Humans On The Loop

This week we have a roundtable discussion (which took place around an actual table in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, José Soler, and Jacob Aman, the hosts and producers of Future Primitive Podcast (600+ episodes and going strong!). Joanna, as you may remember from episode 0020, has been a psychedelic raconteur for her entire adult life, famously snuck LSD into prison for her lover Timothy Leary, and wears her age with an incomparable flair and zest that ought to be an example to all of us. She’s joined with her current partner and Future Primitive co-founder José Soler, as well as our mutual friend and Future Primitive co-host Jacob Aman (who is also close friends with Future Fossils guest and friend Bruce Damer).It’s a conversation about…well, everything, really. But mostly breakdowns and breakthroughs, and what it’s going to take for us to steer civilization toward the better of those options. Enjoy!https://futureprimitive.org/about/We Discuss:Intergenerational communication & listening.Documentary: Wild Wild CountryDocumentary: The Unforeseen“Anybody that wears all the same clothes…I mean…I’m sorry, but, WHY…”- Jacob“These days, I look at everything from the #metoo point of view.”- JoannaMansplaining and unconscious mammalian social power struggles.How social media rewards harmful and divisive behaviors.Book: Ralph Abraham’s Chaos, Gaia, Eros“If sweetheart doesn’t go with brilliant…by the time you get to seventy…you can go to a home for old people. I say, it’s either grateful or bitter.”- JoannaLack of intergenerational dialogue in the Occupy Movement…Protest fatigue.Richard Doyle on Third Eye Drops Podcast.Fascists and Gurus.How are the high school age protesters of school gun violence getting it wrong?Where does Joanna see us making progress, not merely recreating the mistakes of the 1960s, in this latest wave of upheaval and social change?Joanna (and also Charles Shaw on Future Fossils 0058) about child abuse by traumatized parents after World War II.“Do you know why the rich abuse their children? Because otherwise they would give all the money away.”Cognitive dissonance between drone pilot detachment and the violence of the modern world.Daniel Schmachtenberger on Future Fossils 0051 on the disconnect between our overwhelming input and our underwhelming ability to act.“As the years go by, you have to be more and more humble about the difference you are making. And the joy of that humble difference is enormous. The joy of that feeling of having a purpose…that joy is like the smoke of a wonderful incense.”- JoannaJose weighs in on the the Catalonian populist uprising.“We can do better. We can initiate a new narrative, a new dreaming."- JoseDisabusing ourselves of the notions of empire. Can human beings govern ourselves at scale?The nightmare of intersectional identity politics and Sam Harris putting his foot in his mouth.Documentary: Ai Wei Wei’s Human Flow“We have to be magicians. I don’t use the word ‘shaman’ anymore because it has been commercialized. I’m magic and I observe it every single day, and I believe there’s a reason why this Harry Potter thing attracted…look, she’s richer than the Queen of England, which is not a small thing. There’s a reason that erupted in your generations, because inside it’s there but history and the stories have suppressed that. It’s all over the place, in faerie tales and everything - the story of the suppression of what magical beings we are.”- JoannaPodcast: Weird Studies with JF Martel & Phil Ford, on Aleister Crowley (Episode 9)Real magic is connnection, not narcissistic control.“We’re downloading a different future than the one that is broadcast to us constantly.”- JoannaBook: The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (recommended translation: Brian Browne Walker)“This body is an incredible spaceship. I mean, would you let your spaceship fall apart?"- Joanna“We need hot, ecstatic magic. The sun in our chest! We need to bring more burning in the chest and give that breath into the daily life.”- JoseBringing the practice of everyday ecstasy into our lives and relationships.Book: Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your MindTalking about psychedelics with your parents.Podcast: The Psychedelic Salon with Lorenzo HaggertyThe tragedy of Terence McKenna on anti-depressants.“I believe it’s possible to have the right relationship with any chemical that you take.”- JoannaWhat is transformational sobriety?Intuition is full-body listening.Joanna asks the whole group: “What’s next?”Comedy: Steve Martin & Martin Short on NetflixJoin the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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’re blessed to chat with living legend, ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna – one of the most rigorous scientific intellects working with psychedelics in the modern era, responsible with his late brother Terence for popularizing the techniques for cultivation of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms, co-author of numerous books on psychoactive plant and fungal medicines and their curious effects on consciousness, and an outspoken advocate for cognitive liberty psychedelic research.