FUTURE FOSSILS

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week's guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that constrains and formally specifies AI outputs, with reviewable intermediary results, collaborating across sectors to promote this radically different and more empirical approach to applied machine intelligence.After completing his PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, Evan led research at Protocol Labs, creating their research grants program, and led the special projects team that created Hypercerts, Funding the Commons, gov4git, and key parts of Discourse Graphs and the initial Open Agency Architecture proposal.In our conversation we talk about a wide swath of topics including regulatory scaling problems, specifying formal organizational charters, the spectre of opacity, and the quantification of trust — all, in some sense, interdisciplinary matters of “game design” in our entanglement with magical technologies and fundamental uncertainty.If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives. Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future.Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodesDiscussed• Atlas Computing Summary Slides• Atlas Computing Institute Talks (YouTube Playlist)• A Toolchain for AI-Assisted Code Specification, Synthesis and Verification• Also, a relevant paper from Max Tegmark:Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGIMentionedGregory BatesonDavid DalrympleK. Allado-McDowellTerence McKennaYuval Noah HarariCosma ShaliziHenry FarrellHakim BeyNatalie DeprazFrancisco VarelaPierre VermerschPlurality InstitutePuja OhlhaverSean Esbjörn-HargensAlfred North WhiteheadDe KaiPrimer RiffAre we doing AI alignment wrong? Game designers Forrest Imel and Gavin Valentine define games as having meaningful decisions, uncertain outcomes, and measurable feedback. If any one of these breaks, the game breaks. And we can think about tech ethics through this lens as well. Much of tech discourse is about how one or more of these dimensions has broken the “game” of life on Earth — the removal of meaningful decisions, the mathematical guarantee of self-termination through unsustainable practices, and/or the decoupling of feedback loops.AI alignment approaches tend to converge on restoring meaningful decisions by getting rid of uncertainty, but it's a lost cause. It's futile to encode our values into systems we can't understand. To the extent that machines think, they think very differently than we do, and characteristically “interpret” our requests in ways that reveal the assumptions we are used to making based on shared context and understanding with other people.We may not know how a black box AI model arrives at its outputs, but we can evaluate those outputs…and we can segment processes like this so that there are more points at which to review them. One of this show's major premises is that the design and use of AI systems is something like spellcraft — a domain where precision matters because the smallest deviation from a precise encoding of intent can backfire.Magic isn't science in as much as we can say that for spellcraft, mechanistic understanding is, frankly, beside the point. Whatever you may think of it, spellcraft evolved as a practical approach for operating in a mysterious cosmos. Westernized Modernity dismisses magic because Enlightenment era thinking is predicated on the knowability of nature and the conceit that everything can and will eventually bend to principled, rigorous investigation. But this confused accounting just reshuffled its uneradicable remainder of fundamental uncertainty back into a stubbornly persistent Real that continues to exist in excess of language, mathematics, and mechanistic frameworks. Economies, AI, and living systems guarantee uncertain outcomes — and in accepting this, we have to re-engage with magic in the form of our machines. The more alike they become, the more our mystery and open-ended co-improvisation loom back over any goals of final knowledge and control.In a 2016 essay, Danny Hillis called this The Age of Entanglement. It is a time that calls for an evolutionary approach to technology. Tinkering and re-evaluating, we find ourselves one turn up the helix in which quantitative precision helps us reckon with the new built wilderness of technology. When we cannot fully explain the inner workings of large language models, we have to step back and ask:What are our values, and how do we translate them into measurable outputs?How can we break down the wicked problem of AI controllability into chunks on which it's possible to operate?How can adaptive oversight and steering fit with existing governance processes?In other words, how can we properly task the humanities with helping us identify “meaningful decisions” and the sciences with providing “measurable feedback.” Giving science the job of solving uncertainty or defining our values ensures we'll get as close as we can to certitude about outcomes we definitely don't want. But if we think like game designers, then interdisciplinary collaboration can help us safely handle the immense power we've created and keep the game going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsWhat the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophecies of [EDIT: Guy Debord's] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillard's simulation], the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts a kind of reversal as the movement of the Tao that challenges the dreams and ideals of the Enlightenment…it is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it all…or is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game?Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news, my friend Rina Nicolae of Incognita swims comfortably as a thoughtful commentator. Riffing philosophically on network society and its discontents, the emergent spiritual traditions of digital natives, and the posthuman bestiary of our AI- and biotech-saturated century, Rina's Substack is a handbook to the cyborg aesthetic, the imagistic/algorithmic complex of online identity, our entanglement with capital and the possession by and performance of meme-space.How do we not become caricatures of ourselves in the world-creating and -destroying flood of remix culture? How do we cultivate roughness, fractality, wildness, illegigility? How do we stay, as Cadell Last put it in the previous episode, “in the gaps and cracks” instead of becoming prey to the new monsters of the unleashed imagination? How do we *befriend* those monsters?William Irwin Thompson said noise characterizes the emergence of planetary culture — an age in which “Technology slays the victim” of the mind “resurrects it as art” in a new ecology of consciousness. If, then, the only way through is up and out, then join me as, once more, we dive into the noise and make music together with Rina…Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Join the Wisdom x Technology (open) & Future Fossils (legacy) Discord serversDiscussedProphets Of A Machine FutureWhat Is Posthumanism?The New MonstrousMilady Infiltrates The VaticanKim Kardashan Was Never HumanThe AI That Can Change Your MindMentionedPriya RoseDonna HarawayBobby AzarianDavid DeutschJack HalberstamJulia ChristevaTimothy MortonK. Allado-McDowellMary ShelleyBenjamin BrattonCharlotte FangMarshall McLuhanJimi HendrixTaryn SouthernJim O'ShaughnessyKevin Kelly This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest is Cadell Last, the creator of Philosophy Portal, author of Global Brain Singularity and Real Speculations, and organizer of myriad conferences, anthologies, and collaborative volumes exploring biocultural evolution, the mind-matter relation, and speculative futures. Cadell has been the director of psychedelic research at Psirenity, a researcher at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, a science writer on primatology and paleoanthropology for Scientific American, and the founder, writer, and researcher for The Advanced Apes at PBS Digital Studios.In this episode, we discuss self-actualization and self-transformation in our age of magical technologies — the domestication of the human being by AI and institutions, how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, navigating hybrid physical-virtual relationships, the importance of intergenerational learning, and how we can make a better argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value. In the climax of this conversation, Cadell makes a case for “staying with the lack” and “working the cracks in being” as ways of cultivating our agency in a highly-automated world.Become a member to join our hangouts, salons, and study groups:Project Links• Explore this project's essay and episode archives• Make tax-deductible donations (recurring pledges grant membership)• Join the Wisdom x Technology & Future Fossils Discord servers• Browse the books we discuss on the show• Explore the interactive model grown from over 250 episodes• Book me for speaking or consultingCadell's LinksWebsite (with research and social media links)Philosophy PortalYouTube(+ My recent appearance as a guest on Cadell's Philosophy Portal show)Relevant PapersHuman Evolution: Life History Theory and the End of Biological ReproductionSelf Actualization in the CommonsGlobal Commons in the Global BrainGlobal Brain and the Future of Human SocietyInformation-Energy Metasystem ModelAbstraction, mimesis and the evolution of deep learningLandian Exit and Hegelian LoveSystems & Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science & PhilosophyLogic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect OppositionMentionsKevin KellyLawrence SteinbergNick LandNora BatesonJessica FlackThomas PicketyMichel BauwensLayman PascalDavid JayPhilip K. DickYanis VaroufakisChris CutroneAndrew TateBenjamin StudebakerGordon BranderAlan TuringKate RaworthRelated Episodes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest is the singular Michael Dean, who graduated from architecture school and played in a band before spending years in tech working on virtual reality, only to metamorphose into one of the best essayists I've ever read. With support from Humans On The Loop supporters O'Shaughnessy Ventures and Cosmos Institute, Dean is now decoding the structure of great essays and translating his framework into both a textbook and an AI-powered editing tool.In this conversation, we explore how to cultivate human agency at the frontiers where physical reality and the metaverse fold into one another and entangled human and machine intelligences unleash radical new possibilities for reflection and creativity. By the end of our discussion we start to trace the contours of a world in which everyone has a better chance to pursue their passions without having to worry about “product-market fit” — a future in culture stages a glorious insurrection against the dehumanizing division between passion and paid work.If this episode stimulates or triggers you, please leave a comment here or on YouTube — I would love to learn from you and this project exists as a space for thoughtful discourse!Upcoming Events* 3 May @ 11 am Mountain– Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna(patrons-only discussion)* 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere(five-week online course with ten sessions)Project Links• Explore this project's essay and episode archives• Join the Discord server• Browse the books we discuss on the show• Explore the conversational mind-map grown from nine years of conversations• Book me for speaking or consultingDean's LinksThe Secret Architecture of Great EssaysTeleportation, $97/month, coming soonLas Vegas & the MetaverseA change of heartPrepping for the Editor G*dsMega-updateSungazerLucy in the Sky of Large Language Models4 Types of Material in Every EssayMentioned Books & ArticlesMichael Garfield – Sacred DataJohn Smart – The transcenscion hypothesisJ.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor – The Computer as a Communication DeviceKevin Kelly – AR Will Spark The Next Big Tech Platform — Call It MirrorworldDouglas Rushkoff – Present ShockYoshija Walter – Artificial influencers and the dead internet theoryMentioned People & PodcastsJ.F. MartelK. Allado McDowellDanielle BassettTyson YunkaportaMitch MignanoJaron LanierPeter DiamandisWilliam Irwin ThompsonBenjamin OlsenThe BeatlesTerence McKennaGrimesHolly HerndonTimothy LearyJake KobrinSara PhinnThe Ungoogleable MichaelangeloErik HoelMichael Crichton This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

“When I have a rich, powerful, mind expanding, mind bending conversation like this, I'll need to go and lie down in darkened room afterwards.”– Robert PoyntonThis week's guest is my friend and inspiration Robert Poynton, Founder of Yellow Learning, Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, and author of three beautiful short books — Do Pause, Do Improvise, and Do Conversation — full of his insights from decades of designing and leading Executive Education leadership programs and hosting creative retreats in Spain.In Future Fossils Episode 196 Robert and I discussed how important it is to learn the principles of improvisation as a way of life. And as he notes in his latest book, most of us are already skilled improvisers because we spend our lives in conversation — not just with each other, but with our environments. How does trying on this frame transform the ways that we relate to them?In this episode we explore conversations as an art form and as a technology, technology as a conversation, and how weird this all gets when so many of us are having what feel like literal conversations with technology itself. Some of our topics:• How do we create fertile “conversational fields”? • How do different media constrain and open conversational possibilities?• What does it mean to “be generous” with our improv partners?• What might the structure of good conversation teach us about engaging with AI — and help us “converse” with the entire history of a person or a culture?At the heart of this project and this episode in particular is the belief that some things are worth doing not because they get us where we want to go, but because they're pleasures in themselves. Good conversations are their own reward, and conversations with Robert are especially rewarding.(Do yourself a favor and join a Yellow Learning cohort sometime…)PS — A bonus for subscribers this week: an extra mini-episode behind the paywall! After Robert and I landed this discussion we kept talking for another hour. Most of it was off-topic but there were some choice bits in there too good to leave on the cutting room floor. If you don't see it below the show notes, you know what to do:Upcoming Events* 24 April – Right Relationship with AI feat. Turquoise Sound and Michael Garfield at The School of Wise Innovation's Spring Cultivator (free & public 90-minute discussion)* 3 May – Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna (patrons-only discussion)* 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere (five-week online course with ten sessions)Project Links• Explore my full podcast archives and this project's writing/episode archives• Join the Future Fossils Discord for both public and members-only threads• Browse and buy the books we talk about on the show• Explore a map and chat bot grown from nine years of mind-expanding episodes• Meet new allies on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord• Dig into Humans On The Loop's original pitch & planning document• Contact me if you want to work togetherMentioned BooksRobert Poynton — Do Conversation: There's No Such Thing As Small TalkW. Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It EvolvesEthan Mollick — Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AIJennifer Cobb — Cybergrace: The Search for God in The Digital World Mentioned PeopleK Allado-McDowellJ.F. MartelTom MorganDr. BlueKevin KellyErik DavisKen AdamsJake KobrinTheodore ZeldinChris KutarnaMike LargePlatoSam AltmanErothymeGurdjieffKrishnamurtiPeter BrookeFederico CampagnaIain McGilchristDavid BohmCosma ShaliziNick LandYuval HarariTom ChatfieldMax WalucasTerence McKennaJason SilvaAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonBaruch SpinozaGottfried LeibnizLudwig WittgensteinCarlo RovelliT.S. EliotCarlos CastanedaBonus Mini-EpisodeOn The Value of Noisy Media, Conversational Protocols for Scaling Interaction, The Joy of Provisional Lists, and Tech Companies as Networks of Relationships“When Apple has a pile of cash of the size it has, it looks permanent. It looks forever. It looks untouchable, and people get attached by that kind of visible sense of scale. But there was a guy I knew many years ago who'd been around Silicon Valley long enough, and knew all the people, all these organisms that we call organizations or brands. And he always saw Silicon Valley as a network of personal relationships, which would every now and then explode into a visible platform or or company like Google or Apple. But he was kinda like, ‘That's not what's going on.' He would always say ‘It's the mycelial network of the relationships between the individuals.'”– Robert PoyntonHere you go: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest my friend Joshua DiCaglio, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of the fabulous Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry.It's a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it's one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps and another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at once. We can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos, but scale makes it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside it all.And this has enormous implications: contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity but an existential necessity. In an age of exponential AI, our future hinges on whether we can learn to overcome the tendency to colonize other scales with our abstractions and cultivate the capacity to recognize interdependency with the unthinkably small and large. How does truly understanding this change the way we live? Bewilderment is a rich place to start. Let's simmer in it for a while…If you find enjoy this conversation, please like, subscribe, and leave a comment at YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify and consider becoming a member here or making tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.Chapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:12 - Intro Essay: Scale & AI Safety0:13:25 - You Can't Paint Fractals0:21:29 - We Can Only Act on The Scale at Which We Exist0:23:10 - The Story of Scale Theory0:27:49 - Discovering Scale through Computer Science & Nanotech0:38:37 - Being One & Feeling Many0:44:29 - The Embodiment of Mind & Information0:59:55 - The Scalar Synecdoche: Are Organizations Really Organisms?1:18:32 - Why Does It Matter Where We Draw The Lines Around Individuals?1:33:49 - Responsibility in A World Out of Control1:53:51 - ClosingAnnouncementsCheck out my new single and music video “The Big Machine” — along with an essay on songwriting as evolution and a list of my favorite sci-fi ballads. Switch it up from this week's news by diving in for a trip into the scalar reconfigurations of selfhood:Starting next week I'm hosting a members-only reading and discussion of Federico Campagna's Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with a live call on Sat May 3rd:Josh's LinksJoshua DiCaglio's Website + Google Scholar + X + LinkedInScale Theory Part 1 PDF (almost half the book!)Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of NanotechnologyLanguage and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis (unfortunately not open-access)Project LinksContact me if you have questions or want to work togetherHumans On The Loop's living pitch & planning documentJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord serverFull episode and essay archivesPodcastsHumans On The Loop 01 – Richard DoyleHumans On The Loop 06 – K. Allado McDowellHumans On The Loop 10 – J.F. MartelHumans On The Loop 12 – Matt SegallHumans On The Loop 14 – Jim O'ShaughnessyWeird Studies 36 — On HyperstitionFuture Thinkers Podcast – Daniel SchmachtenbergerTalksMichael Garfield — AI-Assisted Transformations of ConsciousnessJacob Foster — Toward A Cultural Ecology of The NoosphereBooksChaim Gingold – Building Sim CityValerie Hanson – Haptic VisionsAndrew Pilsch – TranshumanismPlato – PhaedrusGilbert Ryle – The Concept of MindThomas Hobbes – LeviathanGeoffrey West – ScaleAnonymous – The Cloud of UnknowingDouglas Adams – The Hitchhiker's Guide To The GalaxyArticlesMarc Andreessen – Why Software Is Eating The WorldDavid Krakauer et al. — The Information Theory of IndividualityWilliam Gibson – Google's EarthPeopleCarl SaganEric DrexlerRichard FeynmanNeal StephensonRay KurzweilPlotinusPseudodionysusStuart DavisRina NicolaeN. Katherine HaylesStuart KauffmanVannevar BushGregory BatesonNorbert WienerHeinz Von FoersterKurt GödelJill NephewHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaWilliam BurroughsDorion SaganLynn MargulisPierre Teilhard De ChardinLuigi MangioneIlya PrigogineDavid BohmRamana MaharshiNisargadatta Maharaj This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week Jim O'Shaughnessy (Website | X) joins Humans On The Loop to carry our first on-record conversation on Infinite Loops into bold new terrains! Jim is one of the most renowned investors and asset managers of all the time and the author of several hugely best-selling and influential books on investing, including What Works on Wall Street, Invest Like The Best, and Predicting The Markets of Tomorrow. He also founded the first online investment advisor and holds the patent for “ the origination and fulfillment of stock investment portfolios over a worldwide computer network.” (You heard right!)After decades of success in wealth management, he left his company in the care of his son Patrick and launched O'Shaughnessy Ventures — a firm that combines “Jim's deeply rooted interest in all things art, science, investing and tech with his long-held desire to establish positive sum scenarios designed to help promising creators and their inspiring ideas succeed, regardless of age, location, job history or level of education.”Last fall when I was on his show, we played a game of mind-jazz about “how we can live curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.” For this discussion, I wanted to rotate the axis of our exploration and learn how Jim's personal experiences have contributed to the frame through which he engages life. Sweeping across scales from candid autobiography to team inquiry into some of the wickedest problems — like how we foster meaningful relationships and balance achievement with humility — we covered a lot of new ground.I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and benefit from a fresh take on the mind — and heart — of one of the most exemplary mavericks I know.If you find value in this conversation, please like and subscribe (YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify), leave a comment, and consider supporting my mission to help us cultivate wisdom in an age of magical technologies. Humans On The Loop is fiscally-supported by my friends at HAPPI (Helping Awesome People Prosper Intentionally), so you can become a member here or make tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.Project LinksContact me if you have questions or propositionsProject pitch & planning documentFull episode and essay archivesJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord serverChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:16 - Intro0:06:23 - Jim's Backstory0:31:43 - Crisis Personalities + Creativity vs. Risk Mitigation0:46:28 - Networks of Trust + Bootstrapped Credentials0:53:37 - Incenting Trust: Mass Customization + Consensus Reality Collapse1:06:14 - The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma + Trust-Building in Social Networks1:13:25 - How Do We Design for Flourishing at Scale (or Can We)?1:21:22 - Markets as Complex Systems1:29:10- Using (Especially Local) AI to Accelerate Realizing Your Mistakes1:37:23 - OutroMentioned Reading, Listening, & PeopleFrom Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and The Precognitive Imagination by Eric WargoThe Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchristFinite and Infinite Games by James P. CarseThe Status Game by Will StorrThe Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (John Minford, translator)Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Authority by John P. KotterOne Summer: America 1927 by Bill BrysonGödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas HofstadterThe End of Trust - McSweeney's Issue 54Bilawal Sidhu — How to Unite Reality with Imagination - Infinite Loops PodcastWill Storr — The Status Game - Infinite Loops PodcastBrendan McCord — AI and The Philosophy of Technology - Infinite Loops PodcastAdam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet - Future Fossils PodcastReimagining the PhD - Nadia AsparouhovaThe TPOT PhD - Priya RoseSo many music festivals have been canceled this year. What's going on? - Greg Rosalsky for NPRCory DoctorowDoug RushkoffAlfred North WhiteheadJosiah WarrenJed McKennaJosh WolfeSocratesUpcoming Events* My new single and music video “The Big Machine” goes live on April 1st! Pre-save to Spotify or pre-order on Bandcamp here.