Humans On The Loop (Michael Garfield)

This week’s guest is the artist, gallery owner, podcaster, web designer, and musician Aunia Kahn! Among her many notable achievements, she curates Alexi Era Gallery in Oregon, hosted the Create & Inspire Podcast, and survived eleven years housebound with disability to emerge more creative, passionate, and powerful than before.

http://auniakahn.com

http://alexieragallery.com

In one of this podcast’s more rambling conversations, we discuss:

- Internet & Cellphone Addiction (and the problem of “gameifying” everything to seize attention).

- How the internet has changed the ways we present ourselves to one another online, splintered our identities, and changed our sense of time…

- Using technology (especially social media) instead of letting technology use you.

- Comparing the Internet and Organized Religion, and how institutions serve the role of “tigers” in the modern “jungle” of society.

- Looking at the historical context of disability and the relative nature of contemporary problems.

- How disease can shock us into a deeper sense of mortality and urgency with respect to our creative work.

- How sometimes the big life events change us…and sometimes, they don’t.

—Quotes from Aunia Kahn:

“Stop worrying about people judging you. Just make it.”

“If you people don’t like it, I’m sorry, stop following me. I’m not living my life to please you…I’m not going to sit there and pretend that I’m three different people, and that’s kind of what this digital age has created.”

“Where is that fine line? I’m taking it [the smartphone] to the dinner table and I’m not even paying attention to what I’m eating, I’m posting something to Instagram while I’m shoving food in my mouth, and I’m wondering why I’m choking! It’s dinner time. We’re going to put the phone somewhere else. It’s not work time.”

“Where do you get your value? Do you get your value from social media or do you get your value from true real conversations with people, like we’re having? Where is that true interaction?”

“I don’t think a lot of people are technologically consumed yet that they realize they’re missing out on the human, the real, the not-virtual. And having already gone through that, I just want to grab people and say, ‘PUT IT DOWN AND EAT YOUR DINNER!’ Everywhere you go, it’s always cellphone-to-your-face. Nobody’s looking at the trees, at each other…over time, people will start to crave the more-real, the tangible, the touching…we need that.”

“EVERYBODY’S valid. Everybody’s creativity is valid. I don’t care if I dislike it or not. Every human being on this Earth has value. Old people…are just like, ‘I’m going to live my life and if you don’t like it, kiss my ass.’ We should adopt that earlier on.”

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Featuring cyborg anthropologist and process worker Maraya Karena, whom Michael met in Peru once upon a time, and who can nimbly leap from talk of high technology to casual reflections on accessing visionary consciousness. Maraya delivers us a dose of much-appreciated lucid, grounded female sensibility to this hapless dorkfest...

Follow up with by subscribing to Maraya's blog and YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/user/marayakarena marayakarena.wordpress.com

* Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield * Take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture. What will our generation's legacy look like to future humans? Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine.

Provocative, profound discussions at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy with Michael Garfield, Evan Snyder, and a growing list of awesome guests...

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I would love to see a world where 100% of the people on this planet, and all the other beings, believe their life is WAY worth living. Not just kinda okay, even, but WAY worth living.” This week’s guest is Mitch Altman, a hacker and electronics scientist whose life is the stuff of legend (here's his Wikipedia entry).

Founder of Cornfield Electronics (“We Make Useful Electronics for a Better World”), co-founder of Noisebridge (epic hackerspace in San Francisco), inventor of TV-B-Gone.

This episode’s title is pulled from Mitch’s talk by a similar name.

In this Episode: Living in alignment with your dreams, working for yourself. 

Entrepreneurship as serving your own sense of the awesome and letting the resonant audience come to your own articulated personal meaning.

The potential of full-cost accounting: how weaving every invisible cost (“ecosystem services,” mothering, etc.) into the economy could transform selfish behavior into good for all.

Self-discovery and finding the place where your enjoyment and passion meets the needs of your society.

“Helping me includes helping other people, which feels good. How can I NOT do this?”

Getting through depression and loneliness to find creative fulfillment.

Breaking out of habit to discover the life we CHOOSE with our sudden wealth of free time…

The importance of boredom and leisure to the full development of the soul.

The evolutionary fitness landscape and looking at our choices as moves across a geography of our adaptation to various environments.

Making the hard decision to back out of something you’ve invested in and begin again as something new…

Technological Unemployment, Universal Basic Income, and the rise of Hacker Spaces.

The role of local currencies and minimum guaranteed income in the architecting a society of creativity and leisure.

“All of this has to happen slow enough that things don’t collapse or become traumatic, but fast enough that we can survive as a species.”

Open Source Digital Democracy and fractal structures in economy and politics – what comes after representative republics and printing-press-era legislature in the age of the Internet?

Natural hierarchies (holarchies and do-ocracies) versus artificial hierarchies…and how to create a pocket of effective, fruitful anarchy within the right container.

Chaos Computer Club and the future of meta human swarm intelligence (read also: social creatures living in community)

“I try to not be pessimistic OR optimistic. I try to the best of my ability to see things AS THEY ARE.”

The recent explosive proliferation of Chinese hackerspaces. Photo Credit: Dennis van Zuijlekom

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New essays, music, talks, and writing coming soon for my Patreon supporters! Subscribe here and get everything I do for free if you haven’t already…

This week our guest is Becca Tarnas, whom I caught up with at the 2017 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland.

Becca’s Website

https://beccatarnas.com/about/

Archai Journal: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology

http://www.archai.org/

“Everything breathes together.” - Plotinus

We discussed:

The imminent shift into an archetypal paradigm, in which we transcend naïve subject-object dualism and experience meaning as not merely something manufactured by the brain…

Uranus-Pluto Alignments in the 1960s & the 2010s

Jupiter joining the revolution in 2016-2017 and magnifying things

What will the world be like after all this revolutionary energy runs its course?

Impending collective shadow work in our inherently psychedelic future circa Saturn-Pluto Conjunction, 2018-2021 (ish)

How do we hold to our centers in a storm of history?

How do you deal with knowing that most of your adult life is going to be spent navigating unprecedented social & personal transformation?

“I think having the archetypal perspective helps me to ‘zoom out’ and see this as part of a larger narrative, and to feel myself participating in something that is SO much bigger than me. So that helps. I definitely feel fear, as any mortal person would, during this time. I also feel the wave of excitement of this very powerful revolutionary moment, recognizing that change really IS necessary in this time.”

“…to just try and participate as fully as possible. Because it IS a remarkable time to be alive…”

“I think being okay with the Mystery has to be a part of it. And, at the same time, it can’t be a part of it all the time. Sometimes we do have to just melt down and accept the utter chaos and fear of it all and then pick ourselves back up from that place and keep going forward.”

#futureshock & #pastshock

The wonder of the holistic intelligence disclosed by archetypal cosmology.

James Hillman is awesome and there are a lot of good scholars and academics working on archetypal astrology, these days…

What is rigor in astrology? How does the community peer review?

Science and Imagination.

Books Mentioned:

• Cosmos & Psyche by Richard Tarnas

• Glass House by Charles Stross

• Stages of Faith by James Fowler

• Promethea by Alan Moore

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Support Future Fossils on PatreonReview Future Fossils on iTunesReview Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupThis week is part 2 of our conversation with biohacking polyamorous geneticist and aspiring Australian politician Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry. Get ready for a chat so crazy you’ll think it’s 1999…we spend about 20 minutes arguing about modern art, 20 minutes arguing about the Singularity, and 20 minutes arguing about what’s in the box.

• Meow Himself:

https://www.facebook.com/meowludo

• Biofoundry:

http://foundry.bio/

https://www.facebook.com/Bio-Hack-Syd-488627521201437/

https://www.meetup.com/biohackoz/

• We Talk:

- We compare campaigning for nuclear technology to bringing a stripper with a drug problem to family dinner;

- IP as Art & The Shape of The Future;

- Leveraging existing systems as scaffolding to transition back into a way of life more suited to our paleolithic environment;

- Vantablack & the jerk who got an exclusive license to use it for art – and how the art community fought back;

- What is GOOD art?

- How “What is Life?” and “What is Art?” might be the same question…

- What the next few decades will be like if we assume a Technological Singularity…

- The social construction of identity

- We argue for ages about whether godlike AI will be independent from the biosphere….

• Citations:

- Common As Air by Lewis Hyde

- Damien Hirst

- Anish Kapoor

- Alain de Botton

- Marcel Duchamp

- Michelangelo

- James Gansfield

- The Architects of Air

- Stuart Semple

- Andrew Despi

- What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

- John Allen (Institute of Ecotechnics)

- Shin Gojira

- Teranesia by Greg Egan

- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

- Bacterial Polyamory

• Quotes:

“If you say to ‘them,’ ‘I have fifteen girlfriends, how many of them should I bring?’, you’ll freak ‘em the fuck out.”

“Artists have to be subversive. And why not be subversive within the system that exists? Because that provokes other artists to come and then challenge it.”

“I’ve had enough wine to say this: everything we do now is meaningless. It’s playtime until the Technological Singularity.”

“We are made of atoms, ultimately, but they’re our bitch.”

“We’re talking twenty years from now, and I can’t even predict this year. If I could, I would have invested in Bitcoin in March!”

• Read more about evolution as entropy:

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-3-living-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-2a42538ee2

• Read more about evolution as a remix:

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877

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In this week's episode, we interview our first guest, author Tony Vigorito, and go ape on thoughts about the nature of synchronicity – are we just making this stuff up? Tony's work has been praised repeatedly and effusively by literary greats like Tom Robbins, so even before you get through a single sentence of his florid, playful, genius, totally abundant and absurdly tasty prose you know you're dealing with a singular mind. He's also taught sociology at universities in Austin and Northern California, as well as to festival audiences all over. Michael met Tony when they were on a panel together at the visionary art theme camp Entheon Village at Burning Man in 2009, and it was love at first sight. He's as fun as he is authoritative, so strap in and get ready for a gorgeous little trip through the emergent angel that occurs at the confluence of three very balanced armchair philosophers...

Tony's website: tonyvigorito.com

* Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield * Take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture. What will our generation's legacy look like to future humans? Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine.

Provocative, profound discussions at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy with Michael Garfield, Evan Snyder, and a growing list of awesome guests...

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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This week's guest, Ashley Dawson, is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center/City University of New York, and the author of Extinction: A Radical History (as well as an extensive list of publications on sociology, economics, and literature).

His book's argument – that capitalism's innate drive to grow and consume is essentially incompatible with sustainability – makes Extinction something in between an ecological treatise written by a communist and an economic manifesto written by an ecologist. * Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield *

We had a fascinating and challenging conversation with Professor Dawson – a disarmingly modest and thoughtful fellow in spite of his fiery and politically charged writing. Part of acknowledging our role as ancestors-in-training is the unpleasant responsibility for examining our generation's role in the mass extinction of The Human Age.

His ardent voice as a liberal intellectual, examining capitalism-caused mass extinction as an offense against the civil rights of our fellow beings, is a fresh contribution to the debate about climate change, "green" businesses, and personal responsibility.

But he was also surprisingly willing to hear our critiques and place the conversation in a much wider context that examines the other mass extinctions that predated human beings; that considered the mass killings of premodern humans and the significant increase in recent years of ecological consciousness among average people. In light of his argument that we have to stage an economic coup to put a stop to the Sixth Mass Extinction, we get into it with questions like:

• Can capitalism really be blamed for mass extinction? • How can we transition into a more ecological economics? • What happens if we treat capitalism as something nature's doing?

One of the heaviest – but also deepest and most interesting – conversations we've had on the show to date. Enjoy it before it's too late!

Visit his website: https://ashleydawson.info/extinction/

Buy Extinction: A Radical History at OR Books: http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/extinction-by-ashley-dawson/

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Radical documentarian, activist, and raconteur Charles Shaw joins Future Fossils Podcast this week for part one of an epic double (possibly triple) episode. https://vimeo.com/nomadcinema Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify Join our Facebook Discussion Group We Discuss: • The plight of the despised underclasses and the dark constellation of the Drug War, addiction, deportation, homelessness, and the prison industrial complex • The (largely broken) promise of visionary culture and the global festival circuit • Psychedelic healing for PTSD and addiction with ibogaine and ayahuasca, and the urgent need for trauma recovery in our traumatic age • Similarities between the Great Depression and life since the 2008 mortgage crisis – namely, suspicion of institutions like banks and the government • The untold stories and hidden trauma of the Greatest Generation • The cascading effects of war, emotional trauma, and social-scale health problems • Trauma and consumerism, trauma and hoarding • Messiah complexes and the pressure of being told you’ll save the world • His work as an intake facilitator for the Ibogaine Institute • The history of addiction being treated as an illness • Addiction & Psychedelic Healing • Intoxication as “the fourth primal drive” • How Rogue One conveys the tension between institutions and individuals, and how war twists and manipulates us – Rogue One as a metaphor for PTSD • Borderline Personality Disorder • How the 20th Century’s industrial civilization trauma has become the 21st Century’s information overload trauma • A critique of Portugal’s drug decriminalization policy • Technological addiction and the bombardment of brains • Psychedelic therapy as a treatment for modern life Charles Shaw Quotes: “The dictum that you really only care about issues when they strike home – definitely plays into the trauma discussion. So I didn’t care about trauma or PTSD until I realized I HAD it.” (On War:) “It’s all about trade and it’s all about territory.” “By the same standards that we executed Nazis…we did the same shit. The thing is, now that that generation is gone, these stories are STARTING to come out, but unfortunately they’re being seized on by the alt-right to rewrite the story of Hitler…come on, nothing takes away from what the Third Reich did.” “Every Boomer that didn’t become a rockstar, their kid was going to become a rockstar.” “There was a paper trail. They conclusively proved that Florida stole the 2000 election. We conclusively proved that Ohio stole the 2004 election. Didn’t matter. No one in the Baby Boom generation…would actually believe it. Because it called the whole system into question. And when you call the whole system into question, that’s a much larger conversation than, ‘No, your other party is the problem. It’s just those people.’” “Addiction science is progressing at light speed, but addiction understanding and comprehension is progressing like Yertle the Turtle. And what we know now is that it ISN’T a disease. It is neither chronic nor progressive. Addiction is a learned behavior more than anything else.” “Animals don’t need to hit the bottle because animals don’t suffer guilt. But humans do.” “We come out of this lineage, and we don’t even realize it’s there…” Referenced Media: • The Thin Red Line • Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky • The Body Knows The Score by Bessel van der Kolk • The Biology of Desire by Mark Levin • Living Light (Eartha Harris’ electronic music production project) • The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

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Support Future Fossils on Patreon Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group “I think we’re at a real crossroads. I’m an old guy, I may not live to see a whole lot more of the changes that are undoubtedly going to happen, but I would sure like to. I try to be an optimist. I’d like to hope that through education and science and clear thinking and good communication we come to sort of a passive understanding of the stuff we need to do – rather than having any ‘conspiracy’ organizations shoving it down everybody’s throats. We can have creativity and BETTER lives, rather than just more and more and more.” This week our guest is visionary artist Mark Henson, whose highly detailed and frequently erotic landscape paintings portray the full spectrum of human experience, our greatest dreams and most disturbing nightmares. Mark’s been a friend and elder to me since we met in 2010 and I was delighted to catch up with him at this year’s Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland – please excuse the background noise in this recording as you enjoy this festive and far-ranging conversation about art, life, and creativity! Mark's WebsiteMark's Facebook Page  TOPICS: - Viewing and making art as time travel. - Will artificial intelligence replace artists? - Can we understand the universe? - Altered sense of time self in dreams and psychedelic experiences. - How technology has crept into our memory and dream lives. - The necessity of Universal Basic Income AND Life Purpose in an automated post-work world. - “The Work” of ayahuasca users and telepathic post-humans (on social media) of being open to the intensity and burden of collective experience. - The importance of an intentional media diet. - How Mark got to collaborate with Jimi Hendrix as a teenager! - Mark’s thoughts on the history and evolving intersection of Street Art, Fine Art, and Live Music. - How different musical styles and intoxicants contribute to different media ecosystems. - How Mark and his stepson almost got one of his paintings into the White House. - Projected art as graffiti and political action; augmented reality graffiti as the future of dissent, and geospatial metadata as a new cyberpunk Wild West – metagraffiti. - Defacing ads and reclaiming public space, a polite How To. - The future of the family. REFERENCES: - The Golden Oecumene Trilogy by John C. Wright - Blood Music by Greg Bear - Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research - The Teafaerie’s Erowid Ibogaine Article - Ayahuasca Coloring Book artist Alexander Ward - Michael’s appearance on Comedy Central’s Problematic with Moshe Kasher - Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle QUOTES FROM MARK: “My overall project here is to create impressions of what life was like, in these days…” “By 2000, we were supposed to be flying around in little personal cars and live in a peaceful world where the big issues had been resolved. That didn’t happen, so I’m not going to hold my breath on a Singularity.” “Sometimes I have fairly vivid dreams where, if the dream is strong enough, later on when I’m awake I might confuse that reality with something that happened in my waking moments. Did I dream that, or did that really happen to me ten years ago. What about this little experience? Was that a dream, or…I can’t quite remember. Sometimes that happens to me, and I actually like that, because if I can blur the boundaries between that world and this one, I think it’s more interesting.” “Maybe if the Singularity happens, or Artificial Intelligence gets intelligent enough to be a frustrated, nervous wreck over wanting to express itself to the point of absolute fanaticism where it has to create something new in the world…I would love to see that, actually. See what comes out.” “Do I want to live in a Borg mind where I know what you’re thinking and you know what I’m thinking? No, I do not, because that’ll clog up my thoughts.” “Everybody is radiating self-expression some way or another. It’s one of our basic human desires. How do we not be swamped in all the static? It’s like we’re running 300 radios at one time. It’s hard to listen to one particular song. So somehow we have to filter things out. It’s sort of essential just to keep sane.” “The essence of our culture war is an economic war, in a sense…if you have a good psychedelic experience, you realize that the beauty of a sunset is of more importance than a pallet full of $100 bills.” “I think if the humans manage to manage ourselves, we’ll be able o accomplish managing nature so that nature can still be nature…and maybe we’ll have a few friendly helpful robots as well.”  Future Fossils Intro/Outro Music: "God Detector" by Skytree (feat. Michael Garfield & Dennis McKenna)

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This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network. 

Bloom Network:

http://bloomnetwork.org

Magenta’s Personal Website:

http://www.imaginationhealer.com/

We discuss:

- The adoption of regenerative culture practices;

- Cultivating planetwide resiliency in an age of thousands of years of unprocessed grief and trauma;

- Web native permaculture psychedelic anarchy;

- Communicating across HUGE political gaps (esp. with family);

- Cool Bloom Network community initiatives happening around the world;

- What will it take to adapt our technological environment to suit a more humane and grounded ecological society?

- The relationship between the Wood Wide Web of interspecies partnerships and the maturing World Wide Web of human making.

- How can we be good ancestors?

- A “relational, omnidirectional nowness where we embrace as our own body the other organisms on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of stuff through space”

- Synchronicity & Diachronicity

- An academic angle on decolonizing consciousness. :)

- the inspiration for Intergenerational Psychedelic Dialogues Podcast

Quotes:

“Another key is coming to this conception of time that is relational and omnidirectional, and this nowness in which we embrace as our own body the other organisms that are on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of movement of stuff through space…”

“We’ve disconnected from some of the fungal and soil networks and if we’re going to continue to survive, and that layer of machine-embodied intelligence is going to survive, we need to learn to be in symbiosis with the Earth that we’re on. If we’re going to make this leap to colonizing other planets, to star travel…”

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Ayana Young didn’t even go camping until she was 25. Now she lives in a cabin she built herself in the redwoods of Northern California and manages a 477-acre native species nursery wilderness rehabilitation project (as well as an amazing podcast). This week’s episode is a candid, personal discussion about how awakening to our participation in nature is the key to both our survival and our spiritual salvation…

https://forthewild.world/

https://www.instagram.com/for.the.wild/

For The Wild is currently raising money to plant ONE MILLION redwoods:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1284964860/1-million-redwoods-project

We talk about:

• her transition from anonymous, germaphobic suburban consumer to restoration ecologist, activist, and dirt-working spokesperson for the world’s last remaining wilderness;

• being a person of place and cultivating a personal relationship with our wild (and not-so-wild) lands;

• love in a time of catastrophe and how to FEEL our impact on a planetary scale;

• what wilderness means in The Anthropocene and what ought to guide our decisions in restoration ecology (not just “restoring to 200 years ago” as if that’s the best goal);

• restoring not extinct ecosystems but biodiversity and resiliency IN GENERAL;

• the joy of personal sacrifice to a cause and purpose greater than yourself;

• what inspires her to keep going against all obstacles to the Good Work;

• how to be an empowered activist and servant in love with life and your imperfect self;

• picking yourself up after failure;

• and more. A totally inspiring conversation!

Select Quotes:

“If I’m so consumed by my self and my own life, then what am I willing to risk for others? That’s a question I ask myself a lot: ‘What am I willing to risk for that which I love?’”

“We don’t have reciprocal relationships with land, with Earth, with each other, with our lives. And how do you have a reciprocal relationship? Well, you have to have intimacy. You have to feel things. And I love when people say that if you’re not upset, if you’re not grieving, if you’re not angry, if you’re not feeling these strong emotions, then you’re not awake right now. If you were awake to the realities of what is happening in the world, you’d have no choice but to have immense amounts of feelings. But it’s not easy to unravel all of the conditioning that keeps us from feeling.”

“We can be artists as we farm. We can be artists as we grow food. We can be artists as we clean beaches. We can be artists as we put mushrooms on oil spills. I mean, there are SO many ways we can create and love each other and HAVE A BLAST while restoring the Earth. And I think it takes the sadness and the grief to get into that work – and then when we’re on the other side, we can put all of that rage and that fire and that sadness into doing something tangible.”

“It’s not about playing God. I think it’s more about being an herbalist for the Earth…I want to be more a support system than a savior.”

“How do we embody the dichotomy of large-scale urgency and also gentle deep-time thinking?”

“I don’t think we should wait until mastery to get involved.”

Special thanks to the Body Hacking Conference for their support of this episode!  

BDYHAX.COM ("Body Hacks") is about human augmentation, personal expression, democratized medicine and bringing the DIY ethos to our own bodies. We bring together people from all industries who are interested in what's happening right now in bodyhacking all over the world to make connections, friends, and share experiences and resources in order to build the best possible future. 

February 2-4, 2018 at Sheraton Austin in Downtown Austin. 

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Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on PatreonThis week’s guest is my friend Lindsay Loftin, a professional mermaid who uses her performances to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. She also boasts 60 pushups in two minutes and the ability to transform phone-addicted schoolchildren into avid gardeners.

https://www.facebook.com/mermaidsforcleanwater/

We Discuss:

• How mermaid performances can help us transform our relationship to nature;

• Sea goats and other weird half-and-half creatures, and how the Capricorn’s ambitious in-between-ness was a prophesy of amphibians as an emblem of evolutionary “ascent”;

• Remembering in our bodies the importance of the health of our environment and our right relationship to nature;

• Ecology as a mystical experience or way of being awake;

• The changing definition of nature once you think of the atmosphere as an artifact created by primordial ooze;

• Epigenetics, landscape agency, cities as automatic outgrowths of the lithosphere, and the argument against free will from a planet’s point of view;

• Plastics and endocrine disruption related sterility;

• Activism!;

• Whales;

• David Pearce’s anti-species-ist manifesto;

• Responsible tourist information about how to visit wild places respectfully;

…and much more. I go off the deep end and talk about the possibility of ACTUALLY BECOMING mermaids with CRISPR, and the social consequences of the end of a common “human” body.

Then we talk for another hour. Lindsay tells some AMAZING animal stories. She has never been injured.

Lindsay Loftin:

“I want to be the Bill Nye of mermaids.”

“I think when little girls see me holding my breath for two minutes and swimming around Barton Springs, it blows their minds…they’re thinking, ‘Science is not what I thought it was.’”

“It’s our time to return to the water. At least in our focus and our awareness. Because you know, the way our culture is going is so far removed from any sort of connection to nature as I’ve come to understand it. So that’s a systemic illness, in my opinion. My work…lies with healing that rift, that illness.”

“No two people react to nature in the same way. The way I experience going out side is kind of like a landscape level. Which, as an ecologist, I’m mapping in my brain how energy is flowing from the air, into that tree, into me, into the soil – the water going across the landscape, where that’s going, what animals are here – I’m seeing all of that at the same time.”

“I can pretty much guarantee you that you drank plastic within the last week…essentially, we are becoming plastic.”

“As someone who works with other people’s children, I just cannot stand the thought of sitting here waiting [for plastic-eating bacteria to save the world].”

“I don’t even have an Instagram. People hear that, and they’re like, ‘But you’re a mermaid!’”

“Dangerous wildlife finds me, gets as close to me as possible, and then completely leaves me alone. I can’t really explain why, but that seems to be one of my gifts: that animals are A attracted to me, and B have no interest in eating me.”

“If birds get really loud, or suddenly really quiet, both of those are times when you should pause and evaluate your surroundings.”

MG:

“Could plastic-eating bacteria be used to generate the electricity required to mine Bitcoin?”

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In one of the most QUOTABLE episodes of Future Fossils yet, this week’s guest is Eliot Peper – a “novelist and strategist” writing fiction and consulting businesses about the social implications of disruptive technologies. In addition to writing a steady stream of sci-fi inflected techno-thrillers like True Blue and Cumulus, he’s an editor at Scout.AI (one of the cooler speculative fiction websites I’ve seen out there).

http://www.eliotpeper.com/

http://scout.ai/

We Discuss:

• The power of science fiction to help us imagine future scenarios;

• The possible social impact of radical life extension (gerontocratic radical conservatives vs. an emergent mature wisdom culture);

• The Superstar Effect and how it might play out in the digital age;

• The awesomeness of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway;

• Eliot’s skepticism of mind uploading and conscious AI;

• The specter of technological unemployment;

• Science fiction’s growing significance to corporate think-tanks and creative labs in a future-facing society;

• How science fiction is like traveling to a foreign country – and teaches us more about our own moment than it does about the future;

• And More!

Quotes:

“We don’t call it ‘life extension,’ we just call it ‘healthcare.’”

“I think there is a very misleading public discussion going on around these topics [mind uploading and conscious AI], for a very simple reason. And that is – and I know this as a storyteller – metaphors matter…the human mind is very poor at distinguishing metaphor from reality. That’s what makes art fun! That’s what makes novels entertaining. We experience them as if they are real. Money is that. It only exists because we can build these complex shared fictions. However, those fictions can come back and bite you in the ass. And one of the ways they do it is, we take the metaphor too far.”

“[Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] takes the extension of the Industrial Revolution into the imagination of dystopia. And I think we’re doing that right now when we’re talking about uploading our minds, and about creating general AIs…I just think we’re taking the computer analogy too far.”

“Technology is most useful to the extent that it is inhuman.”

“The whole point of technology is that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish more effectively – or, said another way, we can do less of what sucks.”

“Getting better at the skill of putting yourself in another person’s shoes is really important, and fiction is a great training ground for that. It can illuminate so much about why we do what we do that we can apply in our lives.”

“I think what makes science fiction as a genre interesting is its insights about the PRESENT.”

“I seek out discomfort. I seek out novel experiences that challenge me and that are not always fun. And I try to talk to people from different fields and learn from them, because I’ve learned that in my own life that having a really strange and somewhat random set of life experiences allows me to have a fresh perspective sometimes on a new problem.”

“The most important things about the world and about what it means to be human are very obvious and very old. And I think it’s especially important to remember that when we feel like we’re in the midst of a whirlwind of change that we don’t understand. And that the world we want to build and the lives that we want to lead – either today in 2017, or in 2117 – is that we need to be kind to each other. We need to help our friends out. Even more important, to help out strangers. To pay things forward instead of trying to think about the benefits that accrue to us. To make sacrifices – meaningful, painful sacrifices – financial, emotional, or otherwise – to help each other out. I think that building a better world is just a thousand small acts of kindness.”

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This week’s guest is Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry whom I met at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Innovation Lab in February. Meow is a modern trickster-wizard par excellence, entirely too smart for his own good, and he loves to argue – this is one of the most wide-ranging talks on Future Fossils yet! Enjoy part 1 of a special double feature that continues next week…

• Biofoundry:

http://foundry.bio/

• Press about Meow:

https://www.inverse.com/article/5887-australian-biohacker-meow-ludo-meow-meow-on-diy-biology

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/man-named-meow-ludo-disco-gamma-meow-meow-has-transit-pass-implanted-into-hand_us_5953b3eae4b0da2c732015e6

• We Talk:

- Cryptocurrency

- Biohacking

- Getting Married on the Blockchain

Polyamory & Relationship Anarchy

- Intellectual Property

- An Ecological View of Relationships

- Plural Singularities

- The Genetic Origins of Hominids (HARs)

- Would God be considered an Organism?

- Crystals Are COOL

- Mass Extinctions

- Asteroid Mining

- An Ethical Debate on Eugenics & Nukes

- Meltdowns, Solar Flares, & The Insecurity of The Electrical Grid

Citations:

• Common As Air - Lewis Hyde

• More Than Two - Franklin Veaux & Eve Reichert

• I Heart Huckabees (film)

• The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster - Richard Brautigan

• “Transcending Possessiveness in Love & Music” by Michael Garfield

• Guns, Germs & Steel - Jared Diamond

• Interstellar (film)

• WALL-E (film)

“Capitalism lends itself to models that are in crisis continuously…”

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This week our guest is Tibet Sprague, former solar energy system manager and scholar-practitioner in search of sustainable alternatives to our unhealthy post-industrial communities.

http://tibetsprague.com for all social links, writings, and project info

We discuss:

What it was like for Tibet growing up in a healthy community.

The difference between communities online and in person.

The possibility of a virtual nation, a modern silk road of digital nomads moving in between communities…

…but the issues with that, primarily its unsustainability, and the importance of working to create local communities and tribes.

The tension between freedom and fullness of living, independence and interdependence as valued differently by different societies.

What does it truly mean to be free and to have a society that promotes freedom?

How our individual drives are sculpted by the agencies of our environments and the people with whom we surround ourselves – so even the drive for independence is a symptom of our interrelatedness.

The challenge of building a decentralized society of loners and how culture itself may be the one true technological solution.

“My thinking about what I want to work on in the world has headed from initially thinking, ‘Oh, climate change is the most important thing to be focusing on right now, obviously,’ to ‘Maybe we can’t really resolve our climate issues without changing capitalism and changing our economic system that requires constant growth,’ and ‘Oh, well, maybe we can’t actually change our economic system without a culture that changes people’s relationships with each other, and with money, and with the world.”

“I think a lot of individual work, personal growth work, each one of us doing our own work to resolve the things in us that prevent us from living our most enlivened selves and bringing our gifts into the world, is really important.”

How Charles Eisenstein helps us articulate the core problems of, and potential solutions to, the crisis of our current age:

From separation to oneness, from scarcity to abundance.

The crisis of imagination that we don’t think it’s possible for our planet to provide for everyone.

Universal Basic Income - how it could liberate us to get culture right, or how it could be poorly implemented and create new problems.  

Charles Stress’ novel Singularity Sky as one example of how unprecedented sudden affluence can ruin a society.

Might it not be for a very good reason that massively disruptive technologies we WANT (like free energy) are being (or ought to be) WISELY suppressed by the system (and/or ruling classes)?

Ramez Naam’s Nexus Trilogy as a model for how society might variously adopt and resist disruptive technologies – how technological telepathy specifically might be used by a variety of different factions, and suppressed by nation-states that want whatever vestige of control remains in eras of extraordinary change…

Tamera Healing Biotope in Portugal and their experiments in community living, the healing of interpersonal issues, processing group needs, and building toward a future that includes and nourishes us all.