(Dennis has appeared, subliminally, on nearly every episode of Future Fossils – one of his talks was sampled by my original co-host Evan "Skytree" Snyder for his track “God Detector” – in which I also appear as a guest guitarist – which I still use as the intro and outro music.)In this conversation we push into a DIFFERENT kind of conversation about psychedelic science – not the science of psychedelics as a tool for therapy, but science using psychedelics the way we use telescopes or MRI machines – to let us see in ways we ordinarily cannot, and maybe answer some of the most pressing and persistent questions about human consciousness and the nature of reality.I hope this episode will magnetize the worldwide community of people interested in the possibility of psychedelic science…if you have a story you would like to share in confidence, feel free to email me at futurefossils@protonmail.com where we can talk encrypted! I’ve been thinking about this stuff for my entire adult life – we discuss some of that in this episode – and would love to have more conversations with people who have been thinking similarly…Dennis McKenna’s Links:https://espd50.comhttps://twitter.com/dennismckenna4https://facebook.com/dennisjonmckennaWe Discuss:How can the psychedelic experience in all of its weirdness inform deeper, more rigorous experiments and scientific paradigms?Meet (and then disrupt) the source of all your problems: the default mode network.“The ego…thinks it’s controlling everything, which of course it’s not, but it helps the delusion to think that it is.”Disabling the filters to find aspects of reality you’ve never noticed.The necessity of GROUP psychedelic research from within the altered subjectivity of non ordinary consciousness.The ontology of entities, as studied by the scientific method.What kind of QUESTIONS and what kind of FACTS come out of a psychedelic science for which “real and unreal” is insufficiently nuanced?Crossing the boundary between the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness.Book: On Becoming Aware by Varela, et al.Michael’s initiation into psychedelic science.UFOs.Synchronicity & Coincidence.The Internet is a psychedelic substance.Book: Hyperobjects by Timothy MortonAre waking life and psychedelic consciousness closer now than they used to be?Novelty.The Simulation Hypothesis, The Drake Equation, The Copernican Principle, Occam’s Razor (is fractal)How do you step outside the box?Telepathy & Meta-IndividualityBook: Nexus by Ramez NaamEgregores.“Our cleverness is out of synch with our wisdom.”The wise deployment of technologies.The difference between the past and the future. (???)Concerns about the specter of the collapse of the biosphere.“I’m a science fiction fan, so I assume our destiny is in the stars, right? If we leave the Earth, it would be nice to leave a garden and not a toxic waste dump. There’s no reason why that can’t be so.”The history and future of the ESPD, the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. (!!!)Join the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 continue the ecstatically futural mind-jazz duet with cyborg performance artist and body-machine interface master hacker Onyx Ashanti, exploring the frontiers of new meta-languages emerging at the intersection of the born and manufactured, and creative possibilities thereof. Onyx Online:http://onyx-ashanti.comhttp://youtube.com/onyxashantihttp://twitter.com/onyxashantiAnyone who enjoys this episode will also like these essays from my upcoming book:“The Future is More of Everything”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-2-the-future-is-entropic-2faa4aa6f433“The Future Is Disgusting”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-disgusting-911379af30fe“Being Every Drone: The Future of XR & Robotic Telepresence”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78In this episode, we discuss:Fractal Sonocybernetics & The Future of LanguageThe neurological and experiential differences between speaking and singing, between continuous movement and discontinuous speech.“The English alphabet is created of embedded Fibonacci relationships…there are five vowels; all five of those vowels are odd numbers…between A and E is three letters; between E and I is three letters; between I and O is five; O and U is five; and between U and the end of the alphabet, wrapping around to the A, is five letters…two 3s and three 5s is also one of these relationships. There are twenty-one consonants in the alphabet, and twenty-one is one of these Fibonacci values.”Book: Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard DoyleReaching beyond language to communicate the ineffable psychedelic experience…only to create new (insufficient) languages.Violent counter-reactions to the sudden is-ness of black swan events (like the election of Barack Obama OR Donald Trump).