Classically, anabelian geometry asks to what
extent an arithmetic/geometric object is
determined by its topologically-flavored
invariants. Here "topology" primarily refers
to the etale topology. In this talk I'll discuss
a few results which arose while trying to
understand an "idealized" version of such
questions (I'll explain what I mean by this
during the talk), as well as some related
results which study the interplay between
certain "motivic data" and anabelian
geometry.