* I'm co-facilitating a session on “Right Relations with AI” for the School of Wise Innovation's Spring Cultivator alongside a superb faculty. Cohort starts April 3rd!* The book club is back! Join us for a group reading and discussion of Federico Campagna's Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with asynchronous discussion in the Future Fossils Discord server and a live call on May 3rd. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Where do we need boundaries, and where do we need flows? And how can we ensure that we can redistribute them according to the changing needs of any given moment? These are the kinds of questions I would ask if I were trying to meta-solve a meta-crisis, and this is why I'm glad to share this conversation with you. Today's guest Aishwarya Khanduja, is a fellow living inquiry, an incandescent interrobang just like myself, the founder of The Analogue Group.Announcements: * We will book club Federico Campagna's Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents on April 26th, along with pre-game discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server's members-only channels. This book is a masterpiece of thinking otherwise and just what we need to attend to as transition from one mode of worlding to another…I can't wait to talk about it with you and hear everyone's reflections! * I am finally publishing “The Big Machine”, my anthem for the Screen Age, and will drop my new single and music video on April 1st, so dive into the show notes and pre-save it on Spotify, follow my YouTube channel for notifications when the song goes live, and prime yourself by meditating on the question:“How long can you go without looking at your phone?”Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You'll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server is where we'll do the book club discussions.Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries!ReadsHarnessing the power of our subconscious mindShaping the future with fictional storiesSocratic SalonsAirpods are ruining the worldA case for strategic ignorance by designTranscendence: An Emergent Career LifeHow to know what to doTasty Morsels from Groovy HubsThe Pathless Path by Paul MillerdScatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz Quarterlife by Satya Doyle ByockArtificial You by Susan SchneiderThe_Human_Roots_of_Artificial_Intelligence_A_Commentary_on_Susan_Schneider's_Artificial_You by Inês HipólitoOther MentionsStephanie LeppAri KushnirSøren KierkegaardPeter Sheridan DoddsPriya Rose of Fractal UniversityNadia AsparouhovaMark Pesce on Erik Davis' Expanding MindKatalin KarikóJim O'ShaughnessyEvan MiyazonoK. Allado McDowellAmber Case & Michael ZarghamPaul GrahamKurt VonnegutSrinivasa RamanujanCharles DarwinAlbert EinsteinWinston ChurchillDaniel KahnemannAlbert ClaudeAlfred AdlerGregor MendelAflred Russel Wallace This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week I dialogue with Matthew David Segall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, and author of the Footnotes To Plato blog as well as numerous books on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling. In it, we wrangle with some very fundamental questions, such as:* What distinguishes the organismal and machinic?* How can we support vital cultural activity without reducing the measure of our humanity to our economic productivity?* What if we're looking for mind in AI in the wrong places, and instead treat both technology and human consciousness as unified within one unfolding process of cosmic self-discovery?We welcome your feedback and reflections — here, or in the Future Fossils Discord Server — and to join us in the inquiry about what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination we need to thrive there! I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.Pardon the delay: inexplicable technical issues forced me to re-render this episode half a dozen times. Hopefully you appreciate the “staying up until 1 am to try and ship on time”!Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You'll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordContact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteriesChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:32 - Intro0:08:18 - About Matt0:15:19 - Nouns & Verbs, Machines & Organisms0:24:24 - Emergence & Epistemic Humility0:36:55 - The Relationship Between Cultures & Markets0:49:21 - What Are Markets & Can They Play?0:58:30 - Our Responsibility To What We Make1:06:42 - Is Conscious AI A Hyperobject?1:17:43 - OutroMentionsMatt's Website & TwitterMatt Segall & O.G. Rose - Re-thinking Economics & The Meaning of ValueBrendan Graham Dempsey & Matt Segall - Physics, Metaphysics, Meta-MetaphysicsMatt Segall & Tim Jackson - The Blind Spot (2024): A Critical and Reconstructive ReviewFuture Fossils 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyMichael Garfield - Introducing Humans On The LoopAbraham Flexner - The Usefulness of Useless KnowledgeW. Brian Arthur - The Nature of TechnologyW. Brian Arthur - Economics in Nouns and VerbsMiguel Fuentes - Complexity and The Emergence of Physical PropertiesMichael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cris Moore - The Physical Limits of CommunicationSteven Johnson - Revenge of The HumanitiesAdam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson - The Blind SpotJessica Flack - Hourglass Emergence: Complexity Begets Complexity thru Information Bottlenecks (video)Richard Doyle - Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The NoosphereKevin Kelly - The Expansion of IgnoranceWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or Borges?Danny Hillis - The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live The EntanglementKevin Kelly - Out of ControlKai EnnisCarl JungStephen HawkingFriedrich NietzschRichard DawkinsAlan WattsMichael SchwartzAlfred North WhiteheadSean Esjbörn-HargensFelix GuattariStuart KauffmanRudolf SteinerDavid WolpertRobert RosenMichael LevinNorbert WeinerKen WilberKarl FristonGilbert SimondonHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaJohn VervaekeTerrence DeaconPierre Teilhard de Chardin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week on Humans On The Loop I welcome Andrew McLuhan, author, teacher, and Director of The McLuhan Institute, a generational ark for media theory in a world that desperately needs more help understanding the relationships between our tools, our minds, and our society. Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyPlease consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You'll get all the same perks.)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteriesChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:17 - Intro0:06:38 - Partial Agency & The Great Inversion0:11:53 - Three Generations of McLuhan Theorists0:21:51 - Poetry & Prose, Narratives & Networks0:34:43 - Artists Show Us The Way0:41:29 - The Persistence of Memory vs. The Web As Palimpsest0:51:36 - AI in The Tetrad0:58:19 - Opting Out & The Slow Food Media Diet1:05:40 - Outro & AnnouncementsMentioned Media & PeopleMagick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford by Weird Studies PodcastNora BatesonGregory BatesonWilliam Irwin ThompsonFrom Nowhere by Eric WargoThe Ascent of Information by Caleb ScharfEverything Everywhere All At OncePresent Shock by Douglas RushkoffUnderstanding Media by Marshall McLuhanThe Interior Landscape by Marshall McLuhanEzra PoundPreface to Plato by Eric HavelockJay-ZT.S. Eliot This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Stross' Accelerando, we tune in to the members of an interstellar first contact mission as they pass the time debating whether the Technological Singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert: all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a consensus VR environment as various post-human avatars, riding inside a computer the size of a grain of rice on a craft the size of a soda can. To readers it seems like a satire: what, if not this, would it take to convince you we're over the rainbow? But good science fiction provokes us to question the present, and so we must ask: what are we waiting for? Are we still moderns? Is this still Western civilization? Should we be looking forward to the age of machine superintelligence, or has it already happened, like physicist Cosma Shalizi argues in his blog post “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”? Here's a clip from that piece:Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies”.Maybe we ought to consider, like Bruno Latour, that We Have Never Been Modern. Or maybe, as Federico Campagna suggests in Prophetic Culture, each era's inhabitants identify as “modern” and project the “likely story” produced by their process of “worlding” to imagine futures that recede like mirages or rainbows as we approach the horizon of our understanding? By the time we arrive, we have transformed and the mysteries of the ancient and future are conserved. Some Indigenous cultures believe that all animals identify as “people” — perhaps every world is mundane to its native observers, and yet all of them arise out of chaos and ineffability. Science can't answer some questions because it depends on replicability and provisional consensus, and some questions ultimately force us out of attempts to get everything to make sense and into contemplative surrender to our own cognitive limits (no matter how much we augment ourselves).Science will, of course, continue. As Ted Chiang wrote twenty five years ago in his short story “Catching Crumbs from The Table”, advancements in AI and biotechnology could foreseeably “[leave] journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language… Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings… Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.”In 2025, living through the superexponential evolution of machine intelligence, this story hits close to home. What will we do when all breakthroughs are made by black box AI systems whose logic and insights evade us? We already have to take large language models on faith, doing our best to conserve a modest sliver of understanding as we resign ourselves to the practical benefits of successful but illegible prediction. But given that scientific progress has largely advanced through the proliferation of hyperspecialist experts who cannot understand one another's research, we should again ask if it were ever the case that we could explain everything, or whether we've just been ignoring the central importance of textual interpretation as we puzzled over the riddles of a world that never owed us any satisfying final answers?Whether we're modern or not, it is time for us to reconsider the foundations of ideas like informed consent, agency, evidence, and personhood. Whether you think we're still waiting around for the future or that we are living it, we live among an ecology of diverse intelligences and require a humbler approach…one strangely similar to that of Medieval serfs and jungle-dwelling foragers than first seems obvious…one that owes back pay to the dismissed disciplines of religion, magic, and myth. Which is why I'm excited to get weird with you in this episode.This week I speak with one of my closest comrades in philosophical investigation, Canadian author and film-maker J.F. Martel. Co-founder and co-host (with Phil Ford) of the internationally-acclaimed Weird Studies Podcast and Weirdosphere online learning platform, tenured para-academic explorer of high strangeness and the liminal zones between the known, unknown, and unknowable, J.F. is a perfect partner with whom to refine inquiry into persistent and tricky questions like:– What is the nature of technology and how does it change as our seemingly-discrete tools and built environments merge into a planet-scale thinking machine?– How can we tell when AI achieves personhood, and what does it take to be “good parents” of beings that are fundamentally beyond our control?– What can religion and fairy tales teach us about living well in a world where our explanatory frameworks fail us?– How can we re-think and re-claim healthy institutions to serve human flourishing after the end of history as we know it?Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyPlease consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You'll get all the same perks.)J.F.'s LinksReclaimingArt.comWeirdStudies.comWeirdosphere.orgJF on X | Weird Studies Discord & SubRedditReclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice (book)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteriesChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:01 - Introduction0:09:32 - Revisiting Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice0:15:12 - What we lose and gain by automating culture0:31:12 - Wendell Berry's poem “A Timbered Choir”0:36:50 - Transcendental, Machinic, Immanental, Imaginal, and Fractal0:46:21 - Black Box Personhood & AI as A 'Thou'1:00:00 - Is AI Magic?1:06:10 - Fairy Tales, Faith, and Submission after Modernity1:10:27 - Do we still need institutions?1:16:59 - Thanks & AnnouncementsBack Catalogue FF 18 - J.F. Martel on Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny AwesomenessFF 71 - J.F. Martel on Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2WS 26 Living in a Glass AgeFF 126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural RealitiesJRS Currents 064: Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel on Art x AIFF 214 - J.F. Martel, Phil Ford, & Megan Phipps on Weird Cybernetics: Waking Up From The EcstasyFF 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-TimeMentioned MediaWalter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”Erik Hoel's “Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture”New York Encounter (event)Art is dead. Long live Art with Android Jones | Mind Meld 323 Third Eye DropsCosma Shalizi & Henry Farrell's “Artificial Intelligence is a Familiar-Looking Monster”Sigmund Freud's Beyond The Pleasure PrincipleWendell Berry's “A Timbered Choir”Henri Corbin's “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal”William Irwin Thompson's Imaginary LandscapesDanny Hillis' “The Enlightenment Is Dead. Long Live The Entanglement”Neri Oxman's “The Age of Entanglement”David Krakauer's “Emergent Engineering”Kevin Kelly's Out of ControlFF 150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-HargensFF 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyTop Aerospace Scientists Suspect UFOs are Biblical Time Machines | Diana Walsh Pasulka on The Danny Jones PodcastZiwei Xu et al.'s “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”Isaac Asimov's FoundationGilles Deleuze's Difference and RepetitionOther MentionsDonna TartMatt CardinMichael PhilipBenoit MandelbrotJames AllenGregory BatesonDavid HumeGottfried LeibnizL. Ron HubbardErik DavisCarl JungJacques LacanAlbert CamusJean-Paul SartreCurt JaimungalStafford BeerCarl SaganJames HillmanPhil FordMarie-Louise von FranzGK ChestertonEdmund Burke This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you'll get perks either way).About This EpisodeThis week we speak with “strategic futurist and pattern navigator” Adah Parris, a London-based wizard and weirdo with whom I immediately hit it off over our shared interest in “cyborg shamanism” and an emphasis on being good ancestors. Forbes Brasil called her “one of the most important futurists in the world.” It's hard for me to measure the impact she's had on business leaders, tech startups, marketing and communications firms, arts schools, and in the lives of the countless other people.We talk about the relationship between numbers, language, and the ineffable, ever-shifting human spirit. Adah's work points past knowledge and history into the elemental nature of both human and machine, past our differences into the deep similarity worth celebrating and the mystery that we inhabit and embody. Join us for a yarn that is both silly and profound, present and far-reaching, about being uncategorizably creative, open, and curious amidst the wicked problems of our time…Project Links• Read the project pitch & planning doc• Dig into the full episode and essay archives• Join the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on Discord + Bluesky + X• Join the open, listener-moderated Future Fossils Discord Server• Contact me if you have questions (patron rewards, sponsorship, collaboration, etc.)• Browse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:00:49 - Intro0:05:24 - Feeling Seen & Heard0:09:54 - Adah's Biography0:17:21 - Poetry & Number0:27:55 - Cyborg Shamanism & The Five Elements0:37:03 - The Foraging Neurotype of “Extremely Online”0:51:07 - Surrendering Agency to Systems0:55:14 - The Incremental Reclamation of Agency1:01:19 - Art after Modernity & Healing from Noise1:13:01 - Beyond Narrative & Into Dance1:17:30 - Thanks & AnnouncementsAdah's LinksWebsite | Instagram | LinkedIn | Medium | Chartwell SpeakersFinding Our Future in Ancestral Wisdom @ TEDxSohoWhat Kind of Ancestor Do You Want To Be? @ Think With GoogleCyborg Shamanism & The Case for Elemental AI @ AtmosMentioned MediaRefactoring “Autonomy” & “Freedom” for The Age of Language Modelsby Michael Garfield223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyFuture Fossils PodcastAttention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foragingby David L. Barack et al.New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowellHumans On The LoopRaising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Futureby De KaiTechnoshamanism: A Very Psychedelic Century! at Moogfest 2016by Michael GarfieldProteus (film)Sonic restoration: acoustic stimulation enhances plant growth-promoting fungi activityby James M. Robinson et al.Ada Twist, Scientistby Andrea Beaty & David RobertsOppenheimer (film)Dante's Infernoby Dante AlighieriMentioned People & InstitutionsFord Motor Co.TelefonicaWayraAT&TAugusta Ada Byron LovelaceCharles BabbageMarshall McLuhanDr. Kate StoneErnst HaeckelTada HozumiLewis MumfordJohn Taylor GattoPaul TillichAlan TuringGuest RecommendationsEmalick NijeAnjuli BediCharlie MorleyAmichai Lau-Lavie This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you'll get perks either way).Our next members hangout will be Saturday Feb 15th at 3 pm Mountain Time and I would love to see you in the mix! Expect details on how to join the call by Friday.About This EpisodeWe live in a time defined by the agency of what author, critic, and teacher Howard Rheingold famously described as “tools for thought” — media that expand our minds and enhance our ability to learn and collaborate, both for good and ill. But just because we're on the Web doesn't make us “net smart”, another term from Rheingold's extensive catalogue of pithy idioms. As anyone with a pocket supercomputer can attest, having information on tap doesn't necessarily result in better attention management, boost our critical thinking, or confer a greater capacity to engage in prosocial collective action…but we can choose to allocate ourselves to developing the skills we need to thrive on this electronic frontier. And who better to help us than Rheingold himself, a legendary figure whose reporting and counsel from the frothy edge can teach us all great volumes about how to deepen our humanity in technologically-augmented worlds.Disclaimer: the audio and video on Howard's end of the recording drifted unevenly and sometimes minutes away from each other…and while I put in several extra days of effort to repair it all, you will notice moments where they don't line up. Project Links• Read the project pitch & planning doc• Dig into the full episode and essay archives• Join the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on Discord + Bluesky + X• Join the open, listener-moderated Future Fossils Discord Server• Contact me if you have questions (patron rewards, sponsorship, collaboration, etc.)