.

Join our movement to make the world a better place. See what we're about.

Ignitemyvoice.com.

Ignite my voice. Becoming unstoppable. Your voice is your superpower.

Use it.