“Those of us that get it and CAN talk about it, it is necessary for us to talk about it. But then to reinforce what we’re talking about with action.”The moral imperative of people with a vision to communicate it. The ethical necessity of artists to create and share.Music as an irreplaceable core module of an n-plus-one-dimensional future language.“We’re like some kind of ant, or bee, and our honey is technology.”With respect to the Singularity: The end of the world? The end of WHAT world? WHAT DOES “END” EVEN MEAN?What happens to identity politics in an age of exponential change and its metamorphosis of “baseline” human identity into something plural, mutable, and ineffably always-evolving?“We have to burst out of identity politics in a way such that it is BORING, that it is MUNDANE, that our perception of identity politics is that it is no longer [the house-sized thing that I am within], it is [identity politics, this thing I am holding in my hand and I can examine like I would examine a grapefruit].”“One’s reality is limited by their ability to comprehend complexity.”If we act from the understanding that our brains are harmonically organized, our thoughts and actions can begin to take on that harmonic organization…Gamma brainwaves as the lubricating medium of harmonically coherent brain activity, just as blockchain-enabled microtransactions enables a fluid economy and liquid democracy in the global brain…How to become resilient in a networked society by using failure to inform the design of new evolutionary systems.“Bitcoin…it’s unstoppable. Right now. And when it IS stoppable, we will have a new version that is vastly less stoppable than this one. And then it will get attacked mercilessly…and then maybe someone brings the quantum chain down. And then we create something we can’t even imagine at this point…”“I feel that Bit Torrent begat Bitcoin.”“The interesting thing with the Bitcoin community is that we’re all working for a company that…there’s nobody working for that company!”Is crypto the cathedral of planetary culture we’ve been waiting for?Onyx waxes rhapsodic about the blockchain.Open-source space program.Book: Project Hieroglyph (containing Cory Doctorow’s short story, “The Man Who Sold The Moon”)Onyx uses Sun Ra and the afro-futurist mythology that he created repeatedly to make a point about legendary creative badassery.“You have to share it in such a way that each person feels that they are absorbing it. And want to. ‘How can I get involved?’”Pay No Attention to The Realm of Loud Dumb ShitWhat a bad example of a good future cyberpunk is… (Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, etc.)Story/Film: Johnny Mnemonic by William GibsonImagining a Crypto Pride Parade with everyone wearing reflective Face ID spoofing masksWhat it takes to turn a work of art into a movement: resonance.“If you [lawmakers and IP holding companies] can’t stop a five megabyte file [mp3s], good luck stopping crypto.”And more for those with time to listen!Join the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2 Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-google Subscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossils Subscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5v Subscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Support the show on Patreon:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 one-of-a-kind, ever-evolving Onyx Ashanti, a cyborg performance artist of world renown, who is as busy as anyone I know (in the words of Terence McKenna) “immanentizing the Eschaton” with his intensely futuristic machine interfaces as an extension of his cymatic, fractal, exponentiating, indomitably cool and strange philosophy. Onyx is one of the most inspiring and creative people in my network and even though this episode was recorded in December 2017 – and is in some ways just a little dated – it’s still 99% WAY, WAY in our future. A paradox! Just how we like it, around here…http://onyx-ashanti.com/https://www.youtube.com/user/onyxashantihttps://www.facebook.com/onyxashanti“We have access to technologies and information that are only limited by our abilities to comprehend them.”The creative potentials of encrypted distributed ledgers “that aren’t just about holding until I’m a millionaire.”Marshall McLuhan: “The future of the future is the now.”The uncontrollability of new technologies.When we talk about “THE” future, whose future are we talking about?“The past and the future all exist as constructs in your mind. The past is no more real than the future.”How choosing our story of the past determines what possibilities become probabilities in our future.“When I think about polarities like good and bad, I think about it in an electronic sense. It’s modulation of the relationship between positive and negative that gives you computers.”Physical and spatial computing exercises and how movement in space can help dislodge us from stuck perspectives.