The role of fearless love and re-imagined intimate relationships in new modes of community designed for peace.

The difficulty of making powerfully positive but culturally unusual steps toward love free from fear. 

The Sex 3.0 Wiki and understanding sexuality as a cultural phenomenon shaped by the distributed agency of our technological surround – the enclosure and ownership of land, paternity, etc. all contributing in big ways to our current preference for monogamous mate claiming partnership.

The relationship between digital society (with its emphasis on sharing everything) and the resurgence of nonmonogamy.

Mystics and Moralists as two responses to change.

The plurality of belief systems, adaptability, and resilience.

“We can embrace the fullness and complexity of everything that’s happening in a balanced way that I believe will lead to a much more harmonious way of being on the planet.”

Moving out of an age of answers and into an age of questions…

The invention of Inheritance Day and the awesome idea of a new holiday in which we honor our ancestors and realize that we, too, are ancestors.

And lastly, just a dash of speculation on the Simulated Universe Theory and our participation in what Tibet calls “this fractal godhood…”

“If the future is watching, then don’t you want to say something valuable?” – MG

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This week’s guest is the visionary painter Hannah Faith Yata, whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once. We talk about her new show “Dancing in Delirium,” the role and life of wilderness in the Anthropocene – weather control and fear porn (eerily prescient, given recent events; this talk was recorded in July) – the feeling of living through a time of massive change and chaos (and clocking out with cute pet videos) – art as rebellion and the party as a revolution – the pagan conjunction of human and animal revived in cosplay and furry culture – and the ways our ideas are literally making impressions on the land )yet, we are something that the land itself is doing)… “The city, to me – that’s like a virtual reality made out of brick and steel.” “Wildness for me, means: leave it the fuck alone.” “I like to think of my work as this strange awakening of a rebellion…” “I’m not fond of human faces, and I’ll tell you why. For me, seeing somebody’s face and having to analyze every single detail, every wrinkle, every little nuance, is just…if you think about painting and its historical significance, it’s like you’re immortalizing this person. You’re immortalizing their ego. To me, though, I think it’s all about more or less the abolishment of the ego and this realizing that we’re a part of nature, that we see ourselves in nature…I don’t want to shit on portraiture, because I think it’s beautiful, but that’s not my statement.” “I feel like everything today is this dance of trying to keep the ego so that it doesn’t fly off into space.” “It doesn’t have to be pretty…if you or I were thrown out in the wilderness tomorrow, it’s not like there’s some nature god that’s going to protect us. It’s wild out there! Actual wildness is wild!” “We have more moral codes when we go to war against other people than we do hacking through a rainforest. So to personify things and to think of them as these living personalities helps us to remember our respect for these things.”

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De-Anthropomorphizing The Universe / Science & The Filter Bubble

with Cory Allen, Audio Mastering Engineer & Mindfulness Trainer, Host of The Astral Hustle Podcast

http://cory-allen.comhttp://releaseintonow.com

“It’s just all what is. And I accept every state of being as glorious.”

Two dedicated truth-seekers and cosmos-abiders make a lot of dirty jokes and somehow manage to harmonize their angles on the practice of rigorous inquiry into the nature of reality and consciousness…

We have a totally tangential, irreverent, penetrating conversation. (Luckily for you it’s audio only.) Somehow it all hangs together…much like Cory and I would, if they ever found out about the unrecorded parts of this chat. (Kidding!)

• The paradox of having a podcast that emphasizes memory and continuity having SO. MANY. RECORDING. GLITCHES. Bizarre plumage that doesn’t fossilize and how truly precious little we know of the ancient world.

• Noticing what weirds you out: your surprise reveals your expectation.

• Cory Allen’s “creepy” super intense memory – and memory versus recordings – isn’t it kind of wrong to rely on recordings to justify or validate the way we feel right now?

• Feathered dinosaurs screwing up our whole perception of dinosaurs as monsters. Scales versus feathers and how humans are so quick to judge based on the surfaces…

“Got a face? We’ll give you the time of day. Worms? You’re going to be laboratory experiments. Snakes? We’re going to use you as a symbol for evil in the entire course of Western Religion because you have no arms and legs. You’ve got a face, but you’re the face of evil. Try again. But rabbits? Dogs? Cats? We take care of them because they’re furry.”

• Encountering the dragon on the edge of the map and realizing that it’s you…versus not being able to see the faces of the people you’re firing on as a drone pilot. The closer you get to “it” the more it is you.

• The value of noticing our projections and how we colonialism the world “out there” with our own ideas and imaginations. Everything we think about HUMAN consciousness is just CONSCIOUSNESS.

• Taking the human element out of consciousness.

• Vocabulary Word: Allopoeisis: the process of becoming the other.

• Talking with animals to explore the nature of consciousness from as far beyond our human filter as we can. (How much are we anthropomorphizing Koko the Gorilla’s command of language?)

• Watch out for clamping down on the word “is” when trying to relate your personal experience…as soon as you’re talking about “how it is” you’re not paying attention to your own subjectivity and recognizing its role in your experience.

• We never see beyond the virtual reality of our nervous system, but it’s also the case that there is no separation between self and other in the ecosystem that precipitates “them” “both.”

“On the one hand you can never really know the other. On the other hand, you never know anything BUT the other.”

“Because you ARE the other.”

“Right.”

• Seeing through the academic pretense of objectivity to the necessity of describing the full details of your instruments (including your own nervous system) used in your experiments. The impossibility of perfectly replicating an experiment. Data from studies of psi phenomena show self-verifying results dependent on the belief sets of the experimenter – both positive and negative – even in very tightly controlled and blinded studies.

• The politics, stress, absurdity, and pressure of the academic world and how it inhibits the very exploration to which it’s devoted. Cory’s friend who worked on the roundworm C. elegant and the nature of his research…and near-madness undergoing the completion of his PhD program.

• The social construction of knowledge: this is where “facts” come from, people!

• “School” and “Scholar” comes from a word that meant “leisure.”

• The more narrowly focused our attention, the more we have to compete for one another’s attention. The social ills of the filter bubble. The diminishment of chance encounters and surprise interactions because of our constricted and self-reinforcing “reality tunnels.”

• The Nutcracker is an awesome, very self-aware ballet…which Cory would have never seen if he hadn’t gotten outside of his own bubble.

• The documentary “Century of the Self” and how marketing has gone from advertising products to advertising lifestyles and appealing to the consumer’s ego.

• How diversity and redundancy are essential to the health and vitality of society (as with any ecosystem). How we NEED oppositional perspectives to enrich the whole – and what would happen if Trump and Clinton supporters could recognize this? When will this be common sense?

• Michael’s spiritual practice of listening to radio stations he wouldn’t ordinarily choose and finding out why millions of people tune in and enjoy those stations.

“You can appreciate it without liking it.”

“You have to look at it long enough until you see yourself in it.”

• Advertising fake products from the future.

• The intimacy of evolution and extinction, entropy and complexity.

• Astrosexuality and the CRISPR-induced end of identity politics. The future of identity: radically creative and diverse, or a mushy bowl of oatmeal?

“I think everyone will become so nuanced in their identity that it becomes a tapestry…everyone’s going to be SO individual that we’re all going to be exactly alike.”

• If your social media followers were actually following you around in the street, and you had to turn around and talk to however many of them, how would that change the way you think about your platform as a creator? (“How would it change what you’re saying and how absurd it is?”)

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We’re switching it up this week to present my recent talk on psychedelic futurism at the first weekly meeting of the Australian Psychedelic Society (Fitzroy Beer Garden, Melbourne, Victoria).

The Chinese have a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” The Irish have a toast: “May you be alive at the end of the world” I’m more Irish than Chinese, and I know this because even though we’re living through total chaos these days, that means unprecedented opportunity for wonder, creativity, discovery, and growth.

- How to enjoy life in an age of mass extinction and the imminent transformation of the human species through genetic engineering

- CRISPR and evolution “in real time,” within the lifespan of “individual” organisms

- The self as a multitude of distinct neural “motifs” and how each of us is a village (or a bouquet)

- Living through “a trans-technological, trans-nature” renaissance

- The sharing economy, nonmonogamy, global citizenship, access vs. ownership as symptoms of a global transition to more freely exchanged modular selfhood

- How each of us is basically the sexually mature larval form of our ancestors and how staying “childlike” has empowered us with special powers as a species

- The future of work as a world in which there are as many different kinds of work as there are people

- The spiritual and philosophical implications of “teledildonics”

- What replaces “privacy” in an age of universal coveillance and mutual accountability

- Why we shouldn’t judge the world and lives of our software based digital human descendants

- Tim Leary’s “Just Say Know” as a better approach to technologies (since all technologies are psychoactive, and so tech and drugs should merit similar approaches)

Memorable Quotes:

“To the extent that we recognize that who we believe ourselves to be is a story our brain is creating instinctively and automatically, we can be more conscious about that, and we can inhabit different self-concepts as it suits us.”

“What we’re learning about the origins of life is that it wasn’t like suddenly the cell occurred, with a membrane already on it, and credit card debt, and alimony payments. This happened in stages. And the first stage, what we believe the first life form to be…was a soup of self-reproducing molecules that didn’t really have clear self-other division. And even now, bacteria are very promiscuous and free about the exchange of their own genetic information with one another.”

“When everyone has a 3D printer at home, you’re not going to go to a dealer. You’re going to print your own drugs.”

“Each of us is the still point at the intersection of colliding infinities.”

“It’s not so much that we’re coming to ‘The End of Jobs’…it’s that we’re coming to a world in which everybody’s jobs is basically unique to them. 

“What is a human being? A human being is a pattern that occurs within a field of organization. You’re never the same stuff from moment to moment. Even the same atoms are blinking in and out of virtual particle states. So what are you more fundamentally than a pile of soup and bones? You are the pattern of information that exists within this electromagnetic field. And then…as Gregory Bateson said, information is ‘the difference that makes a difference.’ Information doesn’t exist unless it’s observed. Unless it’s understood. Information and consciousness are two perspectives on the same thing. So to recognize ourselves as, more fundamentally, fields of information, is to recognize ourselves as more fundamentally a nonduality of material and immaterial.”

“The story that we tell about ourselves is something that can be tweaked, hacked, reprogrammed, assumed, dropped. These identities end up becoming more like costumes that we are are able to remove and wear as appropriate.”

“This is part of the anxiety of modern existence: that as we become more and more transparent to one another, as we become more connected, we’re becoming more vulnerable, and our definitions of security have to change accordingly.”

“A good idea is better shared.”

EPISODE ART BY ADAM SCOTT MILLER: http://adamscottmiller.com/

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0014 Michael Phillip (Special Episode: Westworld Problems)

With special guest, host of Third Eye Drops Podcast and fellow esoteric dork extraordinaire, Michael Phillip. We go deep into the layers underneath the layers of HBO’s awesome new show Westworld – its future angst and wonder, and what it can teach us about the value and meaning of human existence.

SPOILER ALERT! We get into details of the Season Finale, so don’t listen to this unless you’ve seen it.

Seriously.

The show is worth it, though, so watch it and then come back to this conversation – in which we totally ignore the precedent of Battlestar Galactica while discussing Westworld’s awesome treatment of “Am I actually a robot?” and its evolution from the original 1970s version – and speculate on the world OUTSIDE of Westworld, the missing context for this robot violence playland that to us makes very little economic sense.

https://youtu.be/K9AwvWGjJeQ

https://twitter.com/hashtag/westworldproblems

http://www.mememaker.net/meme/convinced-i-have-free-will-may-just-be-a-host

http://www.mememaker.net/meme/just-saw-my-own-code-doesnt-look-like-anything-to-me8

Michael Phillip echoes majestically from beyond the void as we talk about:

• William Gibson’s argument that AI isn’t robots but a “coral reef” in which all internet-connected human beings are participating;

• Magic Leap and other paradigm-shattering technologies poised to arrive on the scene simultaneously and challenge our very sense of what is real;

• Branded mixed reality universes shared by fandoms as AI testbeds;

• The danger of projecting our modern values into a fictional world at least 60 years ahead of the present – one where overpopulation may reduce the value of a human life, or might be jaded with the virtual and really want a “flesh and blood” experience of virtual reality (Is Westworld the equivalent of “artisanal small batch” or “analog aficionado” for the not-so-distant future?);

• How being able to 3D print new body parts might one day inspire a carelessness with physical harm, or possibly even new arts of consequence-free self-mutilation;

• The importance of feeling something REAL, feeling like your consequences MATTER, and how comfort sometimes is the enemy of evolution;

• Is human life losing its value?

• Sentience / Sapience & Panpsychism, Complexity

• The project of creating our own machine gods and their seemingly inevitable project of creating their own gods – Dan Simmons’ amazing Hyperion Cantos (science fiction novel series) talks about this – and how we might move into a kind of rainforest of different kinds of artificial sentience…

• Moore’s Law and entropy and evolution – will we run faster people in smaller bodies? (Fraggle Rock, Fractal Rock)

• If we’re data then of course we have duplicate versions of ourselves running around out there…

• The FOMO-ularity, when the risk of printing out a body to run at one millionth of your society’s consensus digital reality is unthinkable.

• Uploading only copies, does not transfer a continuous stream of, qualia – you aren’t immortal, just your pattern (maybe)

• Martine Rothblatt’s idea of “dual platform identity” and the light and dark sides of being able to train a computer to think and act like you.

• Can we use the ancient techniques of ecstasy employed by shamanism to more adequately navigate the turbulence and overwhelm of (post-post-)modern life?

• What else do Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and JJ Abrams have in store for us with this? We know they’re into archetypes and layers…

• MP proposes that Arnold is the heart and Ford is the mind, leading MG to bring up Set & Osiris, Christ & Lucifer…you know, classic pairs that descend through involutionary layers of being into ever branching polar incarnations. Paradox resolved dissolves as dyads in the Fall. Ford is Lucifer and Arnold is the Christ. BAM.

• What are people going to be dissatisfied with in the future?

• Next World Problems

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This week we're joined by Daniel Rozenberg aka DADARA for a thoughtful discussion about Art in Virtual Realities, Information Overload, and Flow States. The creator of Exchangibition Bank, Like4Real, and the upcoming Solipmission installation at Burning Man, as well as countless concert posters and album covers, DADARA has been one of my favorite artists for a while - in no small part because of how his works combine deep, challenging investigations with light-hearted play.  Click here to learn more about the Indiegogo Campaign for Solipmission We discuss his work's overarching philosophical explorations and our age of proliferating realities… • The breakdown of narrative and consensus reality in the virtual spaces of new media; • Virtual Reality as the new frontier, now that we’ve mapped the surface of the planet – and the potential problems of considering a space a “frontier” (especially if it is already inhabited); • The twin archetypes of the “Black Box” and the “Tabula Rasa” as they appear in science fiction, religion, technology, and philosophy; • The relationship between Virtual Reality and psychedelics, and the consideration of VR as a psychedelic in its own right; • What replaces narrative structure in VR storytelling, and how it relates to neuromarketing, cybernetics, and mind control; • How humankind is struggling to maintain coherence in the barrage of contradictory realities online; • How the sciences are coping with increasing specialization and the explosive proliferation of data, complicating the establishment and communication of expertise; • The relationship between VR and floatation/isolation tanks, and why floatation tanks are more necessary now than they have ever been; • Flow states and nondual awareness as a possible solution to information overload – and how we may have come to the end of the ego’s evolutionary usefulness; • Does Virtual Reality as a medium for philosophical inquiry even stand a chance in this commercial environment? Books We Mention In This Talk: (Buy any of these books through these links, and Amazon will pay me a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.) • Ready Player One: A Novel by Ernst Cline • Neuromancer by William Gibson • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley • Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams • The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly • The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank by John C. Lilly • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal Other References: • Neuralink (brain-technology interface currently in development by Elon Musk) • Inside Out (Disney movie) • WNYC’s Note To Self Podcast • Nathan Jurgenson, Social Media Theorist for Snapchat • Maria Popova’s Brainpickings.org • Android Jones & Anson Phong’s Microdose VR DADARA Quotes: “Imagination is this endless unknown territory. We think we might have discovered it, but if we look, I don’t know…” “Nowadays we think a photo shows how something really is. That that’s reality. But it’s just a surface. And that’s something that I love. Maybe stories show reality in a more realistic way.” “People twenty, twenty-five years ago thought the world would be more defined [with the Internet] because we could find all the facts. But what’s interesting now is that it’s almost impossible to find any facts that we agree on, on the Internet.” “Inside the box [of the Solipmission installation], it may be more Burning Man than the outside.” “When people go to a city, they take photos of all the touristy [stuff] – it’s like the bucket list – but if you go to a place, and maybe if you haven’t seen any building but you’ve met this amazing person or gone through an amazing experience, doesn’t that give you a better understanding of that city than just seeing everything that’s there?” “I think floatation tanks now, in this period of time, are probably more important than ever…we’ll have implants [soon] and how can you be in a floating tank when the Internet is in your brain?” “Do you actually exist when you don’t Tweet? It almost feels like people, sometimes nowadays, if they haven’t posted that they’ve been somewhere, then they feel they haven’t been somewhere. But I think often, if you post that you’ve been somewhere, I don’t know if you’ve been there. Because you somehow were distracted. You only go to places when you DON’T post about them.” Coinage of a new term: “information potato.” “Art is about focusing our attention, and entertainment is about distracting our attention.” “Zapping [TV remotes] and scrolling [social media] at the same time is probably also a kind of flow. It’s just not MY flow.” Michael Quotes: “Much as we, in the United States anyway, marched westward under this insane banner of Manifest Destiny into what we were calling the ‘frontier,’ it wasn’t actually a frontier. There were people living there already! And what was unfamiliar to us, what was unknown to us, was already this mature ecosystem. And so there’s this relationship between virtual reality and psychedelics that people like Android Jones have been exploring, that makes me wonder if, in our exploration of what it is that we can manifest into these spaces, if we aren’t somehow causing an ecological catastrophe of the imagination. You know? That there’s stuff there already, and we’re paving over it.” “We assume that life is just given, but we’re actually involved in it, in its creation.” “We’re in the machine already, and so the machine entering us is not that big of a leap.” “Maybe a floatation tank isn’t enough. Maybe we need a Faraday cage, so you can go into this room of your house where it’s actually blocking electromagnetic radiation from entering the room and you can have your own thought for the first time in your whole life.” “Maybe the problem is that we’re so preoccupied with narrative, so preoccupied with history and prediction and who we think we are…that there is a ‘real real,’ but it’s not something that can be understood through the interpretive lens of the self.” More Links: Reality Sandwich Interviews DADARA about SolipmissionAbout DADARA’s “Art as Money” Project from 2012 Hanging out with DADARA and his son at Boom Festival 2016

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Featuring documentarian, psychonaut, and meta-media wizard Mitch Schultz, director/producer of the documentary "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" and founder of Mythaphi. A more than usually enthusiastic group rap on the awesome potential of new media to shift the global story and deliver us into a world of awesome collaborative potential... Evan and Michael met as performers at one of Mitch's events years ago (the DMT RMX party at South By Southwest 2012) so it's like a family reunion having this guy on the show. Not to mention he's a popular podcast guest on other shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, Erik Davis' Expanding Mind, and many others...we're so lucky that we get to share this with you! Check Mitch's work out here: http://thespiritmolecule.comhttp://mythaphi.com

* Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield *

Take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture. What will our generation's legacy look like to future humans? Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine.

Provocative, profound discussions at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy with Michael Garfield, Evan Snyder, and a growing list of awesome guests...

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A special Boom Festival "Future Fossils on The Road" episode featuring some awesome people Michael met while playing and speaking at the amazing biennial psytrance festival in Portugal.

Shaft Uddin is a Tantric Unicorn and Sacred Sexual Awakener (with noisy arm bangles): http://sacredsexualawakening.com

* Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield *

We discuss:

Shadow work, “turning into the swerve,” and going into darkness to claim the light. Realizing that the monster in your dream is you. 

Dealing with people’s projections and how to make peace with the people who embody your opposite or rejected self – in other words, how to be a “polyamorous sex cult leader” with grace and dignity and humility.

“There’s nothing wrong with desire. There’s nothing wrong with harnessing your sexual energy for greater abundance and manifestation.”

The dam is to the river system as the taboo is to the body. How do our needs to control nature manifest in ways that obstruct or interfere with our well-being?

The horrible true history of the corset – designed to keep women from speaking up for themselves.

“The more I study the vagina, the yoni, the sacred space, the more I understand myself. Because I understand where I came from.”

The historical tendencies of masculine magic being about projecting the will and controlling nature, and feminine magic being about aligning will with the power of natural cycles.

The power of the vulnerability of group intimacy and Michael’s experience with The Body Electric School at Burning Man 2008.

Shaft’s ambidextrous “twin goddess awakening” practice and the creation of circuits of loving energy and other “woo woo stuff” that cured his loneliness, depression, and substance abuse.

The difference between “polyamory” as loving multiple people and recognizing the original unity and non-separation of all of us and loving universally (see also Alice Frank’s “uniamory”).

Polyamory vs. Transparent Love (and other Principles of Unicornia)

“Don’t leave me!”

(and then immediately)

”It’s okay, I’m fulfilled in myself, it’s fine.”

— TIME TRAVEL (not externally, but internally) and FATE —

Following the histories of the atoms that compose us into the stars and nebulae from which our parts originated = internal time travel!

The myth of Atlantis as an example of “misplaced concreteness” of the racial memory of an ancient extinction our cells still remember, not necessarily the story that we tell ourselves about an ancient city.

Graham Hancock’s argument that a 13,000 year old comet impact ended the Pleistocene and the possibility that epigenetic molecules have coded this event in our cell nuclei – as well as other even more ancient extinction events such as The Great Oxygenation Event (in which the evolution of photosynthesis nearly destroyed all life).

People are building bunkers preparing for a catastrophe that happened two billion years ago!

Recycling everything.

Faith in humanity and a belief in the Star Trek vision.

“I believe that we will start flourishing.”

Christopher Ryan vs Stephen Pinker and clashing narratives about the progress of our species and whether or not we really are more peaceful than we were as foragers.

“I get my knowledge off of YouTube and Facebook.”

— WOO ALERT ––

We might as well go there: crystals. Meditating on them. Going back to Lemuria through crystal meditation time travel. “OR are we projecting onto it?”

Exalting the natural world by our awareness and appreciation of it. Ensouling technologies by naming them. To observe something turns it from a possibility into an actuality. So with New Age weirdness, how many hallucinations does it take to qualify as reality?

Iboga teaches Shaft to “Ask a tree.”

Michael: “If my cohost were here to reign me in, we might not even be having this conversation.”

Biogeomagnetism and Michael’s 2008 vision-hypothesis that solar maxima and mimina might correlate to changes in the expression of different hormonal balances and behavioral patterns, possibly entirely different genetic expression patterns and states of consciousness.

S: “Do you believe in past life regression? I just paid $400 for my one.”

M: “Why’d you do that when you can talk to a tree for free?”

Camillo introduces himself. Our first third-party guest! He weighs in on the possibility of the cycle of learning that a soul goes through…

Is “how literally true it is” the right question? Or do we just have a modern human obsession with FACTS?

M: “We don’t realize we’re in this Russian doll of nested dreams. And so we regard LOCAL reality as REALITY. And then you get out of that atmosphere and it gets more and more diffuse.”

Writing Field Guides to the Denizens of DMT Space:

- the very circus vibe

- “like with ayahuasca, there’s always a snake”

…and on to Jeremy Narby’s revelations in his book, The Cosmic Serpent, about how plants communicate to animals about their phytochemical properties through gross anatomy.

Camillo talks about synesthetic communication with the body, mapping brain regions to reinterpret signals from the body from feeling to visual cortex processing, etc. How archetypes might be the firmware-esque stable mappings of visual and emotional content onto personified entities. (Why would something like that evolve?) Filtered through the specificities of culture, universal human archetypes become specific deities and spirits.

S: “THIS is why I want to have a church.”

M: “This is why my dad doesn’t want me starting a church.”

The Ten Principles of Unicorn

Unicorn Power Ballads

Biophotonics and the DNA Light Internet

M: “Maybe the medieval view of things as endlessly regressing celestial spheres is closer to the truth.”

Mapping possibility as multiverses on a spherical coordinate plane, and the impossible as antipodal to you, and what’s just unlikely as on the horizon, and what is as where you’re standing. And it all moves when you move.

“I basically suppressed my superpowers. I chose to live a lower form of existence…because what really made me happy was ‘Getting paid and getting laid.’ And it made me super happy until two years ago, when I had my awakening.”

Michael Crichton’s experience, as reported in his autobiography Travels, of learning to see auras. How Shaft and his former lover learned to see auras. Shaft and Camillo share some exercises and anecdotes about how to move energy.

Burning Man as a physicalized internet and the advent of “noetic polities” in which people affiliate and orchestrate according to interests and values, not blood relations or geographic proximity. Will this “unscheduled fluid simultaneity” of liminal zones like festivals be the norm in a few decades, as we get more and more invested in the internet? Nod to Doug Rushkoff’s book Present Shock and his term “narrative collapse.” 

“Let’s see if it’s in flow! Kind of a spiritual bypass; no agreements.”

Scheduling as a byproduct of modern city time; flow as a byproduct as tribal nonlinear time.

C: “You’re not the mountain from which the river flows. You’re something in the river that’s going with it, and you’d better just swim with it.”

M: “But maybe if you had the mass of a mountain in people that were all trying to get the river to flow upstream, you could do it.”

M: “Do you know [of] Peter Diamandis?”

S: “Like a true shaman, I don’t read. I learn through experience. Tell me.”

M: “Okay, well, through my experience of reading people…”

S: [Devious Cackle]

Taking an active stance toward the future. Seeing yourself as an active contributor to the future (rather than feeling disempowered by someone else’s vision of the future).

Abundance vs. Scarcity in history and economics and how the kind of abundance Diamandis predicts for the next century will radically change our sense of value/priority and allow us to be more deeply generous with one another.

C: “A lot of us live in a state of mental scarcity when we’re actually some of the richest people in the world.”

Michael’s perspective on Lisbon and the awesomeness of Europe vs. the ridiculous waste and price of the USA.

Shaft and Kamillo on the difference in agricultural and food standards in the USA vs. Europe.

Parag Khanna and his book Connectography, which argues that our connective infrastructure and economic relationships define boundaries more than actual national borders.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the light and dark sides of globalism vs. planetary culture. NOT THE SAME.

Shaft’s three step plan for extricating yourself from the system.

(Camillo is doing the exact same thing.)

C: “I think the universe is going to show you more love if you show more love to it.”

Reliance on the system we are trying to escape.

M: “What does capitalism actually produce? It seems like people who are trying to escape capitalism is the main product.” 

Alex joins the conversation and drops a knowledge ball on us about permaculture. Shaft brings up Tamera, a sustainable free love community in Portugal – and his mission to travel the world’s intentional communities and model his own on their best features.

M: “Every generation’s trash becomes something valuable to the next generation.”

Was the Baby Boomer acquisition/trash-creation phase the caterpillar phase of humanity, gathering and consolidating for an evolutionary transformation?

Art made out of trash! Building bricks!

Steve brings up the possibility of Universal Basic Income. Camillo mentions that Finland will actually be implementing UBI next year!

Lynn Rothschild’s recent speech arguing for Universal Basic Income because capitalism needs consumers and a middle class to keep things in circulation.

Capitalism is based on extraction - nod to Episode 9 with author Ashley Dawson on his book, Extinction: A Radical Critique.

The origins of the word wealth.

Everyone’s perspectives on the future:

- Steve wants to get involved rather than just complaining.

- Camillo wants people to learn about finding how to make their passions their jobs and creating abundance for everyone before we destroy ourselves.

- Shaft believes in Star Trek, that we’ll live in a beautiful future that’s like Sweden, only everywhere.

- Alex hopes that our good choices reach a critical mass that changes everything in the direction of sustainability.

- Michael asks, “What is the change that each of us must go through in order to make the world we want to live in BELIEVABLE?”

The only way to move forward into this world is as complete people.

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The very first "zero" episode of Future Fossils, in which co-hosts Michael Garfield and Evan Snyder set the tone for our new podcast by attempting foolishly to map time's hyperspatial landscape. We wind up absorbed by black holes, puns, and other singularities. What happens when we use the metaphor of geometry and geography to explore time? Does time have a shape – and if so, can we reconcile the perspectives of various cultures who claim time is different shapes? The arrow, circle, and helix might all come together in some vastly complicated, morphing super-thing that our mere primate brains just cannot comprehend. But that won't stop us from trying! More on this hifalutin silliness from Michael at the Metapsychosis Journal: http://www.metapsychosis.com/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-one/

* Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield *

Take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture. What will our generation's legacy look like to future humans? Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine.

Provocative, profound discussions at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy with Michael Garfield, Evan Snyder, and a growing list of awesome guests...

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is the inspirational badass Jamaica Stevens, key organizer for the Reinhabiting the Village project and Lucid University, and this show’s first pregnant guest (at the time of recording). We dive immediately into the deep end of our half-finished collective birthing process and how to navigate the difficult transition we’re all going through…

http://www.jamaicastevens.com/

http://reinhabitingthevillage.com/jamaica-stevens/

https://www.facebook.com/LucidUniversity/

We Discuss:

• The collective ass-kicking and humbling and veil-lifting that’s upon us

• Can America break up with itself and stay friends?

• What is “the global village” in an age as splintered as ours?

• Cooperative leadership and transcending the hero’s journey with its emphasis on individual growth and development

• How to let go of a dream or vision when it’s time to let it die

• How to process the grief of our ancestors, of our alienation and loss of place and undigested trauma

• Grief as a teacher and a healer

• Being born and reborn, again and again and again

• How initiation needs both witness and community

• Why we need elders for our rites of passage

• How to get out of anthopocentric thinking about wisdom and connect to the vast majority of wisdom in the non-human world - looking to nature and asking it to teach us

• Getting out of the mental attitude that we will understand the paradox…and BECOMING the paradox

• The Epoch of the Steward and The Epoch of the Sage

• Become what you already are

Quotes:

“Birth is not pretty. It’s not rainbows and unicorns. It’s ecstatic and one of the most profound experiences, but it’s also right there at the edge of life and death…there’s something so primal and cosmic at the same time about it, it will transform you.”

“Only when we start embracing the responsibility of self and true accountability, to get into the shadow of our own beauty and tragedy and really get into our woundedness and limitation, and get into our healing on a personal level, and then start to work that on an interpersonal and community level, and learn better skills and tools for navigating conflict instead of avoiding conflict…”

“Stop, drop, and roll, people. Put the fire out. Bring a little water. Go slow. Breathe deep. Own your shit. See another and find the connection of this incredible humanity that we all share.”

“They’re going to look at me and say, ‘When the world was burning, what did you do? Did you keep planting trees? Did you learn to wield well your resources? Did you give up on us? Did you give up on your future and the potential for other generations to learn from the tragedies that we’ve created as humanity? Did you wizen up and face that so you don’t keep handing trauma down to the next generation? Did you become conscious?”

“We ARE vulnerable. Interdependence is non-negotiable. And actually, your heart is liberated when you finally surrender to feeling.”

“Our resistance actually creates more trauma than our learning to surrender.”

“If we humble ourselves we might be able to soften and become pliable enough to find our way through this pressure point. You can’t stop it…how do you embrace it? How do you get on board with this rite of passage that we’re having and leverage it to make the most mighty moves you can?”