• Browse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:50 - Intro0:07:15 - Howard's Story0:15:59 - Technology as Psychedelic & The New Selves of The Web0:26:42 - Attention Management as A 21st Century Literacy0:39:29 - Making Life Online a Lucid Dream0:52:17 - New Architectures of Participation1:01:51 - The Importance of Art & Play1:12:16 - Making Room for Innovation1:17:05 - Howard's Guest Recommendations1:18:24 - Thanks & AnnouncementsHoward's LinksWebsite | Patreon | X | Mastodon | WikipediaAttention: And Other 21st Century LiteraciesNet Smart @ Google Tech Talks (video)Tools for Thought: The History & Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (also on Digital Library for The Commons)Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (also on JSTOR)The Peeragogy Handbook (also public domain)Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (PDF here)Virtual Reality (also on Internet Archive)The Virtual Community: Homesteading on The Electronic Frontier (also on Internet Archive)Pataphysics.usMentioned Books & PapersDouglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual FrameworkLinda Stone - Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial AttentionJacques Ellul - The Technological SocietyRegina Rini - Deepfakes and The Epistemic BackstopPuja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl - Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's SoulJoseph Henrich - The Secret of Our SuccessElinor Ostrom - Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective ActionJ. Stephen Lansing - Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in BaliAnanyo Bhattacharya - The Man from The Future: The Visionary Life of John von NeumannGarrett Hardin - The Tragedy of The CommonsManuel Castells - The Rise of The Network SocietyAnnie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the BrainMentioned People & InstitutionsTimothy LearyJoe KamiyaAlan KayClay ShirkyRichard DoyleRay KurzweilLinda StoneIain McGilchristClifford Nass Stanislas DehaeneTim O'ReillyCory DoctorowAndreas WagnerDavid PasiakDave SnowdenMircea EliadeEd CatmullJohn LasseterAlan TuringXeroc PARCScientific AmericanThe WELLThe Whole Earth ReviewThe Institute For The FutureThe Macarthur FoundationNapsterBurning ManHewlett PackardPixarIndustrial Light & MagicLucasfilmStanford Institute for Innovations in LearningGuest RecommendationsJoe HenrichAnnie Murphy PaulBrian AlexanderAthena Aktipis This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio today. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that's carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica to the Center for Media and Social Impact to The New America Foundation to The Association of Independents in Radio and beyond, and now she oversees a refuge for social innovators working at the intersections of philanthropy, media, arts and culture, and futurism. We need dot connectors more than ever if we are to trace the shape of what's emerging, and I look to Jessica as an example of how to weave research, experience design, production, strategy, and culture-building into something like the raft we need to make our way through vast uncertainty to thriving futures just over the horizon. In this episode we discuss the ideas shared in her book with Kamal Sinclair, Making A New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Futures and how to rethink storytelling in new media.Project LinksPitch and planning documentHire me to help you make senseMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server + Bluesky List + X CommunityChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:40 - Intro0:07:51 - Who is Jessica Clark?0:10:42 - “New Media” Means New Kinds of “Reality”0:15:18 - Storytelling & Social Power0:25:07 - Overcoming Groupthink / Problems in The Creative Economy0:32:39 - Fairness in New Media0:40:38 - What Do We Measure While Incubating Creativity?0:48:32 - Post-Institutional Credentials0:55:01 - How Do We Support “The Interstitionaries”?1:02:14 - Intergenerational Wisdom & The Value of Conflict to Truth1:08:59 - What Biases Do We Want?1:14:29 - The Future Voice of Fandom1:18:03 - Acknowledgements & Next Guest(Most) MentionsMaking A New Reality's Toolkit for Change ResourcesKamal Sinclair & Jessica Clark discuss Making A New RealityVictor Pickard's “We Need a Media System That Serves People's Needs, Not Corporations'”William Deresiewicz's “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”Ward Shelley's Who Invented The Avant Garde Redux, 2020Michael Garfield's “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality'”Doug RushkoffSep KamvarJulie Ann CrommettStephanie LeppAri KuschnirMaureen FanEugene ChungZebras UniteMetalabel Maureen GiovanniniShannon GilmartinNicole AnandEd CatmullLeslie Fields CruzDavid JayCenter for Humane TechnologyWilliam Irwin Thompson's The American Replacement of NatureC Thi NguyenThomas FrankJennifer BrandelBrian EnoTracy Van SlykeThe Center for Media & Social ImpactMIT Open Documentary LabTrista HarrisPatricia AufderheideInternet ArchiveWikimedia FoundationMalka OlderGlobal VoicesDark Trek This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week we speak with K Allado-McDowell, artist, musician, and co-founder of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human-computer co-authorship with the book Pharmako-AI, as well as Air Age Blueprint, Amor Cringe, and the graphic novel Outside, plus works in opera and ritual. Their work reveals the human as inherently relational and ecological, technology as something nature's doing, and the new vistas made legible by technology as a fertile zone within which we can redefine identity and story from a radically transformed awareness. Pharmako-AI, the first book to be co-written with GPT-3 in 2020, sets the tone: mutually interdependent co-arising of selfhood through linguistic interactions between animal, vegetable, and mineral intelligences, AI as an adjunct to our awakening sense of co-imbrication in and as a plural and evolving world.Project LinksPlans, invited thinkers, and needsHire me for consulting or advisory workMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersTend a community knowledge garden in the Wisdom x Technology Discord serverMeet delightful fellow weirdos in the private Future Fossils Facebook groupChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:34 – Intro0:06:54 – Who is Kenric Allado-McDowell?0:13:12 – Entering Linguistic Hyperspace0:31:36 – Neural, Network, Immersive, Broadcast Media0:48:10 – The Poison Path of Machine Intelligence1:05:10 – Post-Cyperpunk Love & Nonduality1:17:55 – Recommendations1:21:02 – OutroMentionsK's “Neural Interpellation”K's “Designing Neural Media”Dale Pendell's Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and The Poison PathPharmako-AIK in conversation with Erik Davis at The AlembicJacques Vallee's The Invisible CollegeJohn KeatsRichard DoyleEduardo KohnSETIDavid Abrams' The Spell of The SensuousRobert RauschenbergJohn CageBell LabsFred Turner's The Democratic SurroundStanford UniversityThe Committee for National MoraleMargaret MeadGregory BatesonCharles & Ray EamesEdward SteichenStan VanDerBeekTerence McKennaReplika AIRay KurzweilMidjourneyJoseph SchumpeterJakob Johann von UexküllJean BaudrillardMiike SnowJohn DanaherSpikeRudolf SteinerTimothy MortonKrishnamurtiAlexander Von HumboldtAndrea WulfNick LandNora Khan Paul Preciado This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound, one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and raises questions like:Where is the line between technology and magic?What is a computer, really, and do humans qualify?How wrong might we be about the future?How do stories shape reality, and what happens when we have to make room for the stories of the more-than-human world?A crucial point of note: this is “hard science fiction”, but it's not the kind you're used to. At a time when even the most square, prosaic suits are quick to quote Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, it is appropriate that sci-fi as a kind of thinking-through of our condition would reflect the cultural retrieval of premodern tropes like wizards, dragons, talking animals, and sacred swords.What follows is a rich discussion of how Robin and I both enjoy traversing and interrogating those familiar boundaries between the lost and found, the sensible and the ineffable, wildness and city, born and created, sleep and waking, care and power…Project LinksLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:38 – Intro0:06:50 – Robin's Story0:08:35 – The Care and Feeding of AI0:13:38 – Magical Technologies vs. The (Other) Powers of Nature0:21:46 – Persistent Wildness in The Post-Apocalyptic Future0:28:57 – Mapping Everything & Getting Lost0:32:30 – The City of Transformation: Ephemeropoli from Burning Man to Rath Varia0:37:48 – Tuning Longevity to the Duration of our Interests0:41:49 – The Loss of Self in Data & The Metamorphic Self0:49:02 – Beaver Governance is Better Governance0:54:23 – Living Robots & Sleeping Institutions in Liquid Modernity1:02:16 – How Do We Keep Healthy Rhythms While Scaling?1:10:35 – Life at The College of Wyrd1:18:01 – Recommendations for Good Discussion & Book Takeaways1:23:09 – Thanks & OutroMentionsEliot Peper (Re: FF 47, 115)Eliot Peper's interview with Robin Sloan, “Binding The Moon”Gordon Bell's MyLifeBitsTim Morton's Hell: In Search of A Christian EcologyThe Long Now FoundationKevin Kelly's “The Expansion of Ignorance” (Re: FF 128, 165, 204)Star WarsTyson Yunkaporta (Re: FF 172)Adventure TimeThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of The KingdomMichael Crichton's Jurassic ParkJack VanceM. John HarrisonHerbert SimonJames C. Scott's Seeing Like A StateRichard Doyle's Darwin's PharmacyKim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue)Neil Gaiman's Long Now talk “How Stories Last”Jonathan Rowson/Perspectiva's antidebateThe Templeton FoundationZygmunt Bauman's Liquid ModernityAlexander RoseJohan Chu & James Evans's “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science”Michael Garfield's “The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, and Economies of Scale”Erik Hoel's “The Overfitted Brain”JF Martel (Re: FF 18, 71, 126, 214)Phil Ford (Re: FF 126, 157, 214)Erik Davis (Re: FF 99, 132, 141)The WeirdosphereBell LabsMagic: The GatheringComplexity Podcast 42: “Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West on Calling Bullshit”Inna Semetsky's “Information and Signs: The Language of Images”The I ChingPhilip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)Iain McGilchristClaire EvansJames BridleQuanta Magazine This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp (Website | LinkedIn), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our limitations of perspective. Stephanie is the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural Evolution and former Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. Her work has been covered by NPR and the MIT Technology Review, supported by the Mozilla Foundation and Sundance Institute, and featured on Future Fossils Podcast twice — first in episode 154 for her project Deep Reckonings and then in episode 205 with Greg Thomas on Jazz Leadership and Antagonistic Cooperation.Her latest project, Faces of X, pits actors against themselves in scripted trialogues between the politically liberal and conversative positions on major social issues, with a third role swooping in to observe what each side gets right and what they have in common. I support this work wholeheartedly. In my endless efforts to distill the key themes of Humans On The Loop, one of them is surely how our increasing connectivity can — if used wisely — help each of us identify our blind spots, find new respect and compassion for others, and discover new things about our ever-evolving selves (at every scale, from within the human body to the Big We of the biosphere and beyond).Thanks for listening and enjoy this conversation!Project LinksLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:00:48 – Intro0:06:33 – The Black, White, and Gray of Agency0:10:54 – Stephanie's Initiation into Multiperspectivalism0:15:57 – Hegelian Synthesis with Faces of X0:23:53 – Reconciling Culture & Geography0:29:02 – Improvising Faces of X for AI0:46:34 – Do Artifacts Have Politics?0:50:04 – Playing in An Orchestra of Perspectives0:55:10 – Increasing Agency in Policy & Voting1:05:55 – Self-Determination in The Family1:08:39 – Thanks & OutroOther Mentions• Damien Walter on Andor vs. The Acolyte• William Irwin Thompson• John Perry Barlow's “A Declaration for The Independence of Cyberspace”• Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell's “Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster”• Liv Boeree• Allen Ginsberg• Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch• Singularity University• Android Jones + Anson Phong's Chimera• Basecamp• Grimes• Langdon Winner's “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”• Ibram X. Kendi• Coleman Hughes• Jim Rutt This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week's guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen. If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io, an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communicate legible impact metrics to stakeholders. Or, in the parlance of our times, she is a master of negotiating the complexities of human communication and community.She has deep, lived experience of what it takes to subvert the toxic status quo, cultivate the health of teams, and rethink our “social” spaces so they actually work for human beings. She also introduced me to the world of “mycopunk”, an earthier and more distributed alternative to solarpunk that places more priority on our relationships and narrative construction as an inherently collective project. This is a warm and grounded dialogue with someone I respect immensely as a force for betterment. Here is how her team describes their work and principles on their own website:Our greatest challenges as a global civilization will require an unprecedented amount of cooperation and may have been caused in large part by unmitigated competition. We have founded Socialroots on a few key principles, summarized below, to support this shift into a more healthy future.* Efficient coordination across groups enables more decentralized organizing and greater innovation.* Data is a commons and must be treated as such. Platform users need to be empowered when it comes to their data.* Power stays healthier when shared. We are dedicated to fair, transparent, and consent-driven work, enabling participatory communities to share values and approaches, and to approach teamwork informed by insights from healthy living systems.There you have it. I highly recommend you reach out to her and her team if you are trying to do better work in groups.Special Announcement: Join me for the first in a new series of live hangout calls for patrons on Saturday, January 18th at 2 pm Mountain Time! Let's foster real and lasting collaborations in a safe place for collective inquiry.Thank you and enjoy this episode!Project LinksLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse my reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:31 – Intro0:06:58 – Meet Christina Bowen0:08:54 – Scaling Social Networks Without Burning Out0:14:00 – Working Out Loud in Small & Large Groups0:19:25 – Social Protocols of Coordination0:22:44 – Healthy Boundaries Online0:30:10 – Supporting Invisible or Illegible Labor0:40:50 – Subverting The Status (More-Than-Human) Pyramid0:51:44 – Salience Landscapes & Safe/Brave/Inclusive Spaces0:53:35 – AI-Augmented Communication & Spacemaking1:01:34 – Edge-Based Coherent Sensemaking vs. Toxic Hierarchies1:09:11 – Mindful Tech Use & Recommended Guests1:12:38 – OutroMentioned MediaMycopunk PrinciplesBuild Capacity: Scaling your network without burning outby Socialroots, Christina Bowen, Naomi Joy SmithWhat is coordination and why is it so important to effective networks?by Ana Jamborcic, Christina Bowen, SocialrootsIntimacy Gradients: The Key to Fixing Our Broken Social Media Landscapeby Socialroots, Ana JamborcicLet's subvert the status pyramidby Socialroots, Ana JamborcicWorking and learning out loudby Harold JarcheAlyssa Allegretti on Sacred Domesticity and Hard Times in The Liminal WebFuture Fossils Podcast 225Descartes' Errorby Antonio DamasioSeeing Like A Stateby James C. ScottC. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as ArtFuture Fossils 175Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As GovernanceFuture Fossils 213Stephen Reid on Technological MetamodernismFuture Fossils 226Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold EquationsFuture Fossils 141The Dawn of Everythingby David Graeber & David WengrowGenerative Team Design: Innovation, Psychological Safety, and Empathyby Dara BlumenthalBeing Glueby Tanya ReillyIdentity Is Such A Dragby Luis Mojica and Sophie Strand on Holistic Life NavigationThe future is fungi: The rise and rhizomes of mushroom cultureby ASU Center for Science and The Imagination with Merlin Sheldrake, Kaitlin Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, and Corey PressmanOther Mentions• DWeb Camp• Responsive.org• Jeff Emmett• Plato• Bayo Akomolafe• Douglas Rushkoff• John Fullerton• Capitalinstitute.org• Cris Moore• Friedrich Hölderlin• Interspeciesinternet.io• Kumu.io• Joe Edelman• Pri Bertucci This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsWhen technology gets byzantine, when the heady early years of cybernetic mysticism give way and our software engineers become the new priests of the Catholic institutions of Big Tech, maybe we can learn a thing or two from a Byzantine Catholic who's made Responsible Technology their life. This week's guest is just that person. Benjamin Olsen is the Head of Windows Responsible AI & Data Compliance at Microsoft, where he also pioneered their first AI & Ethics education programs. He's also an advisor for AI and Faith and has worked as co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Responsible Learning & Education program and member of their Responsible Development and Deployment of Technology steering committee; the former Responsible Innovation Lead at Meta; and a part of the IEEE's working group on Responsible AI. His online courses in Analytics, Data Science, and Responsible Technology have been taken by millions of students in more than 120 countries.But it's his writing at the intersection of religion, spirituality, technology, and human flourishing that caught my eye. I met Ben through Andrew Dunn of the School of Wise Innovation, where I was on the faculty for a course on Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI with Josh Schrei, and was immediately taken by the clarity and heart he brings to places I have always guessed were, frankly, soulless. Speaking with him gave me hope that maybe all this hype is actually the evidence of earnest and concerted effort — in some corners, anyway — to do the future right and not just big. I hope that you enjoy your conversation.Links“The Inner Life of Responsible Innovation” by Benjamin Olsen“Monsters and Moderation in Respsonbile AI” by Benjamin Olsen“Super-responsible AI” by Benjamin Olsen“Mission Impossible: Perfectly Responsible AI” by Benjamin OlsenLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse my reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser Quote0:01:34 – Episode Intro0:03:58 – Introducing Benjamin Olsen0:08:20 – Toward Omni-considerate Corporate Ethics0:17:18 – Practicing Super-responsibility0:27:32 – Between The Scylla of Censorship and The Charybdis of Underblocking0:36:26 – Doing The Lord's Work inside The Leviathan0:43:09 – Consent between Company & Customer0:54:07 – How Do We Exercise Agency Within Social Constraints?0:58:10 – Who Does Benjamin Recommend?1:00:21 – Closing RemarksMentions* Yolanda Gil* Kevin Kelly* Martin Luther King Jr.* Henry David Thoreau* William Gibson* Stafford Beer* James P. Carse* Hans Moravec* Father Walker Ciszek* Catherine Dougherty* Larry Muhlstein* Danny Go* Timothy Morton* Carl Jung* Amber Case* Michael Zargham* Chip and Dan Heath* Bayazid Bastami* Shannon Valor*  Dan Zigmund* Zvika Krieger This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis Week's GuestWhen, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts? After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.” I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis' Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I'd rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…LinksRichard Doyle's faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse my reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:03:36 – Episode Intro0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn't A Professional Service (??)1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of Science1:22:17 – AI-Enabled Extraction vs. AI-Enabled Abundance1:38:40 – Closing RemarksReflectionsMuch of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are “in the loop” or “out of the loop” — whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them, if we ever do…and yet evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the way that humans are always-already intertwingled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops — as focal points of conscious agency dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we've been people we have never really “called the shots” but rather cultivated our response-ability within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque…and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves.And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human. Like the telescope and microscope before them, language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. We do not need to leave our solar system to find “strange new worlds” awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation lately seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. “What can I do?” becomes “Who am I?” and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry. To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just “connected” but precipitate as aggregates, in fields of constellated data, prompts a figure-ground reversal in which selves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing “human” and “non-human” as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility: we find the opportunity to question what we're trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own “source code” and adjust our goals accordingly.If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh, distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity. Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask “What do we want to do, and why is that desire substantiated?”This kind of meaning-making isn't just a luxury but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn't working. It's time to ask if, maybe, this is due to “user error” and the answer doesn't lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world — and, this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well-adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful.In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are both Towers of Babel and fingers pointing to the Moon. They are weird, unprecedented, and sublime — and they are business as usual on Planet Earth, where we have always come awake in medias res amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity and the place from which we can, at last, engage the question of “What Now?” with discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face.Digital technologies are psychedelic. We've been on a bad trip. It's time for us wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the oars together in whatever novel wonders may arise — to neither “give way to astonishment” nor let our fears steer us into the rocks. Humans On The Loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be, right now, to fully give in to the paradox, and notice how its knots untie in hyperspace, and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding — and more lucid (dare I say, productive?) questions.One of those questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now found ourselves swirling. Maps of the World Wide Web look very much like brain scans of the amped-up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down — when every node has edges with each other node, and average path length drops to one — how do we prioritize? What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent “intertwingularity”? Which apparitions do we honor, and which do we ignore? (And how?) Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us: “test your drugs”, “get grounded”, “set and setting”, “integration counseling”…MentionsGenerated by NotebookLM. Please let me know if you notice any errors or omissions!* Richard Doyle* Michael Garfield * Gary Weber* Shankara* Trey Conner* Nora Pandoro* Erik Davis* Joshua DiCaglio* John Perry Barlow* Naomi Most* Nate Hagens* Daniel Schmachtenberger* Tyson Yunkaporta* Martin Luther King Jr.* Mahatma Gandhi* John Von Neumann* Subhash Kak* Iain McGilchrist* Timothy Morton* Stuart Kauffman* Dean Radin* Brian Josephson* Monica Gagliano* Christoph Koch* Gregory Bateson* Elon Musk* Robert Rosen* H.P. Lovecraft* Philip K. Dick* Herbert Simon* Douglas Rushkoff* Sri Aurobindo This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This Episode“The best academic lecture/slam poetry/sermon/magical invocation/attunement and invitation to engage I've experienced in a long while.”– Daniel LindenbargerNext week, after nearly nine years of development, this show grows up to become Humans On The Loop, a transdisciplinary exploration of agency in the age of automation. For long-time listeners of Future Fossils, not much will really change — philosophical investigations in the key of psychedelic futurism, voyages into the edges of what is and can be known, and boldly curious riffs on the immeasurable value of storytelling and imagination have always characterized this show. Many of the episodes I've shared in this last year especially were, effectively, preparations for this latest chapter and play as large a part in my ongoing journey to synthesize and translate everything I've learned from years of independent scholarship and institutional work in esteemed tech, science, and culture orgs…But we are no longer waiting for a weird future to arrive. We're living in it, and shaping it with every act and utterance. So in this “final” episode of Future Fossils before I we bring all of these investigations into the domain of practical applied inquiry, it felt right to ramp from FF to HOTL by sharing my talk and discussion for Stephen Reid's recent online course on Technological Metamodernism. This was a talk that left me feeling very full of hope for what's to come, in which I trace the constellations that connect some of my biggest inspirations, and outline the social transformations I see underway.This is a rapid and dynamic condensation of the big patterns I've noticed in the course of over 500 hours of recorded public dialogue and a lively primer on why I'm focusing on the attention and imagination as the two big forces that will continue to shape our lives in the worlds that come after modernity.It is also just the beginning.Thank you for being part of this adventure.✨ Support & Participate• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon(15% off annual memberships until 12/21/24 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy (most of) the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP• Read “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality'”, my story mentioned in this episode.✨ ChaptersChapter 1: Reflections & Announcements (0:00:00)Chapter 2: Co-Evolution with AI and the Limits of Control (0:12:49)Chapter 3: Poetry as the Beginning and End of Scientific Knowledge (0:18:06)Chapter 4: The American Replacement of Nature and the Power of Narrative (0:24:05)Chapter 5: The End of “Reality” & The Beginning of Metamodern Nuance (28:58)Chapter 6: Q&A: Myths, Egregores, and Metamodern Technology vs. Wetiko & Moloch (0:34:52)Chapter 7: Q&A: Chaos Magic & Other Strategies for Navigating Complexity (45:59)Chapter 8: Q&A: Musings on Symbiogenesis & Selfhood (0:50:18)Chapter 9: Q&A: How Do We Legitimize These Approaches? (0:55:42)Chapter 10: Q&A: Why Am I Devoting Myself to Wise Innovation Inquiry? (0:61:01)Chapter 11: Thanks & Closing (0:63:22)✨ Mentioned IndividualsA mostly-complete list generated by Notebook LM and edited by Michael Garfield.* William Irwin Thompson - Historian, poet, and author of The American Replacement of Nature, which argues that American culture is future-oriented. (See Future Fossils 42 & 43.)* Evan “Skytree” Snyder - Electronic music producer, roboticist, and co-founder of Future Fossils who departed after ten episodes. (See Future Fossils 1-10, 53, 174, and 207.)* Stephen Reid - Founder of the Dandelion online learning program and The Psychedelic Society; host of a course on “Technological Metamodernism” in which Garfield presented this talk. (See Future Fossils 226.)* Ken Wilber - Author of numerous books on “AQAL” Integral Theory. (See Michael's 2008 interview with him on Integral Art.)* Friedrich Hölderlin - German poet who famously said, "Poetry is the beginning and the end of all scientific knowledge.”* George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - Authors of Metaphors We Live By, which explores the role of embodied metaphor in shaping thought.* John Vervaeke - Philosopher who, along with others, uses the term “transjective” to describe the interconnected nature of subject and object.* Sean Esbjörn-Hargens - Integral theorist who taught Garfield at JFK University. (See Future Fossils 60, 113, and 150.)* Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch - Embodied mind theorists and authors of On Becoming Aware, a book about phenomenology.* Kevin Kelly - Techno-optimist Silicon Valley futurist and author on “the expansion of ignorance” in relation to scientific discovery. (See Future Fossils 128, 165, and 203.)* Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and David Bohm - Paradigm-challenging physicists mentioned who, by science to its limits, developed mystical insights.* Timothy Morton - Philosopher who coined the term “hyperobjects” to refer to entities so vast and complex they defy traditional understanding. (See Future Fossils 223.)* Caleb Scharf - Astrobiologist, author of The Ascent of Information, in which he coins the term “The Dataome” to refer to the planet-scale body of information that constrains human behavior.* Iain McGilchrist - Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary, known for his work on the divided brain and the importance of right-brained thinking.* Eric Wargo - Anthropologist and science writer who suggests that dreams are precognitive and the brain binds time as a four-dimensional object. (See Future Fossils 117, 171, and 231.)* Regina Rini - Philosopher at York University who coined the term “epistemic backstop of consensus” to describe what photography gave society and what, later, deepfakes have eroded.* Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky - Philosophers and authors who explored the implications of the loss of a universal moral order grounded in religion.* Duncan Barford - An author and figure associated with chaos magic.* Lynn Margulis - Evolutionary biologist known for her work on symbiogenesis and the importance of cooperation in evolution.* Primavera De Filippi - Co-author of Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code with Aaron Wright and technology theorist who theorized the "Collaboration Monster."* Joshua Schrei - Ritualist and host of The Emerald Podcast who produced episodes on Guardians and Protectors and on the role of The Seer. (See Future Fossils 219.)* Hunter S. Thompson - American journalist and author known for his gonzo journalism and the quote, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”* Tim Adalin - Host of the VoiceCraft podcast, on which Garfield discussed complex systems perspectives on pathologies in organizational development. (See Future Fossils 227.) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ Support & Participate• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon (15% off annual memberships until 12/21 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP, coda “You Don't Have To Move → 8:33” from The Age of Reunion✨ About This EpisodeIn this penultimate episode of Future Fossils before we transform into Humans On The Loop, I bring two of my favorite guests and comrades in the so-called “Weirdosphere” back for their first-ever conversation together — and it's a real banger! Probably the most inspired and provocative conversation I've ever had on the nature of time and human creativity.Joining me for this trialogue are Eric Wargo, author of From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination (previously on FF episodes 117 and 171), and J.F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice and co-host (with Phil Ford) of Weird Studies podcast (previously on FF episodes 18, 71, 126, and 214). Our discussion centers on the concept of precognition — the ability to perceive future events — as the mechanism of all human creative activity. Both Eric and J.F. argue that art, like shamanistic practices, acts as a means of accessing and expressing precognitive experiences, often manifesting as seemingly coincidental events or uncanny correspondences between art and reality. We talk about the role of trauma and dissociation in stimulating creative breakthroughs — why there seems to be a direct biological and psychological link between suffering, displacement, and the discovery of radical new insights and modes of being. Can we create without destroying, or are rupture and connection one thing?We also examine how emerging media through the ages have shaped our experience of time. Starting with the earliest Paleolithic artifacts and the role of cave art in facilitating or encoding ecstatic experience, we trace the evolution of art through to how the development “the cut” in modern cinema led to new ideas of causality. Each new medium provides novel ways of thinking about leaps across space and time, and their study offers new points of entry into a unifying philosophy of rupture and discontinuity.Lastly, we explore some of my own most potent and disquieting precognitive experiences in light of Eric's argument that the UFO phenomenon may actually be the braided precognitive experiences of future human beings and symbiotic artificial intelligences — a thesis that sheds new light on everything from the lives and work of Philip K. Dick, Jacques Vallée, Carl Jung, Andrei Tarkovsky, to The Book of Ezekiel.Where we're going, we won't need roads…Speaking of art, UFOs, psychedelic experience, and time machines, here's the standalone music video for the song we discuss in this episode that was inspired by my UFO (or were they time machine) experiences in 2007. I threw it back in as a coda to the episode but in case you want to view it in its original resolution and in the context of the entire album, here you go. The “8:33” section starts around 3:58:✨ ChaptersChapter 1: Introduction (0:00:00)Chapter 2: Precognitive Imagination in the Arts (0:08:57)Chapter 3: The Personal is Precognitive (0:13:34)Chapter 4: The Cut and the Leap (0:22:15)Chapter 5: The Brain as a Fast-Forwarder (0:30:38)Chapter 6: Campfires, TVs, and Flickering Consciousness (0:38:57)Chapter 7: The Trauma of Truth (0:48:04)Chapter 8: Prophecy and The Trash Stratum (0:54:33)Chapter 9: UFOs as Time Machines, The Disappointment of Destiny (1:14:39)Chapter 10: Closing and News on Upcoming Releases (1:20:28)✨ Other MentionsAn inexhaustive list of people, places, and key works mentioned in this episode.* Morgan Robertson: Author of a novel that is believed to have predicted the sinking of the Titanic.* Hunter S. Thompson: Author and journalist.* William Shakespeare: Playwright who wrote Macbeth.* Comte de Lautréamont: A French poet who talked about "the cut" in his work.* Jean Epstein: Author of the book on the philosophy of cinema, The Intelligence of a Machine.* Carl Jung: Psychoanalyst who developed the concept of synchronicity.* Sergei Eisenstein: Filmmaker, and film theorist.* Gilles Deleuze: Philosopher who argued that “difference is more fundamental than identity.”* Cy Twombly: Artist whose work is discussed by Eric Wargo.* Andrei Tarkovsky: Filmmaker who wrote a diary entry quoted in From Nowhere.* Philip K. Dick: Science fiction author whose experiences with precognition and synchronicity are discussed in From Nowhere.* Jacques Vallée: Scientist and ufologist, author of a book about the UFO phenomena called Passport to Magonia.* Diana Pasulka: Academic who studies the UFO phenomenon.* Johnjoe McFadden: Scientist who works on quantum biology.* Henri Bergson: Philosopher known for his work on time and consciousness, is quoted as saying “the universe is a machine for the making of gods.”* Octavia E. Butler: Science fiction author.* Harlan Ellison: Science fiction author.* James Cameron: Filmmaker who directed The Terminator.* Max Simon Ehrlich: Screenwriter who wrote the Star Trek episode The Apple.* Megan Phipps: Guest on the Future Fossils podcast (episode 214).* Michelangelo: Guest on the Future Fossils podcast who discussed Paisley Ontology and precognition with Michael Garfield.* Björk: Musician, whose song "Modern Things" is mentioned.* Greg Bishop: UFO historian.* Terence McKenna: Ethnobotanist and writer who coined the term "immanentize the eschaton.".* Phil Ford: Co-host of the Weird Studies podcast.* Richard Wagner: Composer who was arrested in 1837.* Zozobra: a hundred-year-old effigy burn in Santa Fe, NM.* Esalen Institute: the center of the Human Potential movement, in Big Sur, CA.* The Fort-Da Game: A game observed by Sigmund Freud in which a child throws a toy away and then retrieves it, demonstrating an understanding of object permanence.* The Third Man Factor: A phenomenon experienced by explorers and mountain climbers in extreme survival situations, involving the feeling of a presence accompanying them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week I talk with Jamie Curcio to ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power, and to whom do we give ours? Where does that power come from? To whom do we sell our stories?We explore the world behind the world, linking Jamie's writing and game world-building in the domain he calls myth punk, and the equally Eldritch complex systems wicked problem of climate action.Studying that link, we can trace the outlines of emergent 21st Century religions — the reinterpretation of axial traditions suited to the digital era, the metamodern revival of land-based animistic traditions, and even weirder novel forms that arise at the end of one world and the effloresence of many others.✨ Jamie's LinksFallen Cycle Podcastmodernmythology.net“Investing In The Unknown”“The Cascade” Part 1, 2, 3Tales From When I Had A Face: B&W EditionTales From When I Had A Face info page✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Chapters1. Jamie's Background (0:05:46)2. Embracing the Unknown and the Role of Artifice (0:11:14) 3. Prometheus, Intentional Mystery, and the Nature of Agency (0:16:21)4. Introducing the Fallen Cycle and its Mythological Framework (0:21:57)5. Exploring Thematic Elements: Gods, Myths, and Consumerism (0:27:32)6. Climate Change, Hyperobjects, and Societal Inertia (0:33:36)7. Festivals, Dionysus, and the Value of Liminal Spaces (0:40:26)8. AI as a Creative Tool and Collaborator (0:46:05)9. Mythology, Role-Playing, and Enacting Change (0:52:16)10. Engaging with Jamie's Work and Final Thoughts (0:56:03)✨ Other MentionsFF 195 — A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesA Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLandaJoseph CampbellFriedrich NietzscheArthur SchopenhauerBuddhismWestern EsotericismEvolving Media NetworkWeird Studies Podcast (with Jamie, with Michael)Tom MorganGilles Deleuze“The Soldier and The Hunchback” by Aleister CrowleyPrometheus (Movie)Alien Romulus (Movie)Eric WargoJohn KeatsUnweaving The Rainbow by Richard DawkinsFF 53 — A Very Xeno Christmas with Evan SnyderStephen BatchelorSamurai Jack (TV show)Fern Gully (Movie)Jitterbug Perfume by Tom RobbinsAmerican Gods by Neil GaimanSandman by Neil GaimanJosh SchreiHell by Timothy MortonThe Book of ExodusThe Demon-Haunted World by Carl SaganCyndi CoonDavid Bowie This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week on Future Fossils I welcome back Sara Phinn Huntley (help her fight cancer!), a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher who has spent the last two decades exploring the intersection of psychedelics, technology, and philosophy.An intrepid psychonaut and cartographer of hyperspace, her current focus involves using VR to represent visual/spatial imagination in real-time. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she documents and maps the states revealed by dimethyltriptamime and other psychedelics, cargo culting higher dimensional artifacts through the intersection of chaos mathematics, Islamic geometry, and 3D diagrammatic performance capture.  Her work has been published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and featured in Diana Reed Slattery's Xenolinguistics. She is the art director for The Illustrated Field to the DMT Entities with David Jay Brown (forthcoming at Inner Traditions, 2025).✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Main Points + Big Ideas* The Entanglement of Language and Being: DMT entities reveal a profound connection between language and the construction of reality, echoing themes found in esoteric traditions and the emergence of AI.* The Cartography of Hyperspace: The book serves as a guide to the vast and uncharted territory of DMT experiences, highlighting the challenge of classifying subjective encounters and the potential for mapping a multidimensional reality.* The Reproducibility Problem and the Power of Big Data: While acknowledging the inherent challenges of studying subjective experiences, we point to the potential of emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and large-scale data analysis to offer new insights.* Embodied Bias and the Nature of Evolution: The nonlinear and multidimensional nature of DMT experiences challenges our understanding of time, evolution, and even anatomy, prompting a re-evaluation of our assumptions about reality.* Attention as a Currency: We emphasize the importance of attention in navigating both the DMT space and the rapidly evolving technological landscape, posing critical questions about who or what deserves our focus.* The Question of Human Survival: The episode ends by urging humanity to confront its self-destructive tendencies and leverage its collective wisdom to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the future.✨ ChaptersChapter 1: Sara's Psychedelic Journey and the Genesis of the DMT Entities Field Guide (00:00:00 - 00:10:00)* Sara's fascination with DMT from a young age.* Her exploration of DMT through various artistic media, including performance art and xenolinguistics.* The inception of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities book, inspired by classic field guides to nature.* The decision to leverage AI in the book's creation due to the vastness of the subject matter.Chapter 2: Language, Being, and the AI Oracle (00:10:00 - 00:20:00)* The role of language in shaping and interpreting DMT entities, drawing parallels to esoteric traditions like the concept of the Logos.* Sara's process of interacting with AI, describing it as "talking to it" to curate the visual representations of DMT entities.* The blurring of categories and the subjective nature of interpreting the raw data of DMT experiences.* The challenge of reconciling diverse and often conflicting perceptions of the same entities.* Language as a compression tool for expressing ineffable experiences.* The increasing relevance of AI in understanding consciousness, particularly with future advancements in brain modeling.Chapter 3: Navigating Ontological Shock and the Nature of DMT Entities (00:20:00 - 00:30:00)* The challenge of reconciling DMT experiences with our "meat space" understanding of reality.* Sara's personal experience of gaining knowledge through DMT, challenging James Kent's view on the limitations of such knowledge.* The neurological basis for some common DMT hallucinations and its implications for understanding the experience.* The interplay of cultural and personal projections in shaping DMT entity encounters.* Exploring the possibility of psychedelics as a way to interact with a simulated reality.* The existence of phenomena that defy current scientific understanding, pointing to the need for open-mindedness.Chapter 4: The Cartography of Hyperspace and the Specter of Evolution (00:30:00 - 00:40:00)* The possibility of DMT entity encounters revealing more about the observer than about independent beings.* The existence of consistent archetypes across different DMT experiences and their overlap with other paranormal phenomena.