“We have to have more art that plays with the malleability of exponential expressions.”Book: Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse“There’s a lot of people who think that if they get the right president, or they get the right representative, or they buy the right car, then it’s all going to be alright. That is not the case. It is very, very not going to be alright. There are evolving and exponentially complying streams of possibilities that can collapse into probabilities – IF you understand that possibility collapses into probability.”We spoil the movie AI.“American media culture likes to wrap everything up in a happy ending, a happily-ever-after scenario. And I think that makes us retarded.”Book: Accelerando by Charles StrossTutting (for those who don’t know what tutting is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbBqtuYvags) vs BreakdancingVitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, as an example of the crazy wizard kids these days, “spoon benders”Berlin and Detroit and the collapse of industrial centers as the mulch in which great artistic movements bloom…“If everybody were able to express themselves properly, we would be something else, and it wouldn’t be controlled by the people it’s controlled by. And that something else would be, I think, grander, but at the same time would have a whole other set of problems.”How do you keep the golden moment of a temporary autonomous zone or a bohemian urban revival going for as long as possible before it’s gentrified, coopted, integrated, and extinguished?“Innovation and institution: I won’t say that they’re oxymoronic, but the modulation is going to be different between them. I don’t look to institutions [for innovation]. I don’t believe the college education system is relevant anymore.”“The first thing that should happen is, everyone learns how to learn.”“There is no limit to synaptic connectivity that anyone has observed. There is no brain that is so full that it cannot process one more thing.”Onyx’s favorite nootropics (racetams).Co-evolving brain-machine interfaces for a constant flow state of cyborg immersivity.How would AI perceive information? Likely as music…Book: Starmaker by Olaf StapledonBook: Xenolinguistics by Diana Reed SlatteryJoin the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2 Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-google Subscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossils Subscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5v Subscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Support the show on Patreon:http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldBig thanks to our featured sponsor, http://transhumanity.net! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:Subscribe on Patreon to watch the uncut interview:https://www.patreon.com/posts/20618842Our New, Better Life?https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/Why I Am Afraid of Global Coolinghttps://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/Discussed:What inspired Charles’ thorough history and critique of civilization, The Ascent of Humanity, and how it differs from “anti-civilization” texts.The independent convergent evolutions of civilization in Mesopotamia, China, India, and several other places, pointing to the inevitability and directionality of what we call “progress.”What new stories emerge at the intersection of the timeless attractors toward a whole and healthy, thriving biodiverse world of human inter-beings, and a fragmented post-ecocidal VR fully artificial landscape?When is it useful to think of humans as part of nature and when is it useful to think of humans as distinct from nature?“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”What cultural appropriation gets wrong in its attempts to retrieve and revive indigenous rites (“It’s not the content of the rituals; it’s the spirit of the rituals.”)Money as a ritual: “One of the reasons money comes so easily to us is that it’s a kind of ritual. The human mind…ritual is its territory.”“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”Operating on a story that believes the world to be dead leads to a world that is, in fact, dead – whether or not it actually was dead in the first place. Treating nature as a resource rather than as a community of minded cohabitants and potential collaborators is a self-fulfilling prophecy and an act of self-sabotage.Charles’ critique of the New Age technologies of manifestation as oblivious of where the intention or vision comes from in the first place, how we’re enfolded into our environments……and how paradoxically similar that critique is to the disenchanting philosophies described by people like Yuval Harari and Timothy Morton, who make the case that it’s equally the case that the world is alive, or that humans are basically just machines. Or Erik Davis’ “re-animism,” in which we return to a pre-modern sense of a sentient environment through our encounter with AI-suffused devices.How the scientific quest for control over a purely mechanical cosmos pushed us all the way around into some truly weird revelations about the indeterminate, irreproducible, and contingent workings of our mysterious universe.Why machines don’t provide a sufficient metaphor for understanding consciousness, and certainly not for reproducing it.Is trying to fit the complexity of the world into a linear narrative structure the problem at the root of all this? Is it a form of violence to talk about time and evolution having a direction?