“There’s no such thing as a brand new fresh beginning that isn’t in context or related to that which has been – and yet, we cannot go into uncharted territory trying to use a map from that which we’ve already mapped, thinking that that’s somehow going to guide us into something we’ve never experienced before.”

“Looking only to the past will not get us into our future, but if we avoid looking to the past, our future will be riddled with the same mistakes.”

“Would you plant trees that you’ll never eat the fruit of?”

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[NOTE: We had a publishing error last week and most subscribers missed Episode 61 with Jamaica Stevens on Crisis, Rebirth, and Transformation! Definitely worth going back to listen to this awesome chat.]

David Krantz is a personal nutrition and genetics coach, sound therapy technician, and electronic music producer based in Asheville, NC.

http://david-krantz.com

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This week we chat about genetics – specifically how different gene variations in people affect the way we experience cannabis. We’re coming up on a revolution in biotech and agriculture that will soon make it a possibility to grow gene-tailored strains of cannabis to suit YOUR DNA specifically…until then, though, here is your primer on how to dance with Mary Jane in ways that work WITH, not AGAINST, you.

(David is a repeat guest from Future Fossils Episode 0010, when he chatted with us about the future of electronic music, plant intelligence, and tripping with cats and modular synthesizers. Be sure to check that one out also!)

We Discuss:

• CYP2C9 - a liver enzyme that breaks down THC - and how the amount your body produces will determine how high you get from edibles, your ability to pass a drug screening, etc.

• How learning about our genetic differences helps us develop tolerance and acceptance of each other’s very different needs and bodies

• COMT, a gene responsible for dopamine breakdown, and how which variant of this gene you possess determines cannabis-induced memory loss and alteration of time perception

• ATK1, a gene whose variants determine how “psychotomimetic” (ie, trippy) your response to cannabis will be, and whether or not it will exacerbate schizophrenic symptoms

• How it is, and isn’t, helpful for the law to regard cannabis primarily as a medicine

• APOE, a gene that heavily influences Alzheimer’s Disease, not in isolation but depending on whether or not you eat a lot of saturated fats or exercise

• How we must revolutionize education and accreditation in an age of digital learning, so that we can deploy as much healing intelligence as possible

• Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, or SNPs, and how these one-letter changes in a gene can make a huge difference

• David’s critique of cannabis studies that DON’T break down research subject populations down into genetic subgroups, and reveal the researchers’ biases

• The need for “cultural interoperability” in our discussions about cannabis research, “across the aisle” between scientists for and against its legalization

• AND Coffee and Chaga mushrooms and more – enacting complex mutually supportive benefits

• Which gene tests David likes best, and best practices for privacy with your genetic data

• The future of genomic science’s influence on cannabis horticulture and use

Quotes:

“There are probably some people that shouldn’t smoke weed.”

“I feel very qualified to help the people that I’m helping, and having the red tape of, ‘You have to be a medical professional or you can’t talk about this stuff at all,’ doesn’t make sense for where we’re going – because I can listen to 2000 hours of podcasts, like I did when I was working at Moog, and feel like I’ve really upped my understanding of some things. Maybe that can help other people besides myself.”

“I’ve become increasingly self-aware of the way I feel about people who disagree with me…”

“There’s no such thing as the perfect human diet.”

Related Links:

Kerri Welch on dopamine and time perception https://textureoftime.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/dopamine-and-traction-between-internal-and-external-time/

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This week’s guest is David Bronner, grandson of Dr. Emanuel Bronner and the heir to and CEO (“Cosmic Engagement Officer”) of Dr. Bronner’s Soap Company. He’s also an outspoken advocate for psychedelic medicines and visionary culture, and has used his wealth and influence in awesome ways to support the collective healing of American society. In this episode we discuss his advocacy and activism, and the life-changing experiences that brought him to his current understanding and role in helping bring about a saner and more loving world…

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David:

https://www.drbronner.com/about/ourselves/the-dr-bronners-story/

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/dr-bronners-magic-soap-david-bronner-gmo-hemp/

Donate to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies:

http://maps.org/donate

We Discuss:

• The visionary science fiction novels of Olaf Stapledon, Last & First Men and The Starmaker

• How David reconciles a sweeping cosmic vision with the day-to-day realities of work in the world

• His experiences with iboga and the consequent deep experience of connection to the life and work of his father and grandfather

• His grandfather’s development of a firefighting foam used today by the forestry service to fight wildfires, and his childhood of blasting foam everywhere around Los Angeles

• Life artistry and appreciation for our families as life artists

• Epigenetic inheritance of trauma and how that affects the survivors of catastrophe

• Healing starts with you and THEN grows outward

• The history of the Dr Bronner’s foam showers at Burning Man and how David and his friends turned it into an immersive experience to help transmute the pain and suffering of The Holocaust

• Society as a finite game obsessed with maintenance; contrasted with culture as an infinite game delighting in renewal and novelty

• Managing wealth as an act of service to the collective

• How entheogen helped David over his conditioned homophobia and jealousy

• The origins of religion in ecstatic experience

• David’s passion for regenerative agriculture and political action (for hemp, transgender rights, psychedelic-assisted therapies, and more)

• Catharsis, the healing-focused Burning Man inspired cultural event held on the National Mall that David has helped organize in recent years

David Quotes:

“All is on the cross.”

“These sacred traditions that have almost been exterminated have the power the heal us and save us.”

“It’s deadly serious, but it’s also a dream…I don’t know.”

“I knew I was being initiated…like, ‘Okay, this is happening. So what is the least karmic consequence for all involved?’”

Michael Quotes:

“The difference between Heaven & Hell is how hard you’re trying.”

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This week: Science Fiction Übermenschen & A Critique of Space Colonization with film scholar Barry Vacker, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. We talk about the critique of contemporary science fiction cinema in his new book, Specter of the Monolith – pointing past the spiritual shortcomings of our relationship to space, and toward a future human being that has both grown in both technology and wisdom.

Barry's Essays:

http://medium.com/@barryvacker

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We Discuss:

• How contemporary science fiction (including Blade Runner 2049) fails to live up to the promise of 2001: A Space Odyssey and articulate a transcendent vision for the future of humanity.

• The role of the machine in a complete science fiction spirituality.

• The different “übermenschen” presented in 2001, Altered States, Lawnmower Man, and Watchmen.

• How Ancient Aliens hijacked the 2001 narrative about extraterrestrial involvement in human evolution.

• How superheroes replaced gods in secular society after Nietzsche declared us the victors of the “Humans vs. God” match.

• The role of the Cold War in cementing the different future visions of the United States and Russia/China.

• The danger of looking to charismatic leaders of industry like Elon Musk for moral guidance in how we should enter space (specifically, extractive capitalism as the model for space migration).

• The possibility and importance of preserving the Moon and Mars wilderness protection areas

• …or is it our moral responsibility to spread life throughout the cosmos?

• Barry’s critique of Interstellar as a film for “spore bearing” humans as opposed to “space faring” humans

• Will it take an economic transition to prepare us for ethical space migration? Or a philosophical transition? Or are those not even different things?

• The cultural importance of stargazing and astronomy – the sublime as the meeting place of the infinite and the infinitesimal – where awe, terror, and transcendence join without getting deities involved

• The necessity for the human species to have “an explosion of awareness” – non mystically, non religiously

• Space tourism: net good, or net evil? Can we reproduce the experience with VR?

• Can we (or SHOULD we) baptise extraterrestrials? (Short answer: not without their informed consent?)

• Colonialist and anticolonialist narratives in Avatar

• Is our lack of rites of passage the reason we see a vastly disproportionate representation of “adulto-lescent” sci fi narratives?

• Is Blade Runner 2049 a feminist film? Even though it fails the Bechdel test?

Barry Quotes:

“The superhero has emerged to make us feel like we’re still worth saving, to give us a moment of salvation at the movie theater – because when we walk out, we realize our political figures have no answers.”

“2001 [is] seen as the prototypical Greatest Space Film Ever, but if you pay close attention, it’s showing a vision of space TOURISM. But when they show you the Moon, they’re not pillaging it. They’re not strip mining it. I think it’s completely ludicrous to think that we should be strip mining the Moon.”

“The idea that we should be terraforming Mars in Earth’s own image…I mean, how narcissistic can you get?”

“It’s time to give up these tired narratives of deities and industrial exploitation and move towards a scientific and artistic appreciation of these planets. And I don’t see that anywhere on the horizon. Very few people are questioning these tribal narratives.”

“In Ridley Scott’s The Martian, there’s very little appreciation of the actual beauty of the PLANET, and in fact, Matt Damon says, ‘F Mars. I’m going to conquer this place.’ And we never see him looking at the dark skies. He would be the single human who would have had the greatest view of the skies EVER. And we don’t see any of that in The Martian. All we see is, ‘How can we transform the world’s resources into surviving?’ And that makes The Martian a very smart film, but it has a poverty of the imagination.”

“I’m opposed to the propagation of human stupidity in the cosmos, nearby or faraway. I’m not opposed to us going to Mars or the Moon…but we should go as an enlightened species. We should go as space-farers, not merely spore-bearers. If we don’t alter this narrative, we know what we’re going to have: it’ll be literally ‘X Games: Moon.’ ‘The Real Housewives of Mars.’”

“There’s something to be said for facing the universe as it is as best we can. Acknowledging our limitations and our humility, but also our aspirations to be more enlightened and more aware of and sensitive to our origins and our destiny, whatever it might be.”

“In the quest for our meaning in the massive universe, we’ll find our destiny.”

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This week’s guest is independent culture critic John David Ebert – mythologist, philosopher, art historian, author of twenty-six books, and co-founder (with John Lobell) of http://cultural-discourse.com. 

We talk about the rich mythological references of Blade Runner 2049 in light of the larger – and very urgent – matter of mechanizing human reproduction and the (actually rather ancient) male quest to appropriate the mysteries of the goddess…

Here’s John’s Blade Runner 2049 essay:

http://cinemadiscourse.com/blade-runner-2049/

John’s awesome YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5B4tbk3U40S4q_3Qt-cVgQ

John has a knack for connecting very different sources across civilizations and millennia, anchoring this conversation about a modern science fiction masterpiece in a transcultural Big Story of the evolution of human consciousness. 

(Listen if you liked Episodes 42 & 43 with William Irwin Thompson on planetary culture, Episode 38 with Marya Stark on reclaiming the feminine mysteries, Episode 18 with JF Martel on art and reality, and Episode 14 with Michael Phillip on WESTWORLD.)

John David Ebert Quotes:

“Every new cosmology makes new machines possible.”

“I’m interested to hear about utopian projects…because after all, we’re going to need them.”

We Discuss:

- Marshall McLuhan’s work on Sputnik’s technological enclosure of the planet and the end of “nature” (not to mention “natural catastrophes”);

- How poets and artists make visible the “invisible environment” of subliminal information about each age;

- Art’s revelation of cosmology through history, from nested heavenly spheres in medieval religious art to the newly-opened skies of Dutch realists to our anxious re-immersion in the closed infinity of the Anthropocene as depicted by H.R. Giger;

- The transition from worship of the Earth Mother to the Sky Father, and the centuries-long struggle to control the mysteries of birth and death with science;

- The connection between Niander Wallace in 2049 and Enke, sumerian trickster creator god;

- The difficulty of replicating ecosystems in space for those “off-world colonies”;

- “Here There Be Tygers,” Jurassic Park, and how monsters (as avatars of the pissed-off Great Mother) disappeared from the Renaissance world maps but make a new appearance in hypermodernity, thanks to genetic engineering;

- Akhenaten’s experiment in monotheistic sun god worshipping utopia;

- What should we do with the 100% certainty that our cosmopolitan super-cities will all soon be underwater, and it’s time to rapidly escalate our alt-civilization experiments?

- The evolution of civilizations, from early revelation to imperial phase to decline;

- The rhyme of history between Ancient Rome and Modern America;

- The retrieval of shamanism and the re-establishment of a polar civilization in the late 21st Century;

- The lineage between Pacific Northwest spirit-travel shamanism and contemporary Californian VR avatar science fiction and superhero stories;

- And more!

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This week we chat with the philosopher and sociologist John Danaher about the book Robot Sex: Social & Ethical Implications, a fascinating collection of academic articles on our sexbot future he just co-edited with Neil McArthur. (John also runs the blog Philosophical Disquisitions, which has been an awesome resource for deep thinking online for over a decade.)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/robot-sex

http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com

http://thefutureofsex.net

Chances are good you’ve seen the “Don’t Date Robots!” public service announcement from the cartoon Futurama, and probably Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” music video. Maybe you’ve seen Her or Ex Machina or Spielberg’s AI. And let’s not forget the Femmebots in Austin Powers. But does any of this media, for or against, paint a realistic portrait of the impact of machines on human intimacy?

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In this episode, John and I talk about:

• “The cognitive niche” and what separates human beings from other species and (maybe) AI

• How would a world of sexbots change dating and marriage?

• The de-coupling of sex for intimacy and companionship and sex for reproduction

• …and how sexbots might actually bring us BACK to a more naïve or primitive state in which we don’t regard sex and fertility as primarily associated

• What happens if we can hack the brain to make anything an erogenous zone?

• The radiating diversity of sexual strategies as we move into crazier transhuman terrain…

• The breakdown of heteronormative society and the emergence of LGBTQ sexbots

• Will sexbots make human sexwork more or less desirable?

• Can sexbots help sexual deviants channel their socially unacceptable urges into more acceptable behaviors?

• What about LOVING robots? Can we ever be convinced the love is mutual?

• Is the question of robot free will moot because we don’t even have free will??

• Is our dismissal of robot consciousness just like the earlier forms of dismissal of personhood in racism and sexism and speciesism?

• Is robot sex a red herring?

• Loving AI would not be compatible or sensible with the goals of transhumanists, who want perfect control over their environment…

• And more!

“As soon as we’ve been making things, we’ve been making things for sexual reasons. You can pretty much trace this throughout history: we get the first mechanical vibrators at pretty much the same time as the Industrial Revolution…the technology of sex has always gone hand in hand with other developments in technology.”

“All the doubts and skepticism you could have about a relationship with a sufficiently sophisticated robot…you could have all the same metaphysical doubts and worries about a human partner.”

STAY TUNED for next week's episode with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops Podcast!

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This week’s guest is media theorist, culture critic, author, graphic novelist, documentarian, and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff! Chances are you’re a “digital native” banking on “social currency” and consuming “viral media” – which means that you are living in the world Doug prophesied for all of us back in the 1990s. 

I watched his debut documentary on social marketing, Merchants of Cool, in my college Introduction to Film class (which is how you know my teacher was, in fact, cool). His book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now was one of the core inspirations for this podcast and its examinations of time in the digital age remain some of my most frequently-recommended writing. 

More recently his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus launched a vital conversation about how to make sure that the “superabundance” of digital society actually MAKES IT TO THE PEOPLE. And his podcast Team Human offers new insightful conversations every week about how we can sculpt a future for the 100%-ers – a world that welcomes everybody, that lets everyone in, that finds something meaningful for all of us to do and be.

Doug’s written shelves on our new media environment and how the digital surround retrieves our magical antiquity. He’s issued potent cautions to us, that we must Program Or Be Programmed. He’s spent his entire life helping us find the bottom-up to complement the top-down that we’re stuck with…to help everyone be literate enough to make it in this modern world.

And in this episode, he looks back on his life’s work, and forward to the great responsibility we bear to help imagine systems, cultures, and relationships for a more humane and equitable future…

Doug’s podcast:

http://teamhuman.fm

Doug’s website:

http://www.rushkoff.com/

This week we’re also joined by guest co-host Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops, our sister podcast, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102, 88, 58, 44 with Doug Rushkoff, 38 with Niles Heckman, 28 with Bruce Damer, 21 with Erik Davis, 9 with Shane Mauss, 4 with Erik Davis, and this special mashup episode – and who has appeared on Future Fossils to talk about Westworld in Episode 14 and the Blockchain in Episode 52.

We Discuss:

• the ethical necessity of finding planet-scale solutions that work for ALL of us, not just a certain economic class; 

• the externalized ecological costs of Bitcoin; 

• how sigils and other ancient magical practices have been modernized for info warfare in the modern age; 

• how the culture of our global information economy retrieves the gods of antiquity; 

• the conflict of interests between our present and future selves; 

• the problem with futurists as propagandists and how we use “the future” as a way to manipulate people;

• and more!

Doug Quotes:

“The aspect of the blockchain that is the most real at this point is the environmental destruction…the smartest scientists I know have given up on the environment. They’re saying, ‘Let’s just have dinner. This is it.’ If that’s the case, then it feels like every conversation about blockchain has to start and end with that. It’s like, ‘Okay, while we’re destroying the planet with technology, isn’t it an interesting model for this and that…?’”

“It’s all just sigil magic on a certain level…although now you can express it through code, instead of just alchemy.”

“As far as the virtual is actual, the virtual is tied to our actual well-being. So thanks to cyberspace, we have a place where all of that symbolic activity becomes real – or at least as real as we’re willing to make this stuff. Your FICO score is on there. This is the landscape that’s defining our reality. So it turns programmers into potential magicians of unprecedented power.”

“The gods that we are looking at today a re subsets of capitalism. They are really more unintended consequences of people looking to game the system, than they are the natural flowering of some higher power, higher agenda. So we’re in a similar relationship to those things, but we don’t want to be re-enacting those things. We want to be, if anything, recognizing them and creating alternatives.”

“Psychologically, they found that people relate to their own future selves the same way they relate to a stranger. So the person you’re saving retirement money for is just some old guy. So on some level, I don’t really care so much if that person is suffering in the cold, because I want an iPhone X. So screw him.” 

“Especially in the heady days of early WIRED Magazine, where they’re saying, ‘Look! Everything’s changing! The tsunami’s coming! You better hire some futurists to tell you where it’s going or you’re all going to die’…I was arguing that it’s fine, that all futurists are propagandists of a certain sort. So if I’m going to be a futurist, I’m going to propagandize a world of peace and love and the egalitarian sensibility that we’re all moving into, NOT a long stock market boom of infinite wealth for venture capitalists.”

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This week we go deep in part two of my epic four-hour conversation with documentarian and gonzo journalist Charles Shaw – one of this show’s most requested return guests.

In part one, Charles laid out the map of the problem: a world in crisis, an age of epidemic trauma and addiction. In this episode, we get into his self-experimentation with sleep deprivation to understand the hallucinatory reality of America’s homeless, his journey of healing and recovery working with entheogens and military veterans, and how facing and embracing our darkness with humility and courage may be the only way we can prepare ourselves to make a meaningful contribution to our world. 

Get ready for a heady brew of grit, dark humor, grief and relief, and the luminous truth that awaits us on the other side of suffering…

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––––––––––––––––

Part One:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/16862172

Charles on Youtube & Vimeo:

https://www.youtube.com/user/UnheardVoicesArchive

https://vimeo.com/nomadcinema

“Meeting The Self You Aren’t,” excerpts from my talks with Charles on the 2010 Light & Shadow Tour:

https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/meeting-the-self-you-arent

In October and November 2010, I traveled to thirty cities across the United States with journalist and documentary film-maker Charles Shaw on what we called "The Light & Shadow Tour." Half our time was spent filming interviews for his documentary about the War on Drugs and prison industrial complex; half our time was spent engaging audiences in deep discussion on the role of what psychologists call "the shadow" in personal and cultural transformation. 

The shadow is the part of ourselves so profoundly disowned that it shows up not as a quality of the self, but a trait of other people - not a choice that we are making, but a fate that imposes itself upon us. And to whatever degree we continue to refuse acknowledgment of our shadows, we remain the desperate victims of life instead of its joyous collaborators. 

It isn't easy to write a new story of the self - and to constantly re-write that story, when new truths come to us in the form of disarming companions, rude awakenings, and other surprises. But it is the work set out before us, if we are to live as whole people and give the most of ourselves to the birthing of a new and better world.

––––––––––––––––

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

- How seeking validation for his work made him miserable, but he moved through the crisis and the victimhood into a new sense of completeness;

- How service to other people in the trauma and addiction healing process as an intake and integration facilitator at ibogaine clinics accelerated his own healing;

- The puzzle of figuring out how to use psychedelics as part of the healing process for people with diagnosed mental disorders, for whom the action of psychedelics is still poorly understood;

- The homelessness and drug addiction situation in San Francisco, a city in crisis and an “open-air asylum”;

- How he took a personal journey into the insanity and delusional states of America’s growing homeless population through a gonzo journalist’s approach of firsthand speed use and sleep deprivation (up to nine days at a time, under clinical supervision);

- What he learned from three years of intense work with entheogens about the experience of death and the emotional process of moving through epochal transitions;

- Hanging out with the “shadow people,” the characteristic hallucinations that externalize our own repressed internal voices when we start to lose our minds;

- Our resistance to treatment and medicine, because keeping things the way they are is easier, because healing is an ordeal that challenges our identities;

- Getting to the heart of the inquiry of “Why am I doing what I’m doing, here?” and “What do I WANT?”

- What it is to lose touch with the young and hungry, eager and determined artist that we used to be and then to find it in a painful retrospective, and to realize it was because we were out there seeking validation, hustling, instead of giving our lives to the work;

- Is the conversation to identify the problem, or to critique by creating and move toward solutions?

- How do we even TRY and turn the global conversation toward concerted action for positive and universal (planetoid) change?

- We manage to sneak some Blade Runner 2049 in there…

- Aging and growing older in our culture, which nobody wants to talk about;

- A Luke Skywalker-esque critique of now-institutional festival culture;

- The Pluto Transit (!!!);

- Hungry Ghosts;

- Going into the heart of darkness with veterans on ayahuasca and understanding what teamwork can do for psychedelic healing;

- His dialogue with ayahuasca about visiting his late sister in the underworld, and how he found his peace with her passing;

- Dodging the psychedelic messiah complex;

- The astrology of Jesus and Piscean martyrdom;

- How study of the archetypes inform our passage through the phases of our lives;

- The truth about how being a prophet is a difficult, unappreciated act, not this glamorous role we imagine it to be;

- How his film The Plastic People, on Tijuana and the deportation crisis, led to sweeping reforms in Mexico and pissed off countless Trump supporters on Netflix;

- The challenges of documenting the secret history of the ibogaine underground;

- The futility of protest in the postmodern information warfare landscape;

- What Charles thinks was REALLY going on at Standing Rock, and how it’s related to the infiltration and disruption of the Women’s Movement;

- How the government collects and processes intelligence on protesters and other political dissidents;

- Can you have fun and still effect social change?

- How learning the surprising hidden story of his own family changed how Charles thinks about identity and the human condition;

- Big Mind Process and listening to the voice of “The Damaged Self”;

- And more!

––––––––––––––––

CHARLES QUOTES:

“I thought I was doing the right thing the whole time. I thought I was fighting the good fight. But at some point, you have to ask yourself why you keep ending up in the same situations.”

“We are way too liberal with our use of the word ‘insane’ in our culture. Most of what people call insane is just plain suffering. End of story.”

“Power is power for a reason. You want to take that shit on firsthand, you’re going to get hurt. A lot of young people don’t realize that.”

“Healing’s an ordeal, and that’s the thing: most people check out too early. They actually make a decision on some level to just rather live their lives in dysfunction and unhappiness and keep repeating patterns and cycles rather than go through it, and go through the ordeal… Healing Land requires a stay in Shadow Land. If you want to heal, you gotta go through Shadow Land first.”

[With homeless delusional behavior] “The drugs aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of sleep.”

“Hoffman tested the acid, Shulgin tested the MDMA, I tested the insanity.”

“Even Elon Musk cannot save the world, and frankly, I don’t think he’s a very palatable human being to begin with, but people love him and he’s kind of a sacred cow and you can’t criticism him, but I say ALL these billionaires are shifty and you can’t trust any of them.”

“I’m not very good at killing myself. I should probably STOP.”

“I don’t have to know how to do it right to know you are doing it wrong.”

“Being a prophet means you’re never going to experience the things other people experience in life…it means you’re going to be alone and your whole existence is defined by your alienation from the status quo. But if you can accept it…”

“Anybody who thinks there aren’t informants in the Native American community does NOT know the history of the Native American community.”

“What is healing all about? So much of it is about accepting shit you can’t control.”

“I’m not saying I’m better than anyone. I’m unique. I serve a unique function. And right now my unique function is to try to make the people that are the least understood in our culture more understood. I can do that. And I’ve sacrificed everything – my life, my body, a family, stability, everything – in pursuit of this, now across my fifth platform, the fifth group of despised subcultures. And I’m just going to keep going until we get to all of them. I may put the brakes on when we get to pedophiles – I’m not sure I can make an argument for that – but I study the people that do. Because it’s all about compassion. It is ALL about learning compassion.”

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Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ continuous unfolding creativity.

http://timfreke.com/

http://timfreke.com/ONLINE-TOUR/COSTS.aspx

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We take a deep dive into the nature of time, reality, and creativity:

• Is spiritual awakening the “leading edge” of evolution? (Not technology, as proposed by Kevin Kelly et al.?)

• How story may be more fundamental to reality than we’ve believed

• Is evolutionary “novelty” created, or simply discovered lying in wait?

• A psychedelic view of time in which the present is a “handshake” between all possible pasts and all possible futures

• Can we change the past, or merely our interpretation of it?

• Soul as the fundament or medium of our intersubjectivity

• Does the imagination operate as an information platform distinct from biology and physics?

• Is Heaven an evolutionary emergent?

• Is mind, imagination, and soul a different level of a hierarchy of being, or is it the interior experiential dimension of

what we call body and matter?

• The relationship between subjective and objective in the time-stream

• The ongoing trialogue between MG, Ken Wilber, and Bruce Damer on the origins of life and co-enactment of mind and matter “all the way down” through orders of complexity to the very quanta of our cosmos

• The role of landscape and material agency in prebiological and postbiological inheritance (what comes before and after DNA?)

• The Invention of Death

• The proposed/hypothetical symbiosis of the soul and body 

• Tim’s critique of artificial consciousness and mind uploading

• Can we ensoul technologies? If bodies can provide a vehicle for these nonphysical information patterns, can we engineer new bodies that invite souls into novel forms of incarnation?

• Can you give something a soul by loving it?

• The Question of Death

• Evolution as the movement from unconsciousness unity through individuation into conscious individuated unity.

Quotes:

“Fundamentally, it’s a flow. It’s a process. The universe is not made of things.”

“The philosophy that I’ve been exploring is that we have the wrong metaphor of time. That time doesn’t pass…but rather, time accumulates. And there is more past now than when we started this conversation…and the past hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s actually present, because everything that has ever happened is implicit in this moment.”

“Every moment is the meeting of the possible, the ground of being, the potentiality, and everything that has been. But what this next moment can be, it’s limited. It must contain everything that’s happened before.”

“The potentiality for the rainbow was there before eyes. But there was no rainbow.”

“Technology is brilliant, but it’s nothing compared to the imagination.”

“What I’m suggesting is that there is information on the soul level, which is nonphysical, which is a separate domain….we can’t reduce the body to physics, and we can’t reduce the soul to biology.”

“The immortality of the soul has evolved as a continuation of the emergent and evolutionary universe. If you look at the history of what people have said about death, it’s almost like it’s evolving.”

“There is no objective reality. There is, rather, objective information objectively and subjectively perceived.”

“The body is discriminating information sensually, and then over the top of that, imagination is discriminating conceptually.”

“Evolution itself has evolved. The physical universe did not happen through genetic mutation and natural selection.”

“The more individual we become, the more we can understand the oneness.”

“The whole philosophy, really, is a way of intellectually shoring up some almost childlike insights that arrived for me when I feel most deeply awake.”

“Life is Good. Death is Safe. And what really matters is Love.”

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“Ah, eventually you DO plan to TALK ABOUT dinosaurs on this dinosaur podcast, right? Hello? Yes?”

- Ian Malcolm about this episode.

This week’s guest is professional dinosaur hunter Steve Brusatte, paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.

https://twitter.com/stevebrusatte

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Beyond being a totally awesome – and more importantly, FRESH – take on the Mesozoic Era that weaves vital updates from the last twenty years of discovery into the official story, this book also paints a rich and lively portrait of the human beings who actually do dinosaur science. Their stories moved me as much as the story of how the dinosaurs evolved, came to dominate the landscape, and then disappeared. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs offers more than the “what” of prehistory; it also offers us the “who” and “how” and “where” and “why,” and it will be a spiritual experience for anyone as into dinosaurs OR science OR science writing as I am.

Plus, Steve’s great fun to talk to. He’s totally contagious.

WE DISCUSS:

• How we’re living through a worldwide renaissance of paleontology, a “Golden Age of Dinosaur Science” – and how it

is related to deeper historical and economic trends – such as the opening of new international trade routes, increasing access to science education, and accelerating global development (the movement of wealth discovers dragons);

• How the technology and methods of dinosaur science have advanced dramatically over the last few decades – but it’s still “a discovery science” that requires people out in the field, opening the ground and looking for new fossils;

• Steve’s legendary globetrotting professors Paul Sereno and Mark Norell, and how their generous mentorship launched his career;

• How paleontology remains one of the most awesome lifestyles for anyone with the spirit of an adventurer;

• The role of landscape in stimulating the imagination – especially for bored Midwestern children whose imaginations fill the empty space with visions of lost worlds;

• What it’s like to BE a paleontologist and to know about the history of the land where you are, to have insights into the Deep Time Big Story and how it relates you to the ground on which you walk;

• How time perception changes when you’re in the badlands doing paleontological field research;

• Michael’s childhood mentor and role model, rockstar revolutionary “heretical” paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, who had a habit of weaving Bible scripture and Broadway musical numbers into his energetic and engaging dinosaur ecology talks;

• The major role that contingency plays in mass extinctions and the rise and fall of groups that otherwise seem dominant (like dinosaurs, and humans) – ie, “How do you become dominant? How do you rise up from nothing and become a BRONTOSAURUS?”

• And the major role that MYSTERY plays in our understanding of the ancient world;

• Oh, and we also talk about dinosaurs! For like half an hour. About Tyrannosauroidea, specifically, and how T. rex rose to greatness. And how to survive a mass extinction. But you’ll just have to listen for the rest.

QUOTES:

“I’m always thinking about, ‘Where is this area, where was it during the Mesozoic Era, what was it like when Pangaea was still around, what kind of environments were there, what kind of dinosaurs were living there?’ Just having this perspective, when you travel around on the Earth, of looking at landscapes and being able to see the looooooong history of those landscapes. Being able to see in the shapes of hills, and the types of rocks that are exposed, and the colors of those rocks, being able to see deep distant pasts, reconstructing vanished worlds. And I think that’s part of the magic of sciences like paleontology and geology…and probably nobody that’s not a paleontologist or geologist thinks like that. I’m sure we just think really strangely.”

- Steve Brusatte

“Nobody in science ever does anything alone. MAYBE in mathematics you can be a lone genius and figure out some great proof just sitting alone in your boxers in the dark, or whatever, but MOST science is NOT LIKE THAT. It’s collaborative, you work with teams, you NEED teams, and you need good mentorship when you’re student. So now that I run my own lab, I just hope I can provide for my own students what my mentors did to me.”

- Steve Brusatte

“There’s something just indescribable about that feeling of finding and holding and appreciating fossil objects. And that never gets old. A new fossil discovery never gets old.”

- Steve Brusatte

“Studying dinosaurs isn’t going to save the world, of course…BUT…”

- Steve Brusatte

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This week’s episode features returning guest JF Martel, film-maker, culture critic, and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. In his first appearance on Future Fossils, we discussed art as an opening to the transcendent and his awesome three-part essay on the philosophy of Netflix’s Stranger Things, “Reality Is Analog”…so it only made sense to have him back to weigh in on Stranger Things 2 and the extremely artful Blade Runner 2049, both of which speak directly to the evolution of the soul and “the human tragedy” in an increasingly digital age. 

It’s ultimately a discussion of The Sequel, and how what distinguishes good simulacra from bad is all in the label, “Made With Love”…

JF’s book and blog:

http://reclaimingart.com

JF’s podcast:

http://weirdstudies.com

We Discuss:

- The humanization of replicants (and the “animalization” of a previously monstrous demogorgon) as empathetic characters in these stories, and how that provides a vital contrast to our future-shocked insistence on hard categorical divisions between made and born, human and non-human;

- Carl Jung and Jungian therapist James Hillman, The Velveteen Rabbit, and “earning one’s soul” through individuation of the self (soul as connection to the imaginal contrasted with soul as individuality);

- Where does order come from in the evolutionary process?;

- The theological angle on the soul as digital because it is the soul as the absolute appearance of a singular (non-evolutionary) form;

- Do things need to happen for a reason?;

- Is it better to act as if you’ll die tomorrow or to act as if you’ll live forever? (And does thinking “only now exists” make you a lousier person?);

- Balancing the two poles of “soul” in philosophy: that which exists beyond cause and effect, and that which is made through tribulation;

- Looking at our lives from the perspective of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return and Alan Watts’ notion of the life as a symphony, comprehensible only from the outside;

- The genius horror writing of Thomas Lugatti (sp?);

- Why it’s so important not to spoon-feed your audience the plot points of a film, to invite them into an interactive process with the narrative;

- Donna Haraway, John David Ebert, body hacking…and the shadow form of posthuman philosophy in the peril of ironic hipster detachment to human incarnation;

- Rachel Nagelberg’s book The Fifth Wall and how she figures our postmodern dissociation from self through a matrix of surveillance technologies and the out-of-body experiences they induce (see also Erik Davis and Technobuddhism);

- The difference between a good sequel and a bad one is “Made With Love” – and how the character of “Luv” in Blade Runner 2049 can be read as a statement on the evils irony is capable of;

- The Strong Female Lead as a major trope in recent cinema, from Silence of the Lambs to The X Files to Arrival, and what it means about femininity and institutions in our current Zeitgeist;

- An update on the writing process of Michael’s book, How To Live in the Future;

- More gushing about James P. Carse’s book, Finite and Infinite Games;

- Dungeons & Dragons. ;)

- And more! 

Quotes:

“There’s no reason why something can’t happen for no reason at all. The only way you can prove the Principle of Sufficient Reason - that things happen for a reason - is by presupposing the principle.”

“The universe might have come about in all its complexity ten seconds ago, and might disappear in another ten seconds for no reason at all.”

“We don’t know what death means, so we don’t know what it means to live your last day, in that context. But the idea to live as if you’re already dead – that to me has a lot of resonance, because it means that you live your life in such a way that the story of your life has been written somewhere. For me it resembles Nietzsche’s idea of The Eternal Return: it’s that every action you take should be something you would will yourself doing for the rest of time, for eternity, so that everything resonates at the deepest level.”

“Good stories don’t really work in such a way that everything has its place, morally, in the universe. It’s more like everything makes sense at the aesthetic level. It’s like everything fits together aesthetically somehow, through some weird synchronicity. And I think that it’s possible to look at life that way, and to experience life that way.”

“I would compare Jurassic World to one of those Old West roadshows that used to travel around in the 1910s and recreate the battles of the Wild West in the kitschiest, most facile way possible – and Stranger Things is more like a Pre-Raphaelite painting to me. It’s SO hyper-aware of what it’s doing, and at the same time it’s not ironic. It REALLY IS nostalgic. It REALLY IS pining for that lost time.”

“I don’t think technology is helping a lot of people ‘make a soul.’”

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Biological Time Travel: Organ Regeneration & Brain Reanimation – Turning back time in cells and tissues with the new medical techniques of bio-logics, simulating “t = 1” in the human body...

This week’s guest is Ira Pastor, CEO of the revolutionary biomedical firm BioQuark in Philadelphia. I had no idea who these people were until Ira messaged me about appearing on the show…and I’m so glad he did, because otherwise I don’t k now when I would have learned about their work with new techniques that enable truly miraculous treatment of brain trauma, catastrophic organ failure, and other complex and confounding issues. 

We’re on the cusp of another moment in history when we have to redefine what it means to be “dead,” and how far someone can go before they’re irrecoverable. And at the prow of that epochal shift is BioQuark’s method of simulating ooplasm – in other words, “tricking” our cells into thinking that they’re fertilized ova at the very beginning of embryonic development, so they’ll do amazing feats that even stem cells won’t do.

I have to admit, I went into this conversation a skeptic. And everything is still bracketed by a big “IF” – but I’m considerably more willing to believe that this is coming, soon, and that it’s going to be a good thing. Get ready to have your mind blown by a conversation about the miracles that might be commonplace in just a few more years…

http://bioquark.com

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart Radio

Join our Facebook Discussion Group

We Discuss:

• Why do some other organisms (like jellyfish and amphibians) demonstrate such awesome regenerative abilities, but human beings don’t?

• How to reset a cell’s internal “clock” to zero and induce extraordinary regenerative abilities;

• How this research builds on existing science dating back to the 1950s (and retrieves “lost knowledge” from other animals we’ve been evolutionarily separated from for hundreds of millions of years);

• How biology as a lab science has changed over the last century, and how that (in part) reflects changing sentiments about the relationship between masculine and feminine, physics and biology, waves and particles;

• Neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation research and the link to The Immaculate Conception and our lineage’s trend toward increasing neoteny and pedomorphism;

• Regarding Liz Parrish, Aubrey DeGrey, and other death-resisting transhumanists…where does work like Bioquark’s fit into the picture of radical life extension and its current genomic/pharmaceutical bias?

• What’s the worst that could happen? Is this going to be affordable for everyone? Ira addresses issues of unequal access and (“access for everybody, it’s not just for the billionaires”) and puts Michael at ease about other possible negative outcomes. (Including ZOMBIES.)

• The Future of the Medical Industry: a decrease in pharmaceutical company dominance and the business of endless management, and the rise of a business of CURES – no lifelong dependence on medication, no 3D printed transplant organs, just good old-fashioned “miraculous” healing, along with electroceuticals, microbiome supplements, parasite-based treatments, 

• The Future of Medical Research: international alliances, Right To Try, navigating a complex menu of potential regulatory environments for research, and how Merck partnered with China to create a tropical island hub for medical research tourism…

• And more!

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Patricia Gray is an animal music researcher, working with all kinds of creatures (humans, whales, songbirds, bonobos, even coral reefs) to understand what functions pitch and rhythm have in animal communication, how the sound of our living planet is actually a symphony of hidden meaning, and how to improve our lives by embracing the innate musicality of our human brains.

https://research.uncg.edu/patricia-gray/

We Discuss:

• How she went from being a concert pianist to the chamber music director for the National Academy of Sciences to the piano-playing lead of a National Science Foundation-funded research lab;

(http://www.wildmusic.org/research)

• How our understanding of animal communication has shifted over the last few decades from using human language to using music as the orienting metaphor;

• The evolution of (and scientific study of the evolution of) music-making in our species;

• Pitch discrimination, beat entrainment, and musical memory (rhythm and frequency pattern detection, musical memory and capacity for repetition);

• How human conversations rely on musical intelligence for us to flow together and follow and “jam” with each other;

• The cultural origins of “biomusic” as a scientific discipline;

• Making music with bonobo apes at the Georgia Tech animal communication lab;

• Dancing sea lions and cockatoos;

• Why do and don’t some animals learn to find the beat?;

• Which came first, music or language?;

• Harmonized sonic environments and acoustic ecology attuned to the biome (disrupted);

• How human technology and civilization has disrupted animal communication in the wild AND human (and pet) psychology at home;

• The songs of elephants, mice, bats, and other inaudible “songsters” revealed by new microphones;

(https://www.mckalcounisrueppell.org/)

• Whalesong! Analyzing the musical structure of cetacean communication and seasonal songs;

• Human babies are musical animals! The science of neonatal musical cognition;

• The uncanny similarity of whale and human musical systems…what does this suggest about an underlying mathematical order to the cosmos?

• Understanding the oceans through a combination of reef hydrophones and machine learning;

• Letting the wild back into music and society… 

• And why it’s essential to teach children music!

See Also:

Bernie Krause, Roger Payne, Mark Tramo, Peter Cook, Ani Patel

(http://www.musicmendsminds.org/mark-tramo) 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Terry Patten is a lifelong practitioner of both contemplative spirituality and real-world activism whose new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide To Inner Work for Holistic Change, gives us lucid instructions for how we can start to ask the hardest questions and engage the toughest problems in our age of global transformation.

https://www.terrypatten.com/a-new-republic-of-the-heart/

I met Terry in 2005 when he was teaching how to recognize and integrate the psychological “shadow,” our repressed unconscious, at a seminar for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. His warmth, humility, and generosity of spirit is palpable in this conversation, and reflects the decades of experience that has inspired his latest writing…it’s an honor to have Terry on the show, thirteen years after he transformed my life by teaching me how to engage and love the hardest, most unpleasant parts of my own mind.

In one of Future Fossils Podcast’s most vulnerable episodes yet,

We Discuss:

- How to deal with new problems that none of us have the abilities to handle on our own, or even by thinking together?

- How do we actualize our true potentials and what roles do others play in this?

- The need for personal transformation in order to meet our civilization-level challenges.

- There is no formula. It’s all an adventure. But you can’t ignore any of it.

- (How/) Can Global Warming and other urgent “wicked problems” be a planetary koan?

- Does social media provide an adequate venue for the difficult and vulnerable conversations that we need to have?

- The leap of faith that is group improvisation in art and collective sense-making.

- What does it really mean to “Follow Your Bliss?” What role do heartbreak and genius play in this?

- The need for the secular and spiritual communities to come together in respectful mutual discussion in an era of vicious disagreement.

- How the ideological defense of conspiracy theories AND mainstream narratives gets in the way of effectively focusing on our most urgent realities…and how to evolve beyond the media environment that prefers inflammatory grudge matches over compassionate mutual learning.

- What do we do if we never get “reality” back, and people’s points of view just keep diverging? How can we come together on coherent strategies if we can’t come to a consensus on the basic facts?

- Who inspires Terry Patten as exemplars of heartful and soulful transformational activism?

“We live in a culture that is in deep, deep denial…[Global Warming] is talked about all the time on the evening news, but it’s denied just as much on the evening news. You aren’t really talking about it if your voice isn’t breaking with emotion. We’re kind of in this mass consensus trance that doesn’t allow us to break through into effectiveness. It’s a time that calls for revolutionary engagement, and yet…”

“How to stay reality-bound in our post-truth era is at the center of things.”

“Love is going to have to find a voice that’s even more powerful and authoritative than the voice of righteous indignation and anger. Love is going to have to reassert its natural authority…whether it’s a great hospice project or it’s the process by which we turn all of this around, the heart is at the center of it.”

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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This episode’s guest is David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute – the world’s pre-eminent research center for complexity science. We discuss SFI’s new Interplanetary Project and how they are weaving scientists, engineers, science fiction authors, concept artists, and musicians together into a new collaborative storytelling and visioning project about how we can sustainably scale human civilization beyond Earth – and help spark a renaissance of Big Picture thinking and Big Problem solving worthy of our species in this century.

About SFI and the Interplanetary Project:

https://santafe.edu/research/initiatives/interplanetary-project

About the Interplanetary Fest:

https://interplanetaryfest.org/lineup

Cool local news coverage about David & The Interplanetary Project:

https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2017/07/11/out-of-this-world/

“Part of my job, and SFI’s job, is to not allow people to imagine that they’re living in isolation – IN ANY SENSE. Right? Socially, intellectually, economically, technologically, and so on.”

“Is there a different way, now, of getting the best of what we have done to as many people as we possibly can? And in a way that isn’t preachy, isn’t didactic, is genuinely engaging and fun? And where a single individual, somewhere in the world, who we’ve never met, who has limited resources, could make a real contribution to it?”

We Discuss:

• How can we make ideas that benefit the world as easily accessible as possible, as open for expansion and review?

• Why it is necessary to take a planetary perspective, and why SFI decided to open up this vastly trans-disciplinary Interplanetary Project;

• Why it’s worth reviving the spirit of the World’s Fair for a new wave of international co-imagination;

• How complexity science has invaded our everyday thought in the form of “hyperobjects” – launching us out of the enclosed infinity of modernity (endless, but knowable) and into a new exploration of capital M “Mystery” in the cosmos, in which the edges of the map are now its center(s);

• The importance of soliciting the perspectives of children and other marginalized groups to help us strike the course for a new renaissance;

• Whether to be comforted by “human exceptionalism” and our uniqueness in a vast and senseless cosmos, or by the possibility of our total lack of specialness in a cosmos rich with life and mind;

• What Krakauer thinks of the enduring “either/or” question, of why we should be spending ANY money on space exploration when we have so much hardship here at home;

• Does the existential serve the utilitarian? Or to put it another way, is answering the Big Questions just a luxury, or is it the fruit and reward and deep work of human existence?

• Looking at the development of fields like AI, might it not make more sense to take on the biggest projects indirectly, obliquely, by focusing on tiny pieces and more modest goals?

• Is Earth’s “minimum viable product” a second complete biosphere? Will “humans” really ever make it to other worlds, or will only “biospheres” – humans understood as focal points of entire ecosystems, within which we will travel?

• What is the role of science fiction in imagining the future?

• How does our hyper-connectivity change the way we understand the self and each self’s role in something greater?

• What new (and likely anti-fragile, decentralized) modes of governance will emerge in this era?

• Ethereum is sponsoring SFI’s computational science summer school, interested in using network theory and agent-based modeling, and other complex systems sciences concepts/practices to explore new modes of social infrastructure and governance;

• How important it is to not regard humanity’s Big Problems as merely software engineering problems, and what we miss by turning away from our cultural inheritance in the regard of these matters;

• Why it’s silly to think of art and science as completely separate projects, and how SFI uses the best of both to inspire the next generation of planetologist;

• How TED presents an inaccurate, maybe even disingenuous, view of the scientific process;

• How the Santa Fe Institute’s first-ever festival is just the tip of a global, all-inclusive brainstorming session about the best possible future for our species;

• And more!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:

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Support the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):

http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Self-aware machines, organs on a chip, brain-entangled meta-human military units, smart-sensor-gridded coral reefs, drone flocks, DNA-based computing, robots having baby robots…the line between the “made” and “born” is getting blurrier and blurrier each day. What does it mean to be alive in a time when we already treat the corporation as a legal person, fall in love with chat bots, and “possess” telepresence robots in virtual reality for work?

This talk is a three-part argument:

1 - The Internet is usefully understood as a psychedelic substance, in that it remixes what we ordinarily think of as “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “other.”

2 - The psychological effects of the Internet are, then, usefully addressed through the methods of psychedelic harm reduction (like MAPS’ Zendo Project, techniques developed by the Women’s Visionary Congress, or KosmiCare in Europe).

3 - Because the Internet remixes everything, it casts our categories of “made” and “born,” “alive” and “mechanical” into question – and suggests a more complex and nuanced understanding in which “intellectual property” has a life and a destiny of its own, and we have far more in common with machines and “corporate persons” than we’re used to thinking.

Therefore, the best way forward in this crazy age may be to treat ALL things, the living AND nonliving, with compassion and respect. We’re almost certainly mistaken about what merits care, these days…so let’s be kind to our machine descendants, treat our great ideas like children that we can’t control but CAN encourage down the right path, and in general do everything we can to be remembered as good parents to/for/by Whatever Comes Next…

Recorded at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017, Black Rock City, Nevada. Guest appearances by Mitch Mignano (guest of episode 57) 

For more along these lines, check out these related media:

• The prologue to this talk, a short rap from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia Innovation Lab last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfjnWkDwYrc

• An archive of nearly all of my public talks since 2009, including every talk I’ve given at Burning Man:

http://evolution.bandcamp.com

• Writings about the co-evolution of humans and technology:

http://medium.com/@michaelgarfield

Thanks and Enjoy!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2 

Subscribe on Stitcher:

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Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:

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Support the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):

http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield 

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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“The best anti-virus is common sense.”

This episode’s guest is Dylan Curran, a cybersecurity specialist who recently went viral after his exposé tweets about the personal information Google and Facebook collected about him were shared by Edward Snowden. Strap in for an uncomfortable close look at just how little privacy we have online – it’s even worse than you already knew – but also, some straight, practical advice for how to navigate the “glass house” we all live in now, with safety, dignity, and savvy.

Dylan:

https://twitter.com/iamdylancurran

http://dylancurran.net

Here is his epic Twitter thread about how “The internet knows more about you than you do”:

https://twitter.com/i/moments/977591863732527106

Dylan works with two privacy-focused search engines:

http://duckduckgo.com

http://presearch.org

• Why there isn’t any good way to hide who you are online anymore;

• The difference between anonymity and pseudonymity, and why that matters to everyone investing in blockchain tech and crypto assets;

• Why our notions of privacy should change, and how we’re better off with the “small town” co-veillance of John Perry Barlow’s Wild Westworld than we are with 19th Century ideas of self and secret;

• Why it’s not really about data transparency, it’s about power inequality;

• The NSA’s PRISM Program and your government’s backdoors to all your private information;

• How privacy tech is only going to keep evolving if we ask for it, because the market drives invention;

• How lucky Europeans have it with GDPR, and how less great we have it in the US, where we can’t just ask them to erase our data;

• Does Cambridge Analytica scandal prove that we’ve reached the end of democracy and its replacement with black magic user-interface design for social behavioral engineering?

• How do we get people to use privacy-focused services if they don’t work as well as the convenient data-harvesting services?

• Why it’s important to let your political opponents speak (ie, Why Censorship Is Wrong, MmmK?);

• The cultural significance of “Change My Mind” style posts in combatting the filter bubble issue;

• Can we design a platform that rewards cultural synthesis?

• The difference between how Ireland and the USA have adapted to constant internet surveillance, in part because of differing governmental systems and structures;

• Dylan’s rant for individualism in the age of proliferating identity politics and obsessive membership mentality;

• Hyper-collectivization leads to hyper-personalization (according to Teilhard de Chardin) = made-up job titles;

• The decentralized future;

• Don’t use Amazon Web Services!

• The (totally shameful, unnecessary) UnderArmor hack;

• Privacy Audits as a new low-level data standard;

• Dylan’s personal digital hygiene regimen;

• And, most importantly, if EVERYONE has everyone else’s nudes, isn’t that a Mexican Standoff and we’re good?

Additional Media:

My three-part essay on The Evolution of Surveillance, a psychedelic foray into the history of predator-prey co-evolution and our invention of weird new technological sense organs:

Part 1 - From Burgess Shale to Google Glass

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-1-burgess-shale-to-google-glass-220fefb3a906

Part 2 - Red Queens & Evil Eyes

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-2-red-queens-evil-eyes-79fcbce68d5e

Part 3 - Living in the Belly of the Beast

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-3-living-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-2a42538ee2

The song at the end of this episode is “Transparent” from my live performance at Mycelium Studios in Melbourne, Australia last year. You can grab it for free here:

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/2017-02-03-mycelium-studios-melbourne-australia

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Support the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):

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Visionary artist Archan Nair joins Future Fossils this week for an infectiously fun conversation about the new creative opportunities of the digital age.

http://www.archann.net/

• How learning to use new tools is a little like dying;

• Archan’s history of using computers for art;

• The feedback loop between evolving tools and evolving artists;

• How to stay clear-eyed and full-hearted about the always-on awesomeness of the world, and not let the daily BS drag you down;

• The role of the nondual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta in his life and creative process;

• The exclusivity of the present when we investigate subjectivity (“The past and future don’t exist; only now exists”)

• How is the all-encompassing now of eastern mysticism different from the “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” of our eidetic and prophetic virtual existences?

• What does the practice of Vedanta teach us about how to receive rapid change as an opportunity for transformation rather than as an overwhelm and assault on what we hold dear?

• The problem created when our educational system focuses exclusively on examining the world “outside” of us, to the neglect of what’s “inside”;

• How never speaking the word “I” can diminish the experience of a self;

• How do we lose the self in the city when we’re constantly reminded of it through social interactions?

• Social media and inauthenticity…

• Attaining beginner’s mind

• And more!

Mentioned:

• Ramana Maharshi

• Nisargardatta Maharaj

• Ramesh Balsekar 

• Richard Doyle 

• Nura Learning

• Adi Da

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Support the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):

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This week’s guest is James Eggleston, research and business development at Power Ledger, a blockchain software company helping the world build a resilient decentralized electrical utilities networks that’s more resistant to the turbulence of our century – and lets all of us participate in and earn from distributed power production.

Power Ledger:

https://powerledger.io/

https://twitter.com/powerledger_io?lang=en

James:

https://twitter.com/jamesbychance?lang=en

We Discuss:

• The history of dematerialization and the shift from things to data;

• The logic and practice of decentralizing our infrastructure;

• Why solar makes more sense than coal, no matter what you believe;

• How we’re going to build a distributed global renewable energy market;

• How we can have a tech-positive attitude and answer to existential risk (ie, the Yellowstone Supervolcano, super solar flares, massive cyberattacks, etc.);

• How James integrates the principle of resilience into his whole life – in particular, his commitment to intense physical training and meditation, including “Hell Week” special forces training;

• How to shape an “integral life practice” and the importance of balancing all of the areas of personal development in your life;

• James’ academic research into an open source governance framework for energy-independent and hyper-locally managed apartment communities;

• The role of industry and government in innovation;

• How Power Ledger utilizes a two-token system to ensure fair market pricing for electricity and still provide a return for equity investors;

• How are utility tokens are different from cryptocurrencies;

• And the future of smart - even INTELLIGENT - cities AND villages!

“You can have electricity without an economy, but you can’t have an economy without electricity.”

“If you look at global spending on electricity, more money is going into renewables than any other source.”

“When you push yourself to the point where you want to stop, that’s where it starts. And the way that you grow your resilience is by putting yourself in that uncomfortable situation. So from my perspective, I try to put myself in that situation every day.”

“We [Power Ledger] see this as an evolution, not an extinction event.”

7y8qr5yz

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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This week’s guest is George Dvorsky, futurist, science journalist, and long-time contributing editor at legendary sci/fi blog io9 at http://gizmodo.com.

http://twitter.com/dvorsky

http://kinja.com/georgedvorsky

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/

https://io9.gizmodo.com/20-crucial-terms-every-21st-century-futurist-should-kno-1545499202

We Discuss:

• Today’s explosive evolution of AI personal assistants, and where it’s heading…

• Will children today, immersed in a world of AI dolls and smarthome devices that speak to them by name, grow up with a different idea of what entities deserve our moral concern?

• The pressing cybersecurity and surveillance problems we encounter in the process of filling our lives with internet-connected devices.

• Autonomous vehicles and weapons and the ethics of machine intelligence.

• The history of our attempts to suppress or prevent the industrialization of warfare.

• AI as proxy selves that we can deputize to act as us, on our behalf…

• What kind of literacies will we need to have in a world of mature AI?

• The future of human-AI collaboration in the arts and creative media.

• This story he covered for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/a-four-year-old-boy-used-siri-to-save-his-unconscious-m-1793584170

• Is paper a “broken” non-interactive touchscreen?

• Mapmaking and prosthesis, and how differently we orient ourselves in landscapes now that we use Google Maps (or Waze, or Apple Maps, or Mapquest, or or or).

• And is it ethical to increase the intelligence of other animals? Is it wrong to create an Interspecies Internet that weaves nonhuman persons into our already-messy processes of electronic governance and culture? Or is it morally required of us to go “all together now” and bring the rest of the biosphere with us into the heavens we create?

• The transformation of the biosphere into superintelligence – as an ethical necessity.

“I always like to look at things around us today that we will laugh at years from now and then marvel at how stupid it was…”

“My own gut instinct is that very, very few people would willingly plow their car through a bus stop filled with passengers. So why do we feel that we wouldn’t want to own a car that’s programmed with that same ethical sensibility?”

“I’m on team AI. I’m all for it. I cannot wait to see what artificial intelligence may do…four to five generations from now.”

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This episode’s guest is Arthur Brock, currency design expert and lead visionary behind the Holochain project – which just might be the basis for the truly free, encrypted, peer-to-peer, surveillance-resistant, voluntary, non-exploitative Web we’ve all been dreaming about since the 1990s.

Described by many as a “blockchain killer,” Holochain offers users an endlessly scalable and secure decentralized platform for our lives online, inspired by the fractal branching flows and emergent order we observe in nature.

You don’t have to be a cryptocurrency enthusiast or economics wonk to appreciate the smarts and wisdom that Art brings to his work – or to understand why he’s spent the last ten years teaching people about a new paradigm of currency and governance.

This is an introduction to a whole new way of thinking about what matters most to you – whatever that might be – as well as how Art and the Holochain team are working day and night to help us ditch the scarcity mindset, and to give us the tools for building a more human and generous society.

Holochain Website

Metacurrency Project Website

"Building Responsible Cryptocurrencies" by Arthur Brock

Quotes:

“I think one of my particular gifts is interfacing with complex systems, being able to find leverage points for changing those patterns…”

“Currencies are not just about money. That’s like a fingernail on the animal of currencies.”

“There’s two fundamental fallacies that blockchain is stuck in. The first one is that data exists, and the second one is that time exists.”

“There is no absolute time. To pretend that there is, is to create a fiction.”

We Discuss:

• Currencies as “current-sees,” ways to see, shape, and enable flows of value;

• How does nature use signaling systems to create evolutionary “current-sees” that can guide our thinking on currency design?

• Why most of the blockchain/cryptocurrencies space is thinking wrong about value and how to generate value in a thriving ecology.

• How to design money for stability, compared to the intense volatility of nearly all cryptocurrencies.

• Comparing Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’ “Metacapital Framework” to Art’s “Metacurrency Project” and how things shift when you shift your thinking from pools of resources to flows of resources.

• How our CONNECTIONS are actually deeper and more important realities than our BORDERS.

• How the transition to p2p money routing around banks is like the Protestant Reformation and its ensuing political chaos.

• The balance between centralized and decentralized systems – how does Art think the ecology of different organizational structures will ultimately shake out?

• How different system architectures encode completely different worldviews and ideas and how facts are made – and how assuming the independence of data we miss something vital.

• Art addresses Nathan Waters’ questions about whether Holochain can handle “fungible assets” – land rights, artworks, etc.

• Does time even exist?

• The mathematical inevitability of the Deep State.

• How capitalism is a Ponzi scheme and we’ll have to ditch it to survive.

• Why crypto needs to be at least as easy as the Web if it is going to ever work.

• And the future of real and symbolic value…

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Lydia Violet Harutoonian is a badass Armenian-American violinist and folktronica artist who has played with some of today’s juiciest crossover acts, including Rising Appalachia and The Polish Ambassador, in addition to launching her own solo project this year. She also works with the supremely wise Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects, and leads singing workshops in which she applies her lifetime of music and work with Macy to teach music as a form of collective healing.

Links:

https://lydiafiddle.com

https://workthatreconnects.org

We Discuss:

• How being monogamous in San Francisco is practically a form of bondage – a delicious kind, one expression of love in a whole ecology of relational styles;

• The collaborative and improvisational super powers of the unique musical instrument we call a violin;

• How can we use music to metabolize our fear and grief as communities?;

• The power of song in building resilience;

• Working with Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects;

• How the expanded, interconnected human identity of deep ecology informs our lives and moral actions;

• Bodhichitta – the Buddhist virtue loosely translated as “goodwill” – and how the practice of deep ecology can help us cultivate it;

• The silver lining of crisis and how it can elicit our best humanity;

• Why Art Matters (especially when we’re most likely to abandon it because it has “no practical value”);

• How music can effect change when conversation (data, analysis, logical arguments, diplomacy) can not;

• Musical activism and the awesome experience of touring with Reverend Sekou and the Holy Ghost

• “How do we heal racism as a community and what part does music play in that?”

• “When did you stop singing?” (And why do so many European-Americans have such difficulty with singing, when the European musical heritage is so vibrant?)

• “What would it look like if we all knew a song from our heritage and could teach it to each other?”

• And more!

Quotes:

“When you’re upset about something in the world, that’s usually an indication that you give a damn.”

“I really care what happens to people! I don’t know how to relate to the homeless man on the street because it confuses me that he’s on the street.”

“Music is another fundamental way that we as people, and we as communities, find our resiliency in hard times, the way we share our stories.”

“I think it’s important to not demand – especially with creativity and music – that when someone starts, that everyone chime in in the exact same way.”

“I am empowered because I’m interconnected with so many other beating, pulsing people in the world who are working to help the planet.”

“I think music is fundamental because there is nothing that a human being says or does that isn’t first seated of consciousness. And music helps work in the realm of consciousness. I think that’s part of why so many people and communities are talking about ‘shifts in consciousness’ as so important – because if we find a new way of tending the garden, how will that structure last unless we have had some kind of shift in our consciousness to sustain us through the ups and downs of what could happen with that garden? And I think music has an intelligence on multiple levels that helps us with that.”

“No one can tell you we’re going to make it out of this. No one can tell you that we’re not going to make it out. That is real. And so, then, in that uncertainty, I have to ask myself – and I think we all have to ask ourselves – what do I want to do anyway? What do I want to do?”

Related Episodes:

Episode 74 with Terry Patten - A New Republic of the Heart

Episode 73 with Patricia Gray - Animals & Music

Episode 50 with Ayana Young - Living for the Wild

Episode 22 with Simon Yugler - Travel Alchemy

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One third of American adolescents are on medication – half of that number, on psychoactive prescriptions. We have an educational system that not only can’t prepare young people for the rapidly evolving future world we’re creating for them to inhabit – it traumatizes people by attempting to squeeze every kind of human through the same twelve-plus-year sentence of indoctrination and obedience training. 

Are damaged and addicted mind control slaves really who we hope we’re shaping? Obviously not! That’s where the radical (yet common sense and plainly reasonable) ideas of Michael Strong come in. Michael has devoted his life to establishing new education systems that prepare young people for a lifelong learning process, to think for themselves and find their self-esteem in cultivated excellence, not rote memorization or decontextualized performance. Civilization might mean domesticated people…but do want to live in the Calcutta Zoo?

In this week’s episode, I speak with Michael Strong – about how he sees the future evolution of education and learning – starting with a “narrative collapse” about our consensus standardized testing hallucination and a departure from the “factory-worker factory” model that dominates the US public education system now – and growing into an ecology of different styles and possibilities more suited to the future: early-entry programs that restore apprenticeship, train young entrepreneurs, link “un-schooled” families into a learning network, and rebuild the independent and creative minds we’ll need to thrive through the next hundred years of exponential change.

About Michael Strong:

https://thoughtandindustry.com/about

https://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com/about-michael-strong/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelstrong1/

https://www.edreform.com/edspresso-shots/why-we-dont-have-a-silicon-valley-of-education-michael-strong/

We Discussed:

“I think creating better ways of living is the most exciting, fun task for the 21st Century…[and] middle and high school is more or less prison for 80% of students.”

• How to create happy, positive, creative experiences for young people by reimagining the education system

• How do we unwind a system that pressures everyone to conform, and establish a system that encourages the vast (and USEFUL) diversity of human personality types, talents, and learning styles?

“School is a very narrow band for people who are good at tasks…that doesn’t do justice to the diverse count of moral beings, but also there’s this moral chaos, where I think a lot of the consumerism and addictive behaviors of young people is that there is no sense of virtue or excellence.”

• Why mental health and behavioral disorders are at an all-time high, and getting worse, and what to do about it.