* The intriguing connection between DMT entities and cross-cultural mythological figures.* Examining the role of genetic lineage and the intergenerational transmission of unusual experiences.* The book as a tool for intellectual curiosity, humility, and exploring the vastness of hyperspace.* The influence of culture in shaping our perceptions of both traditional and modern entities.* Sara's personal stance on the reality of DMT entities - acknowledging their potential existence while remaining open to other interpretations.Chapter 5: The Machine in the Ghost: Folklore, AI, and the Urge to Classify (00:40:00 - 00:50:00)* The blurring lines between insectoid and mechanical entities in both folklore and modern UAP narratives.* The impact of technology and the idea of a simulated reality on our perception of entities.* Sara's view on the potential taxonomic shift in our understanding of entities due to technological advancements.* Exploring the limits of AI in understanding consciousness and the potential for using it as a tool for self-reflection.* The challenge and importance of maintaining a sense of awe and wonder amidst scientific inquiry.Chapter 6: The Problem of Reproducibility and the Potential of Big Data (00:50:00 - 01:00:00)* Acknowledging the inherent limitations of scientific inquiry into subjective experiences.* The promise of machine learning and big data in identifying patterns and correlations across diverse DMT experiences.* The potential for reconstructing visual fields from brain data to gain further insights into the DMT experience.* The potential for utilizing blockchain technology, quadratic voting, and other advanced tools to address researcher bias and context in large-scale data collection.Chapter 7: Embodied Bias and the Non-Linearity of Time (01:00:00 - 01:10:00)* The idea of anatomy as an encoded representation of environmental features and its implications for understanding non-human entities.* Challenging the linear concept of time and evolution in light of the multidimensional experiences offered by DMT.* The vastness and complexity of "meat space" reality and its potential to hold hidden dimensions and Easter eggs.* The potential for AI and advanced computation to unlock deeper understanding of reality in conjunction with psychedelic exploration.Chapter 8: Sara's Breakthrough Experience and the Reverence for Mystery (01:10:00 - 01:20:00)* A detailed description of the experience, including encountering cloaked entities, a 12-dimensional brain diagnostic tool, and a neurosurgeon-like being.* The intensity and reality-shattering nature of the experience, surpassing previous encounters with DMT entities.* Sara's decision to take a break from psychedelics after this experience.* The importance of reverence and respect when engaging with the DMT space and its mysteries.* The continuing potential for breakthroughs and the limitlessness of the DMT rabbit hole.Chapter 9: Attention, AI, and the Question of Human Survival (01:20:00 - 01:30:00)* The book as a shared tapestry of experiences, honoring the work of other artists and researchers.* The importance of acknowledging both shared archetypes and individual variations in DMT experiences.* The potential for AI to evolve beyond human comprehension and the need for humans to adapt.* The question of AI's attention span and its potential implications for human-AI interaction.* The need for humanity to overcome its self-destructive tendencies in order to harness the potential of technology and navigate the future.* Sara's personal mission to inspire progress and wonder through her art.✨ Mentions* David Jay Brown - Author of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities* Diana Reed Slattery - Author of Xenolinguistics* Ralph Abraham - Chaos theoretician at UCSC who taught Sara about wallpaper groups* James Kent - Author of Alien Information Theory* Aldous Huxley - Author of the essay "Heaven and Hell"* K. Allado-McDowell - Co-director of Google's Artists and Machine Learning program* Roland Fischer - Experimental researcher and pharmacologist* Iain McGilchrist - Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary* William Irwin Thompson - Historian and poet-philosopher* The Tea Faerie - Psychonaut and harm reduction expert* Terence McKenna - Known for his ideas on the Logos and the psychedelic experience* Andrés Gomez Emilsson - Director of Qualia Research Institute focusing on the mathematics of psychedelic experiences* Chris Bledsoe - Known for his family's experiences with entities in a waking state* Stuart Davis - Host of "Aliens and Artists" and known for his encounters with mantis beings* Graham Hancock - Author who encountered "big-brained robots" during a psychedelic experience* Adam Aronovich - Curator of Healing From Healing* Rodney Ascher - Director of the documentary "A Glitch in the Matrix"* Ian McGilchrist - Author and researcher who studies hemispheric specialization in the brain* René Descartes - Philosopher known for his mind-body dualism and views on animals* Helané Wahbeh - Researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, discussed the reproducibility problem in science This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I'm stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has gone swimming into the deep end of The Weird for long enough to develop an appreciation for its paradoxical profundities. He can also boast personal friendships with two of the greatest (and somewhat diametrically opposed) science fiction authors ever: Phil Dick and Isaac Asimov. In this conversation we start by exploring some of his discoveries and insights as an intuition-guided laboratory biomedical researcher and follow the river upstream into his synthesis of emerging theoretical frameworks that might make sense of PKD's legendary VALIS experiences — the encounter with high strangeness that drove him to write The Exegesis, over a million words of effort to explain the deep structure of time and reality. It's time for new ways to think about time! Enjoy…✨ Support This Work• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Go DeeperBill's Academia.edu pageBill's talk at the PKD Film FestivalBill's profile for the Palo Alto Longevity PrizeBill's story on Facebook about his biochemistry researchBill in the FF Facebook group re: Simulation Theory, re: The Zero-Point Field, re: everything he's done that no one else has, re: how PKD predicted ChatGPT"If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" by PKDThe Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup by Eric WargoMy first and second interviews with William Irwin ThompsonMy lecture on biology, time, and myth from Oregon Eclipse Gathering 2017"I understand Philip K. Dick" by Terence McKennaWeird Studies on PKD and "The Trash Stratum" Part 1 & Part 2Weird Studies with Joshua Ramey on divination in scienceSparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert & Michele Root-BernsteinDiscovering by Robert Root-Bernstein✨ MentionsPhilip K. Dick, Bruce Damer, Iain McGilchrist, Eric Wargo, Stu Kauffman, Michael Persinger, Alfred North Whitehead, Terence McKenna, Karl Friedrich, Mike Parker, Chris Jeynes, David Wolpert, Ivo Dinov, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schroedinger, Kaluza & Klein, Richard Feynman, Euclid, Hermann Minkowski, James Clerk Maxwell, The I Ching, St. Augustine, Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Alexander Vilenkin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Timothy Morton, Futurama, The Wachowski Siblings, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonard Euler, Paramahansa Yogananda, Alfred Korbzybski, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Claude Shannon, Ludwig Boltzmann, Carl Jung, Danny Jones, Mark Newman, Michael Lachmann, Cristopher Moore, Jessica Flack, Robert Root Bernstein, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Ruth Bernstein, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Diane Musho Hamilton This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft. Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast (his edit here) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation. Enjoy!✨ Support This Work• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Chapters00:00 Introduction to Lifelong Collaboration and Innovation 01:18 The Role of Art and Holistic Processes in Innovation 01:37 Challenges in Fostering Collective Intelligence 03:37 The Intersection of Science and Art 03:49 Introduction to the Special Episode with Tim Adelin06:36 Exploring Technology and Human Civilization 07:27 The Importance of Trust and Dialogue in Organizations 42:41 The Rise of Wise Innovation 43:34 The Information Scaling Problem 44:49 The Epidemic of Loneliness 46:58 The Obsession with Novelty 50:21 The Role of Cultural Intelligence 53:25 The Finite Time Singularity 01:01:15 The Future of Human Collaboration✨ Takeaways* Wise innovation requires reconnecting with the purpose and mission of organizations and cultivating a field that allows for the ripening of ideas and contributions.* The tension between exploration and exploitation is a key consideration in navigating large networks and organizations.* Play, creativity, and the integration of holistic, playful, and noisy approaches are essential for innovation and problem-solving.* Deep and authentic relationships are crucial for effective communication and understanding in a world of information overload.* The need for wisdom to keep pace with technology is a pressing challenge in the modern world. Innovation is a crossroads between the need for integration and the obsession with novelty and productivity.* Different types of innovation are needed, and movement in one dimension is not equivalent to movement in another.* The erosion of values and the loss of context can occur when organizations prioritize innovation and novelty.* A tripartite regulatory structure, consisting of industry, art/culture/academia, and government, is necessary to prevent the exploitation of power asymmetries.* Small-scale governance processes and the importance of care and balance in innovation are key to a more sustainable and wise approach.✨ MentionsAlison Gopnik, Iain McGilchrist, Brian Arthur, Bruce Alderman, Andrew Dunn, Turquoise Sound, John Vervaeke, Naomi Klein, Erik Davis, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Mignano, Rimma Boshernitsan, Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, Jim Brown, Elisa Mora, Chris Kempes, Manfred Laubichler, Annalee Newitz, Venkatesh Rao, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Yanis Varoufakis, Ferananda Ibarra, Josh Field, Michel Bauwens, John Pepper, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Landua, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Kevin Clark, Stuart Kauffman, Jordan Hall, William Irwin Thompson, Henry Andrews This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeHow can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation?How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly dominated by anxiety and technological determinism?This week on Future Fossils (as a teaser for the kind of conversations I am having for my upcoming spin-off Humans On The Loop), I meet with Stockholm-based transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator, complexity researcher, founder of The Psychedelic Society, and once upon a time the youngest-ever board member of Greenpeace UK, Stephen Reid to discuss the importance of taking a more values-driven approach to technology development. Stephen and I agree that it's crucial to consider the potential consequences of technological advancements and to promote a more thoughtful approach to innovation…but for the sake of playing with tension, he places more of an emphasis on our capacity for axiological design whereas I feel more of a need to point out that the rapid evolution of technology can outpace our ability to predict its consequences, troubling efforts to design an enduringly sustainable future. One thing we agree on, and model in this episode, is the value of deeper conversations about the role of technology in society…and how to integrate their transformative potentials.PS — I'm guest lecturing for Stephen's upcoming four-week course on Technological Metamodernism soon, along with Alexander Beiner and Hanzi Freinacht and Ellie Hain and Rufus Pollock. We'll engage critically with ideas like Daniel Schmachtenberger's axiological design and Vitalik Buterin's d/acc. As usual I'm probably the odd duck in this lineup, going hard on epistemic humility and the injunction of digital media to effect a transformation of the modern self-authoring ego into networked, permeable, transjective sub-agencies arising spontaneously and fluidly from fundamentally noncomputable interactions of rapid information flows... Anyway, the point is we'd love to have you join us and sink your teeth into these discussions! I absolutely promise to bring up voting cyborg ecotopes. Big thanks to Stephen for inviting me to play!PPS — Here is another really good, very different conversation between me and Stephen and Alistair Langer on Alistair's show Catalyzing Radical Systems Change.(Editorial Correction: It was Mike Tyson, not Muhammad Ali, who said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.")✨ Support This Work• Hire me as a consultant or advisor• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backers for Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Chapters(0:00:00-0:10:29) Stephen's Background and Interests in Technology and Metamodernism (0:10:29-0:18:03) Navigating the Complex Relationship Between Technology and Human Values (0:18:03-0:25:18) The Limits of Axiological Design and the Importance of Community Oversight (0:25:18-0:34:29) Defining and Defending Axiological Design (0:34:29-0:45:03) Exploring Alternative Governance Structures: Guilds and Rites of Passage (0:45:03-0:56:36) Vitalik Buterin's "Defensive Decentralized Accelerationism" (0:56:36-1:06:04) Integrating Humor and Recognizing Irony in the Technosphere(1:06:04-1:12:17) Recovering Awe, Curiosity, and Playfulness in a Tech-Saturated World (1:12:17- 1:12:56) Finding Lightness in the Face of Existential Questions (1:12:56-1:13:28) Exploring The Future and A Call to Action✨ MentionsIain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Hanzi Freinacht, Josh Schrei, Ken Wilber, Vitalik Buterin, Bayo Akomolafe, Cory Doctorow, Nora Bateson, Dave Snowden, W. Brian Arthur, J. F. Martel, Stafford Beer, Rene Descartes, Bill Plotkin, Joe Edelman, Ellie Hain, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Kegan, Aldous Huxley, Andrés Gomez Emilsson✨ Select Related Episodes (also available as a Spotify playlist)223 - Timothy Morton, 220 - Austin Wade-Smith219 - Joshua Schrei217 - Gregory Landua and Speaker John Ash214 - Megan Phipps, JF Martel, Phil Ford213 - Amber Case, Michael Zargham212 - Geoffrey West, Manfred Laubichler187 - Kevin Welch, David Hensley178 - Chris Ryan176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, Sam Gandy174 - Evan Snyder172 - Tyson Yunkaporta166 - Anna Riedl165 - Kevin Kelly163 - Toby Kiers, Brandon Quittem141 - Nora Bateson122 - Magenta Ceiba109 - Bruce Damer094 - Mark Nelson086 - Onyx Ashanti080 - George Dvorsky076 - Technology as Psychedelic Parenting066 - John Danaher060 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens056 - Sophia Rokhlin051 - Daniel Schmachtenberger050 - Ayana Young042 - William Irwin Thompson017 - Tibet Sprague This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeIf you're wondering why this episode came later than I promised, well…look no further than the text and subtext of this very rich discussion: it ain't easy being a scholar when your kids keep banging down the door. This week I speak with professional organizer, single mother, and badass independent public intellectual (in no specific order) Alyssa Allegretti (Website | Substack | Facebook) about making one's way in the Wild West of the digital realm as someone balancing the seemingly-opposed responsibilities of parenthood and philosophy. Herein we discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age, particularly for those navigating non-traditional career paths, parenthood, and the search for authentic connection.This conversation touches on the themes of invisible labor, particularly the often-unrecognized contributions of women and caregivers; the limitations of traditional institutions in recognizing and supporting diverse voices and lifestyles; and the importance of finding the sacred in the mundane aspects of daily life. We also grapple with the complexities of online communities, acknowledging both their potential for fostering connection and their tendency to amplify social divisions and reward performative behavior. Ultimately, my riffs with Alyssa underscore the importance of personal responsibility, self-awareness, and strong relationships in navigating the ever-evolving liminal zones of our metamorphic century.Enjoy, and thanks for listening!✨ Support This Work• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Episode Breakdown (Provided by NotebookLM)Chapter 1: Introductions and Invisible Labor (0:00:00-0:10:01)Alyssa's Background: Alyssa discusses her experience as a “Facebook Intellectual” and the limitations of traditional paths to intellectual and creative pursuits for women, particularly mothers.Sacred Domesticity: Alyssa introduces her work, which focuses on “sacred domesticity,” viewing housekeeping and homemaking as a microcosm of larger social issues and a valuable space for personal growth.Alyssa's Work: Alyssa details her work as a professional organizer and house cleaner, emphasizing its therapeutic aspects, particularly for women and those struggling with executive functioning.Chapter 2: Marginalized Voices and the Liminal Web (0:10:01-0:20:00)Michael's Story: Michael shares his personal journey to becoming an independent scholar and the challenges of navigating financial instability while pursuing non-traditional intellectual work.Value of Marginalized Perspectives: Both speakers acknowledge the unique insights offered by individuals outside traditional academic and professional structures.The Liminal Web and Gender Imbalance: Alyssa recounts her experience with a perceived gender imbalance in online intellectual communities, using the “liminal web” as an example.Chapter 3: Work-Life Integration and Alternative Spaces (0:20:00 - 0:30:00)Motherhood and Intellectual Pursuits: Alyssa describes the difficulties of pursuing a career in intellectual fields as a young, single mother. She highlights the inherent unfriendliness of these spaces to parents and those with marginalized identities.Alternative Solutions: Alyssa argues that viable solutions for work-life integration are emerging in female and queer-dominated spaces, like the coaching industry, that prioritize alternative education and self-employment.Critique of Traditional Institutions: Alyssa critiques the inaccessibility of traditional academic institutions for individuals facing socioeconomic barriers, neurodiversity, and past trauma.Key Themes: Work-life integration, challenges of parenthood, accessibility in intellectual spaces, alternative education, female and queer-dominated spaces, critique of traditional institutions.Chapter 4: The Sacred in the Mundane (0:30:00-0:40:00)Domestic Realm and Personal Growth: Alyssa discusses the importance of recognizing the domestic realm as a legitimate space for personal growth and mental health support, regardless of gender.Blurring Boundaries: Alyssa highlights her efforts to integrate her work life and home life, finding inspiration in the mundane aspects of parenting and domesticity.Seeking Community and Authenticity: Alyssa expresses her grief over the separation between the “best parts of life” and her children. She desires more inclusive and accepting spaces where individuals can be their full selves.Chapter 5: Intergenerational Knowledge and Societal Fragmentation (0:40:00 - 0:50:00)Invisible Labor and Gender Roles: Alyssa and Michael discuss the concept of invisible labor, particularly within the context of traditional gender roles. They acknowledge the complexities and nuances of labor distribution in modern families.353637Reconciling Parenthood and Personal Pursuits: Alyssa shares her personal approach to balancing her writing with the demands of motherhood, emphasizing the importance of presence and self-awareness.The Loss of Intergenerational Transmission: Michael laments the fragmentation of families and the loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer due to the separation of work and family life.Chapter 6: The Planetary Layer and Rethinking Community(0:50:00-1:00:00)Online Communities as Extensions of Family: Michael discusses his transition away from generic online communities towards local groups, emphasizing the importance of grounded, real-world connections.The Unhealthy Influence of Globalist Thinking: Michael critiques the tendency of globalist thinking to prioritize abstract ideals over the needs of individuals and communities.The Trad Wife Phenomenon and the Moralization of Domesticity: Alyssa and Michael discuss the rise of the “trad wife” phenomenon and the dangers of romanticizing and commodifying domestic life.Chapter 7: Embracing Imperfection and Domestic Liberation (1:00:00-1:10:00)Domestic Liberation: Alyssa challenges listeners to envision “domestic liberation,” reclaiming home life from external pressures and embracing its inherent value.54Finding Inspiration in Imperfection: Alyssa acknowledges the limitations and imperfections inherent in both online and offline communities, advocating for a more compassionate and accepting approach to social change.5556The Power of Difference: Alyssa believes that true social progress relies on acknowledging, accepting, and integrating differences, rather than striving for unattainable ideals.57Chapter 8: Vulnerability, Transparency, and Digital Identity (1:10:00-1:20:00)The Paradox of Online Domesticity: The speakers discuss the paradoxical nature of online platforms like YouTube, where individuals are encouraged to commodify their family lives for financial gain.Counter-Narratives and Authenticity: Alyssa highlights emerging counter-narratives in the online domesticity sphere that challenge the romanticized and idealized portrayals of home life.Transparency as a Tool for Healing: Alyssa shares her personal experience with using online platforms to challenge societal expectations and de-stigmatize taboo subjects.Chapter 9: Navigating the Digital Age with Children(1:20:00-1:30:00)The Impact of Technology on Parenting: Michael and Alyssa discuss the challenges of navigating technology's influence on family life, particularly the potential dangers of online exposure for children.Teaching Digital Literacy and Boundaries: Alyssa highlights the importance of teaching children digital literacy, helping them understand the complexities of online spaces, and setting healthy boundaries.Modeling Self-Awareness and Responsibility: Alyssa emphasizes the need for parents to model self-awareness and responsibility in their own online interactions, demonstrating healthy ways to engage with digital spaces.Chapter 10: Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Accountability (1:30:00-1:42:49)The Burden of Being the “Reasonable Adult”: Michael and Alyssa discuss the emotional labor involved in maintaining composure and promoting healthy discourse in online spaces, particularly given the lack of external validation for such efforts.Redefining Accountability in Relationships: Alyssa advocates for a shift from externally imposed accountability to personal responsibility, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with individuals who prioritize self-awareness and growth.Finding Sustainable Ways to Connect: Alyssa emphasizes the importance of strong friendships and chosen families in navigating the complexities of modern life and creating a more sustainable future. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeThis week on Future Fossils we speak with Helané Wahbeh (LinkedIn), Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University, and author of over ninety peer-reviewed publications as well as the book The Science of Channeling. Our main course: a recent review in Frontiers of Psychology entitled, “What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models”. In this conversation we take a thirty-thousand foot view of the history and future of the science of consciousness, the socioeconomic impediments to unflinching consciousness research, and the overwhelming weight of transcultural experience that make this such a promising domain for fundamental investigation.Enjoy, and thanks for listening!✨ Support This Work• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Related EpisodesDig into an extensive back catalog of consciousness-research-flavored episodes (psi phenomena, non-ordinary states, psychedelic neuroscience, oracular praxes, time and consciousness, etc.) at the Future Fossils Consciousness Research Spotify playlist or through the following Substack links:03 Tony Vigorito05 Mitch Schultz20 Joanna Harcourt-Smith27 Niles Heckman and Rak Razam30 Becca Tarnas37 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo45 Kerri Welch57 Conner Habib and Mitch Mignano58 Shane Mauss69 Tim Freke78 Archan Nair88 Dennis McKenna99 Erik Davis100 The Teafaerie103 Tricia Eastman112 Mitsuaki Chi113 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens117 Eric Wargo119 Jeremy Johnson124 Norman Katz125A Stuart Kauffman (patrons only)126 Phil Ford and J.F. Martel127 Cory Allen131 Jessica Nielson and Link Swanson132 Erik Davis150 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens156 Stuart Davis170 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo171 Eric Wargo176 Sophie Strand and Richard Doyle and Sam Gandy179 Scout Wiley 186 Solo: A Manifesto for Weird Science218 Neil Theise222 Andrés Goméz Emilsson This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeThe world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as an instrument for biospheric action? Reading the above probably generated more distress than motivation. Might Western civilization actually be better off reclaiming what the modern world felt it didn't need — namely, the sacred? What if Christianity has ALWAYS at its core held teachings meant to stir up riotous love — the kind that gets us off our asses striving joyously to serve the living world we are?Endlessly subversive author and Rice University Professor Timothy Morton (Twitter | Substack | Patreon | YouTube | Instagram) thinks so — and their new book Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology argues eloquently for a weird and wonderful postmodern nondual Christianity in which we give up trying to run the place and realign ourselves with Life. Hell is a rousing and reviving work I underlined extensively, and our discussion traces and retraces Tim's characteristically good-lurid and good-florid, stark-but-dreamy, mystically mundane, paradox-rich writing. We soar into romantic numinosity and dwell in body horrors, throw curtains open to pure light and celebrate the stains we can't erase. Trigger warnings plenty, here — but one of them is that in the high-brow, low-brow oscillations you might find yourself awakened to the nature of your being-as-the-God-shaped-hole-in-everything.I'll let them introduce what is easily one of the most potent episodes this show has ever published:“A wonderful three-dimensional podcast. Like, I can't thank you enough for wanting to go all the way around the mulberry bush and then into the mulberry bush and then outside the mulberry bush, then pulverize the mulberry bush into powder, send it around a particle accelerator, and watch the diffusion cloud chamber patterns as you compose another symphony using fractal geometry. I just love this.”If that's the kind of conversation you enjoy, then buckle up. Tim knows precisely the poetic mind-keys with which we can find The Garden in the flames of Hell itself, and Heaven in the sinful body of the Technocene.Over the next two hours, we round the bases on a Greatest Hits of all my favorite topics, all of which appear in some sublime form in Tim's wonderful new book. An we perform embroidery and exegesis of this anthem to raves and William Blake and AI and facing childhood trauma on the way to saving the biosphere from one of its own most deliciously sinful experiments (namely, civilization), we cover a kaleidoscopic swirl of topics such as:• Making climate action (and America) cool again• Nonduality, convergent evolution, and the sacred as the feeling of biology• When teleology goes bad, then redeems itself through pluralism• Flipped gnosticism and dispensing with master/slave thinking• What deals with the devil teach us about how to wisely wield AI• “The Black Goo” as a science fiction trope and how it relates to…• How to make the best of living in Hell, aka social media• The Peacock Angel Melek Taus and having sympathy for the devil• Failure as comedy, sin as a blessing, thinking as a kind of failure mode• Evolution as a Christic promise of possibility better futures, and yet…• Why we shouldn't use “emergentism” to solve “the meaning crisis”We also pay dues to a totally prodigious list of inspirations.As per our custom, those of you supporting the show have subsidized the extra time it takes for me to organize a thorough bibliography with links to the books, papers, films, TV shows, podcast episodes, and historical figures mentioned therein.Thank you for listening and for your contributions!✨ Support This Work• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Books & ArticlesHell: In Search of A Christian Ecologyby Timothy MortonHyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after The End of The Worldby Timothy MortonSubscendenceby Timothy MortonDarwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphereby Richard DoyleA Beginner's Guide To Constructing The Universeby Michael S. SchneiderThe Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selectionby Charles DarwinLiquid Modernityby Zygmunt BaumanHallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Modelsby Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan KankanhalliUnweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and The Appetite for Wonderby Richard DawkinsSimplification, Innateness, and the Absorption of Meaning from Context: How Novelty Arises from Gradual Network Evolutionby Adi LivnatThe Cloud of Unknowing by AnonymousThe Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Usby Nicholas CarrPresent Shock: When Everything Happens Nowby Doug RushkoffAt Home In The Universe: The Search for The Laws of Self-Organization and Complexityby Stuart KauffmanComplexity and The Emergence of Physical Propertiesby Miguel FuentesThe Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Centuryby Matthew FoxThe Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissanceby Matthew FoxReclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Actionby J.F. Martel✨ Podcast EpisodesSolPurpose Conversations 2 - Richard Doyle on The Cloud of Unknowing75 - David Krakauer on Thinking Interplanetary with The Santa Fe Institute132 - Erik Davis on Perturbations in the Reality Field174 - Evan Snyder on Sound Design for A Robotic Built Wilderness186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The TechnosphereWeird Studies 101 - Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'✨ Movies & TV ShowsAlienWestworldBlade RunnerHellraiserFriendsCurb Your EnthusiasmThe SimpsonsPrometheusThe ShiningAlien ResurrectionInterstellarThe Wizard of Oz✨ Other PeopleWilliam BlakeCarl Hayden Smith Jeffrey KripalKurt GödelGeorg CantorAlfred North WhiteheadBertrand RussellGerald Manley HopkinsKarl MarxSlavoj ŽižekGregory BatesonGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelPhilip K. DickE.F. SchumacherAnna HollandPhoebe PlummerFrancisco VarelaHumberto MaturanaJacques DerridaJohn MiltonJulian of NorwichDilgo Khyentse RinpocheJón GnarrChögyam Trungpa RinpocheMurray Gell-Mann✨ Objects Of NoteQAnonGoogle GlassThe Sex PistolsCambridge Analytica This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode we're joined by Andrés Goméz Emilsson, President and Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), with whom we go deep on their computational approach to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the psychedelic experience — and thereby, perhaps, make the world a substantially happier place. Join us for an adventurous dialogue at the intersections of phenomenology, spirituality, and mathematics…with stops along the way to ask about the neurobiological construction of time's arrow(s), the geometry of DMT space, and the ethical challenges of creating conscious computers. It's a trip…!00:00:00 Intro, Thanks, and News00:11:18 Dialogue Starts00:14:15 The Origins of Qualia Research Institute00:17:37 The Importance of Consciousness Research00:22:18 Phenomenology and Symmetry00:47:38 The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT00:54:12 Avoiding Dissonance in Psychedelic States00:56:09 Complexity, Music, and Cognitive Processing00:57:22 Future Shock and Technological Overwhelm01:04:28 Pharmacological Adaptations to Technology01:08:39 Temporal Perception and Psychedelics✨ Support This Work:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Help me pitch my next big projects Humans On The Loop & Jurassic Worlding.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp — this episode features “You Don't Have To Move” off The Age of Reunion & “Sonnet A” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org reading list.• Browse original paintings and prints or commission new work.✨ Related Episodes:212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West176 - Richard Doyle128, 165, 203 - Kevin Kelly99, 132, 140 - Erik Davis131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson42, 43 - William Irwin Thompson111, 199 - Android Jones14, 52, 161 - Michael Philip57, 140, 153 - Mitch Mignano60, 113, 150 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens✨ Mentioned:QRI Research LineagesAndrés' Noonautics Advisory Board BioThe Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled ScenesThe Pseudo-Time ArrowNon-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography (Innovate)Digital Sentience Requires Solving the Boundary ProblemQualia Mastery (Guided Meditations, Part 1 & 2)Principia Qualia by Michael Edward JohnsonThe Psychedelic Transhumanists: A Virtual Round Table Between Legends Living & Dead by Michael GarfieldOne Half A Manifesto by Jaron LanierJürgen Schmidhuber's HomepageThe Peripheral (TV series adapting William Gibson)Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 by Michael GarfieldAn ‘Integrated Mess of Music Lovers' in Science by Michael Garfield for SFIWestworld (TV series adaptation)Sean McGowanMike JohnsonDavid PearceAndrew GallimoreJim O'ShaughnessyJulio TononiKarl FristonRobin Carhart-HarrisIlya PrigogineJaron LanierSteven LeharRupert SheldrakeWilliam GibsonJürgen SchmidhuberAlain GorielyDarren ZhuHugh EverettSean CarrollIsaac NewtonStephen WolframChris LangtonJames C. ScottH. P. LovecraftNoonautics This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”– Terence McKennaThis week I meet our guest Tom Morgan (LinkedIn, Twitter) in mid-leap as we both make giant bids to meet our destiny and better serve the world. Tom Morgan, who calls himself a “curiosity sherpa” and writes the superb blog What's Important, worked for years in finance while he grew increasingly compelled by transcendental mysteries. His blog reflects a rare appreciation for the edges of our knowledge and his reputation is for getting high-performing businesspeople to ask deeper questions. In this conversation we discuss complexity and higher intelligences, the heroic metamyth, the alchemy of money, love as an organizing principle in transrational cognition, and holding other people through their personal encounters with the so-called “meaning crisis.”If this discussion does it for you, look below to find scores more potentially life-changing (certainly mind-altering) talks and essays we discussed therein…✨ Support The Good Work• Learn about my new project on wisdom and technology, Humans On The Loop!• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts & “Tin Heart” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.• Read my pitch for Jurassic Worlding, my next book on the future of evolution!✨ Mentioned MediaLooking Over The Edge – Tom MorganFor The Person Who Has Everything – Tom MorganAdventure Capital: An Interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy – Tom MorganHeresies of The Heart – Tom MorganThe Great Betrayal – Tom MorganTom's recent five-minute talk at the Sohn Investment ConferenceToward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 – Michael at SFI in 2019Intimations Of A New Worldview – Brett AndersenThe Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchristCognition All The Way Down – Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett at Aeon MagazineAnimism Is Normative Consciousness – Josh Schrei on The Emerald PodcastThe Passion of The Western Mind – Richard TarnasTech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting – Michael at CBA Innovation LabExodus as Revolution – William Irwin Thompson at the Lindisfarne AssociationPicbreederWhy Greatness Cannot Be Planned – Kenneth Stanley and Joel LehmanProof of Spiritual Phenomena – Mona SobhaniThe Phenomenon: Control System, or Developmental Driver? – Stuart DavisMeditations on Moloch – Slate Star CodexStudies on Slack – Slate Star CodexAlison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. – Michael for Complexity Podcast✨ Related Episodes:212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere202 - Caveat Magister on Psychomagic, Amusement Parks, & Turning Your Life Into Art196 - Robert Poynton on Improvisation As A Way of Life191 - Roland Harwood on Learning To Be Liminal186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science161 - On Play & Innovation with Michael Phillip: Hermes, EvoBio, Bitcoin, and Good Noise150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact45 - Kerri Welch (Fractal Synchronicity & The Future of Time)3 - Tony Vigorito (Synchronicity)✨ Other Mentions:William Irwin ThompsonCarl JungJoseph CampbellBill PlotkinDave Snowden & The Cynefin FrameworkStafford BeerFrozen 2 (film)The Matrix (films) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week I riff with Austin Wade Smith (they/them) — an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York and the Executive Director of Regen Foundation, a US-based non-profit working with distributed ledgers and AI to design sovereign regenerative economics. Austin's work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster greater interdependence between individuals and our living world. They teach design and engineering courses related to their research at universities in New York.In this conversation we explore what Austin calls “a simple framework designed to expand the legibility of the ‘more than human world' (such as ‘Nature', Non-Humans, ‘More-than-Human Ecologies', etc.) to various anthropogenic infrastructures and technologies, with the aim of increasing the ‘surface area' through which non-humans directly exert influence on human-made systems.”How can we make ecosystems more legible to the economic and political contexts in which they now exist?Get ready for a conversation that up-ends conventional categories to hack open a new possibility space for human-machine symbiosis and technologically-assisted biospheric stewardship!PS — I'm trying to launch a NEW podcast, Humans On The Loop, about how to use our new AI superpowers wisely. Here's more info in case you'd like to help support this project or know someone who might!✨ Relevant Links:AustinWadeSmith.comTwitterLinkedInEssaysRegen Foundation“Legibility for Our Living World with Austin Wade Smith” on Ma Earth“Corporate Metabolism” by Xander Paco Nathan“The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.✨ Select Related Episodes:• 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet• 215 - Social Science & Collective Intelligence with Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs• 213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance• 212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere• 180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend• 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions• 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit• 76 - "Technology as Psychedelic Parenting at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week marks the beginning of Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I., a six-week online course led by writer and teacher Joshua Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast.  This course is, in large part, inspired by an episode he wrote last year called “So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in The Age of Mythic Powers” — exploring the mythic dimensions of tech innovation and calling for a reclamation of initiatic mystery schools in order to provide us with the requisite self-mastery to wield tools like generative language models. I'm honored to be part of the all-star crew lined up to co-facilitate this course and as part of our pre-game sync and prep, I met with Josh to talk about the forces we've unleashed and how to live responsibly in a world where tech is, in Arthur C. Clarke's words, now undoubtedly “indistinguishable from magic.” We explore the need to pace ourselves and anchor novelty production in ecologies of accountability; what it means to raise kids well amidst the A.I. revolution; and why humans cannot seem to stop invoking power and powers greater than our understanding.If you enjoy this conversation, join us — and several dozen other awesome people — from 4/18-5/16 to learn and grow together and answer the call to better ourselves in service of this great historical unfolding!(Big big thanks to former Center for Humane Technology Innovation Lead Andrew Dunn, founder of The School of Wise Innovation, for everything you've done to help inspire and organize all of this…)Right after this course I will be in Denver for the 2024 ICON Future Human Conference and would love to see you there!  Use my link to grab yourself a conference pass and spend 5/16-5/19 with me and folks like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Marianne Williamson, Ken Wilber, Jeremy Johnson, Layman Pascal, and many more…✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp. This episode features:Tålmodighed (from Live at The Chillout Gardens, Boom Festival 2016)Gamma Pavonis (from Pavo: Music For Mystery)The Cartographers (from Get Used To Being Everything)• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Mentioned & Related Links:“Modern culture is ‘ahead of the one.' Modern culture is rushing to get somewhere.”* Josh Schrei on Howl In The Wilderness Podcast Episode 120Sam Arbesman's Cabinet of WondersDetermined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert SapolskyRick Rubin and Dan Carlin discuss magicMichael Garfield w/ host Kiki Sanford on This Week In Science Episode 965“Information overload is a personal and societal danger” by Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteThe Glass Cage by Nicholas CarrFuture Fossils 172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. ModernityCenter for Humane TechnologyThe Age of Em by Robin Hanson“Scan Lovers” from How to Live in The Future by Michael Garfield at Boom Festival 2016Wisdom 2.0 Summit”The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc AndreessenIron John by Robert Bly“The Model Isn't The Territory, Either” by Douglas RushkoffDarwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard Doyle“Chief Philosophy Officer” by Peter Limberg“The Next Tech Backlash Will Be About Hygiene” by Jonnie Penn at TIME MagazineDouglas Rushkoff at Betaworks in 2023: “I Will Not Be Automated”Zohar Atkins (Website, Twitter)My comments on “Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” by Xu, et al.“For The Intuitives” (Part 1, Part 2) on The Emerald Podcast This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