“I’m not a story fundamentalist. If I say the world is built from story, I also recognize that that itself is also a story. I look at the story of inter-being, for example, as really just the ideological layer of an organism that is far deeper than story.”“There are many ways to know. And we’re conditioned by a story that says only the measurable is real. So we’re conditioned to give priority to ways of knowing that have to do with putting things in categories.”“Progress as currently formulated is not real progress at all. We’re not getting ANY closer to the fulfillment of human potential. Well, aybe we are getting closer on one very narrow axis of development. But there is so much more to a fully expressed human being…and we’re moving away from it in a lot of ways.”What metaphor for mind/life/nature is set to replace “the computer,” just as “the computer” replaced “the steam engine,” which replaced “the geared watch?”How black box AI solutions restore the mystery and magic to the technosphere, replacing reason with blind faith.Kevin Kelly, Stephen Pinker, William Irwin Thompson, Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Brock,“The more empathic our participation, the better off we’ll be.”Can we be TOO empathic?“I think on some level, we all DO feel what all beings are feeling.”The boundaries we draw between our selves and the world, between one organism and another, also evolve.The healing power of grief.Purge-aholics Anonymous.The evolution of service as a continuously shifting, molting thing that changes, that requires careful listening. No moment is the same.The sacred disquiet that attends our new perspective as we learn to see a bigger (ever-bigger) picture.“We have to be cognizant of the inevitable reduction that happens when we assign values to things…one way to translate the humble awareness of the limitations of quantified value is to design currencies that do not need to grow in order to survive.”Did money invent science?“Property is an agreement. It’s not an absolute objective thing…as much as libertarians would like it to be.”Why cryptocurrency (wants to, but) can’t replace human agreement with code.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on YouTube:http://youtube.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSupport the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldBig thanks to our featured sponsor, transhumanity.net!7y8qr5yz Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

Former NASA-JPL Mission Architect and founder of the Exploration Institute, Armin Ellis helps people think big and execute visionary projects for a living. He’s also now the Mission Architect for the Arch Mission Project, a group committed to getting long-lasting civilizational archives carried into deep space by other missions. Armin is exactly the guy to talk to if you want to think the future’s somewhere you would like to live…Watch the entire uncut video on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/posts/20404177Armin's projects:http://exploration.institutehttp://pioneerscircle.comhttps://archmission.org“I really do believe that the future is pretty bright for us.”A rallying cry to not let our amygdalae rule us, to not succumb to fear and desperation.How working on a Mars rover mission helped him develop a humility and appreciation for complexity.“Ego slows us down. It makes us stupider, you know? I’m not sure there are too many intelligent people out there. I think there are people who embrace intelligent practices; that allows them to have intelligent outcomes.”And also: in defense of egotistical people who perform a vital function in the ecosphere by making sure we Get Things Done.How the limitations of each of us as individuals can align with others’ limitations and assets to form a functioning team.Diaspora by Greg EganHow do you craft communications to reach everyone on a neurologically diverse team?“When opinions aren’t backed up by empathy, then you’re necessarily going to run into problems.”“I can’t remember a day in my life when space wasn’t this burning passion, something that REALLY mattered to me…I remember I was eight years old when I decided I wanted to work at JPL.”Idea To Implementation MethodHow to recognize when the processes in an organization are out of alignment.How he got involved in space entrepreneurship and space exploration as a young man.The vital importance of a frontier, of curiosity, of exploration…Why the quest for certainty leads us astray and the quest for meaning leads us true.“Being able to influence it is a fundamentally different premise than being able to control it.”IkigaiWould somebody please build an Ocean Roomba already?Trying to make Star Trek’s Federation happen.The Arch Mission Project, an awesome and ambitious endeavor to leave engraved nickel civilization archives at the ocean’s floor and on the Moon, and with every deep space mission…The importance of emotional mastery (again, not control…) if we are to become the kind of species we could be…And more!