• The tragicomedy of Socratic process versus fundamentalists in the schools, and taking a pragmatic stance to the chaos and complexity of our time.

• Crafting your own sense of meaning and independent moral authority in stark contrast to our legacy of hierarchical thinking.

• How to individuate in an era of increased networking – how to tell the difference between pressure to conform and desire to connect?

• Technology addiction versus relational meditation and deep nature communion.

“One of the things I love about the San Francisco Bay Area is that no matter how weird you are, somebody is weirder.”

• Individualism versus political correctness.

• The dissolution of established job categories and the beginning of totally unique, distinct purpose and meaning for individuals.

• The proliferation of new aesthetics and the emergence of new freedom and openness in the human experience.

• How grateful should we be for living in the modern era?

• How do we prepare young people to think independently?

• What integrated educational curricula look like, exploring ideas across subjects rather than demanding the learning of specific facts.

• How to measure success for students in nontraditional systems so they can still win at the university admissions game.

• And more…

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Former NASA-JPL Mission Architect and founder of the Exploration Institute, Armin Ellis helps people think big and execute visionary projects for a living. He’s also now the Mission Architect for the Arch Mission Project, a group committed to getting long-lasting civilizational archives carried into deep space by other missions. Armin is exactly the guy to talk to if you want to think the future’s somewhere you would like to live…

Watch the entire uncut video on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/20404177

Armin's projects:

http://exploration.institute

http://pioneerscircle.com

https://archmission.org

“I really do believe that the future is pretty bright for us.”

A rallying cry to not let our amygdalae rule us, to not succumb to fear and desperation.

How working on a Mars rover mission helped him develop a humility and appreciation for complexity.

“Ego slows us down. It makes us stupider, you know? I’m not sure there are too many intelligent people out there. I think there are people who embrace intelligent practices; that allows them to have intelligent outcomes.”

And also: in defense of egotistical people who perform a vital function in the ecosphere by making sure we Get Things Done.

How the limitations of each of us as individuals can align with others’ limitations and assets to form a functioning team.

Diaspora by Greg Egan

How do you craft communications to reach everyone on a neurologically diverse team?

“When opinions aren’t backed up by empathy, then you’re necessarily going to run into problems.”

“I can’t remember a day in my life when space wasn’t this burning passion, something that REALLY mattered to me…I remember I was eight years old when I decided I wanted to work at JPL.”

Idea To Implementation Method

How to recognize when the processes in an organization are out of alignment.

How he got involved in space entrepreneurship and space exploration as a young man.

The vital importance of a frontier, of curiosity, of exploration…

Why the quest for certainty leads us astray and the quest for meaning leads us true.

“Being able to influence it is a fundamentally different premise than being able to control it.”

Ikigai

Would somebody please build an Ocean Roomba already?

Trying to make Star Trek’s Federation happen.

The Arch Mission Project, an awesome and ambitious endeavor to leave engraved nickel civilization archives at the ocean’s floor and on the Moon, and with every deep space mission…

The importance of emotional mastery (again, not control…) if we are to become the kind of species we could be…

And more!

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This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.

Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:

Subscribe on Patreon to watch the uncut interview:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/20618842

Our New, Better Life?

https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/

Why I Am Afraid of Global Cooling

https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/

Discussed:

• What inspired Charles’ thorough history and critique of civilization, The Ascent of Humanity, and how it differs from “anti-civilization” texts.

• The independent convergent evolutions of civilization in Mesopotamia, China, India, and several other places, pointing to the inevitability and directionality of what we call “progress.”

• What new stories emerge at the intersection of the timeless attractors toward a whole and healthy, thriving biodiverse world of human inter-beings, and a fragmented post-ecocidal VR fully artificial landscape?

• When is it useful to think of humans as part of nature and when is it useful to think of humans as distinct from nature?

“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”

• What cultural appropriation gets wrong in its attempts to retrieve and revive indigenous rites (“It’s not the content of the rituals; it’s the spirit of the rituals.”)

• Money as a ritual: “One of the reasons money comes so easily to us is that it’s a kind of ritual. The human mind…ritual is its territory.”

“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”

• Operating on a story that believes the world to be dead leads to a world that is, in fact, dead – whether or not it actually was dead in the first place. Treating nature as a resource rather than as a community of minded cohabitants and potential collaborators is a self-fulfilling prophecy and an act of self-sabotage.

• Charles’ critique of the New Age technologies of manifestation as oblivious of where the intention or vision comes from in the first place, how we’re enfolded into our environments…

• …and how paradoxically similar that critique is to the disenchanting philosophies described by people like Yuval Harari and Timothy Morton, who make the case that it’s equally the case that the world is alive, or that humans are basically just machines. Or Erik Davis’ “re-animism,” in which we return to a pre-modern sense of a sentient environment through our encounter with AI-suffused devices.

• How the scientific quest for control over a purely mechanical cosmos pushed us all the way around into some truly weird revelations about the indeterminate, irreproducible, and contingent workings of our mysterious universe.

• Why machines don’t provide a sufficient metaphor for understanding consciousness, and certainly not for reproducing it.

• Is trying to fit the complexity of the world into a linear narrative structure the problem at the root of all this? Is it a form of violence to talk about time and evolution having a direction?

“I’m not a story fundamentalist. If I say the world is built from story, I also recognize that that itself is also a story. I look at the story of inter-being, for example, as really just the ideological layer of an organism that is far deeper than story.”

“There are many ways to know. And we’re conditioned by a story that says only the measurable is real. So we’re conditioned to give priority to ways of knowing that have to do with putting things in categories.”

“Progress as currently formulated is not real progress at all. We’re not getting ANY closer to the fulfillment of human potential. Well, aybe we are getting closer on one very narrow axis of development. But there is so much more to a fully expressed human being…and we’re moving away from it in a lot of ways.”

• What metaphor for mind/life/nature is set to replace “the computer,” just as “the computer” replaced “the steam engine,” which replaced “the geared watch?”

• How black box AI solutions restore the mystery and magic to the technosphere, replacing reason with blind faith.

• Kevin Kelly, Stephen Pinker, William Irwin Thompson, Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Brock,

“The more empathic our participation, the better off we’ll be.”

• Can we be TOO empathic?

“I think on some level, we all DO feel what all beings are feeling.”

• The boundaries we draw between our selves and the world, between one organism and another, also evolve.

• The healing power of grief.

• Purge-aholics Anonymous.

• The evolution of service as a continuously shifting, molting thing that changes, that requires careful listening. No moment is the same.

• The sacred disquiet that attends our new perspective as we learn to see a bigger (ever-bigger) picture.

“We have to be cognizant of the inevitable reduction that happens when we assign values to things…one way to translate the humble awareness of the limitations of quantified value is to design currencies that do not need to grow in order to survive.”

• Did money invent science?

“Property is an agreement. It’s not an absolute objective thing…as much as libertarians would like it to be.”

• Why cryptocurrency (wants to, but) can’t replace human agreement with code.

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7y8qr5yz

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This week’s guest is the one-of-a-kind, ever-evolving Onyx Ashanti, a cyborg performance artist of world renown, who is as busy as anyone I know (in the words of Terence McKenna) “immanentizing the Eschaton” with his intensely futuristic machine interfaces as an extension of his cymatic, fractal, exponentiating, indomitably cool and strange philosophy. Onyx is one of the most inspiring and creative people in my network and even though this episode was recorded in December 2017 – and is in some ways just a little dated – it’s still 99% WAY, WAY in our future. A paradox! Just how we like it, around here…

http://onyx-ashanti.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/onyxashanti

https://www.facebook.com/onyxashanti

“We have access to technologies and information that are only limited by our abilities to comprehend them.”

The creative potentials of encrypted distributed ledgers “that aren’t just about holding until I’m a millionaire.”

Marshall McLuhan: “The future of the future is the now.”

The uncontrollability of new technologies.

When we talk about “THE” future, whose future are we talking about?

“The past and the future all exist as constructs in your mind. The past is no more real than the future.”

How choosing our story of the past determines what possibilities become probabilities in our future.

“When I think about polarities like good and bad, I think about it in an electronic sense. It’s modulation of the relationship between positive and negative that gives you computers.”

Physical and spatial computing exercises and how movement in space can help dislodge us from stuck perspectives.

“We have to have more art that plays with the malleability of exponential expressions.”

Book: Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse

“There’s a lot of people who think that if they get the right president, or they get the right representative, or they buy the right car, then it’s all going to be alright. That is not the case. It is very, very not going to be alright. There are evolving and exponentially complying streams of possibilities that can collapse into probabilities – IF you understand that possibility collapses into probability.”

We spoil the movie AI.

“American media culture likes to wrap everything up in a happy ending, a happily-ever-after scenario. And I think that makes us retarded.”

Book: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Tutting (for those who don’t know what tutting is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbBqtuYvags) vs Breakdancing

Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, as an example of the crazy wizard kids these days, “spoon benders”

Berlin and Detroit and the collapse of industrial centers as the mulch in which great artistic movements bloom…

“If everybody were able to express themselves properly, we would be something else, and it wouldn’t be controlled by the people it’s controlled by. And that something else would be, I think, grander, but at the same time would have a whole other set of problems.”

How do you keep the golden moment of a temporary autonomous zone or a bohemian urban revival going for as long as possible before it’s gentrified, coopted, integrated, and extinguished?

“Innovation and institution: I won’t say that they’re oxymoronic, but the modulation is going to be different between them. I don’t look to institutions [for innovation]. I don’t believe the college education system is relevant anymore.”

“The first thing that should happen is, everyone learns how to learn.”

“There is no limit to synaptic connectivity that anyone has observed. There is no brain that is so full that it cannot process one more thing.”

Onyx’s favorite nootropics (racetams).

Co-evolving brain-machine interfaces for a constant flow state of cyborg immersivity.

How would AI perceive information? Likely as music…

Book: Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon

Book: Xenolinguistics by Diana Reed Slattery

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This week we continue the ecstatically futural mind-jazz duet with cyborg performance artist and body-machine interface master hacker Onyx Ashanti, exploring the frontiers of new meta-languages emerging at the intersection of the born and manufactured, and creative possibilities thereof. 

Onyx Online:

http://onyx-ashanti.com

http://youtube.com/onyxashanti

http://twitter.com/onyxashanti

Anyone who enjoys this episode will also like these essays from my upcoming book:

“The Future is More of Everything”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-2-the-future-is-entropic-2faa4aa6f433

“The Future Is Disgusting”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-disgusting-911379af30fe

“Being Every Drone: The Future of XR & Robotic Telepresence”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78

In this episode, we discuss:

Fractal Sonocybernetics & The Future of Language

The neurological and experiential differences between speaking and singing, between continuous movement and discontinuous speech.

“The English alphabet is created of embedded Fibonacci relationships…there are five vowels; all five of those vowels are odd numbers…between A and E is three letters; between E and I is three letters; between I and O is five; O and U is five; and between U and the end of the alphabet, wrapping around to the A, is five letters…two 3s and three 5s is also one of these relationships. There are twenty-one consonants in the alphabet, and twenty-one is one of these Fibonacci values.”

Book: Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle

Reaching beyond language to communicate the ineffable psychedelic experience…only to create new (insufficient) languages.

Violent counter-reactions to the sudden is-ness of black swan events (like the election of Barack Obama OR Donald Trump).

“Those of us that get it and CAN talk about it, it is necessary for us to talk about it. But then to reinforce what we’re talking about with action.”

The moral imperative of people with a vision to communicate it. The ethical necessity of artists to create and share.

Music as an irreplaceable core module of an n-plus-one-dimensional future language.

“We’re like some kind of ant, or bee, and our honey is technology.”

With respect to the Singularity: The end of the world? The end of WHAT world? WHAT DOES “END” EVEN MEAN?

What happens to identity politics in an age of exponential change and its metamorphosis of “baseline” human identity into something plural, mutable, and ineffably always-evolving?

“We have to burst out of identity politics in a way such that it is BORING, that it is MUNDANE, that our perception of identity politics is that it is no longer [the house-sized thing that I am within], it is [identity politics, this thing I am holding in my hand and I can examine like I would examine a grapefruit].”

“One’s reality is limited by their ability to comprehend complexity.”

If we act from the understanding that our brains are harmonically organized, our thoughts and actions can begin to take on that harmonic organization…

Gamma brainwaves as the lubricating medium of harmonically coherent brain activity, just as blockchain-enabled microtransactions enables a fluid economy and liquid democracy in the global brain…

How to become resilient in a networked society by using failure to inform the design of new evolutionary systems.

“Bitcoin…it’s unstoppable. Right now. And when it IS stoppable, we will have a new version that is vastly less stoppable than this one. And then it will get attacked mercilessly…and then maybe someone brings the quantum chain down. And then we create something we can’t even imagine at this point…”

“I feel that Bit Torrent begat Bitcoin.”

“The interesting thing with the Bitcoin community is that we’re all working for a company that…there’s nobody working for that company!”

Is crypto the cathedral of planetary culture we’ve been waiting for?

Onyx waxes rhapsodic about the blockchain.

Open-source space program.

Book: Project Hieroglyph (containing Cory Doctorow’s short story, “The Man Who Sold The Moon”)

Onyx uses Sun Ra and the afro-futurist mythology that he created repeatedly to make a point about legendary creative badassery.

“You have to share it in such a way that each person feels that they are absorbing it. And want to. ‘How can I get involved?’”

Pay No Attention to The Realm of Loud Dumb Shit

What a bad example of a good future cyberpunk is… (Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, etc.)

Story/Film: Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson

Imagining a Crypto Pride Parade with everyone wearing reflective Face ID spoofing masks

What it takes to turn a work of art into a movement: resonance.

“If you [lawmakers and IP holding companies] can’t stop a five megabyte file [mp3s], good luck stopping crypto.”

And more for those with time to listen!

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This week we’re blessed to chat with living legend, ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna – one of the most rigorous scientific intellects working with psychedelics in the modern era, responsible with his late brother Terence for popularizing the techniques for cultivation of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms, co-author of numerous books on psychoactive plant and fungal medicines and their curious effects on consciousness, and an outspoken advocate for cognitive liberty psychedelic research.

(Dennis has appeared, subliminally, on nearly every episode of Future Fossils – one of his talks was sampled by my original co-host Evan "Skytree" Snyder for his track “God Detector” – in which I also appear as a guest guitarist – which I still use as the intro and outro music.)

In this conversation we push into a DIFFERENT kind of conversation about psychedelic science – not the science of psychedelics as a tool for therapy, but science using psychedelics the way we use telescopes or MRI machines – to let us see in ways we ordinarily cannot, and maybe answer some of the most pressing and persistent questions about human consciousness and the nature of reality.

I hope this episode will magnetize the worldwide community of people interested in the possibility of psychedelic science…if you have a story you would like to share in confidence, feel free to email me at futurefossils@protonmail.com where we can talk encrypted! I’ve been thinking about this stuff for my entire adult life – we discuss some of that in this episode – and would love to have more conversations with people who have been thinking similarly…

Dennis McKenna’s Links:

https://espd50.com

https://twitter.com/dennismckenna4

https://facebook.com/dennisjonmckenna

We Discuss:

How can the psychedelic experience in all of its weirdness inform deeper, more rigorous experiments and scientific paradigms?

Meet (and then disrupt) the source of all your problems: the default mode network.

“The ego…thinks it’s controlling everything, which of course it’s not, but it helps the delusion to think that it is.”

Disabling the filters to find aspects of reality you’ve never noticed.

The necessity of GROUP psychedelic research from within the altered subjectivity of non ordinary consciousness.

The ontology of entities, as studied by the scientific method.

What kind of QUESTIONS and what kind of FACTS come out of a psychedelic science for which “real and unreal” is insufficiently nuanced?

Crossing the boundary between the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness.

Book: On Becoming Aware by Varela, et al.

Michael’s initiation into psychedelic science.

UFOs.

Synchronicity & Coincidence.

The Internet is a psychedelic substance.

Book: Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton

Are waking life and psychedelic consciousness closer now than they used to be?

Novelty.

The Simulation Hypothesis, The Drake Equation, The Copernican Principle, Occam’s Razor (is fractal)

How do you step outside the box?

Telepathy & Meta-Individuality

Book: Nexus by Ramez Naam

Egregores.

“Our cleverness is out of synch with our wisdom.”

The wise deployment of technologies.

The difference between the past and the future. (???)

Concerns about the specter of the collapse of the biosphere.

“I’m a science fiction fan, so I assume our destiny is in the stars, right? If we leave the Earth, it would be nice to leave a garden and not a toxic waste dump. There’s no reason why that can’t be so.”

The history and future of the ESPD, the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. (!!!)

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This week we have a roundtable discussion (which took place around an actual table in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, José Soler, and Jacob Aman, the hosts and producers of Future Primitive Podcast (600+ episodes and going strong!). Joanna, as you may remember from episode 0020, has been a psychedelic raconteur for her entire adult life, famously snuck LSD into prison for her lover Timothy Leary, and wears her age with an incomparable flair and zest that ought to be an example to all of us. She’s joined with her current partner and Future Primitive co-founder José Soler, as well as our mutual friend and Future Primitive co-host Jacob Aman (who is also close friends with Future Fossils guest and friend Bruce Damer).

It’s a conversation about…well, everything, really. But mostly breakdowns and breakthroughs, and what it’s going to take for us to steer civilization toward the better of those options. Enjoy!

https://futureprimitive.org/about/

We Discuss:

Intergenerational communication & listening.

Documentary: Wild Wild Country

Documentary: The Unforeseen

“Anybody that wears all the same clothes…I mean…I’m sorry, but, WHY…”

- Jacob

“These days, I look at everything from the #metoo point of view.”

- Joanna

Mansplaining and unconscious mammalian social power struggles.

How social media rewards harmful and divisive behaviors.

Book: Ralph Abraham’s Chaos, Gaia, Eros

“If sweetheart doesn’t go with brilliant…by the time you get to seventy…you can go to a home for old people. I say, it’s either grateful or bitter.”

- Joanna

Lack of intergenerational dialogue in the Occupy Movement…

Protest fatigue.

Richard Doyle on Third Eye Drops Podcast.

Fascists and Gurus.

How are the high school age protesters of school gun violence getting it wrong?

Where does Joanna see us making progress, not merely recreating the mistakes of the 1960s, in this latest wave of upheaval and social change?

Joanna (and also Charles Shaw on Future Fossils 0058) about child abuse by traumatized parents after World War II.

“Do you know why the rich abuse their children? Because otherwise they would give all the money away.”

Cognitive dissonance between drone pilot detachment and the violence of the modern world.

Daniel Schmachtenberger on Future Fossils 0051 on the disconnect between our overwhelming input and our underwhelming ability to act.

“As the years go by, you have to be more and more humble about the difference you are making. And the joy of that humble difference is enormous. The joy of that feeling of having a purpose…that joy is like the smoke of a wonderful incense.”

- Joanna

Jose weighs in on the the Catalonian populist uprising.

“We can do better. We can initiate a new narrative, a new dreaming."

- Jose

Disabusing ourselves of the notions of empire. Can human beings govern ourselves at scale?

The nightmare of intersectional identity politics and Sam Harris putting his foot in his mouth.

Documentary: Ai Wei Wei’s Human Flow

“We have to be magicians. I don’t use the word ‘shaman’ anymore because it has been commercialized. I’m magic and I observe it every single day, and I believe there’s a reason why this Harry Potter thing attracted…look, she’s richer than the Queen of England, which is not a small thing. There’s a reason that erupted in your generations, because inside it’s there but history and the stories have suppressed that. It’s all over the place, in faerie tales and everything - the story of the suppression of what magical beings we are.”

- Joanna

Podcast: Weird Studies with JF Martel & Phil Ford, on Aleister Crowley (Episode 9)

Real magic is connnection, not narcissistic control.

“We’re downloading a different future than the one that is broadcast to us constantly.”

- Joanna

Book: The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (recommended translation: Brian Browne Walker)

“This body is an incredible spaceship. I mean, would you let your spaceship fall apart?"

- Joanna

“We need hot, ecstatic magic. The sun in our chest! We need to bring more burning in the chest and give that breath into the daily life.”

- Jose

Bringing the practice of everyday ecstasy into our lives and relationships.

Book: Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind

Talking about psychedelics with your parents.

Podcast: The Psychedelic Salon with Lorenzo Haggerty

The tragedy of Terence McKenna on anti-depressants.

“I believe it’s possible to have the right relationship with any chemical that you take.”

- Joanna

What is transformational sobriety?

Intuition is full-body listening.

Joanna asks the whole group: “What’s next?”

Comedy: Steve Martin & Martin Short on Netflix

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This week we chat with science writer (and former laser physicist) Kate Greene, whose writing explores everything from Big Data to boredom to brain scans, and whose fascinating and eclectic life is brightly punctuated by the four months she spent living inside a Mars base simulation on Hawaii.

http://www.kategreene.net/about/

We Discuss:

How she became a scientist, and then a science writer.

The importance of good teachers and mentorship and encouragement along a person’s developmental journey.

“Everything that I’ve done is the result of network effects.”

Her time as a guinea pig in a simulated Mars colony on Hawaii…

Why astronauts love hot sauce.

Knowing your purpose - feeling the intuitive hit that lets you know you’re on the right path.

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab and the scientific evidence for the influence of intention on the outcome of random events.

Kate’s fascination with brain scans.

“I often wonder, what the hell is my brain doing right now?”

Terence McKenna’s vision of posthuman, cephalopod skin telepathy…and Twitter as a form of that same ambient telepathy.

“Never in the history of humanity have we had such extensive communication prosthetics.”

How do science journalists and scientists alike keep up with the “info quake” of modern life?

Big data and AI – can we preserve and evolve critical thought and rigorous investigation when our research is done in collaboration with machine intelligences using logical processes we ourselves don’t understand?

“Science is so HUMAN. It’s performed by humans that have all of these biases and blind spots…the fact that there’s so much information points to the fact that there needs to be new ways to sift through it.”

“A lot of people think that AI is just going to replace people in a lot of ways, but I feel like it is going to be one of the most intimate symbiotic relationships that we have in the future. I mean, this technology will become as close to human as anything humanity’s ever created, and it’s not going to be able to do it on its own. It will be a symbiosis. We will be learning from each other and training each other.”

The problem science journalism has with reporting real science, not just sensationalist headlines based on science…and how social media has made it worse.

What you would miss about Earth if you moved to Mars.

“Earth is SO wonderful. And I don’t think I knew it – I kinda knew it, but I didn’t ACTUALLY know it – until I couldn’t be a part of it for four months.”

Cooking “on Mars” in a simulated colony on Mauna Loa.

Aromatherapy in space!

What Kate learned from teaching creative writing in a women’s prison.

“This is modern day slavery: there are more people incarcerated in the United States than in any other Western country, and it’s because it’s profitable. Something needs to change…one thing that you can do is realize that people in prisons are still part of your community, and that you still have a responsibility to them. To give what you can, to make sure that their lives are better, that all of our lives are better.”

Cory Doctorow’s short story “The Man Who Sold The Moon” in ASU’s Project Hieroglyph compilation.

The crossover between the Burning Man crowd and the space exploration crowd.

Other mentioned science journalists to follow:

Ed Yong

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-yong/

Kenneth Chang

https://www.nytimes.com/by/kenneth-chang

Natalie Wolchover

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/

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This week’s episode is an experiment in science fiction storytelling – the author-read short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality.’” Originally released to Patreon supporters (without the intro or musical soundtrack) last November, this story brings together many of the core themes of Future Fossils: the challenges of navigating overwhelming and contradictory information online; the new literacies that will emerge in response to AI-assisted “deep fakes” that make conventional evidence inadmissible in courts or scientific journals; the thinning veil between our physical senses and the ethereal realm of data; and the experience of time in a future when possibility, prediction, and recording stretch out in all directions (but unreliably).

My first adult foray into the world of science fiction, this piece was inspired – nay, made necessary – by the recent news about new vocal synthesis AI that lets consumers edit audio and video and manufacture wholly new, convincing forgeries that sound and look exactly like "the real thing." 

We all grew up in an age when our recordings are the evidence of something. It was certainly a step up from the hearsay that we once relied on, but it's not enough these days – and as technology gets more and more sophisticated it may be impossible for us to tell the difference between "what's really there" and what is just a digital illusion. 

Trip with me down this vertigo-inducing psychedelic tunnel to a world in which invisible and discarnate agents speak to you in lovers' voices; in which algorithmic AI pop stars outcompete real artists and our thoroughly-mapped world returns to demon-haunted wilderness; in which we all become half-monks and half-forensics-experts as the new obsession is attempting to determine if we can believe our senses... 

This piece is planned as the epilogue to my forthcoming book, How To Live in The Future. It's a rare weird bird among its influences: one part literature, one part psychedelic beat screed, and the first time I have managed to combine the metanoia, vision, and poetic flourish that inspires me to write. 

(I also wrote it all by hand in a delicious Clairefontaine "Flying Spirit" journal that I bought in Montréal this summer, and took with me to the Global Eclipse Gathering and Burning Man. I have to say, that had no small effect on how this all came out. Real pen and paper leads to very different writing.) 

If you’d like the PDFs of the original handwritten manuscript, you can find them here:

https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/an-oral-history-of-the-end-of-reality

Read all of my publicly-available draft chapters of How to Live in the Future, the companion essays to this story:

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield

All of the music in this episode is from my album, Love Scenes & Field Recordings, which you can download for any price here:

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Cover Image © Giacomo Carmagnola and reused with permission. 

Check out his work and help him support his aging mother: 

https://facebook.com/giacomocarmagnolaart

https://instagram.com/Gore_XV

Special thanks to Transhumanity.net for being a featured sponsor of this podcast! Their concerns about the ethical deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) are perfectly aligned with this episode’s rather chilling speculative futures, and I’m glad to know that there are people working on a world where AGI improves the lives of every person, not just the very rich.

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This week’s a treat – not one, but FOUR amazing guests, in Future Fossils Podcast’s first live taping at EFF-Austin, 10 July 2017. Heather Barfield (Head of EFF-Austin Digital Arts Coalition and Director of Development, Vortex Theater); Maggie Duval (Chief Experience Liaison, 7th Generation Labs & Senior Developer, Polycot Associates, LLC); Paul Toprac (Associate Director of Game Development at UT, RTF Department, and Senior Lecturer); and Kevin Welch (President of EFF-Austin, Fullstack Web Developer at Texas Legislative Council) joined me for one of the most visionary conversations this show’s ever published – and certainly the most politically aware episode to date, as well.

Yes, this is about “The Pre- and Post-History of Virtual Reality, Surveillance, and Swarm Intelligence” – and a lot more else, to boot. Just strap in and enjoy…

The whole event was streamed live if you’d rather watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2hNX9eM6k

Full bios for each panelist and more info about EFF-Austin:

https://www.meetup.com/EFF-Austin/events/240796194/

We discussed:

How for Maggie, growing up at Guantanamo Bay as a form of preparation for living in the 21st Century.

The psychological and moral implications of living in a simulated reality.

What is the humanest human? What are we aiming for?

Challenging the colonizer narrative of space as a “frontier.”

Narrative collapse!

Pernicious, ubiquitous, intelligent and coercive, ambient AI manipulation as the nexus of this talk’s three topics.

Guest spot from Jon Lebkowsky on emergent democracy.

Guest spot from an audience member who grew up in communism.

What is it about our internet as it is now that is keeping a global swarm intelligence from emerging?

Let’s not just talk about making NEW things…let’s talk about MAINTENANCE.

The side effects of automation.

“I’m a technologist that makes social media software. So it’s all my fault…we knew when we created the net as a publishing medium that we did not think through the human connections or other values that should have gone into it. We broke the community; we broke the BROADER community. I think the fact that a Trump voter doesn’t think they can talk to me is part of my sin. The wrongness isn’t their Trumpism; the wrongness it that they don’t think they have a connection to me as a human. And the technology that I built has failed them. So I’d like the panel to talk about, ‘How do we fix it?’”

- Random Audience Commentator

“The future is messy technology that is aggravating to deal with. We don’t spend our days in paradise or dystopian hell; we’re trying to get the dang computer to work. And maybe the problem is in the stories we’re telling. Maybe we’re setting up false narratives and false expectations for how to live and how to communicate with each other. Maybe we need to be telling better stories again.”

- Kevin Welch

Stable background levels of deceit in the system.

The way we teach history is a mistake because it doesn’t make history palpable and thus unrepeatable.

Topher Sipes of Sound Self chimes in.

Heather challenges the assumption that virtual reality will solve any humanitarian issue.

(Cover photo taken from http://www.iaacblog.com/programs/swarm-intelligence/)

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This week’s guest is one of my favorite living musicians, acoustic guitarist Andreas Kapsalis. We linked up at the magical experimental city of Arcosanti, Arizona last year during their Convergence event, at which we both performed, and talked about life as itinerant musicians drawing on a wealth of world cultures and traditions. This is a humbler and more human episode of Future Fossils – hope that you enjoy it!

http://www.akguitar.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Andreaskapsalisguitar/

Watch a video of Andreas playing his composition, “Ethnos”: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnogdfXyWIo

We Discuss:

Being raised in a musical family and how being musical changes one’s experience of time.

The cultural influences of Greece and Andalusian musics and their vocabulary of odd time signatures and harmonies and energies.

His love for the Old West and Arizona’s cowboy movie landscape…and the “freaking weird mutation” of Arcosanti’s aberrant European retro-future architecture in the desert.

Why is the West Coast of anywhere like the West Coast of anywhere else?

Living off-grid and the importance of getting away…

…but silence is awkward!

Cultivating a relationship with plants.

“You don’t really matter. Being reminded of that is really important.”

The integration of nature and city living, architecture as biology, the legacy of Paolo Soleri and Arcosanti.

Touring is amazing. People are amazing.

“Well, yeah, there is something to be said about stability.”

Nomads and nomadism.

Empathy and Introversion.

“Two handed tapping has allowed me to take a leak and fill a glass of water at the same time, and they say that that’s not good for you…”

The spiritual practice of multi-tasking.

The future of musical communication.

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This week’s episode is the first of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture.

I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass with seven other brave souls is powerful, inspiring, and full of potent lessons for both life on Earth and life in space.

www.ecotechnics.edu

www.synergiaranch.com

We Discuss:

– How theater can save a tight team from decaying into “kill the leader” reflexes and the importance of drama to living a full human life;

– Gerard O’Neill and the Space Studies Institute, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, and how space exploration went in, then out, then back into fashion;

– Biospheres are materially closed but energetically open;

– The study of comparative biospheres;

“If anyone’s running the show, it’s the microbes. It’s a reality that’s actually quite joyful to realize. You are NOT an island. We are totally enmeshed biologically in the biosphere.”

– Carrying around the trauma from the Great Oxygenation Event in our intestinal microbiota;

– Biomes as the building blocks of a biosphere;

– The Research Vessel Heraclitus, the Institute of Ecotechnic’s rehabbed Chinese junk, exploring the World Ocean;

– How they designed “lungs” for the building to enable pressure differences inside the building;

“Life transforms the planet. And in fact, when we look out, we’re looking at the by-products of life. And even a lot of what used to be thought of as mineral deposits – these huge deposits of iron, for example, used to be considered to be ‘natural’ formations, ie, geologic ones. No! In fact, [it was the work of] ‘slime’…juicy, fecund with life.”

“I think we need a whole new generation of creative people to give us the storylines for new outcomes. I kind of borrow from William Burroughs, who said, ‘We need a new mythology for the Space Age.’ And he further said that we’re going to judge heroes and villains by their intentions toward the planet.”

– Synergy (popularized by Buckminster Fuller) and synergy in life and love;

– Saving his sanity with “Hallucinogenic Outback Comedies” and using original plays and dances to communicate nonverbally around the world

“In the negative news stories, they would say, ‘These aren’t scientists, these are recycled actors from New Mexico.’ Well, Biosphere 2 was an in-life production…I have some friends who say that Biosphere 2 was John Allen’s greatest theater production. We really thought it was going to be a quiet research facility.”

“Thinking is hard. But PRETENDING to think, I can do that really well.”

“The opposite of an actor is a RE-actor.”

– Theater as a way of escaping the person you are at 7 AM

“I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting quite a number of astronauts and cosmonauts…and they’re all changed men.”

– The first and second Inter-Biospheric Festivals

“Our culture, I think, and it may have a malevolent intent in doing so, tends to diminish people’s expectations of what they personally can do.”

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This week’s episode is the conclusion of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. 

Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture. I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. 

Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass with seven other brave souls is powerful, inspiring, and full of potent lessons – both for our present on Earth and our future in space…

www.ecotechnics.edu

www.synergiaranch.com

We Discuss:

“Learning to Live Intelligently, Coming of Age in the Anthropocene – This is the Challenge of Our Life.”

– Why did Biosphere 2 get so much attention?

– What is the legacy of Biosphere 2? Biosphere J and The Eden Project and Q Gardens…the proposed but never-built, polluted Russian Biosphere 3…

“I think that optimism is a yoga. You want to do your hatha yoga and keep in shape. Despair is like screwing off and not meditating, and forget the physical exercise. Optimism is important psychologically, because it tells you, ‘I can make a difference and this is all going to work.’ Now it may be irrational, but if you give into despair, all of the hormones and emotions are going to tell you that it doesn’t matter. So forget about separating the recycling.”

– Living in the small tight loops of controlled ecosystems.

– Empowering ourselves with new senses so we can see the impacts of our actions at the planet scale.

– Pollutants from different countries where they are not banned yet as a kind of “living fossil” in the flesh of world travelers.

– The Anthropocene and The Noosphere. Human activity (and thus human cognition) as geological force.

“It’s not rocket science to redesign our technosphere.”

“There are consequences to the type of technology that we permit to operate on Planet Earth.”

– Solacestalgia.

– What’s wrong with Modernity and what Modern People suffer.

– Wastewater gardening in Mexico in exchange for cultivated coral.

– Using the soils to purify the air.

“Our farm was the most productive half acre ever run by humans! Of course, we had some advantages.”

– The four great taboos of science broken by Biosphere 2.

“To get into space, we’re going to have to be superb ecologists.”

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This week’s guest is the intriguing, talented, and amazingly well-organized Malena Grosz, who is currently traveling across the United States to interview party culture professionals for her multimedia thesis on community-led party culture to gain and share their perspectives on best practices and shared challenges in cultivating better life through celebratory gatherings – and to tackle the corporate commodification of “nightlife” and its dangerous side effects.

Her website-as-thesis-project will eventually be live (circa May 2019) at:

http://partyprotoolkit.com

We Discuss:

Gentrification and corporatization of nightlife versus community-led celebration, 

What urban nightlife can learn from Burning Man and festival culture, 

The disavowal of mundane time in spaces of celebration and how party culture does and does not need to accept the realities of our organic rhythms,

Mentorship, moderation, self-control, personal agency, 

Reconciling the nomadic and sedentary strains of humanity,

Taking responsibility for your own education (and life in general),

Getting kicked out of the School of Art for consent-based body painting,

Harm reduction versus the nanny state,

Learning to speak party to Academia,

The extraordinary importance of cognitive liberty and the freedom to imbibe,

The economics of big festivals and their scaling problem, and how it turns people into cattle,

Alternatives to alcohol (like tonics) and how parties can stay solvent without depending on encouraging dangerous levels of intoxication,

Learning how to empower people by delegating decision-making authority as an event producer,

Everything in moderation, even moderation,

The importance of safe spaces within every party (like Camp Soft Landing at Burning Man),

Rest stops at festivals and rests in music, quiet places where people can connect to contrast against losing yourself on the dance floor,

What party culture can learn from the intensely structured environment of academia,

“Festival referees” - good idea or disaster waiting to happen?,

Deputizing “Knights of the Dance Floor” and empowering people to be guardians of collective space,

Festival sheriffs and Night Mayors and the successful interfacing of mainstream culture and the needs of revelry populations,

The New York Nightlife Advisory Board and other official groups representing the needs of party culture in city and state governments,

Other promising international developments in the progress of human understanding of what safely integrated party culture looks like,

Figuring out how to measure the contributions of everyone involved in an event, not just the headlining acts.

And more!

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This week’s guest is Dr. Zak Stein, an author and educator whom I met as fellow students of the work of philosopher Ken Wilber over ten years ago. Zak took the road of serious high academic scholarship while I was learning the less laudable and messier way through immersion in the arts and entertainment world, but here we are converging to discuss one of the most important issues of our time: the need for a new human story that includes both modernity’s rigorous scientific inquiry and postmodernity’s revelation of how everything we know is framed by language, culture, and perspective. Without some clever, soulful balance of the two we’re stuck in a “post-truth” era where our need for answers to our fundamental questions leads us backwards into “isms” instead of forwards into something more good, true, and beautiful than what has come before.

Zak’s answer (like so many other guests on Future Fossils) is to get MORE rigorous about the scope and limits of the world disclosed by science, MORE honest with ourselves about the context-bound claims we can make on knowledge, and MORE open to how all “reality” starts in direct experience, as conscious subjects – where we meet to make new, open-ended, ever-more refined, evolving answers to the questions:

What is human? What is love? What are we here to do?

Read Zak’s new paper, “Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern ‘Return’ to a Metaphysics of Eros”:

http://www.zakstein.org/love-in-a-time-between-worlds/

‘Where modern scientists often critique the claims of metaphysics as unverifiable and thus untrue, postmodernists critique both science and metaphysics for making truth claims in the first place. Either way, to call an idea or theory “metaphysical” has become another way of saying it is unacceptable. Often with comes with some implication that the theory is a kind of superstition, which means metaphysics is taken not as an attempt to engage the truth but rather as a kind of covert power play or psychological defense mechanism. I argue the opposite: metaphysics is what saves us from a descent into discourses that are merely about power and illusion. Believe it or not, there are metaphysical systems that survived postmodernism and popped-out of the far end of the 1990’s with “truth” and “reality” still intact. These include object oriented ontology and dialectical critical realism, among others.’

Zak is also the Co-Presdient and Academic Director at the Center for Integral Wisdom:

https://centerforintegralwisdom.org/

…and on the scientific advisor board at Neurohacker Collective:

https://neurohacker.com/

— In this episode we discuss:

Lewis Mumford, Ken Wilber, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jurgen Habermas, Seth Abramson, Timothy Morton, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, Hanzi Freinacht, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Greenhall, and many other luminaries.

Right-wing and authoritarian political thought is resurgent today because of the absence of reasonable discourse about metaphysical realities during a time when exactly these realties are being put in question due to the apocalypse of global capitalism and the accompanying planetary transition into the Anthropocene .

The way we answer questions like, “What is the human?” will determine the next century because of the emerging power of new technologies that render the human mailable in unpresented ways, which has been made clear by writers like Yuval Harari.

“The difference between metaphysics and science is not about what you can see and what you cannot see. It is about what you are paying attention to when you are seeing.”

“What we call postmodernism is just modernism with the volume turned WAY up.”

The difference between modern, postmodern, and metamodern views on science and the realities disclosed by science.

What does it mean to cut a definition of the human out of our education systems?

The relevance of Rudolf Steiner’s metaphysics and pedagogy in 21st Century education – especially its attention to subjectivity and interiority.

How fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, and other regressive movements in society are symptoms of a postmodern assault on consensus reality.

“In the absence of metaphysics, there’s a vacuum of meaning…what can step into that is not always pretty.”

“After postmodernism, we can’t return to some pat, totalizing answer for everybody. After postmodernism, when we begin to build a new coherence, it’s always going to be a polycentric and dynamic and always renegotiated coherence. And that’s what science ought to be, which is to say, knowledge building, and not knowledge finding. Period.”

“Ideas matter – and right now, we live in a context where ideas matter only insofar as they can be leveraged for clicks on websites that generate advertisement revenue.”

When did we start gladly giving our decision-making powers over to others? And who do we trust now when we know that expertise is so contextual and frequently abused?

Making the Earth into a giant building is the beginning of metamodern history – the Anthropocene signaling our deep relationship with the ecosphere.

Michael reveals his vision of an Eclipse Station & Black Madonna University as a nobler motivation for a second “space race.”

We’ve succeeded in making mega-machines out of people but need to reframe what it means to be IN relationship…

Hyperobjects and a metamodern investigation of synchronicity and time…the objectivity of time is tricky.

“Animals do not build sundials, even though they would benefit greatly from them. And so you’ll notice that one of the things that sets humans apart is their ability to make metaphysics – that they relate to things that are objectively real, like time.”

The eternal and the everlasting – two different things.

“Who gets to decide, and how do we get to decide, on these deep questions?”

“To reify a false and truncated metaphysics – for example, to say that love doesn’t exist, that free will doesn’t actually exist – to really try to build institutions based on that, which would result in a radically authoritarian society – these things have been done. But never with the technological power that we now have to, for example, to build a school around that hypothesis. Or an army. And so there’s this very sincere need to make sure that as we move through this period, we’re keeping the voices who want to simplify and reduce and return to modernity and the monological at bay. So applaud, the postmodernists, but we also want to get beyond the postmodern critique, and the whole spirit and emotion of critique, and somehow move into a space where we’re reconstructing a new metanarrative, instead of taking potshots and deconstructing anyone who steps up to offer a metanarrative. After postmodernism it needs to be provisional, polycentric, built iteratively through collaboration. But there needs to be a project in good spirits in that direction. Because the regressive tendencies on the right who want to drive us toward racism and nationalism are having questions about, ‘What is the human?,’ and answering them irrationally. We need to have VERY reasonable and profound answers to questions like, ‘What is human?,’ ‘What are we here on Earth to do?,’ ‘What is a relationship?,’ ‘How important are relationships?,’ ‘What is love?,’ ‘Is love real?’, ‘What’s the significance of love?’…these things are part of what it means to be human.”

How do we build a just and humane, “post-tragic” culture on the other side of the Crisis of the Anthropocene?

We are all dependent on unjust and ecologically devastating supply chains…now what?

“Hate creates externalities. Love creates no externalities.”

The logic of the metamodern system has to be one in which there are no externalities.

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It’s a deep and wide investigation of decentralized networks of many kinds this week, drawing on the insights and wisdoms of five very different panelists in a discussion held at the legendary experimental city-under-construction Arcosanti, Arizona. Like it’s a rainforest, I don’t even know how to start talking about this conversation – too many points of entry, too many species living in it! Here are this week’s fabulous guests:

Emaline Friedman of Holochain

https://herlinus.com/

Sarah Johnstone, COO of The NuMundo Project

https://numundo.org/about

Jacob Devaney of Unify 

http://www.culturecollective.org/about/

“Raven” Mitch Mignano, loosely “of” Reality Sandwich & Institute of Ecotechnics

https://facebook.com/mitch.mignano.77

––

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We Discuss:

The three forms of decentralization (architectural, logical, and political);

The historical centralization of human culture around resources;

Why technological decentralization is insufficient to achieve the goals of a more humane and equitable society;

Decentralization of civilization through the emergence of digital nomadism and the ecovillage movement;

The transition from a value of ownership to a value of access;

Decentralization as an adaptation to the unscaleability of imperialism and colonialism;

How the free market capitalist ideology rewards success and punishes failure, even though those are largely dependent on luck;

How can we make planetary culture NOT a pyramid scheme?

Distributed trust and trustless transactions, and their political consequences;

Data ownership, data security, and the vital importance of restoring our ability to communicate through “unenclosable carriers”;

How can we divest from abusive and exploitative giant tech companies?

How decentralization as an ideology can conceal the ways that enforced consensus is a kind of “shadow centralization”;

Who is affected by this decision? Who has stake in the outcome of this issue?

How can we avoid #algocracy when technological literacy is a constant challenge?

Incentive structures and incentive landscapes: What kind of behaviors are we encouraging?

Why Facebook and Google will be seen by history as a humanitarian crisis (and what we can do about it);

Market-driven shifts in consciousness;

The limits of crypto-economic governance;

William Irwin Thompson - At The Edge of History

Joshua Ramey - The Politics of Divination

JustOne Organics

FairBnB

Arcade City

Steemit

Trybe

Scuttlebutt

MiVote

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This week’s guest is Erik Davis – one of my great inspirations, someone who has influenced me and this podcast in immeasurable ways since I first encountered his amazing criticism, histories, and “seen it all” visionary cool – I still recommend his first nonfiction book (Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information) on a near-daily basis, and his show Expanding Mind has got to be my number one most-listened podcast of all time.

Erik is a native Californian Gen X mystic who played no small part in the explosive West Coast visionary cyperpunk scene in the 1990s alongside folks like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Doug Rushkoff, and Jaron Lanier. But he’s taking a profoundly different stance these days, with a Religious Studies PhD in hand and a new book at the printers, drawing on his thirty-plus years experience investigating modern life’s weird marginalia to help us navigate a world in which the weird’s no longer marginal.

https://techgnosis.com

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-weirdness

High Weirdness Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies by Erik Davis

"A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality— but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality."

"Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, and counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica."

We Discuss:

Enacting the weird through media

The 1970s understood as the sort of beginning of our darker, weirder time - capitalism, consumer credit, surveillance, paranoia, density, historical dread…

“The occult, conspiracy theory, a dark dreamlike character…is now central…the way fictions become operational as quasi-truths to navigate the post-truth environment…the popularity of psychedelics…”

Key literacies for navigating Our Weird Future

Slender Man as operationalized fiction, as a kind of “tulpa” or thought-form activated into quasi-life

The intermarriage of reality and the hoax

HP Lovecraft’s modern distance from his horrors vs. Phil Dick’s postmodern intimacy with his horrors

The Coming Age of DNA Monsters and Routinized Weirdness

“We are called upon to analyze our resistances to all variety of shifts, mutations, couplings – and unless we want to go reactionary and hold onto certain ideas we have about how humans should be, or how the world should be, we’re in a situation of a strange kind of embrace with the other.”

Distrusting the Apocalypse

Figure-ground collapse in the impression of planetary hyperobjects into our immediate awareness

Neuroplasticity and neoteny – becoming childlike in order to surf accelerating change

Future shock and getting drawn into (right-wing, fundamentalist, fear-based, racist, boundary-defending) stories as a bid for solid ground

“Not knowing who we really are is part of the game. In fact, it’s one of the great opportunities of our moment.”

Plasticity vs. Flexibility ~ Will or Flexibility 

The discipline of transforming subjectivity - religions as practical algorithms for self-transformation, not as collections of beliefs

Everything you do is a self-engendering practice

“I look at the 20th Century, and the most important thing that happened in the 20th Century is cybernetics – both the concept and the operationalism of creating communication feedback loops that begin to generate their own processes.”

“The further I go into a cybernetic model, at least for me, it needs to be ground out in a deepening relationship with animals, with weather, with food, with plants, with plant wisdom, and definitely with those peoples – in whatever traces, in whatever mutations we can encounter them now – those groups, those societies, that had a very different relationship that’s not really mediated by the machine.”

The return of the nonhuman, cultural retrieval, the archaic revival, “reanimism”

Intelligence is Everywhere

Present Shock & the collapse of history & Jurassic Park

The future of time - metaperspectival time

Zizek’s critique of Buddhism and how mindfulness has been coopted by neoliberal surveillance capitalism

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This week’s guest is The Teafaerie, my amazing friend and a true one-of-a-kind psychedelic superhero.

The Teafaerie writes stories, poems, movies, plays and essays, makes videos, organizes flash mobs, and is one of the founders of Prometheatrics, a big beautiful Esplanade camp at Burning Man. At various times she has been a writer, nanny, actress, flow arts teacher, childbirth doula, homeless person, aid worker, live-action storyteller, toy inventor, app designer, street performer, and party promoter. She is a frequent contributor to the worlds most excellent psychedelic information site Erowid.org. She also regularly volunteers as a festival trip sitter with the Zendo Project and RGX medical.

Her most recent essay on Erowid:

https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2016/05/17/mapping-the-source/

My favorite of her essays:

https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/page/18/

More about psychedelic harm reduction:

https://www.zendoproject.org/

We Discuss:

• Why it’s okay that the Elon Musk will get (to beta-test) immortality first (for the rest of us)
• The intimately cybernetic world of brain-machine interfaces and Life After Advertising
• “I’m just a coward. I TRIED despair and I can’t TAKE that shit.”
• How parenthood changes your decision to be or not to be an optimist.
• Simulation Theory
• ~ ”We need to stop stressing the system and offload our consciousness offworld to L5 or VR”
• …or is that some whack pseudognostic transmania?
• “I believe the universe is art, because…”
• We’re the children of god, but most people act like we’re the pets of god or the toys of god.
• The child of a sheep grows up to be a sheep. The child of a god grows up to be a god.
• Mass manifestation and the Global Consciousness Project
• How to make wishes come true by getting god’s attention
• Partner yoga for engineered miracles
• Burning Man is a manifestation engine
• What Are You Playing For?
• What evolution looks like to DNA
• Designer Babies & THE ETHICS OF Designer Babies
• “Do you know The Silmarillion?”
• Olaf Stapledon is the man
• Black Mirror’s episode “Black Museum”
• Autonomous by Annalee Newitz and robot AR architecture
• Greg Egan’s Permutation City (and Diaspora)
• “Any sufficiently advanced 3D printer could tattoo you.”
• ~ “If the universe is determined, it’s offensive to me, it devalues my art.”
• Getting your wishes fulfilled is of evolutionary benefit
• How many things had to go right? ALL of them.
• “Maybe THIS is the shortest path, and it’s JUST LONG.”
• 5-Meo DMT
• The burden of publishing to an enormous audience on Erowid
• Fangirling about my sci fi, “An Oral History of the End of ‘Reality’” (Episode 91)
• 
  

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This week's guests are two of the most limber and insightful minds I know, futurist Michelle Shevin and actor-artist "The Ungoogleable" Michaelangelo. Since this is episode one of a whole new hundred episodes – and since I'm a sucker for ceremony and round numbers – this week we're taking a whirlwind tour of this show's recurring themes: how life, mind, culture, psychology, art, and science all change in the Internet Age, and how to live the best lives that we can amidst these transformations...

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Michelle Shevin

medium.com/@michebox

Michaelangelo

voidandimagination.com

We Discuss:

• Kronos & Kairos, revisited

• Re: JF Martel – Episodes 18 & 71

• The information science of innovation and why Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero may not be TOTAL hogwash

• Book: Geoff West - Scale

• Re: “An Oral History of the End of ‘Reality’” – Episode 91

• IS our time unique at all?

• WJT Mitchell paraphrase: “We’re all constantly feeling as though everything is about to happen, or perhaps it already has and we just haven’t noticed it”

• #presentshock

• Did we miss the singularity?

• Trapped in the present

• MA: “chronopractic adjustments” of pulling your past and future into alignment

• MA: “I feel like all expression is a form of deception…I try to look to the deception closest to the truth.”

• Plato: “Writing is a step backward from Truth.”

• Biological evolution as machine learning and the domestication of humans by technology

• MA: “I took a hit of GPS / got lost within the endlessness / gave up the compass in my chest / and oriented to the West”

• Michaelangelo – Episode 37

• Evolution’s bias toward paedomorphy / neoteny

• MS: “What happens when DNA becomes the substrate for all this information?”

• Storing data in the organic cloud

• The zone of proximal evolution and how “We can’t invent what we don’t have the parts lying around for”

• Every new technology is a remix

• David Krakauer – Episode 75

• Dennis McKenna - Episode 88

• Toxoplasmosis mind control and how nobody actually things if “my brain made me do it”

• MS: “If we are midwives to new myths, then part of the project is to litter the landscape with the right raw material, so that in the future, the right raw material is just lying around for people to pick up and build the tools with.”

• MA: “meme-ifying” (vs. “mummifying”)

• Book: Sam Harris – Free Will

• Film: Upstream Color

• Film: Primer

• Book: Peter Watts – Blindsight

• Book: Peter Watts – Echopraxia

• Re: The Teafaerie – Episode 100

• Re: Erik Davis – Episode 99

• Re: Doug Rushkoff – Episode 67

• Weird Studies Podcast is amazing, their Episode 32 on Eyes Wide Shut

• MG: “At the dusk of civilization, our eyes are adjusting to the darkness.”

• The digital dark age

• Book: Stewart Brand – The Clock of the Long Now

• Richard Doyle on Philip K. Dick and the evolutionary arms race of cameras and blind spots leading inexorably toward paranoia and then beyond into metanoia (see also, “The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast”)

• An entropy-driven metabolic arms race inevitab fractal Argus, coated in eyes

• When it comes to living through a Dark Age, MA suggests, “I think it comes down to learning how to glow in the dark. The agents of deception are our greatest teachers, in that sense.”

• MA: “Increased surveillance creates more performative personalities.”

• Re: Mitch Mignano – Episodes 57 & 98

• Elon Musk on Joe Rogan (of course that guy believes in simulation theory)

• Song: Yeasayer’s “Under The Glass of the Microscope”

• Linear, Circular, Helical time

• MS: “Planning often disguises itself as prediction”

• What is causation, anyway?

• Possibility as a fractal branching lightning bolt from potential to actual

• MA: “Scrye-ogenic Future” in a crystalline model of time

• MA: synchronicities vs. “synchroniceties”

• Book: Julian Jaynes – The Bicameral Mind

• Daniel Dennett’s “software archeology”

• The origins of divination

• Morsels of bicamerality reinstated by our digital ecology, with someone’s agenda in it

• MS: “The arrogance is in thinking that it was only ever us.”

• The Neurological Explanation for Imaginary Friends

• The Microbiological Explanation for “Self-Transforming Machine Elves”

• Swing Low, Eukaryote, coming for to carry me home

• David Pearce – “The Antispeciesist Manifesto”

• Are Laboratory Burgers Vegan?

• Empathy is a human (but not uniquely human) super power

• Rebranding the human species (eg, “Dog Friends,” “Cat Friends”)

• Book: Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where The Bird Sings Best

• Expertise is knowing the right search terms

• DNA as a language; microbial ecology as a language

• Introspection as an escape hatch from history and “profane time”

• And more...

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This week we sit with Bill Pfeiffer – deep ecologist, shamanic guide, and spiritual coach – whose life carried him from nuclear protests on the US East Coast to citizen diplomacy to Russia, where he first encountered Siberian shamans and became immersed, over decades and dozens of visits, in their traditions of ecstasy and communion, with realms and intelligences deeper than the world of identity and politics. A friend of Joanna Macy’s, founder of the Sacred Earth Network, and leader of hundreds of spiritual ecology workshops, Bill has dedicated his life to being a bridge between Native American & Siberian cultures, between alienated humans and the wisdom of the Earth, between heart and mind, future and past.

https://billpfeiffer.org/bio

http://www.sacredearthnetwork.net

Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon to join our book club, access secret episodes, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

In this episode, we discuss:

Reconnecting to nature, to the body

How political activism for nuclear disarmament changed his whole life and perspective

“I began to feel like I could make a difference…like you can make a difference…in how things play out here on Planet Earth.”

How Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs was appropriated from the Blackfoot tipi, and what we lost in the translation

“We’re all indigenous to land if we go back far enough in our ancestry, and we have a blueprint of a balanced existence.”

“Mystical experience is a birthright, if we’re open to it, or grace is there for us.”

Book: The American Replacement of Nature by William Irwin Thompson

How can we differentiate healthy and unhealthy solutions to our human need for belonging?

“There’s a lot of people who are spiritually inclined, and I’m like…I’m sorry, man, you gotta vote. It doesn’t mean you have to go crazy, it means you have to PAY ATTENTION.”

His journey from citizen diplomacy to Siberian shamanism, through connecting Siberians to Native Americans

What he learned about being human from the Siberians

Book: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

“To reclaim our power is to reclaim ourselves as cosmic beings, not just beings. It’s that big.”

“It’s not that I didn’t get rejected or that people weren’t angry with me at times, or copped an attitude because of what I was doing. But largely, I have felt embraced by both of those cultures as being a bridge, of serving a bridge-building function. I feel like I know how to love people, and how to receive love, and that is the currency that gets the job done.”

Episode 60 with Sean Esbjörn Hargens

Episode 65 with John David Ebert

The possible revival of a circumpolar shamanic tradition in the latter 21st Century after global warming

“I was an amateur futurist and then I just gave up, because there were far too many possibilities, and I was wasting my time getting afraid of imagining.”

What did he learn from the Siberians that were not lessons living in the Native American legacy he encountered?

“The relative success that me and my cohorts have had with native people is all about listening and respect. If that’s cliche, I want more of it.”

The ongoing resurrection of Native American ecstatic traditions

Book: Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

Joanna Macy

How to co-opt ecstasy for money, and how not to

One of Michael’s craziest sober experiences ever

Conscious sexuality

And more…

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Happy holidays! This week’s guest Tricia Eastman helps people find the holiness in every day by facilitating legal ceremonies in which ordinary membranes in between the different areas of thought and non-thought relax, and new or somehow ancient greater selves emerge appear whatever.

It’s a solid conversation with a fascinating person doing very crucial work. I hope you get as much from this dense hour of passage, insight, integration…

Tricia’s Sites:

psychedelicjourneys.com

instagram.com/psychedelicjourneys

We Discuss:

How she became a plant medicine practitioner through the festival psychedelic harm reduction underground

Leaving a husband, four houses, and all of her possessions to be of service to humanity

Overcoming her severe, debilitating eating disorders with ibogaine, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO DMT

How to smuggle the sacred into the global shopping mall

Reviving the ecstatic mystery schools and other lost spiritual traditions

Coping with the aftermath of collectively “waking up in a burning house” as we make last-minute moves to steer the planet out of further catastrophe

“A lot of the decisions that we make are based on false structures of safety, things that make you FEEL safe - like locking your door. Does locking your door really actually make you safe? If someone wants to get into your house, they’re going to get into your house. The truth is, we are all walking around with a lot of trauma. And if we can understand that that is actually an aspect of us, that it is NOT us, then we can get into a space where we can start interacting in a more peaceful way.”

Bringing back the rites of passage

Moving as a culture into responsibility for the decisions that we make

Growing up in a Christian family while experiencing “entities”

“I was like, ‘If I drink this bottle of wine, this ghost cannot f-ck with me.’ Until I started understanding was that all they wanted was to be shown to the light.”

Metamodernist science takes on the psychedelic Other(s)

A psychedelic facilitator’s advice on how to behave with ghosts

The gods and spirits as messages from the somatic unconscious

Integrating indigenous practices into the modern world

Replacing hierarchical teacher-student models with networked and facilitated group learning models

“We are the medicine. We don’t necessarily need to take medicine.”

How do we come up with something better for a world of proliferating trauma than “Accredited Facilitator from Iboga University”?

Shout-Outs To:

The Zendo Project

Plant Spirit Healing

Café Gratitude

The UDV

Rick Doblin & MAPS

Burning Man

Philip K Dick

Blue avians

Rudolf Steiner

Carl Jung

Terence McKenna

Richard Rudd * Gene Keys

Support this show on Patreon and come be in our book club!

Also, tons of cool free music, art, etc. there:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

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This week, we have a rad roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we talk Snow Crash, Linguistic Entropy, and The Metaphysics of Video Games; spoil Meow Wolf and Annihilation (warning!); and go deep on the origins of Hypnotherapy and NLP. It’s just part one of an intense three-hour hoedown with some of the sharpest minds I know…

The Guests in Order of Appearance:

Michael Aaron Kamins

https://twitter.com/michaelaaronk

John David Ebert

https://twitter.com/johndavidebert

Ikkyu Sojun

https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue

Support this show on Patreon. It’s good for you and makes you feel good:

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We Talk About:

Michael Aaron Kamins:

“Shigiro Miyamoto is the Dante of the Hypermodern Age.”

Mario is a shaman, Link is Percival of the Round Table…

NextNature.net, the Anthropocene, and the Wood Wide Web

Are videogames more effective than books as a form of storytelling?

John David Ebert likes Grand Theft Auto:

“Video games aren’t the problem; they’re the SOLUTION to the problem of living in these bizarre cosmopolitan cities, these huge megalopolitan cities that we’re constantly stressed out by.”

Narrative collapse in the shift from the serialized dramas of print-era TV and the reality shows of web-era TV

Michael Aaron Kamins:

“What does the hero’s journey mean in a world where we have to work 9-to-5 jobs?”

Skeumorphism in digital spaces:

Video games that mimic office life seem inevitable…

…but unlike in Snow Crash, we don’t want to walk everywhere in VR.

Lists, Explosions, & Flows

Why Michael Aaron Kamins disagrees with Daniel Pinchbeck about UFOs.

If Jordan Peterson is our Confucius, who is our Lao Tzu?

MG:

“History is a thing that you make.”

JDE:

“We’ve lost the metaphysics. We have to bring back the metaphysics.”

Why and how civilizations disintegrate.

MG:

“If you’re going to upload me, at least upload me in HD.”

JDE:

“It’s gotta get more fractal.”

Meow Wolf is The Shimmer in Annihilation

Archangel Michael & Garuda, archetypes expressed across the world in time and landscape

Michael and Michael talk about the dragon fighting St. Michael meteor-dinosaur connection thing.

Everybody tries to guess MG’s sign.

Dr Blue aka Norman Katz, student of Milton Erickson

Jungian vs Ericksonian psychotherapy and the importance of combining the two.

We talk smack on the sociopathic founders of NLP.

Mimetic theory.

Evolution, entropy, and the Tower of Babel.

Shout-Outs:

RadioLab

Douglas Rushkoff

Pac Man

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Carl Jung’s Red Book

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

Google Glass

Kevin Kelly

William Burroughs

Meow Wolf

Rudolf Steiner

“The Fighting Dinosaurs”

Paleontologist Robert Bakker

Houston Museum of Nature & Science

Timothy Leary

The Fourth Turning

History, Big History, and MetaHistory by SFI Press

Being John Malkovich

Gilles Deleuze

Peter Sloterdijk

The Joseph Campbell Foundation

Robertson Jeffers

Jon Steinbeck

Buddha Bomb

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

Tom Hui Hu - A Prehistory of the Cloud

The Square in the Tower by Neil Ferguson

The Architects of the Internet Apologize - New Yorker Magazine

Jeff Van Der Meer

Tool & Alex Grey

Parvati

Scott Adams

NLP

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This week is part two of the intense, bizarre, and wonderful roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we discuss the puzzling connection between clowns and DMT; John’s voyage into the strange realm of mediumship; and Michael’s life-altering series of UFO encounters right after college. Among other things…

The Guests:

Michael Aaron Kamins

https://twitter.com/michaelaaronk

John David Ebert

https://twitter.com/johndavidebert

Ikkyu Sojun

https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue

Subscribe to Future Fossils on any platform you desire:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils

Support this show on Patreon. It’s good for you and makes you feel good:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

We Discuss:

How everyone gets their own language once we invent the universal translator.

Addressing the question of hyperspace “entities” from nonduality and landscape agency.

Clown/Harlequin Theory in the psychedelic realm.

JDE:

“Now I don’t wanna do DMT. You’ve ruined it for me, because I don’t wanna see a clown.”

Ikkyu:

“Imagine Meow Wolf…but a thousand times more.”

The Joker is a floating signifier.

Ikkyu talks about an extremely potent and disturbing N,N-DMT trip.