I'm honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity. ✨ Mentioned & Related Links:Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin's Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review.  The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom. Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we're doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it's well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!✨ Mentioned & Related Links:The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki's Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week I speak with Jingmai O'Connor (Staff Page | Instagram), Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles (a.k.a. Priestess of Dead Dino-Birds) at The Field Museum in Chicago, about the magnificent strangeness of Mesozoic flying reptiles, the perverse anthropology of paleontologists, and much else. Contrary to expectations for a show with “fossils” in its title, I don't ordinarily interview people who actually dig up prehistoric creatures, but as I make perhaps too obvious in this enthusiastic get-to-know-each-other session, I still care deeply for the treasured mysteries that lie in store beneath our feet and love the people who devote their lives to studying the ancient biosphere — even if the system's crooked and we fight about as much as dinosaurs themselves.Here's to Jingmai and her singular life and mind! Do yourself a favor and acquire her book When Dinosaurs Conquered The Skies, truly a treat for all ages, and then if you want to leap like Microraptor into the thicket of her publications you can scope her work on Google Scholar.  (And shout out to her friends Rextooth, who do in fact make awesome dino comics.)✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I'll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!✨ PLUS! New Single & Music Video “Indecision” from The Age of ReunionListen on Bandcamp/Spotify or Watch on YouTube/Instagram.This one's a Jon-Brion-inspired riff on the phenomenology of near-death experiences and the neurophysiology of 5MEO-DMT, a quick trip up above the plane of normal waking life to see the panoply of possibility exfoliating from the Godhead in each moment. How do you choose your next life? (Trick question.)Join my small but gorgeous mob by preordering the entire album at Bandcamp (or subscribe on Substack/Patreon to have it all at once right now), and then go talk to integrate your experience with Daniel Shankin. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week I speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams (Twitter, LinkedIn) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence — new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges.  And the time for this work is definitely NOW.  As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological systems, humankind migrates from an Earth on which most events seem impossibly distant and irrelevant to an Earth defined by nonlinear, often exponential impacts of seemingly-trivial developments anywhere on the planet.  This is the century — and the decade — in which many of us have no choice but to learn, the easy way or the hard way, the consequences of our increasing vulnerability to and power over one another.  And one of the places this is most vividly apparent is in how truths and untruths ripple at unprecedented speeds across the globe, forcing us into a new and intense cosmopolitanism.  In the 1940s, the message was “Loose lips sink ships.”  Perhaps the message for the 2020s is “Cognitive biases spread mind viruses.”If you've followed me for a while, you've likely read my 2017 science fiction short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality'”, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together.  We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt — to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale — and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard.  2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense:  fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality.  I'd be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology:  a sane and healthy global brain.Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. I'll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.✨ Mostly-Complete List of Citations:Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)✨ Support My Work:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I'll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!Merry Christmas, Future Fossils!  This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 214 of the podcast that explores our place in time — and as demonstrated in the Dr. Who and Aliens franchises, Blade Runner 2049, and Batman Returns, Christmas is a fruitful backdrop for the pondering of big ideas — a moment in which we can see with greater clarity than usual the unity of everyday mundane humanity and transcendental cosmic matters.  In other words, perfect timing for this episode's conversation about cybernetics and the philosophy of the weird with Megan Phipps, Phil Ford, and J.F. Martel.  Megan studies new media at the University of Amsterdam and writes immensely trippy and insightful papers on topics like Brian Eno, circuit bending, and surveillance capitalism.  Phil is an author and musician who teaches musicology at IU Bloomington and infuses his curricula with the profundity he has polished through years of committed Zen practice.  J.F. is an author, film-maker, and para-academic online course instructor in media studies and magick, who runs Dungeon and Dragons campaigns on the side.  Together, J.F. and Phil host the delicious Weird Studies Podcast, every episode of which triggers in me the Holy Grail of podcast affective listener programming: namely, that I wish I were in the room and part of these discussions.  Luckily, I've had that opportunity before, to talk about my writing on the material agency of glass in our scientific era…and both of them have been on Future Fossils also, both alone and together.  But getting all four of us on one call is a rare and precious thing — and now's the perfect moment to rap about the emergence of the cybernetic era as a kind of numinous event in human history, a divine invasion that transfigures us and forces us to think about which boundaries *should* melt away and which should stay where evolution learned to put them.  You see, we live in an age of multilayer networks — and when our view of humankind transmogrifies from the static image of divine forms to a fluid wash of interweaving processes, the self becomes a metamorphic fugitive and  a work of art. When everything's connected, politics is an aesthetic act and art acquires moral force. Advanced   technologies have granted us godlike powers to reshape the world in our image…but “life finds a way” and there are always gremlins, aliens, dinosaurs, and elves lurking latent in the tidy systems diagrams. The beauty of progress necessarily conceals the ugly externalities, the entropy exported in our efforts to arrange wild nature into an image of our lost garden. So what does cybernetics as a way of seeing change for us in terms of how we live?  What does it mean to be human in an age of very lively, seemingly intelligent machines?    But before we dive headlong into this recording of a conversation so good our first attempt was erased by trickster intervention, let me express my thanks to everyone who has helped me and Future Fossils through a year of (what I hope remains) extraordinary challenge. This show is weird and obstinate in its refusal of clear definition. I follow my muses where they lead me and leave these discussions and soliloquys as fossils of a process of discovery and creativity…and staying true to this defies the logic of the market, which would have us classify ourselves as tidily as possible so we are pre-chewed for the algorithms that determine whether what we make is ever noticed by those over the horizon of organic peer-to-peer suggestion networks. If you're listening, chances are a friend told you about this show — I'd be surprised if you just found it randomly, and definitely not because a sponsor amplified it. I started Future Fossils under pressure from my friends but keep it going as a kind of Benedictine prayer.  However it might seem, it's lonely work — but every now and then I find I've reached somebody where it counts, that I've inspired a major life change or just helped you orient yourselves amidst the wider movements of a transformation that once seemed chaotic and now seems symphonic.  That's why I keep this going.  Every single time I check my email to discover someone else finds value in my work and shows appreciation with a Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp sub, it makes my day and takes a little of the sting away from my ongoing balancing of kids and unemployment.  I'd like to make this work sustainable in 2024 but I'm still very far from that…so thank you, each and all, for everything you do to help me run this ultramarathon.New patrons I would like to thank include Ian Benouis, EGH2128, Lynn Amores, Robert Cummings, Katie Teague, Slow Dancing Fool, and Brian Mapes.Thank you!  And thank you to EVERYONE who chips in every month, or who has left or will ever leave a good review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or who shares this show with your friends…and a special thanks to Suzy Lanza of Ahara Rasa Ghee for shipping me a sweet little care package with her delicious ghee as a gesture of appreciation for this show — she's not a sponsor but I do endorse her work and recommend you check out iloveghee.com. Lastly, thanks to Noonautics.org for inviting me to join their advisory board and for their continued support of efforts to explore and map and understand the realms beyond.And now onto the main course!  Let's start somewhere else: in the “trash stratum” of a dirty manger, in the mess of our kinship and identity with the nonhuman (animal, vegetable, AND mineral). In the revelation of our contiguous, nested, and modular interbeing — we begin our conversation…guided here by visitations from a higher realm in which communication and control are aspects of some secret third thing that transcends duality. The information age is one in which we cannot separate the bomb from the computer from the drug and in this way, in spite of all the grimy cyberpunk and body horror of our media environment, the trillion-eyed panopticon the Web became appears to us like the archangel Gabriel: “Be not afraid,” dear listeners. Enjoy this awesome conversation, and enjoy your holidays!✨ Support My Work:• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.✨ Related Weird Studies Episodes:26 - Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield42 - On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien131 - Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute151 - The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster153 - Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot157 - Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'160 - The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'✨ Related Future Fossils Episodes:18 - JF Martel (Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny Awesomeness)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)71 - JF Martel (On Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2)117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural Realities157 - Phil Ford on Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere✨ Additional Mentioned & Related Media:Zygmunt Bauman - Liquid ModernityMitch Waldrop - The Dream MachineMichel Houellebecq – The Elementary ParticlesWilliam Shakespeare – OthelloMark Fisher – Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-FictionEzra Klein interviews Erik Davis — “The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here's Why That Matters.”Richard Brautigan – “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”Megan Phipps interviews Erik Davis — “New Cybernetic Psychedelia”Brian Eno – “The Studio As A Compositional Tool”Michael Garfield's “Reader's Rig” pedalboard teardown feature at Guitar ModerneMichael Garfield – “Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement”Phil Ford waxes poetic about Wagner's Ring Cycle on the Brute Norse PodcastDror Poleg on the future of a highly automated economy on Infinite Loops PodcastErik Wargo – “The Passion of The Space Jockey”Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)Man of Steel (2013)Digibarn.com Jeffrey KripalMichael LevinDadaSam Arbesman on Coding As Magic and The Magic of CodeThank you for listening and for your support! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!This week I speak with two of the most thoughtful people I know in tech, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and systems engineer Michael Zargham (Founder & CEO of BlockScience) — who work together on tools for building trust between tech users and tech companies at the Superset DAO and each contribute diverse value to society through myriad creative projects in their own right (like Amber's totally fabulous music group Glo Torch!). Thanks to the generous invitation of Regen Foundation CEO Gregory Landua, I met Amber and Michael for an in-person recording at the Regen Summit — easily one of the most inspiring Web3 events I've ever attended — in between jam sessions with a few dozen others working at the intersections of regenerative finance, ecosystem stewardship, distributed ledgers, and civtech. This episode only catches a tiny sliver of the awesome conversations that we had while gathered face-to-face, but it's a potent morsel nonetheless. We talked about the market's perverse fascination with talking appliances as a failed attempt to reboot animism, how good design empowers and bad design deprives by making choices possible or not, and why it's time for a new kind of terms-of-service agreement that allows users to migrate en masse from platforms that have violated people's trust…along with much else. A very lucid and articulate, yet very playful, trialogue on matters that deserve sincerity but also benefit from childlike curiosity and warmth!Enjoy…✨ Support My Work As A Public Good:• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.✨ Related Links For The Intellectually Voracious:Amber's Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium.Michael's Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Google Scholar.Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Reviewby Sidney RednerHow Design is Governanceby Amber CaseWe Need More Control Over Our Own User Databy Amber CaseThe Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputeesby Michael Garfield (on technology as an other-controlled prosthesis and the vulnerability of cyborgs)“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”by Harlan Ellison✨ SOME Upcoming Episodes:• Jingmai O'Connor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Chicago, on her singular life and work.• J.F. Martel & Phil Ford of Weird Studies Podcast and Megan Phipps of The University of Amsterdam on Weird Cybernetics.• David Jay Brown and Sara Phinn on their field guide to the entities of DMT hyperspace, published next year by Inner Traditions.• Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs on social science and collective intelligence tools for a memetic immune system.• Michael Skye of VisionForce on his work to help confront the crises faced by contemporary boys and men.• Neil Theise, professor of pathology at NYU, on complex systems science and his new book, Notes on Complexity.✨ Related Archive Episodes:211 - Adam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet207 - Tech & Community LIVE at Junkyard Social Club with Evan Snyder, Ryan Madson, Roger Toennis, Aaron Gabriel, & Juicy Life204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together197 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Lost Civilizations, and The Singularity (Part 1)180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations106 - Stowe Boyd on The Future(s) of Work and How to Thrive Amidst Accelerating Change80 - George Dvorsky on Strange Days Ahead: Ethics for Autonomous Machines29 - Sara Huntley (Raising Robots Right)✨ Thanks to Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever!This week on the show I speak with physicist Geoffrey West (SFI) and evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler (ASU, SFI) about the transformations that our geosphere, biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere are undergoing as the “extended phenotype” of human innovation runs rampant across the surface of Planet Earth.  These two distinguished scientists are some of the most profound thinkers I've ever encountered, helping midwife a new understanding of what it means to be human and a planetary citizen. I have wanted Geoffrey West on Future Fossils since well before I even started working for SFI in 2018, so this episode is the consummation of a years-long journey and I cannot be more excited to share it with you!  It feels a little like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, but we live in an increasingly-intertwingled world, so let's make the best of it!  I wouldn't be where I am today without these two fine minds and their important work.  Enjoy…“The consequences of the Anthropocene are the product of innovations, and yet somehow we think the way out is through EVEN MORE innovation. This is a predicament…Innovation has to be looked at critically. One of the interesting things in the history of life is the OPPRESSION of innovation.”– Manfred Laubichler✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my 2008 Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify)• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!✨ Your Anthropocene & Technosphere Syllabus:More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.Phil AndersonPopulation growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine' that's changing the planetManfred LaubichlerScale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionJaeweon Shin et al.Policies may influence large-scale behavioral tippingKarine Nyborg et al.Teaching the Anthropocene from a Global Perspective (2014!)Manfred Laubichler & Jürgen RennMore from them:Seminar: Co-Evolutionary Perspectives on the TechnosphereAnthropocene Campus | Technosphere / Co-Evolution, presented by Jürgen Renn and Manfred LaubichlerThe Growth and Differentiation of Metabolism: Extended Evolutionary Dynamics in the TechnosphereSFI Community Event - Panel discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of the AnthropoceneSander van der Leeuw, D.A. Wallach, & Geoffrey West, moderated by Manfred LaubichlerWelcome to the Future: Four Pivotal Trends You Should Be Aware OfEd William on the work of Dror PolegThe Future is Fungi: The Rise and Rhizomes of Mushroom CultureJeff VanderMeer, Kaitlin Smith, & Merlin Sheldrake, moderated by Corey PressmanDoes the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer?John Pepper at SFIThe Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and NightmaresRe: TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru & Émile TorresComplexity Literacy for a Sustainable Digital Transition: Cases and Arguments From Transdisciplinary Education ProgramsGerald SteinerRelevant episodes from my past life as the host of SFI's Complexity Podcast:Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryMelanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationChris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionThe Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten SchefferScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey WestMichael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever!This week on Future Fossils we pierce the veil with Adam Aronovich, cultural anthropologist and psychedelic integration therapist, to talk about the strange brew of web-connected healing and web-inflicted paranoia and delusions of grandeur, conspiracy epistemics, how people are being treated as robots, and robots are being treated as people, and engaging reality directly versus engaging through the manipulation of symbols. Among other things! It's a perfect treat for tricky times…Adam's Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Re Precision Health Page✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music: “Autocatalysis” (Live Extended Remix) coming this Friday to my Bandcamp!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!✨ A mostly-but-not-entirely-complete list of references:An Oral History of The End of RealityMAPS Psychedelic Science 2023“A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology” by Geoffrey West, James Brown, Brian EnquistNew Religions of the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari's Google Tech Talk)The Matrix (franchise)A Glitch in The Matrix (documentary)Doug Rushkoff “fractalnoia” (FF 67)Stanislav Grof“So You Want To Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers?” on The Emerald PodcastWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or BorgesJorge Luis Borges - On Exactitude in ScienceJean Baudrillard - Simulacra and SimulationsChatGPTDouglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Encyclopedia Galactica)Simon DeDeo on plural epistemology (interviewed by MG on Complexity Podcast 72)Erik Davis (FF 132)Bruce Damer (FF 109)Ken Adams (FF 209)Shane Mauss (FF 58)What the heck happened to Reality Sandwich?Mondo 2000 + R.U. Sirius This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever!This week I welcome back psychedelic film-maker and culture-cultivator Mitch Schultz, Director of the legendary documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule, alongside our mutual co-conspirator, experience design consultant and psychedelic provocateur Shanta Stevens.  The two of them have formed a nucleus at Uniphi Studio around which a new transmedia documentary project is emerging — The Conscious Molecule — which will reflect on the decade-plus since Schultz's groundbreaking documentary on the science and philosophy of DMT to look at these themes through a MUCH wider aperture. The three of us go deep and broad on a very far-ranging constellation of topics:(0:00:01) - AI, Psychonautics, Digital Media, Language Models, and The Third Western Psychedelic Revolution(0:17:25) - The Future of AI-Human Cooperation(0:26:42) - Consciousness, Complexity, and Panpsychism(0:31:28) - Randomness, Entanglement, Decentralization, and The Conscious Molecule(0:38:46) - Exploring Consciousness and Futures(0:42:23) - The Future of Journalism and The Role of Independent Documentaries(0:47:55) - Psychedelic Therapy and The Overview Effect(0:51:43) - Transcension Hypothesis, UFOs, and Quantum Physics(0:57:43) - Altered States, Self-Reprogramming, Initiations, and Integration(1:03:32) - Technology's Impact on Consciousness and Humanity(1:13:08) - DataViz, Hyperdimensional Passports, The Future of Identity, and The Role of CommunityIf that sounds like a whirlwind, it is!  Find a cozy recliner — and maybe an eye mask — and book an appointment with your favorite peer support/integration counselor, because this is going to be a ride…NOTE: I'm delighted to drop this episode in the midst of a smoking hot debate about what does and does not qualify as “pseudoscience” in the research of consciousness (see coverage by Flora Graham and Erik Hoel).  LOL✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Buy the show's soundtrack (recorded live at Psychedelic Science 2023) on Bandcamp• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!