• Join the Future Fossils Podcast Facebook Grouphttp://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils• Support Future Fossils on Patreon for Exclusive Episodes & Morehttp://patreon.com/michaelgarfield• Subscribe on Apple Podcastshttp://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2• Subscribe on Google Podcastshttp://bit.ly/future-fossils-google• Subscribe on Stitcherhttp://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossils• Subscribe on Spotifyhttp://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5v• Subscribe on iHeart Radiohttp://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/• Subscribe on Steemit/dSoundhttp://steemit.com/@michaelgarfield• Subscribe by RSShttp://feed.pippa.io/public/shows/5a85dc81756ad1eb46c66330Big thanks to transhumanity.net for being a featured sponsor! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

One third of American adolescents are on medication – half of that number, on psychoactive prescriptions. We have an educational system that not only can’t prepare young people for the rapidly evolving future world we’re creating for them to inhabit – it traumatizes people by attempting to squeeze every kind of human through the same twelve-plus-year sentence of indoctrination and obedience training. Are damaged and addicted mind control slaves really who we hope we’re shaping? Obviously not! That’s where the radical (yet common sense and plainly reasonable) ideas of Michael Strong come in. Michael has devoted his life to establishing new education systems that prepare young people for a lifelong learning process, to think for themselves and find their self-esteem in cultivated excellence, not rote memorization or decontextualized performance. Civilization might mean domesticated people…but do want to live in the Calcutta Zoo?In this week’s episode, I speak with Michael Strong – about how he sees the future evolution of education and learning – starting with a “narrative collapse” about our consensus standardized testing hallucination and a departure from the “factory-worker factory” model that dominates the US public education system now – and growing into an ecology of different styles and possibilities more suited to the future: early-entry programs that restore apprenticeship, train young entrepreneurs, link “un-schooled” families into a learning network, and rebuild the independent and creative minds we’ll need to thrive through the next hundred years of exponential change.About Michael Strong:https://thoughtandindustry.com/abouthttps://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com/about-michael-strong/https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelstrong1/https://www.edreform.com/edspresso-shots/why-we-dont-have-a-silicon-valley-of-education-michael-strong/We Discussed:“I think creating better ways of living is the most exciting, fun task for the 21st Century…[and] middle and high school is more or less prison for 80% of students.”• How to create happy, positive, creative experiences for young people by reimagining the education system• How do we unwind a system that pressures everyone to conform, and establish a system that encourages the vast (and USEFUL) diversity of human personality types, talents, and learning styles?“School is a very narrow band for people who are good at tasks…that doesn’t do justice to the diverse count of moral beings, but also there’s this moral chaos, where I think a lot of the consumerism and addictive behaviors of young people is that there is no sense of virtue or excellence.”• Why mental health and behavioral disorders are at an all-time high, and getting worse, and what to do about it.• The tragicomedy of Socratic process versus fundamentalists in the schools, and taking a pragmatic stance to the chaos and complexity of our time.• Crafting your own sense of meaning and independent moral authority in stark contrast to our legacy of hierarchical thinking.• How to individuate in an era of increased networking – how to tell the difference between pressure to conform and desire to connect?• Technology addiction versus relational meditation and deep nature communion.“One of the things I love about the San Francisco Bay Area is that no matter how weird you are, somebody is weirder.”• Individualism versus political correctness.• The dissolution of established job categories and the beginning of totally unique, distinct purpose and meaning for individuals.• The proliferation of new aesthetics and the emergence of new freedom and openness in the human experience.• How grateful should we be for living in the modern era?• How do we prepare young people to think independently?• What integrated educational curricula look like, exploring ideas across subjects rather than demanding the learning of specific facts.• How to measure success for students in nontraditional systems so they can still win at the university admissions game.• And more…Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2 Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-google Subscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossils Subscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5v Subscribe on YouTube:http://youtube.com/michaelgarfield Subscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSupport the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

Lydia Violet Harutoonian is a badass Armenian-American violinist and folktronica artist who has played with some of today’s juiciest crossover acts, including Rising Appalachia and The Polish Ambassador, in addition to launching her own solo project this year. She also works with the supremely wise Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects, and leads singing workshops in which she applies her lifetime of music and work with Macy to teach music as a form of collective healing.Links:https://lydiafiddle.comhttps://workthatreconnects.orgWe Discuss:• How being monogamous in San Francisco is practically a form of bondage – a delicious kind, one expression of love in a whole ecology of relational styles;• The collaborative and improvisational super powers of the unique musical instrument we call a violin;• How can we use music to metabolize our fear and grief as communities?;• The power of song in building resilience;• Working with Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects;• How the expanded, interconnected human identity of deep ecology informs our lives and moral actions;• Bodhichitta – the Buddhist virtue loosely translated as “goodwill” – and how the practice of deep ecology can help us cultivate it;• The silver lining of crisis and how it can elicit our best humanity;• Why Art Matters (especially when we’re most likely to abandon it because it has “no practical value”);• How music can effect change when conversation (data, analysis, logical arguments, diplomacy) can not;• Musical activism and the awesome experience of touring with Reverend Sekou and the Holy Ghost• “How do we heal racism as a community and what part does music play in that?”• “When did you stop singing?” (And why do so many European-Americans have such difficulty with singing, when the European musical heritage is so vibrant?)• “What would it look like if we all knew a song from our heritage and could teach it to each other?”• And more!Quotes:“When you’re upset about something in the world, that’s usually an indication that you give a damn.”“I really care what happens to people! I don’t know how to relate to the homeless man on the street because it confuses me that he’s on the street.”“Music is another fundamental way that we as people, and we as communities, find our resiliency in hard times, the way we share our stories.”“I think it’s important to not demand – especially with creativity and music – that when someone starts, that everyone chime in in the exact same way.”“I am empowered because I’m interconnected with so many other beating, pulsing people in the world who are working to help the planet.”“I think music is fundamental because there is nothing that a human being says or does that isn’t first seated of consciousness. And music helps work in the realm of consciousness. I think that’s part of why so many people and communities are talking about ‘shifts in consciousness’ as so important – because if we find a new way of tending the garden, how will that structure last unless we have had some kind of shift in our consciousness to sustain us through the ups and downs of what could happen with that garden? And I think music has an intelligence on multiple levels that helps us with that.”“No one can tell you we’re going to make it out of this. No one can tell you that we’re not going to make it out. That is real. And so, then, in that uncertainty, I have to ask myself – and I think we all have to ask ourselves – what do I want to do anyway? What do I want to do?”Related Episodes:Episode 74 with Terry Patten - A New Republic of the HeartEpisode 73 with Patricia Gray - Animals & MusicEpisode 50 with Ayana Young - Living for the WildEpisode 22 with Simon Yugler - Travel AlchemySubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on YouTube:http://youtube.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSupport the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 episode’s guest is Arthur Brock, currency design expert and lead visionary behind the Holochain project – which just might be the basis for the truly free, encrypted, peer-to-peer, surveillance-resistant, voluntary, non-exploitative Web we’ve all been dreaming about since the 1990s.Described by many as a “blockchain killer,” Holochain offers users an endlessly scalable and secure decentralized platform for our lives online, inspired by the fractal branching flows and emergent order we observe in nature.You don’t have to be a cryptocurrency enthusiast or economics wonk to appreciate the smarts and wisdom that Art brings to his work – or to understand why he’s spent the last ten years teaching people about a new paradigm of currency and governance.This is an introduction to a whole new way of thinking about what matters most to you – whatever that might be – as well as how Art and the Holochain team are working day and night to help us ditch the scarcity mindset, and to give us the tools for building a more human and generous society.Holochain Website Metacurrency Project Website "Building Responsible Cryptocurrencies" by Arthur Brock Quotes:“I think one of my particular gifts is interfacing with complex systems, being able to find leverage points for changing those patterns…”“Currencies are not just about money. That’s like a fingernail on the animal of currencies.”“There’s two fundamental fallacies that blockchain is stuck in. The first one is that data exists, and the second one is that time exists.”“There is no absolute time. To pretend that there is, is to create a fiction.”We Discuss:• Currencies as “current-sees,” ways to see, shape, and enable flows of value;• How does nature use signaling systems to create evolutionary “current-sees” that can guide our thinking on currency design?• Why most of the blockchain/cryptocurrencies space is thinking wrong about value and how to generate value in a thriving ecology.• How to design money for stability, compared to the intense volatility of nearly all cryptocurrencies.• Comparing Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’ “Metacapital Framework” to Art’s “Metacurrency Project” and how things shift when you shift your thinking from pools of resources to flows of resources.• How our CONNECTIONS are actually deeper and more important realities than our BORDERS.• How the transition to p2p money routing around banks is like the Protestant Reformation and its ensuing political chaos.• The balance between centralized and decentralized systems – how does Art think the ecology of different organizational structures will ultimately shake out?• How different system architectures encode completely different worldviews and ideas and how facts are made – and how assuming the independence of data we miss something vital.• Art addresses Nathan Waters’ questions about whether Holochain can handle “fungible assets” – land rights, artworks, etc.• Does time even exist?• The mathematical inevitability of the Deep State.• How capitalism is a Ponzi scheme and we’ll have to ditch it to survive.• Why crypto needs to be at least as easy as the Web if it is going to ever work.• And the future of real and symbolic value…Stay Tuned:• Join the Future Fossils Podcast Facebook Group • Subscribe on Apple Podcasts• Subscribe on Google Podcasts• Subscribe on Stitcher• Subscribe on Spotify• Subscribe on iHeart Radio Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 George Dvorsky, futurist, science journalist, and long-time contributing editor at legendary sci/fi blog io9 at http://gizmodo.com.http://twitter.com/dvorskyhttp://kinja.com/georgedvorskyhttp://www.sentientdevelopments.com/https://io9.gizmodo.com/20-crucial-terms-every-21st-century-futurist-should-kno-1545499202We Discuss:• Today’s explosive evolution of AI personal assistants, and where it’s heading…• Will children today, immersed in a world of AI dolls and smarthome devices that speak to them by name, grow up with a different idea of what entities deserve our moral concern?• The pressing cybersecurity and surveillance problems we encounter in the process of filling our lives with internet-connected devices.• Autonomous vehicles and weapons and the ethics of machine intelligence.• The history of our attempts to suppress or prevent the industrialization of warfare.• AI as proxy selves that we can deputize to act as us, on our behalf…• What kind of literacies will we need to have in a world of mature AI?• The future of human-AI collaboration in the arts and creative media.• This story he covered for Gizmodo:https://gizmodo.com/a-four-year-old-boy-used-siri-to-save-his-unconscious-m-1793584170• Is paper a “broken” non-interactive touchscreen?• Mapmaking and prosthesis, and how differently we orient ourselves in landscapes now that we use Google Maps (or Waze, or Apple Maps, or Mapquest, or or or).• And is it ethical to increase the intelligence of other animals? Is it wrong to create an Interspecies Internet that weaves nonhuman persons into our already-messy processes of electronic governance and culture? Or is it morally required of us to go “all together now” and bring the rest of the biosphere with us into the heavens we create?• The transformation of the biosphere into superintelligence – as an ethical necessity.“I always like to look at things around us today that we will laugh at years from now and then marvel at how stupid it was…”“My own gut instinct is that very, very few people would willingly plow their car through a bus stop filled with passengers. So why do we feel that we wouldn’t want to own a car that’s programmed with that same ethical sensibility?”“I’m on team AI. I’m all for it. I cannot wait to see what artificial intelligence may do…four to five generations from now.”Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSupport the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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