The Mantis-Clown connection, vis-a-vis Michael’s Peruvian ayahuasca experiences.

The clown in Eastern philosophy as Lao Wonton, the childlike “crazy” old man in kung-fu movies.

Michael’s ONE critique of William Irwin Thompson (hint: “Lindisfarne,” what’s in a name?).

What is the difference between the techno-optimism of Buckminster Fuller and the techno-optimism of Peter Thiel, Peter Diamandis, and Jeff Bezos?

Trump the Clown, the Magician, the Alchemical Fool.

Ikkyu:

“What if I were like Duncan Trussell or Joe Rogan but I interview ideas, rather than people?”

JDE interviews Rudolf Steiner through a medium, Shruti Campbell. He tells us of his love affair with Steiner.

JDE explains how he become convinced that there are in fact legit mediums who can communicate with dead people.

The theme of confinement in world myth.

Exoteric lab institution science and esoteric wilderness field prospecting discovery science.

Michael goes into unprecedented detail about his UFO sightings in 2006.

Sufjan Stevens’ song “Concerning the UFO Sighting…”

Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Pope about UFOs.

Book: Who Built The Moon?

Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” music video (feat. Kate Bush)

Michael’s eternalist/quantum-democracy theory of our self-fulfilling origins/histories.

Dan Larimer vs. Vitalik Buterin on the limits of crypto-economic governance.

The connections between alien abductions and shamanic initiations.

Searching for metaphors complex enough to allow us to inhabit and dwell in hypermodernity.

Carl Jung

Crowley’s Thoth Tarot

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

James Hillman

Nassim Taleb

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

Rupert Sheldrake

John C. Wright

Sam Harris

Stephen Hawking

Erik Davis

Zechariah Sitchin

Westworld

“The Moon” Tarot Card

Greg Egan’s Distress

Finnegans Wake - HCE (“Here Comes Everyone”)

Blade Runner 2049

Charles Stross’ Accelerando

Jeff Noon (Vert & Pollen)

Steven Greer & CE-5

Jacques Vallee

J Allen Heinich (sp?)

Prometheus & Atlas

Mircea Eliade

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This week it's a deep dive into futurist Stowe Boyd's research on Social Scaling, Boundless Curiosity, Deep Generalists, Emergent Leadership, and other major features in the metamorphic landscape of the 21st Century workplace.

We live in an age when our human cognitive limits are being tested against a proliferation of possibilities in the digital space – and we zealously rush into always-on internet work, open office co-working spaces, enormous distributed online collaborations, and other novelties that seem to be more about the infinite capacity of our electronic tools than the finite reality of our minds and bodies.

Stowe Boyd has been studying and reporting on the future of work for over a decade, and his blog Work Futures is one of my cherished news sources for understanding how “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Talking with him is a blast of cool reason and warm humor about the insanity of the modern work environment and the impossible demands that it makes on us – pointing toward more lucid, grounded, manageable, and yes productive new modes of labor in the dizzying technological milieus to come.

Learn More:

StoweBoyd.com

WorkFutures.org

Check out a recent edition of his Work Futures newsletter:

https://workfutures.substack.com/p/work-futures-daily-the-human-spring

Support Future Fossils on Patreon and get access to secret episodes, our sci fi book club, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

We Discuss:

Invented the term “social tools” and founded the Work Futures blog.

How do we live in an unstable landscape in which new platforms are constantly replacing the ones where we’ve established merit and earned currencies?

The return of publishing to human scale as a response to ubiquitous weaponized advertising.

Book: Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock

The modern era of social networking isn’t about social concerns but business concerns…human curation returns to the fore in its primacy: newsletters, list management, etc.

Why is it that certain tools and practices “work” for work, and some don’t?

How certain ill-conceived collaboration software recreates the scaling problems of cruiseship tourism’s effects on local economies.

Anywhere-ism and “The horrible sameness of the places we’re working these days”

The paradox of blocking out open-office distractions with recordings of people talking in cafés.

“If you want to be creative, turn the lights down. You are more creative if you have high ceilings and dark. So if you take all that away, which is usually what they do in open offices…”

>>> Ten Work Skills for the Post-Normal Era

Laszlo Bach at Google using a data-driven approach to correlate skills with work success…not Ivy League degrees, not ability to solve certain IQ test type problems…

“BOUNDLESS CURIOSITY is the #1 skill for the future. The most creative people are insatiably curious. They want to know what works and why. And so that’s the skill you should seek. If you’re not naturally insatiably curious, then you should learn the techniques and skills involved with that and practice that so that you’re acting as if you’re insatiably curious, even though it’s a learned and not innate characteristic.”

How curiosity leads to unexpected second-order insights in at-first “unrelated” areas.

Bill Taylor, founder of Fast Company Magazine: four styles of leadership useful today.

The leader as a learning zealot.

The posthuman workplace: collaboration with radically other entities, be they AIs or transgenic persons.

The future of work looks like freestyle chess.

How and why to be a “deep generalist.”

“There’s still a lot of the Bronze Age in how typical companies are run…Bronze Age thinking is still 70% of companies.”

Emergent Leadership 21st Century Management, and Liquid Democracy.

AI and technological unemployment – a kind of “tragedy of the commons” as we each try to do the best thing for our organizations and race to the bottom.

Book: Amy Goldstein, Janesville

The collision of AI, climate change, and the collapse of globalist neoliberalism.

Book: William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order

“You have to start thinking about things at the watershed level. When you’re thinking about geography, it can’t just be the outlines of nation states, which are the remnants of old empires and other kinds of craziness. It has to have some logical relationship to the actual world, and that means city states, watersheds, and so on. And when you have that mindset and start to see through that lens, well, the desire of the Catalonian people to have their own state – it seems like an inexorable direction, and the notion that the EU is resisting that, fighting it, well…they’re fighting the future.”

The end of trucking and the inevitable riots.

Book: Project Hieroglyph, edited by Neal Stephenson

Using science fiction instead of futurist scenarios to make different futures truly palpable.

Three Visions of the future: Humania, Neo-Feudalistan, & “Just Horrible.”

“You can’t talk about the future of work without talking about the future in general, and the future in general is not just more of what we have today. It’s certainly not what we had in 1970.”

––

Cover Image Photo Credit: (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us

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This week’s guest is Epiphany Jordan of Austin, Texas – a nurturing touch professional whose therapy sessions help triage the crisis of loneliness and touch-hunger facing billions of tech-immersed but intimacy-stranded people. In her new book, Somebody Hold Me: The Single Person’s Guide to Nurturing Human Touch, Epiphany explains how to get your basic touch needs met – consensually – outside of romantic relationship. In our conversation we talk about why this is such a widespread issue, how people are fumbling their attempts to connect with one another, and what to do about it.

Her Website:

nurturinghumantouch.com

Printed Book:

amazon.com/gp/product/1732879206?pf_rd_p=c2945051-950f-485c-b4df-15aac5223b10&pf_rd_r=VGPWK0WEF50A2TD8YA3T  

E-Book:

amazon.com/Somebody-Hold-Me-Persons-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B07MM6FFBD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=somebody+hold+me&qid=1550610978&s=gateway&sr=8-2

Support Future Fossils on Patreon and get access to secret episodes, our sci fi book club, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Join the (lively, interesting) Facebook Group:

https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils

Subscribe on any platform you desire:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils

We Discuss:

The internet has not replaced human intimacy; it has only convinced many of us that it can.

“Because our culture identifies sex with touch, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, you’re not getting your touch needs met.”

“Nonconsensual touch is like a starving person stealing a loaf of bread, or something.”

When hugging someone is their worst nightmare.

Is not wanting to be touched something that should or should not be seen through the lens of trauma-induced disorder?

The future of getting touch needs met by nonpersons: heavy blankets, hugging machines, womb simulators, intimacy robots…

Eliza Schlesinger’s Elder Millennial standup special and how women in their 30s start displacing mother impulses onto their pets.

Why don’t we extend the same rights we give people to other nonhuman beings? (e.g., nonconsensual touch of animals…)

Is professional cuddling a symptom of a tragic dehumanizing trend in the evolution of civilization?

“Paleo-cuddling”

Tips for effective, safe, consensual, non-sexual cuddling.

The tribal joy of the pseudo-anonymity of cuddle puddles.

The double-edged sword of oxytocin.

Teaching touch to teenagers.

Touch deprived, or touch illiterate? Multicultural societies and trouble navigating overlapping rules about intimacy.

“Part of what I’m trying to do is have people write another story about what it means to be human and how humans treat them. There’s so much distrust and fear of other humans, and humans can be nice to each other, and kind and gentle and look out for each other. I think it can help us be more of a global village…”

“I don’t want to be a part of the revolution unless it has to do with people being nice to each other.”

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This week’s guest is Nadja Oertelt – research scientist turned film-maker and founder of Massive Science, a science communication community that cares about restoring care to the storytelling of scientific discovery. Not only is the website wonderfully both rigorous and easy on the eye, the writing takes you on a journey. Clearly she and her colleagues are doing something right by teaching scientists it’s not just okay, but vital to the meaning-making of their work, to have a story and not just solutions.

Here’s her amazing publication:

https://massivesci.com/

And an interview she did with Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/catescottcampbell/2017/04/10/the-limit-does-not-exist-nadja-oertelt-has-a-massive-take-on-science/

Super cool short film series Nadja did for HarvardX Neuroscience:

https://vimeo.com/channels/972301 

We Discuss:

How working with scientists was a revelation into the social process of knowledge production and translation.

Anna Wexler & DIY brain interfaces.

http://www.annawexler.com/

David Cox, Director MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ibm-David.D.Cox

The erasure of the subject in academic writing.

Integral psychology and the application of psychometric information to the addressing of truth claims.

How do psychedelics change the way we understand and practice science?

Alex & Allyson Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

https://cosm.org

https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/technologists-of-attention-at-the-chapel-of-sacred-mirrors

The Fundamentalism-Zen Continuum in the thermodynamics of computation.

Creating a new neural ecology of science by including more kinds of people in the investigations.

“We’re approaching some sort of memento mori for reality.”

The “black box” of AI is not as big of a problem as the “black box” of why we feel the need to create these technologies in the first place.

The human reality and personal sacrifices of science and knowledge production.

The pain of becoming a storyteller for so many who have been trained as scientists.

How social media has changed the subjectivity of young researchers.

The importance of care in all of this.

Allison Parrish - artist & programmer.

https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/itp/853082171

Irreversible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing & Science - Steven Meyer

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=750

This episode is backed by Mike Schwab of KnowYourMeme.com, a fascinating living document/community exploring memes and their effects.

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Bruce Damer is a living legend and international man of mystery – specifically, the mystery of our cosmos, to which he’s devoted his life to exploring: the origins of life, simulating artificial life in computers, deriving amazing new plans for asteroid mining, and cultivating his ability to receive scientific inspiration from “endotripping” (in which he stimulates his brain’s own release of psychoactive compounds known to increase functional connectivity between brain regions). He’s about to work with Google to adapt his origins of life research to simulated models of the increasingly exciting hot springs origin hypothesis he’s been working on with Dave Deamer of UC Santa Cruz for the last several years. And he’s been traveling around the world experimenting with thermal pools, getting extremely close to actually creating new living systems in situ as evidence of their model. Not to mention his talks with numerous national and private space agencies to take the S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D. asteroid mining scheme into space to kickstart the division and reproduction of our biosphere among/between the stars…

I find it amazing that anyone as potently psychedelic as Bruce gets the focused listening attention of audiences at NASA, Scientific American, Google, and numerous esteemed academic communities around the world. A late-career PhD who spent his early years designing software that changed the world and going on adventures with his dear friend Terence McKenna, talking to Bruce is an inspiration and reminder that the big questions really DO take the dedication of a lifetime – and that dedication DOES bear fruit.

(Appropriately to the McKenna link, there were some connectivity issues during our call that stretched out Bruce’s voice in a way very reminiscent of the Shpongle grain delay remixes of Terence’s talks. I left these in because I think they’re funny and in keeping with the good doctor’s trippy ideas, but apologies regardless.)

Bruce was the second guest of this show way back in Episode 4, but that was three years ago and his work (and my ability to discuss it with him) has developed considerably since then. Enjoy this high-level update about one of the deepest questions we have on the table, right now…the profound implications of this new model of life’s origins for everything from business and politics to the strategies for thriving through an age of worldwide turbulence and transition…

Bruce’s Website:

https://damer.com

We Discuss:

• Updates on Bruce’s efforts to recreate the conditions of the original “progenote,” a living system before the invention of cells;

• How modern life prevents a second “Genesis” from happening on the Earth;

• Why life must have started in a wet-dry cycling pond, and not in the sea or on land;

• The three properties of life: crowding/containment; networks; and information storage – or P,I,M: Probability, Interaction, Memory;

• The origin of life as a niche-construction process;

• The origin of life vs. the origin of individuality and competition – likelihood that started as integrated consortia, not free-living cells in resource conflict;

• Scaling up the progenote origin of life hypothesis to human systems and the origins of human civilization with “social protocells”;

• Does life require organic molecules, or is it primarily an informational process?

• Are memes even a real thing? (Compared to genes, we can’t point to one…)

• Working with Google to simulate the origins of life with a chemistry-modeling deep learning system;

• The increasing evolvability of (some) genomes in ever-more complex environments leading to a transition from genetic to cultural inheritance;

• How evolutionary networks can bump themselves off local fitness peaks and into novelty to prevent becoming over-adapted to tiny niches;

• Cycles of federalism and fragmentation in both nature and society;

• The possibility of a global plan to build sea walls – to make it an issue of national defense, and a better use of our time than border walls;

• What can we learn from the origins of life about the future of planetary culture and the ongoing evolution of our “progenote planet?”

SEE ALSO:

Bruce on Future Fossils Podcast Episode 4:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/5a85dca3144c44bd2557158b

Michael’s Version 1.0 Mind Map & Bibliography of research on major evolutionary transitions in self-organizing systems:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022

Evolution Evolving Conference:

https://evolutionevolving.org/

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Erick Godsey was almost my roommate in Austin, and even though I trust our destinies I still consider it a bummer that we didn’t. He is a nobler beast than I. He’s also the host of The Myths That Make Us, which is an excellent program for reasons that have nothing to do with my recent appearance on his show, but that’s nice too…

What Erick IS is devoted to helping people live the absolute best stories that they can, which means first figuring out why we’re living the stories we already ARE.

Notes are slim for this episode but that’s because just go listen to it right now.

Erick’s website:

https://erickgodsey.com

“A great idea reconstructs your map. It’s one of the most painful things you can go through, but it’s beautiful.”

“I was an atheist but I prayed. At night, I would pray to a thing I didn’t understand and say, thank you, because all the people who were asking for things were stupid, and I was self-righteous.”

Don’t read Gödel, Escher, Bach and then take 5 grams of mushrooms. (Psychedelic Conservatives.)

“If you tell a twenty-eight year old, ‘Your story is an illusion,’ it f-cks more people up than it helps…especially in Western culture, it’s not the right medicine at the right time.”

Our stories are not useful for as long as they used to be. Are they no longer serving us in the “infoquake” of life online? How long will our evolutionary drives and archetypes persist amidst this metamorphosis?

Spiritual Bypass. It’s all perfect. There’s a season for bullshitting yourself. Or no, you shouldn’t ever do it. Don’t resist your own psychodynamic forces.

Most adaptive story: you are not a noun; you are a verb. Least adaptive story: you are a noun; you have to endure; the world is happening to you.

What to do about being disempowered in a global landscape of tragic news, in our own personal lives, to do anything about anything?

Is it better to be good or great?

How to be good ancestors.

Can we bring our full selves to work at our “day jobs”? What does it look like when we do? (AKA, What’s it like working at Onnit?)

What are your coping mechanisms and how can you channel them to make the world a better place?

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Android Jones is one of the world’s hottest digital artists – even if it’s kind of a mistake to label him this way and limit his creative action to the digital. A master portraitist, designer, and explorer of new tools, Android made concept art for video games in his early years before becoming the creative consultant for the best-in-class Corel Painter software, touring the world while doing live visuals for huge musical acts, collaborating on epic dome projection shows, and ultimately pioneering the possibilities of VR with his latest project, Microdose. But arguably his most vital and illuminating evolutionary edge as an artist has been with his two children, learning to raise the next generation of curious and creative minds. This week on Future Fossils, I sit down for a three-year-overdue discussion with one of the most objectively inspiring people I can call a friend – to talk about our hopes and our concerns for Those Who Come Next, and what being a creative parent means in our Age of Transition.

https://androidjones.com

https://microdosevr.com

Join my community of patrons and receive exclusive perks (like book club membership):

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Join the daily discussions erupting like psychedelic flowers in our Facebook Group:

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We Discuss:

• Electromineralism & medium as material agent lending its qualities to your identity
• Tools as extensions of the body, and the most modern tools we have are still so ancient
• Reimagining truths that have real legs on them, not praising absolute truths
• Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse
• Being a part of the six thousand year plus art history conversation that we have
• Drilling down to making deeper and more universally relevant art to “provide a greater reflective surface” for viewers
• Visionary Art, (a different take on)
• What psychology teaches about making (real) art *for* people
• How fatherhood changed his art and life and everything
• Making art with kids – both digital and analog media – and how the forms differ as learning experiences
• What VR has that other media do not, and Android’s first breakthrough moment in Microdose VR
• When Android met Robert Venosa at Art Hardware in Boulder at age 16
• There are too many things to learn
• The future of visual performance is WHAT? (!!!)
• THE ART SCHOOL
• Going Icarus to Daedalus
• Apprenticeship
• The transformative potentials of VR as biofeedback
• What scares Android Jones?
• What comes next?

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This week’s guest is professional psilocybin retreat host, long-time practicing Buddhist, and general good guy Mitsuaki Chi of Amsterdam. In this episode we get into the practices and benefits of psychedelic community, his unusual path from hardcore meditator to mushroom trip facilitator, and how he understands his life and purpose in light of a mysterious intelligence none of us can fully comprehend…

trufflestherapy.com

tripsitters.org

“Even after so much time in meditation, I was still falling back into my patterns…”

Coming to our senses.

Going Buddhism-to-Psychedelics (instead of the usual other way around). How does meditation prepare you for tripping?

Control? Renunciation? Acceptance? Grief?

How does psychedelic healing as spiritual practice interface (if at all) with science and medical institutions?

“More circles, less stages. Which is more important, direct experiences from a hundred people or one scientist who has been studying this stuff in a laboratory?”

What are the longitudinal benefits of practice in a psychedelic community?

“I think the two things people want more than anything are purpose and community [and] I think people are realizing how poisonous social media can be.”

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My graduate advisor Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the most consistently inspiring and refreshingly different thinkers I’ve ever met. In our first Future Fossils conversation, we discussed his work to apply a profoundly “meta” and pluralistic philosophy to the everyday work of organizational development and social impact. In this discussion, we turn over the rock and examine his decades of inquiry into some of the world’s most puzzling and confounding phenomena – namely, those surrounding the UFO and its aura of science-challenging incursions into mundane reality. 

Might “Exostudies” be the locus of a transformation in how we understand reality? This is not your normal New Age conversation about aliens, but a rigorous look into the persistent weirdness and problematic implications of one of humankind’s greatest mysteries. As Phil Dick famously said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” If UFOs are here to stay – with all of their attendant provocations to our oversimple categories (self and other, artificial and natural, hallucination and perception, physical and immaterial) – then we are overdue for a new definition of “reality.” In preparation for his Exostudies online course this fall, we look at how to make sense of the stubbornly ineffable – an evolutionary call to take up higher-dimensional logic and more nuanced understandings of What Is…

http://www.exostudies.org/

“When you go into the UFO field, at least with an open heart and mind, you come across some really crazy shit. It is a freakshow. There are so many bizarre claims being made by standup citizens who are quite believable in what they are saying, even though what they’re saying just does not map onto our general view of reality.”

“The truth is stranger than science fiction. Not just fiction, but science fiction.”

“The phenomenon is subjective and objective; it’s subjective and objective simultaneously; and it’s neither. So I think what it’s asking us is to re-examine the relationship between mind and matter, and how do we relate to subject and object, and how has our current scientific methodology failed us horribly in having a more sophisticated answer or framing or understanding of how these two aspects are related.”

“There are really good, legitimate photographs, and trace evidence, and all kinds of physical evidence for UFO craft and other otherworldly realities…and yet, there are so many fakes. And how do you sift through all that? You almost can’t.”

“We’re entering into an augmented and virtual space that’s going to be ontologically fragmented, and highly pluralistic, and solipsistic. So how do we navigate that culturally? I don’t know, but I think we’re largely unprepared.”

“We’re not that far from discovering some form of mini-life elsewhere. And as soon as that happens, then the floodgates are going to open in considering the implications of that.”

“So many UFO or ET enthusiasts often want to put everything in one box, like ‘they’re all bad,’ ‘they’re all good,’ ‘they’re all future versions of ourselves.’ I think it’s much messier than that.”

“I think one of the core strategies is hermeneutic generosity. A sense of critical thinking, but from a place of generosity, where we stay open. Postmodernism has been so jaded – the hermeneutics of suspicion – I think when we approach these phenomena, we need a different orientation.”

“To really bring any kind of justice to this inquiry, we need to draw on the best thinking from as many kinds of disciplines as we can – because the phenomenon is that big, and that mysterious, and that paradoxical. So anything short of a meta, integrative approach – and even that – is going to fail.”

Mentioned:

Diana Slattery, John Mack, Avi Loeb, Ken Wilber, Jeff Kripal, Whitley Strieber, Arthur Brock, George Knapp, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Stuart Davis, Jeff Salzman, Richard Doyle, Carl Jung, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, DW Pasulka, Eric Wargo, Jacques Vallee

Sean’s appearance on the Daily Evolver Podcast:

https://www.dailyevolver.com/2019/02/taking-aliens-seriously/

If you liked this episode, check out Episodes 60 & Episode 91:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/60

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/91

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This week’s guest is Bernie Taylor, whose novel interpretation of ancient cave paintings suggests an overlooked and deeply significant alternative take on the subjective experience and world-space of prehistoric human culture. Finding animals hidden in the interplay of paint and rock forms unnoticed by other archeologists, and corresponding with a diverse array of experts over decades (including legendary animal researcher George Gamow), he argues that these murals depict a heroic journey across continents, the crossing of the Iberian Peninsula, an ancient rite of passage coded in time and story that, if accepted by the scholarly community, would transform our understanding of our ancestors.

Bernie’s Website: beforeorion.com

We Discuss:

• How Bernie noticed an entire parade of African and European animals in the El Castillo’s Cave of Disks that no one had seen before;

• The ancient animal versions of the constellations that became the modern ones (crocodile > Draco, great auk > Cygnus, etc.);

• The prehistoric origins of the Twelve Trials of Hercules and the origins of the monster from misinterpreted shamanic lore;

• Did the ancients really use cave art to track the precession of the equinoxes?

• How Bernie reconstructed the ancients’ mapping of the annual calendar to various animal life cycle markers and visible stars;

• Was the El Castillo mural testing for the ability to find hidden images - evidence of a shamanic apprentice’s ability to think differently?

• The role of neurodiversity in prehistoric AND modern human society, and how that may relate to the function, not dysfunction, of dyslexia and autism;

• How this initiatic journey is the earliest record we have of the heroic monomyth, which modern secular artists like Billy Joel continue to express even without knowing why these archetypes persist in human dream and story;

• What we might learn from these ancient stories, and the minds of those who made them, to inform our strategies for an(other) era of massive change on Earth;

“Modern art isn’t even modern art. It’s a recreation of paleolithic art.”

Future Fossils theme music: “God Detector” by Skytree (ft. Michael Garfield)

Additional music: "On Higher Ground" by Michael Garfield

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Eliot Peper (Episode 47) is back on the show this week to talk about the themes around and within his Analog trilogy of very adjacent and believable sci fi novels (Bandwidth, Borderless, and the new “conclusion” Breach): that is, about the complex interactions between people and technology, both the layer cake of deep utilities we take for granted and the new affordances that disruptive tools produce – and how we shape our lives within them.

https://www.eliotpeper.com/

“One of the most fun things for me as a novelist about writing fiction is that it is very much about the questions, rather than the answers…if the answer’s obvious, I don’t need to write a book about it.”

“You can’t really tell history without the history of technology.”

“Congress writes laws about what’s going on, not what might be going on ten years from now. Policymaking is largely a reactionary measure.”

“We haven’t figured out the new societies we want to build, given the new realities we’ve already invented.”

“If you start thinking about the entire internet as an AI, then Google is not a company that is building what could be in the future some kind of AI program. Rather, Google and its status as a corporation, all of the corporate hierarchies that exist within it, and all of the people working on teams there, are actually just one part of that AI.”

“I’m not a big believer in unitary self as an idea. I think we are all made up of MANY selves. We have these competing elements within us, and part of what it means to be human is to stitch these together into a coherent narrative. And we do that on the fly all the time.”

“Your solution is going to create new problems, and the best way to best way to deal with that knowingly is to try to keep an open mind, try to maintain your beginner’s mind, maintain your state of awareness about the world and continually challenge your own assumptions.”

“We are living in an age of acceleration – and yet, we have ALWAYS been confronted by a universe that defies our limited ability to make sense of it.”

“My hope is that by using it like reasonable, mutually respectful people, we can turn the digital world into a place that is still gonna have some of the nasty stuff, but is gonna have a lot of the good stuff.”

Mentioned: Kevin Kelly, Geoffrey West, Douglas Rushkoff

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Additional Music: “On Higher Ground” by Michael Garfield

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/on-higher-ground

Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes:

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This week is a watershed moment for Future Fossils Podcast: the show’s first guest host! My friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut is an engineer who creates occasional one-shot podcasts of fiction and nonfiction, and (according to him) worries about the future too much. We met at InterPlanetary Festival last year on the visit that inspired me to move to Santa Fe, and ever since we’ve had a rich correspondence of mutual far-future fiction recommendations and armchair philosophy chats.

Kevin sent me his very cool readings of two essays with the same name, each portraying very different version of “The Next Ten Billion Years,” and both so provocative I felt like sharing them here on the show’s main feed – with my own commentary at the end, on blind spots in imagining deep time and our own psychedelically weird future.

You can find Kevin active in the Future Fossils discussion groups at Facebook and Patreon.

Professor Ugo Bardi blogs at https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com and http://chimeramyth.blogspot.com. You can read his essay here.

John Michael Greer posts longer works at https://www.ecosophia.net and shorter works at https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org. You can read his essay here.

Outro reading excerpted from Michael Garfield’s “How to Live in the Future Part 2: The Future is More of Everything.”

Cover Artwork by evolutionary robotics researcher Andrew Lincoln Nelson.

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

Additional Music: “On Higher Ground” by Michael Garfield

Additional Music by http://www.daikaiju.org & http://www.evanbrau.com

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This week’s guest is Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. 

Contrary to your most likely first impression based on the title of the book alone, this is a supremely carefully constructed argument that anticipates its critics, understands statistics and their abuse, appeals to our desire for simplicity in scientific explanations, and single-handedly reorganizes the entire field of parapsychological research beneath a new and rational umbrella that allows for major weirdness without sacrificing mechanistic causation or parsimony. Telepathy and spooky action at a distance, Jungian synchronicity and many worlds quantum physics all get re-evaluated under Wargo’s tesseract-brain model, in which there’s no such thing as entanglement, but living systems co-opt quantum post-selection to “steer” toward evolutionarily significant events. 

If you have ever dreamt of something that then happened in your waking life, this episode’s for you. And if you think that time’s an arrow and this all sounds like high nonsense, this episode is also for you.

I can’t possibly attempt to cover all the subjects we discuss in these two hours, but here are books and essays that we reference (some of which I haven’t read):

Eric Wargo - Time Loops

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Loops-Precognition-Retrocausation-Unconscious/dp/1938398920

J. Scott Turner - Purpose & Desire

https://www.amazon.com/Purpose-Desire-Something-Darwinism-Explain/dp/0062651560

(I have to make a personal note that without having read this book, I’ve read enough reviews to caution anyone against taking it as legitimate science. I’ve argued for the importance of beauty and desire, purpose and effort in the evolutionary process – and I’ve argued evolution in general does have a kind of direction. So I’m sympathetic to the author’s desire to re-introduce these ideas into the discussion. But from everything I can tell this particular book misrepresents evolutionary theory in its attempts to get where it wants to go, and I can’t support that.)

Paul Davies - The Goldilocks Enigma

https://www.amazon.com/The-Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Right/dp/0713998830%

Matthew Fox - “The Return of the Black Madonna”

http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-century

Seth Lloyd, et al. - “The quantum mechanics of time travel through post-selected teleportation”

https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615

Eric Wargo - “Dream Paleontology”

http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4215

Eric Wargo - “What Lies Under The Skin”

http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3198

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Additional Music: “It All Turned Out All Right” by Michael Garfield

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/it-all-turned-out-all-right

Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes (and the last ten minutes of this conversation):

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“I want to break the idea that housing is an investment vehicle. I mean housing is a f-cking HUMAN NEED.”

This week’s guest is Australian futurist Nathan Waters, whose vision for a mobile, modular mashup of apartment living and driverless cars offers a solution to a trifecta of wicked problems in affordable housing, cost of living, and enjoyable work. We’re talking about a mature and equitable sharing economy that goes asteroid-to-dinosaurs on the exploitative systems of corporations like Uber and Airbnb…this is an episode for anyone who dreams of a fairer and funner world, a world that reconciles the yearning for flexibility and adventure with the desire for a nice place to call your own:

Nathan’s popular essay on “driverless hotel rooms”:

https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1?gi=cecb64856db9

Nathan’s blockchain-based skill-sharing economy website:

https://www.peerism.org/

Nathan’s futures-oriented social media channel, Futawe:

https://twitter.com/futawe?lang=en

Nathan cohosts this YouTube talkshow about the singularity, Hive45:

https://www.youtube.com/user/hive45com/videos

Somebody either ripped off his driverless hotel rooms idea or just stumbled on it independently:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2018/11/27/self-driving-hotel-room/2123668002/

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/autonomous-travel-suites/index.html

From this episode:

“A job is a terrible, terrible concept. I think of jobs as modern-day slavery. It’s a bunch of wasted mind and human capital.”

“We have material abundance because of capitalism, but now it’s almost an existential threat. And we need to transition quickly to something else.”

Most of the housing space and vehicle space we own is unused most of the time.

We can’t legislate affordable housing because the incumbent politicians are real estate speculators.

Modular hotels made of autonomous vehicle components (adding a z-axis to the not-a-trailer-park for hip young professionals).

A new resolution for our age-old dialogue between sedentary and nomadic communities, wanderers and people of place.

How to fit 9 billion people into 100K apartment buildings; see also: Paolo Soleri’s Lean Linear City.

Building a blockchain-based, decentralized skill-sharing economy.

A/B testing modular cities to find the optimum layout for human happiness.

Mark Lakeman of City Repair and restoring streets to a safe commons.

Can we handle constantly fluctuating and re-organizing architecture?

Geophysical filter bubbles.

Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon and get access to dozens of secret episodes, book club calls, live concert recordings, and more:

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“The human being is actually this kaleidoscope of different ways to relate to time and space. And to be present with it all, to be awake with it all, is what we’re doing.”

Jean Gebser mapped the mutating structures of human consciousness, the topology of mind from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral. His work inspired generations of inquiry by authors like William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber. Now Jeremy Johnson’s latest book for Revelore Press expands into the truly visionary and unique “amensional” reality that Gebser posits as the next mutation for our planetary culture.  

“We’re not just going to have an ‘archaic revival’ and dump what we’ve been doing with the nightmare of history. There’s something that’s been achieved in this kind of coalescing of the self and the emergence of spatial linear time that’s true, as well.”

“The endgame of perspectivalism and the mental world…is eventually breaking down to the point where everyone has their own little perspectival ‘reality tunnel,’ where nobody’s able to talk to one another and everybody’s in this sense of cultural warfare and fragmentation and social isolation.”

“You should know by now that things are ever-present.”

Jeremy’s Book:

https://revelore.press/product/seeing-through-the-world/

Jeremy’s Podcast:

http://www.jeremydanieljohnson.com/mutations

Discussed:

James Joyce

Marshall McLuhan

Martin Heidegger

Sri Aurobindo

Grant Morrison

Timothy Morton

Doug Rushkoff

Eugene Thacker

Graham Harman

Support the show on Patreon for an avalanche of secret episodes, writing, art, music, and the Future Fossils Book Club:

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This week we surf the fun-gularity with the brilliant artist, standup comic, and podcaster Ramin Nazer! This episode is significantly less a heady philosophy-of-science discussion than usual and significantly more a wank-fest of two people who love each other’s shows going on about all the mind-blowing visionary notions contained therein. Kick back, light some incense, and prepare for a juicy conversation about where we stand in the Cosmic Order and what to do with all of our creative possibility…covering everything from universal basic income to celebrity schadenfruede, visionary art and science fiction to to the psychological impact of trying to stay original in the midst of a tech singularity. If you’re anything like I am, Ramin is going to inspire the hell out of you. Enjoy…

Ramin’s Website:

https://rainbowbrainskull.com/collections/prints

Michael on Ramin’s podcast, Rainbow Brainskull:

https://www.raminnazer.com/blogs/rainbow-brainskull-hour/michael-garfield

Mentioned:

Archan Nair, The Teafaerie, Nikola Tesla, Onyx Ashanti, King Raam, The Rock, Andrew Yang, Yuval Harari, Bill Gates, Star Trek Discovery, Charles Stross’ Accelerando & Glasshouse, Black Mirror, Esperanza Spalding, Duncan Trussell, Richard Florida, Jeff Bezos, William Irwin Thompson, Terence McKenna, John C. Wright’s Eschaton Sequence, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Eric Wargo’s Time Loops, Colin Frangicetto, Who Built The Moon?, No Man’s Sky, An Oral History of the End of Reality, Ariana Grande, Jimi Hendrix, Amazon Alexa, Life in the Glass Age at Burning Man 2013, Dadara (Daniel Rozenberg), The Mirage Men, Jason Silva, Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Michaelangelo, Slavoj Zizek, Marshall McLuhan, Chuck Palahniuk, Jordan Peterson, Aziz Ansari, Louis CK, Julia Cameron, Alan Shelton, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Zappa, Mortal Kombat, Roko’s Basilisk, Norman “Dr. Blue” Katz, Joe Biden, Awake Aware Alive Podcast, Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, Rak Razam, Adam Dipert, Giant Leap Dance Company, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Greg Parkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Weird Studies, Brave Browser

Support this show on Patreon and score a zillion awesome perks:

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This week we dive into the troublesome, urgent, and underdiscussed issue of space ethics with planetary scientist and artist Divya M. Persaud. Can we transcend the traumatic conflict and exploitation that characterize human history, come together in compassionate mutual understanding and respectful discourse, and leave our children with better and more interesting problems? Or are we doomed to transmit the legacy of violence we inherited into fractured futures even more disparate, tragic, and unequal than our own time? A deep dive into the real stakes of space, and a preliminary exposition of the ethical discussions we will need to get there…

Divya’s Website:

https://divyampersaud.wordpress.com/about/

Selected Writings:

https://phdvolcanology.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/space-and-time-for-diversity/

https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2018/02/talking-about-tesla-by-emily-lakdawalla.html

https://twitter.com/Divya_M_P/status/1080310839465467909

Intro Music: Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Outro Music: Divya M. Persaud, “Orogenesis” for Voice, Violin, Saxophone, and Piano

https://soundcloud.com/divyamp/orogenesis-for-voice-violin-saxophone-and-piano`

Additional reading on the ethics of space exploration:

https://www.bmsis.org/the-ethics-of-space-exploration/

https://theconversation.com/eight-ethical-questions-about-exploring-outer-space-that-need-answers-98878

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/bioethics/resources/articles/articles-on-the-ethics-of-space-exploration/

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2017-business-and-economics-of-space/Documents/John%20Rummel.pdf

Support Future Fossils on Patreon to get access to our science fiction book club calls, secret episodes, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Join the daily conversation in the Future Fossils facebook group:

https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils 

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This week’s guest is Magenta Ceiba, Executive Creative Officer (ECO) for the Bloom Network, a worldwide constellation of regenerative design hackers working in ecology, economics, civil engineering, software design, restorative justice, organizational development, and more. Bloom is hosting Pollination, an “unconference” or immersive in-person hack-a-thon, this coming weekend in San Francisco – a place for this amazing extended international network (including you, potentially) to convene for design sprints for new practices and systems to restore the health and value of our world.

I hope you’ll treat this episode as a gateway into an amazing profusion of awesome ideas and people, just the very tip of a very deep and well-furnished rabbithole.

Here are some leads to get you started: 

• See the Pollination 2019 program on Bloom Network’s website.

(If you have friends in the Bay Area who might like to come, here’s a promo code for a $50 discount: BLOOM50 so they can join for just $195. The Bloom Network also has low income/scholarship tickets available: please fill in the form here. I am not an affiliate and get no reward from this, other than knowing that you attended and got to participate.)

• Magenta’s personal website.

• Another excellent conversation with Magenta (plus copious resource links) at Abundant Edge Podcast.

• Mark Heley interviews Pollination 2019 MC (and Future Fossils guest) Maya Zuckerman.

These three quotes came in Rob Breszny’s email newsletter today and couldn’t be more appropriate:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

—Buckminster Fuller

“We have to encourage the future we want rather than trying to prevent the future we fear.”

—Bill Joy

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

—Dan Millman

Related Episodes:

• Episode 46 - Magenta Ceiba’s first appearance on Future Fossils.

• Episode 56 - Sophia Rohklin on the inter-relationship of ecology & economy.

• Episode 61 - Jamaica Stevens on crisis, rebirth, and transformation.

• Episode 98 - Decentralization Panel at Arcosanti w/ members of NuMundo Project, Unify, & The Institute of Ecotechnics.

Credits:

• Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).

• Additional Music: “Single & Feeling” by Michael Garfield.

• Episode Cover Image: Concept Art for The Fifth Sacred Thing by Jessica Perlstein.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we’re joined by David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Technology exploring the effects of technology on how we think. David’s led a fascinating and nonlinear life, studying Heiddeger as a young philosopher, working in marketing for high technology, working as a journalist, and authoring four books on technology, creativity, and knowledge. His new book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility, explores what changes for us in the age of machine learning.

I have to admit, I was worried this was going to be just another technocratic puff piece when I started. Certainly it’s a Harvard Business Review Press volume, speaking largely to a business audience; but this is a book that doesn’t flinch at the weirdness of a world in which we know things we don’t know how we know. David’s argument is for a creative embrace of the complexity and mystery that has always surrounded us – that we are in fact made of – and that is becoming much more obvious in light of superhuman but opaque machine intelligences that rehab us from the delusions of our modern pretense that the world is knowable, transparent, and controllable. But unlike the doomsayers of the AI conversation, David has an enviable peace about the fact that we never actually had a lock on what is really going on – and argues eloquently for a fresh encounter with a world of wonder, possibility, and the unknown.

David at Harvard:

https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/dweinberger

David on Medium (“Machine Learning Might Render The Human Quest for Knowledge Pointless”):

https://onezero.medium.com/machine-learning-might-render-the-human-quest-for-knowledge-pointless-5425f8b00a45

With open APIs, open access journals, game modding, and other empowering information technologies, we are purposefully making the world less predictable.

Laws are not necessarily the most accurate way of describing reality.

The death knell for the theory of everything - letting go of unifying universal frameworks.

“It’s not really a three-body problem. It’s an every-body problem, because everything with gravity effects everything else.”

“Everything - EVERYTHING in our lives we basically don’t know, and can’t predict. But the picture of our lives has been, until recently, ‘It’s simple and law-like.’ The chaos, this is our lives. The laws, they are real, they are helpful, but they don’t govern as much as we like to think.”

“We think out in the world with tools. There’s no shame in this, but it does mean we’re not locked in our own heads. And now we have new tools.”

“…it depends on what you count as an explanation.”

“We need to leave room for the accidental, because that is the stuff of our lives.”

“I don’t know what a transparent algorithm is.”

Are we willing to trade a thousand auto deaths a year for the explicability of autonomous vehicle safety algorithms? Or fuel efficiency?

“An explanation is a tool. It’s not a state of the world.”

• Relatedly, we just read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem in the Future Fossils Book Club:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/book-club-3-body-29353389?cid=26063131

• Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).

• Additional Music: “Single & Feeling” by Michael Garfield.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Norman Katz, aka Dr. Blue – a lifelong practitioner of hypnotherapy and the impresario of 3SidedWhole, nine acres of magical weirdness in the desert outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve known Dr. Blue for nearly a decade and he’s deeply enriched my life over the years with his amazing stories, empowering mind hacks, and community of soulful southwestern weirdos. In this episode, he regales us with stories of psychological research into UFOs, past lives, fractals, and flow states; the history of hypnosis, his study under hypnotherapy pioneer Milton Erickson, the psychophysiology of laughter yoga, and – more broadly – the importance, and the surprising ease, of choosing the trance you want to be in…

Dr. Blue’s Website:

http://www.normankatzphd.com/curricula-vitae.html

3SidedWhole Website:

http://www.3sidedwhole.com/

“We were doing LSD as the patient and the therapist simultaneously…it was quite interesting.”

“There still is no study that verifies that hypnosis is a particular brain state or neurological constellation. Hypnosis is not a brain state. It turns out to be a skill and an aptitude that’s based on combining attention, and fantasy, and a predilection for dissociation.”

“Our perception of reality is at least half constructed by what we expect, what we imagine, and what we pretend. In fact, it’s really hard to teach people new things, because most of the time they’re trying to match new things to their old models.”

“It was the only lecture I’ve ever seen where 300 psychotherapists stood up afterward an gave him a standing ovation. And his theory was, bascially, individual psychotherapy is not only ineffective, it’s wrong, and it disconnects people from their community. He said, the biggest mistake in Western Civilization was when Descartes said, ‘Cognito ergo sum,’ ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And what he should have said was, ‘Convivo ergo sum.’ ‘I celebrate in community, therefore I am.’”

“At any point in time, ask yourself this question: ‘If I had been hypnotized to be doing what I’m doing right now and having this experience, what would I have been told?’”

“Erickson used to tell his students, ‘Pretend, and pretend you’re not pretending.’”

“In the West, most people breathe too much.”

“I had a formal psychology training at Harvard. Most of that turned out to be nonsense. Learn to unlearn. Learn to forget. Learn to be innocent. Let yourself continue to reinvent yourself and discover who you are, because you are more than any of us think you are.”

Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Intro Music: “Undefeatable Optimism Gets Up From K.O.” by Michael Garfield

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Outro Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Appendix: 51 blackbelt hypnosis skills, a partial list of course

(the master skill is to perceive a coherent reality in one frame ignoring the 27 other timelines)

instant time travel, to past, present and future. multiple timeline realities possible like in string theory in quantum physics

humor, ability to tell self joke and beginning laughing, and see humor and paradox in all situations

increased creativity as needed, transcend functional fixedness, and create new uses for objects, tools, situations 

ability to reframe anything

ability to create synthesis to create positive action altered states of consciousness

ability to make pain disappear

ability to increase pleasure to ecstatic levels

ability to shift mood instantly 

ability to tap into higher consciousness, both neurologically and to source (the universe)

ability to become WISE without thinking (i.e. go into no trance trance in which wisdom flows)

abilities to see life as movie within movie within movies and change the stories

ability to profoundly relax and melt, both physically and mentally

to be comfortable both inside and outside shared realities

ability to balance two nervous systems, sympathetic and parasympathetic, i.e. hypno-autogenics master

ability to come out of shell and act immediately, go fast or slow

ability to tell stories within stories within stories with threaded key meanings or concepts

ability to create useful symptoms as necessary e.g. lust for reading certain materials, exercise, etc.

ability to create amnesia or hyper recall memory (memory palace)

ability to be in the now in slow motion

ability to enter mystical states of oneness or everything-ness and transition through the infinity loop

ability to create and radiate happiness, joy and energy

ability to avoid the DARK SIDE of hypnotic hexes, vengeance or negative energy and to recognize when others are doing such and intervene

ability to do hypnotic shamanic ceremonies to invoke sacred space

ability to intervene in disease or create disease

ability to discern the "truth" or "lies" of self and others trance states

hypnotic protection of self and others, use of attention filters

sensory awareness enhancement (Charlotte Selver) both internal and external

mastering use of breathing

peak performance, for self and others – golf example, 2 holes in one in a row

ability to direct and choose trances for self and others (magic number in psychology 87 plus or minus two)

ability to completely let go

ability to experience and create compassion through mirror neurons

ability to alter blood blow: for healing work, pain control, sex therapy

ability to have too much fun

ability to create and use posthypnotic suggestion for self and others

ability to create health through medical interventions for surgery,

psychoimmunology and general well being

ability to will to live and to enjoy life

ability to find meaning and purpose in any situation, circumstances, and life challenge

ability to control altered states of consciousness both from plant guides, extreme circumstances and as training and for emergency interventions

ability to tap into special energies

ability to erase self and know nothing and be the fool

ability to deal with death, dying, and transitions

ability to hallucinate and now what is not real simultaneously

ability for extreme selective attention

ability to shift identity, archetypes AND PERSONALITY CONSTELLLATIONS

ability to deal with change, both small and large

ability for discernment: what to pay attention and listen to

ability to keep evolving

ability to recognize that we not are the healing force, only the gateways

ability to have supreme confidence

ability to balance

ability to recognize synchronicity and act on it

ability to shift energy, both physically, metaphysically and also medically

ability to recognize when less is more (homeopathy) – see Andrew Weil, The Marriage of the Sun and Moon

ability to see through culture and its assumptions in different cultures

ability to contact the ancestors and invite their presence and wisdom

ability contact DNA wisdom and ancestral memories

ability to do fractal healing

ability to stay open and curious

(note this does not include classic hypnosis suggestions on the Stanford hypnosis scales, which are elementary)

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is living legend, transdisciplinary scientist-philosopher Stuart Kauffman, whose pioneering work on self-organization and the emergence of order helped launch the field of complex systems science and has brought us to the very edge of understanding the origins and nature of life. Over his 50+ year career and six books, including this year’s The World Beyond Physics, Stu has done more than almost anyone to restore the historic union of science and philosophy, articulating a new spirituality for our secular age of systems thinking, and filing numerous patents on technologies of chemical synthesis and quantum mechanics.

It's an epic conversation with a bold and boundary-less mind. In this episode we drive right to the heart of one of humankind’s biggest and most persistent mysteries: What is life?

Stuart Kauffman’s EXTENSIVE & ILLUMINATING Google Scholar Page:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yoPM0F8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

This week’s vocabulary word: “ergodic”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ergodic

Become a Patreon supporter to listen to Part 2 of this conversation, on quantum physics and consciousness:

http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

We Discuss:

the adjacent possible

the origins of life

niche construction & niche propagation (which i initially conflate, but he re-differentiates)

exaptation

the incomputability of the list of all possible uses of a thing

why are there hearts in the universe?

“the universe is non-ergodic and most complex things will never exist”

“there are no laws whatsoever for the evolution of the biosphere”

contingent, or inevitable? enabled, or caused?

the economy creates the possibilities into which it is sucked

Terence McKenna’s strange attractor at the end of time

constraint closure and the release of energy in fewer degrees of freedom

abiogenesis and the protocell as a model of its environment

are there constraints without work?

the number of cell types in an organism is roughly the square root of the number of genes

“information is precisely the release of energy into fewer degrees of freedom”

Paul Davies & Sara Imari Walker

Johnjoe McFadden

Giuseppe Longo

the system will spend more time in macrostates in which there are more microstates (Boltzmann)

Supplemental Materials:

Stuart Kauffman’s essay, “No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069.pdf;alsoseeGiuseppeLongo

Stu’s co-author Wim Hordijk on autocatalysis at Orbiter Mag:

https://orbitermag.com/how-did-life-begin-part-3/

Michael’s essay, “The Future is Exapted/Remixed”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877

Michael’s extensive notes on the ideas of this episode, “Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm”

https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022

Original intro music by Michael Garfield, “Birds Waking Up In Trees”

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Show outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Future Fossils gets even weirder with guests Phil Ford and JF Martel, cohosts of the Weird Studies podcast. Weird Studies is one of my favorite shows, hands down. Phil and JF’s marvelous threading together of the joyful and the bleak, the transcendent and the hangdog, the gems of literature and the tentacles of the ineffable real, is a sorely needed tightrope walk in an era insistent on clean answers and decisive resolutions.

The modern world is a VERY weird place, and these two gentlemen are some of my most trusted curators of places to look and ways of seeing for thriving amidst that weirdness. In this episode, we explore (among other eldritch horrors) the irreducibility and always-ness of the weird; the historical and metabolic forces that join beauty and trauma; and the value of the stubbornly unassimilated fact and its adherents.

Dig into Weird Studies and become transformed:

https://weirdstudies.com

Support Future Fossils on Patreon for over a dozen exclusive episodes, book club membership, original art and music, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Find all of the books we mention and support the show at no cost to yourself:

https://www.amazon.com/shop/michaelgarfield

A very thin slice of the topics we discuss:

JF on Future Fossils (episode 18 & episode 71)

MG on Weird Studies (episode 26)

Weird Studies on Marshall McLuhan

Weird Studies on William James

Erik Davis - High Weirdness (Future Fossils episode 99; Weird Studies episode 48)

Leonard Cohen - “Waiting for the Miracle”

Phil: “The seawall we build against the seething Lovecraftian whatever.”

Eric Wargo - Time Loops (episode 117)

Global Weirding

The Replication Crisis

Lady Chatterly’s Lover: “The cataclysm has happened. We are among the ruins.”

Richard Doyle - Darwin’s Pharmacy

Douglas Rushkoff - Present Shock (episode 67)

William Burroughs - Naked Lunch

Aleister Crowley

Jonathan Zap

Furtherrr Collective

Beauty & Danger

Theodor Adorno

Weird Consultants to help you organize for the unexpected

David Weinberger - Everyday Chaos (episode 123)

lntro music by Michael Garfield, “Undefeatable Optimism Gets Up After KO”

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Cory Allen – mindfulness instructor, audio engineer, host of The Astral Hustle Podcast, binaural beats factory, and now the author of Now is the Way: An Unconventional Approach to Modern Mindfulness. We talk about cutting through the noise and insanity of our overwhelmed digital transition age with simple presence, the rewards of even minor and incremental acts of awareness, and the richness of expressive work created from a place of calm alertness.

Grab yourself a copy of Now is the Way from my Amazon storefront:

https://www.amazon.com/shop/michaelgarfield

I’m on Cory’s show in episodes 72 & 92:

http://www.cory-allen.com/theastralhustle

Cory’s on my show on episode 16:

http://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/16

Discussed:

• What is the now?

• Is mindfulness about getting better at achieving goals, or is it really about something else?

• How has meditation practice changed in the age of always-on digital insanity?

• The collapse of past, present, and future into NOW and living in the bardo afterlife of the 21st Century.

• Getting over the infinite to-do list.

• Music as meditation vs. The Concept Album. Songwriting vs. temple music.

• Impermanence and cycles of creation/destruction in music.

• Create from where and what you are.

• Notes on the media diet for original thinking.

Support Future Fossils on Patreon for over a dozen exclusive episodes, book club membership, original art and music, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

lntro music by Michael Garfield, “Undefeatable Optimism Gets Up After KO”

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We live in an age of increasingly lively, intelligent, and responsive technologies, and have a lot of adjusting to do. This week’s guest is one of the major inspirations animating Future Fossils Podcast: Kevin Kelly, co-founder of the WELL, Senior Maverick at WIRED, author of numerous books that profoundly shaped my thinking about our coevolution with technology. After reading Kevin’s latest essay on the imminent challenges and opportunities of augmented reality – a superb rendering of the bizarre and wonderful new possibilities of a “mirrorworld” in which everything has an annotated digital double, constantly rewritten – I asked him to join me for a discussion of how our relationship to change is changing, what choice means in a world beyond control, how history becomes a verb amidst the metamorphosis, and how to properly engage these potent evolutionary tools we’re building…

Kevin’s Website:

https://kk.org

Support Future Fossils on Patreon for over a dozen exclusive episodes, book club membership, original art and music, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Shop through my Amazon storefront and support the show indirectly with your purchases:

https://amazon.com/storefront/michaelgarfield

lntro music by Michael Garfield, “Undefeatable Optimism Gets Up After KO”

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

We Discuss:

• How evolutionary technologies restore us to a kind of pre-modern relationship to living systems we use and depend upon, but do not control (growing tomatoes, raising livestock, having children).

• How do we understand choice and agency as cybernetic selves, all of our behavior informed by invisible or opaque entitities (like Cambridge Analytica, or simple GUI design)?

“We are both the creator and the created. We are both the parent and the child of ourselves. We are the masters of technology, and the slaves to it. And we will always be in that conflicted, two-faced relationship. That’s why we wring our hands, and we’ll be wringing our hands in a thousand years, because we can’t escape from the fact that we make our tools and our tools shape us.”

• If we are going to spend the rest of our lives as noobs in an ever-accelerating metamorphic world, what does that mean for our conceit of continuous identity?

“The question is not, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ but, ‘What do we want humans to be?’”

• How do we have the metaphysical conversations we need (about what we are, what matters) if we can’t agree on the objective ground truth?

“We have only one way to detect lies, which is retrospectively. So it’s almost impossible to ascertain, infallibly, the truth in the present. We can only trust sources that have proven to be reliable in the past, and that’s ultimately where the truth resides.”

“We can’t think our way out of these problems. We should think about them. We should try to forecast and analyze and quantify. But these things are so complex, they’re life life and a child growing up, that we have to experience our way through them. We have to engage with them through use to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.”

• The new superpowers and profound challenges (both practical and philosophical) afforded us by augmented reality and its attendant “mirrorworld” of spatial computing.

“The big problems that we’ll all be pulling our hair out about in twenty years will be ones we never thought of.”

“I’m for steering technology through engagement, through using it. I think if you don’t use something, you don’t get to steer it. That’s why prohibition, outlawing, regulating to a standstill are bad ideas. Because then you don’t get to steer.”

• The past and future of history-as-a-verb. Contingency vs. inevitability. How does Kelly situate himself in time?

“Most of my favorite people talking about the future are historians… The more I want to look into the future, the more I need to look into the past.”

“1% per year is all we need: if we create 1% more than we destroy every year, that’s all we need for civilization.”

• What is Kelly most concerned with communicating to the unborn future?

“The statistical destiny for most time capsules is to be forgotten. They’re buried and nobody remembers them. 95% of them are forgotten within 5 or 10 years. But the ones that are opened, you get to see this message from the past into the future. And almost invariably, the contents are not interesting to us now.”

Go Deeper:

Out of Control, New Rules for The New Economy, What Technology Wants, The Inevitable

https://kk.org/books/

The Expansion of Ignorance

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/10/the_expansion_o.php

AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform – Let’s Call it Mirrorworld

https://www.wired.com/story/mirrorworld-ar-next-big-tech-platform/

The End of Video as Evidence of Anything

https://kk.org/ct2/the-end-of-video-as-evidence-o/

Great Kevin Kelly interview with Smithsonian Magazine

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/wired-founder-kevin-kelly-on-technologies-that-will-dominate-our-future-180959708/

[video] HyperReality by Keiichi Matsuda

https://vimeo.com/166807261

The Future is Indistinguishable from Magic (by Michael Garfield)

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-indistinguishable-from-magic-5b9596a4ea

Being Every Drone (by Michael Garfield)

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78

Future Fossils Episode 97 with Zak Stein

shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/97

Future Fossils Episode 91, An Oral History of the End of Reality (#deepfake #scifi)

shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/91

The Long Now Foundation

https://longnow.org

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

…in which I talk about Jurassic Park, Terminator, Pokémon, cat videos, Radiolab, Google, DARPA, Charles Stross, the Singularity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martine Rothblatt, Genesis P Orridge, neo-advaita nondual philosophy, and angels. (“Do you guys believe in angels?”)  

DISCUSSED:

Bringing Heart Back To Futurism. 

Technological Acceleration As Psychedelic Yoga. 

It Doesn’t Have To Be Either/Or. 

Scan Lovers. 

Can We Have Identity Politics In A Posthuman Society? 

Control or Liberation?

Recorded at Boom Festival's Liminal Village, 16 August 2016 — here’s the official Boom Festival video of the talk.

Originally published on my archive of public talks at bandcamp, this lecture became the basis for the essay series with the same name, which you can read on my Medium blog.

Support The Show: patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan Snyder feat. Michael Garfield

QUOTES:

The future is an idea that is constructed socially, just as insanity is constructed socially.

Most people spend most of their time thinking about what the world we’re moving into is going to look like, and very little time thinking about what it’s going to FEEL like. Who we are going to be, once all this transformative change has settled into a newly-constituted world age?

It’s very telling that so much of the conversation around artificial intelligence is this notion that there’s some kind of demon emerging through the machine for us to encounter and to reckon with. That there is something we have to confront…something that may destroy us even as it transforms us. And I think that the problem here is that this is a half-chewed sandwich. We’re right there on the precipice of recognizing that we too are implicated in this global conspiracy, that we too are participating in the evolutionary process, and it falls upon us all to heal this alienation from the natural world – especially as it appears in non-human living systems and as it appears in non-human machine intelligences. And to recognize, first of all, that we are a function, we are an action, of Earth’s geology.

It’s by failing to identify our own transcendental nature – our own identity beyond the opposites of subject and object, self and other, nature and culture, the made and the born – that renders the transcendental as something against which the limited identity of the egoic self has to be defended. And so we experience what could be regarded as the emergence of a planetary Christ child – as the internet swallows us and we awaken together into this planetary identity, we experience this as the intrusion of a Borg mind or Terminator: Rise of the Machines. We are capable in our understandably anxious paranoid delusion of seeing only the demonic manifestation, because it’s so much easier to reject this kind of radical transformation than it is to embrace it and to steer it. And I’m hoping that by the end of this talk you all feel slightly more empowered to participate in this future, and to participate in the growing number of people worldwide that recognize that it falls upon us as we birth a new age, to love what we create. And to infuse it with love and creativity, and not to reject this baby, but to raise it right.

The mirror was believed to have terrifying spiritual properties: that a mirror can steal your soul, or that a vampire couldn’t be seen in a mirror because it had no soul. And likewise with the camera: anything that renders the previously unconscious as the conscious, anything that shows our selves to ourselves in a new way and thus creates an object out of what was originally the subject, a new “it” out of what was “I,” is going to appear to us as the monstrous.

As we become more transparent to one another, we become more accountable to one another. And the accountability is in some sense the masculine structure that we see growing as the companion to the desire to share with one another as a sort of feminine urge for intimacy.

As a river runs all possible ways down a mountain, the future will have more options for how to be a human being than before. It will have more ways for us to become partial and non-inclusive of the future than ever before.

We are becoming more and more compatible with the machine and it is becoming more and more compatible with us, in the same way that we domesticated corn and corn domesticated us.

We have this profound opportunity to invest as much beauty and love and creativity into this new space as we possibly can. 

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is writer Lydia Laurenson, editor of The New Modality, whose beat explores how people find and make meaningful lives in our era of change, anxiety, and new opportunity. For years Lydia also wrote a popular BDSM blog under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, an experience that has profoundly shaped the way she understands plural and mutable identity in the digital age — and the importance of protecting our right to act behind created identities in the web’s cultural commons. In this episode, we discuss the years of weird and wonderful adventures she’s had as a writer and a researcher of digital society, and how those experiences have shaped her vision for a new print magazine…

Join the show's proud roster of supporters: patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Theme music: “God Detector” by Evan Snyder feat. Michael Garfield

About The New Modality:

Kickstarter • Medium • Facebook • Twitter

Related Writings:

Lydia Laurenson:

“My Year in San Francisco's $2 Million Secret Society Startup”

The Atlantic article about internet pseudonyms and anonymity 

O'Reilly article about culture's impact on social media adoption 

Policy briefs on digital media governance and polarization

Clarisse Thorn’s Website

Michael Garfield:

The Future Acts Like You

Discussed:

The Latitude Society and postmodern startup esotericism.

Can we scale community? Can we continue to redefine ourselves in an increasingly regulated planet-scale society?

Pseudonymity and speaking freely on the Web…the importance of being able to explore new versions of yourself, to entertain a plural identity.

Reimagining the family. Coming to care about the conversation around alternative parenting approaches…having children without having a romantic relationship.

3+ parent families, platonic co-parenting, co-housing distributed childcare, and other forms of interdependence emerging in our pluralistic and atomized age.

Polarization, peacebuilding, and digital governance on social media.

The individual as institution, the long tail, Rule 34, and the future of evolutionary vascularization.

Can we design social media to help people respect each other more and foster better conversation? (And if so, why aren’t we doing it?)

Mentioned:

Erik Davis • Doug Rushkoff • Vice Magazine • Whitney Houston • Blade Runner 2049 • Hypermodernity • Lazarus (Graphic Novels) • Altered Carbon • Adam Curtis - Century of the Self • Her (movie) • John Perry Barlowe • Papadosio • Tricia Wang • Oprah • SXSW • The Benedict Option • Mirta Galesic • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin • Andrés Mora (writer) • Toda Peace Institute

Cover Photo by Jane Hu with Model Anina Net

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What’s the line between being inspired and getting broken by transcendental experience? This week’s episode was recorded live at the Hook & Ladder at Minneapolis as part of a special multimedia event I did with the Psychedelic Society of Minneapolis, a group led by neuroscientist Jessica Nielson. Jessica and her PhD student Link Swanson were both dear friends of mine before they met each other and I cannot be happier that they’re doing psychedelic neuroscience research together now at UMN. In this conversation, which involves me definitely talking too much (but in the role of honored out-of-town guest, which makes it somewhat excusable), we talk about the effects of psychedelics on perception, the continua between inspiration and trauma, and what it might mean to make a machine learning algorithm trip balls. Among other things…

Dr. Jessica Nielson

https://med.umn.edu/bio/psychiatry/jessica-nielson

Link Swanson

https://swanson.link/

The Psychedelic Society of Minneapolis

https://www.meetup.com/Psychedelic-Society-of-Minneapolis/

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Show music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Discussed:

The hallucination-perception continuum

Trauma and novelty in biological and cultural evolution

The Stoned Ape Hypothesis Revived

Chapel Perilous & studying mental illness with machine learning

Do psychosis and the psychedelic state really have much in common?

Making AI trip

How do psychedelics affect the way our brain processes perception?

Pharmacogenomics and whether it might help explain The Experiment at La Chorrera

Novelty and the collapse of civilizations

Evolution, learning, and addiction

Mentioned:

Saj Razvi (Our free and public Patreon discussion) • MAPS • Santa Fe Institute (FF Episode 75) • Andreas Wagner • Terence McKenna • Stuart Kauffman (FF Episode 125) • Stuff To Blow Your Mind Podcast on Urban Animals • Werner Herzog • Dinotasia • Richard Doyle • Erowid • Robert Anton Wilson • Dennis McKenna (FF Episode 88) • Geoffrey West • Rudolf Steiner

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