✨ Mentions:“Cognition All The Way Down” by Daniel Dennett and Michael Levin James Oroc Seth Lloyd David Chalmers DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman Infoboros: Recursion Across Mind, Matter, and Information by Vidur Mishra Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard DoyleAlfred North Whitehead Gregory Bateson John Conway Bruce Damer Reggie Watts Melissa Etheridge Tommy Pallotta Klee Irwin ESPD '55 Wade Davis Dennis McKenna Psychedelic Science 2023 “Corporate Metabolism” by Paco Xander-Nathan William Shatner Mark Nelson Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game by Andrew Gallimore “The transcension hypothesis: Sufficiently advanced civilizations invariably leave our universe, and implications for METI and SETI” by John Smart Ramana Maharshi Ken Wilber The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life by Robert Kegan Michael Persinger Luminarium by Alex Shakar“Why Ibogaine Is Not The Answer To The Opioid Crisis” by Jonathan Dickinson and Dimitri Mugianis R. Buckminster Fuller Liv Boeree Meditation Death Match✨ Keywords:AI, Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Reality, Panpsychic Perspective, Materialist Neurobiological Model, Daniel Dennett, Michael Levin, Cognition All the Way Down, Ethical Implications, Human Development, Information Bombs, Digital Media, Psychonauts, Cyber Culture, Third Western Psychedelic Revolution, Kickstarter, Future Fossils, Album, AI Music Videos, Patreon, Substack, Evolution of Human Beings, Data Streams, Complexity of Systems, Empathy, Life System, Documentaries, Journalism, Hollywood Strike, Unions, Documentary Funding, International Multi-Billion Dollar Psychedelic Industry, UFO Phenomenon, Altered States, Self-Reprogramming, Technology Impact, Humanity, Hyperdimensional Passport, Metaphysical Stamps, Media Ecosystem, Visualizing Data Structures, Neurological Alignment, Spirit Taking Form This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week I have the joy of sharing a long-overdue discussion with legendary psychedelic media pioneer Ken Adams (Vimeo | LinkedIn), one of the first people I ever interviewed on record years before Future Fossils and whose influence on my own creative life cannot be overstated. Two of Ken's main claims to fame are the films he created in collaboration with Terence McKenna, namely Alien Dreamtime (mediocre fan upload, archived references to) and Imaginatrix (rental page). This June was the thirtieth anniversary of Alien Dreamtime's theatrical release, a major if initially under-appreciated moment in the history of digital film-making, and I had the good fortune to meet up with Ken here in Santa Fe for his commemorative screening at The Jean Coctea Cinema. What followed was an EPIC storytelling download about bold underground innovation told by one of the most soulful, thoughtful, heartfelt, humble, humorous, and generous people I know.✨ Support Future Fossils:• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server!• Buy the show's soundtrack (recorded live at Psychedelic Science 2023) on Bandcamp.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Dig my reading list at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Chapters, Summary, & Keywords provided by Podium.Page:(0:00:00) - Reminiscing on Psychedelic Underground and Filmmaking(0:10:07) - Ken's Childhood & Early Adulthood(0:25:04) - Screenings and Influence of Psychedelic Movie(0:30:06) - McKenna and Psychedelic Community Influence(0:35:24) - Nature, Doubt, Validation(0:44:23) - Late Night Studio Discovery and Reflection(0:49:30) - Non-Human Encounters and Embracing the Weird(0:57:17) - Encounters With Terence McKenna After His Passing(1:10:46) - Spiritual Experiences and the Need for Change(1:18:51) - Life, Legacy, and Creative Expression ReflectionsJoin me as I host Ken Adams, an experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and psychedelic explorer. We journey through his life from his childhood in Louisiana, his graduate studies in sociology and anthropology, to his discovery of LSD, and his eventual meeting with Terence McKenna. Ken shares his experiences with psychedelics and computers, and we discuss the impact these have had on his life and work. He provides insight into the psychedelic world in San Francisco, shedding light on the risks people took to make psychedelia accessible.This episode offers a fascinating look into the world of psychedelic filmmaking, with Ken Adams sharing how he created a business model from showcasing his experimental film. From the Adobe theater in Austin to the Roxy in San Francisco, Ken reveals how his work was embraced in the psychedelic space. He further explores the influence of Terence McKenna, discussing how Terence navigated the expectations of being a celebrity, his thoughts on psychedelics, and his ability to unite the psychedelic community.Finally, we examine Ken's experiences with non-human entities in altered states of consciousness, as well as his ideas on serving the common good. Ken shares his unusual encounters and his belief in the need for imaginative solutions to the issues facing the planet. We also reflect on the sadness and loneliness of the digital era, and discuss how digital arts are changing our world. Join us as we traverse the path of creativity, courage, and psychedelic exploration.Psychedelic, Filmmaking, Terence McKenna, San Francisco, Digital Filmmaking, Louisiana, Sociology, Anthropology, LSD, Art World, Austin, Digital Arts, Transmutation of Trauma, Winter Solstice 2012, Non-Human Entities, Altered States, Spiritual Experiences, Imagination, Transformation, Existential Issues, Melancholia, The Digital Age, Oral History, Unborn, Dreaming, Noble Things, Valuable MistakesSpecial thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.comThis week on the show I share a reading and panel discussion with three amazing psychedelic thought-leaders I facilitated as a satellite event during the MAPS 2023 Psychedelic Science Conference! Samantha Sweetwater (author of The Wisdom of WTF?!? and the forthcoming book True Human), Jahan Khamsehzadeh (author of The Psilocybin Connection), and Ian-Michael Hebert (founder of Holos Global) met in an intimate elixir bar high above the fray of the conference to riff on what it will take to have the psychedelic renaissance so many of us THOUGHT we were helping incubate and midwife (as opposed to what we got).✨ Support Future Fossils:• Subscribe to (and review!) Future Fossils anywhere you go for podcasts.• Then, support my work on Substack or Patreon for many, MANY extras, including our members-only Facebook Group and Discord Server's special private channels!• You can also buy my artwork (or commission new custom art) and/or music.• Follow my music and annually-updated listening recommendations on Spotify.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Chapters and keywords provided by Podium.Page:(0:00:00) - Navigating the CollapseMidwifery, courage, acculturation, pleasure-seeking, True Human Reimagining Humaneness, gracefully facing collapse.(0:08:04) - Foundations of Psychedelic Renaissance ExploringWe explore wholeness, psychoactivity, Samantha Sweetwater's journey, and David Bohm's quote on fragmentation and perception.(0:26:10) - Psychedelics and the Evolution of WholenessPsychedelics, Maslow's hierarchy, Richard Doyle's work, and nature's evolutionary process are discussed to catalyze holotropic states of consciousness and unity.(0:37:22) - Communion and the Circle of LifeWe explore the implications of our current ways of doing humanness on the life cycle of a complex life-bearing planet, and how to cultivate a mastery of relationship and the between.(0:54:10) - Future of Meta-inviduality and BalanceWe explore academic prestige, decolonization, life-centrism, psychedelics, and the Luciferic/Ahrimanic balance.(1:01:38) - Paradigms of Development and Igniting MomentsPsychedelics access animism, integrate individual missions, explore Stoned Ape theory, and set conditions for humanity's flowering.(1:11:15) - Exploring AI, Technology, and DevolutionWe explore technology, AI, nature, and aging to find love, understanding, and elegant solutions.✨ Keywords:Consciousness, Psychedelics, Collapse, Humaneness, Wholeness, Psychoactivity, David Bohm, Stanislaw Grof, Abraham Maslow, Richard Doyle, Macroorganism, Interconnection, Ken Wilber, Terence McKenna, Decolonization, Biocentrism, Luciferic Principle, Ahrimanic Principle, Midwifery, Animism, Stoned Ape Theory, AI, Technology, De-evolution, Nature, Aging, Kate Raworth, ✨ Affiliate Links:• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and love it!• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• Musicians, let me recommend you get a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.comThis week I'm glad to share a special Future Fossils Live recorded at one of the coolest places I have ever seen, the Junkyard Social Club in Boulder, Colorado! It's a menagerie of interesting brilliant weirdos, including my old friend and original co-host/robotics engineer Evan Snyder, soul-searching serial community-development entrepreneur Ryan Madson, former rocket scientist turned tech advisor Roger Toennis, former Google employee turned Director of Consciousness Hacking CO Aaron Gabriel Neyer, and “self-metaprogrammer” Tom Bassett aka Juicy Life.In a rather fast-paced hour, we explore what is emerging in an age of learning machines and reimagined urban spaces and radical new modes of social order. This was one of those delightful in-the-flesh discussions that CLEARLY left us all enriched and hopeful for a world that, while out of our control, still shines with tasty possibility.Chapters and keywords provided by my AI buddies at Podium.Page:(0:00:00) - Exploring Interdependence and Community Dynamics(0:03:50) - The Responsibility of Technology and Parenting(0:15:48) - AI's Impact on Art and IP(0:23:21) - The Intersection of Technology and Physicality(0:31:25) - Exploring Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Shifts(0:41:00) - The Future of Technology and Ethics(0:45:58) - Technology and Interdependence in Society(0:50:19) - The Interplay Between Interdependence and Technology(0:55:47) - Technology, Culture, and Individual Impact(1:01:27) - Tensegrity and the Future of Work(1:05:37) - Exploring Hope and Creating New ParadigmsInterdependence, Community Dynamics, COVID-19, Human Connection, Urban Spaces, Technology, Parenting, Holistic Thinking, Future Tech, Corporate Power, Open-Source Language Models, Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Shifts, Individual Purpose, Operating System, Individualistic Consciousness, Tensegrity, Hope, Paradigms, Funemployment, Fractal Pods, Neural Nets, Fractal TribeEnjoy and do not hesitate to reach out if this kindles something in you!✨ Support Future Fossils:• Subscribe to (and review!) Future Fossils anywhere you go for podcasts.• Then, support my work on Substack or Patreon for many, MANY extras, including our members-only Facebook Group and Discord Server's special private channels!• You can also buy my artwork (or commission new custom art) and/or music.• Follow my music and annually-updated listening recommendations on Spotify.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and love it!• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• Musicians, let me recommend you get a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.✨ Patrons-Only Extras Below The Fold:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com...about AI, art, culture, celebrity, identity, and trauma.Before we begin: I'm teaching a six-week online course on science, philosophy, economics, media, and dinosaurs! Join me at NuraLearning.com for Jurassic Worlding, a psychedelic deep dive into self-fulfilling techno-thrillers and the analog-digital transition, starting August 1st!The course is now pay-what-you-can thanks to the generosity of our learning platform…everyone into the pool for my first “Michael plays professor” cohort!This week on Future Fossils, I'm joined by returning guest my friend Scout Rainer Wiley, metamodern ritual artist, expectation-defying wunderkind, and host of the blog and podcast The Oscillator's Stone for a conversation about…well…Here, I'm going to let the superb language model at Podium.Page break it down for you. I wouldn't call this list “exhaustive” since we let the ADHD faeries carry our discussion wherever they liked, but I'm pretty impressed with this briefing:Key Takeaways:1. The episode delves into the complex intersection of art, culture, and artificial intelligence. It brings to light the implications of AI on our lives, potentially liberating us from the attention economy and the idea of work as a requirement for survival.2. The conversation touches upon the significance of local scenes in the era of globalization and scrutinizes the perils of celebrity worship.3. Intellectual property rights and ownership boundaries in the age of late capitalism are explored, sparking a debate about fairness and the redistribution of wealth in an increasingly digital and AI-driven world.4. The episode delves into socio-economic issues, discussing how rising real estate prices and the scarcity of affordable housing impact culture.Unanswered Questions and Potential Inquiries:1. How can AI be used to promote cultural diversity rather than appropriating and diluting it?2. How can the power of AI be harnessed to address socio-economic issues such as housing affordability?3. Can AI help us understand and navigate the complexities of celebrity culture, or will it exacerbate the problems?4. What does the future of intellectual property rights look like in an age of increasingly advanced AI?5. How can the insights of indigenous and black sci-fi writers inform our approach to the future?6. As technology continues to reshape our world, how do we maintain the importance of local scenes and individuality?7. How can the lessons of metamodernism inform our approach to the future, particularly in relation to technology and AI?8. Can AI play a role in addressing ancestral traumas, and if so, how?Overall, this podcast episode offers a thought-provoking exploration of the intersections of art, culture, and AI, sparking questions about our future in an increasingly AI-driven world.HA! Wow. There you have it. Imagine all that only through the filter of two delightfully bizarre transmedia philosopher-artists at their Casual Friday best.✨ Chapters:(0:00:00) - Culture's Impact on Art Exploration(0:06:16) - AI's Impact on Work and Culture(0:21:05) - Scale and Local Scenes(0:27:49) - Scene and Cultural Shift Impact(0:33:42) - Doom, Hope, and the World Reflections(0:48:54) - Metamodernism, Apocalyptic Themes, and Personal Reflections(0:58:38) - Exploring Ancestral Traumas and Embracing Romanticism(1:05:49) - Exploring Popularity, Culture, and the Future✨ Mentions:Future Fossils 195 - Emergency AI Art Panel with Topher Sipes, Jamie Curcio, Evo Heyning, Julian Picaza, and Micah DaigleMusic in this episode:“Biome Seven” from Biosphere Dreaming“The Luminous Night” from Empty FramesJohnny DeppAnson MountWeezer - “My Name is Jonas”Pierre-August Cot - The Storm (painting)Donald TrumpStuart Davis - Bright ApocalypseElroy CraichDaniel Görtz + Michael Garfield + Tom Amarque on metamodern deep futurismStar Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV series)Taylor Swift - “Blank Space” (music video)MitskiHarley Quin (Batman franchise)Queen's Gambit (TV series)Victoria Nelson - The Secret Life of PuppetsMichael Garfield - “In Defense of Star Trek: Picard and Discovery”✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp.Follow me and my annually-updated listening recommendations on Spotify.Join our lively members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels) for rewarding discourse on tap every day!✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• And musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that's a link to a new AI music video).✨ Transcript available for Patreon & Substack members

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.comBefore we begin: I'm teaching a six-week online course on science, philosophy, economics, media, and dinosaurs! Join me at NuraLearning.com for Jurassic Worlding, a psychedelic deep dive into self-fulfilling techno-thrillers and the analog-digital transition, starting August 1st! Use discount code FUTUREFOSSIL for 10% off.This week on Future Fossils, I enter into a deep and delightful call-and-response game with Greg Thomas, co-founder of Jazz Leadership with his wife Jewel Kinch-Thomas, and Stephanie Lepp, CEO of Synthesis Media and multiple Webby-winning transmedia culture hacker whose friendship I made interviewing her for episode 154.Among many other things, we discuss these superb articles by Jewel Kinch-Thomas:Jazz Improvisation: Lessons for ConversationReciprocity: The Ebb and Flow of Relationship BuildingChange Leadership …and these pieces by Greg:Race and Jazz: A Candid ViewA Paradigm Shift on RaceCultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos…and these pieces by and with Greg at Free Black Thought:Deracialization NowJazz, The Omni-American Ideal, and a Future Beyond BigotryConsidering Deracialization: A Response to Glenn Loury and Clifton Roscoe✨ Chapters:(0:00:00) - Departing From The Score To Navigate Transition(0:13:08) - Jazz, Business Leadership, and Conversation(0:31:37) - Principles of Jazz Leadership and Anti-Debate(0:49:53) - Exploring Reciprocity, Power, and Disagreement(1:03:33) - Deracialization, Defining Jazz, and Integral Theory(1:19:40) - Race, Jazz, Cultural Somatics, and Collective Intelligence✨ Mentions:Tyler Marghetis (Complexity 67), Allan Combs, Charles Eisenstein (Future Fossils 85), Doug Rushkoff (Future Fossils 67), Tech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting at CBA, Stewart Brand's Pace Layers, Robert Poynton (Future Fossils 196), Jewel Kinch-Thomas, Albert Perry, Ian Leslie at Aeon Magazine: “A Good Scrap”, Lynn Margulis, Daniel Schmachtenberger (Future Fossils 51), Zak Stein (Future Fossils 97), Joseph Campbell, Heinrich Zimmer, Ralph Ellison, Peter Limberg, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Danielle Allen, Glenn LouryFull show notes and transcript generated by Podium.Page for patrons down below.✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp.(Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.)This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• And musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that's a link to a new AI music video).✨ Full (machine-generated) show notes and transcript below the fold for patrons:

This week we talk with Jamie Joyce of The Society Library!✨ SOME References:An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality'Regina Rini and the Epistemic BackstopStephanie LeppYuval Noah Harari SapiensAlison GopnikThe Hyperion CantosThe Internet ArchiveEd Bernays✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that's a link to a new AI music video).✨ And listen, folks…if you haven't seen my AI music videos yet…get on it: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Pardon the delay, as I've been gathering more conversations than I've shared. Future Fossils is about to go into the rapids with three amazing back-to-back episodes! The next will be with Jamie Joyce of The Society Library and then it's Greg Thomas of The Jazz Leadership Project with producer/futurist Stephanie Lepp (formerly The Center for Humane Technology and The Institute for Cultural Evolution). BUT FIRST!Our guest for this episode is technologist, best-selling author, and WIRED founder Kevin Kelly, who sits on the board of one of my most-beloved projects, The Long Now Foundation (I wrote a bunch of pieces for their blog that you can find here and presented at their 2020 Ignite Talks here). I had Kevin on in episodes 128 to discuss his thoughts on the evolution of technology and augmented reality in particular, and again in 165 to discuss his book Vanishing Asia and the tensions between the economic opportunity and ecological/cultural erosion of urbanization, but today we're having a far more grounded conversation about the wisdom he's accumulated in his 71 years of living — much of which he has generously encapsulated for us in his latest book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier.We also meander into banter about cognitive pluralism and the tango with generative AI, with specific references to rants here and here.Kevin's a treasure. I'm honored to share this with you.✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “Throwing Sparks” and “Delta Pavonis.”) Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!The next Jurassic Park Book Club call will be on June 13th at 3 pm Mountain! I'll share the call link to Discord.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that's a link to a new AI music video).✨ And listen, folks…if you haven't seen my AI music videos yet…get on it: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode I welcome Caveat Magister, resident philosopher of Burning Man, to Future Fossils to discuss his latest book, Turn Your Life Into Art! We talk about transformational cross-country and urban adventures, psychomagic, and the difference between two kinds of experience design — one of which structures something fun but easily consumable and the other which demands our personal transformation at great risk and maybe peril. Get more familiar with your daimon through this conversation and engage the evolutionary edge of your own being as a work of art! This is a fun, weird, twisted rabbit hole I'm glad to share with you.✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features vibes from “Biosphere Dreaming”)Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.✨ Mentioned Media & People (incomplete):Caveat's Patreon“Giving In To Astonishment” by Michael Garfield (audio/text)Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide To The Art of Long-Term World Travelby Rolf PottsRolf Potts on Future FossilsWikipedia list of incidents at Disney WorldTeam Rodent: How Disney Devours The Worldby Carl HiaasenApocalypse Cabaret on FBThree Questions About Creating Transformational Experiences Anywhereby Caveat MagisterTroy DaytonMicah DaigleJacqueline NorthScout WileyNaomi MostMitch MignanoJake KobrinHenry AndrewsRobin ZiiroConner HabibMichael AngeloTada HozumiAlejandro JodorowskyMore Caveat:FF 153Plutopia PodcastEamon Armstrong's Life Is A Festival PodcastBurning Man PodcastKosmos JournalBook Excerpts This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe