Humans On The Loop

David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, discusses SFI's Interplanetary Project aiming to sustainably scale civilization beyond Earth. They explore collaborative storytelling, weaving science, art, and music to spark Big Picture thinking. Krakauer emphasizes the importance of transcending isolation, making ideas accessible to all, and fostering global solutions through engaging and fun approaches.

Terry Patten is a lifelong practitioner of both contemplative spirituality and real-world activism whose new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide To Inner Work for Holistic Change, gives us lucid instructions for how we can start to ask the hardest questions and engage the toughest problems in our age of global transformation.https://www.terrypatten.com/a-new-republic-of-the-heart/I met Terry in 2005 when he was teaching how to recognize and integrate the psychological “shadow,” our repressed unconscious, at a seminar for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. His warmth, humility, and generosity of spirit is palpable in this conversation, and reflects the decades of experience that has inspired his latest writing…it’s an honor to have Terry on the show, thirteen years after he transformed my life by teaching me how to engage and love the hardest, most unpleasant parts of my own mind.In one of Future Fossils Podcast’s most vulnerable episodes yet,We Discuss:- How to deal with new problems that none of us have the abilities to handle on our own, or even by thinking together?- How do we actualize our true potentials and what roles do others play in this?- The need for personal transformation in order to meet our civilization-level challenges.- There is no formula. It’s all an adventure. But you can’t ignore any of it.- (How/) Can Global Warming and other urgent “wicked problems” be a planetary koan?- Does social media provide an adequate venue for the difficult and vulnerable conversations that we need to have?- The leap of faith that is group improvisation in art and collective sense-making.- What does it really mean to “Follow Your Bliss?” What role do heartbreak and genius play in this?- The need for the secular and spiritual communities to come together in respectful mutual discussion in an era of vicious disagreement.- How the ideological defense of conspiracy theories AND mainstream narratives gets in the way of effectively focusing on our most urgent realities…and how to evolve beyond the media environment that prefers inflammatory grudge matches over compassionate mutual learning.- What do we do if we never get “reality” back, and people’s points of view just keep diverging? How can we come together on coherent strategies if we can’t come to a consensus on the basic facts?- Who inspires Terry Patten as exemplars of heartful and soulful transformational activism?“We live in a culture that is in deep, deep denial…[Global Warming] is talked about all the time on the evening news, but it’s denied just as much on the evening news. You aren’t really talking about it if your voice isn’t breaking with emotion. We’re kind of in this mass consensus trance that doesn’t allow us to break through into effectiveness. It’s a time that calls for revolutionary engagement, and yet…”“How to stay reality-bound in our post-truth era is at the center of things.”“Love is going to have to find a voice that’s even more powerful and authoritative than the voice of righteous indignation and anger. Love is going to have to reassert its natural authority…whether it’s a great hospice project or it’s the process by which we turn all of this around, the heart is at the center of it.”Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe 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

Patricia Gray is an animal music researcher, working with all kinds of creatures (humans, whales, songbirds, bonobos, even coral reefs) to understand what functions pitch and rhythm have in animal communication, how the sound of our living planet is actually a symphony of hidden meaning, and how to improve our lives by embracing the innate musicality of our human brains.https://research.uncg.edu/patricia-gray/We Discuss:• How she went from being a concert pianist to the chamber music director for the National Academy of Sciences to the piano-playing lead of a National Science Foundation-funded research lab;(http://www.wildmusic.org/research)• How our understanding of animal communication has shifted over the last few decades from using human language to using music as the orienting metaphor;• The evolution of (and scientific study of the evolution of) music-making in our species;• Pitch discrimination, beat entrainment, and musical memory (rhythm and frequency pattern detection, musical memory and capacity for repetition);• How human conversations rely on musical intelligence for us to flow together and follow and “jam” with each other;• The cultural origins of “biomusic” as a scientific discipline;• Making music with bonobo apes at the Georgia Tech animal communication lab;• Dancing sea lions and cockatoos;• Why do and don’t some animals learn to find the beat?;• Which came first, music or language?;• Harmonized sonic environments and acoustic ecology attuned to the biome (disrupted);• How human technology and civilization has disrupted animal communication in the wild AND human (and pet) psychology at home;• The songs of elephants, mice, bats, and other inaudible “songsters” revealed by new microphones;(https://www.mckalcounisrueppell.org/)• Whalesong! Analyzing the musical structure of cetacean communication and seasonal songs;• Human babies are musical animals! The science of neonatal musical cognition;• The uncanny similarity of whale and human musical systems…what does this suggest about an underlying mathematical order to the cosmos?• Understanding the oceans through a combination of reef hydrophones and machine learning;• Letting the wild back into music and society… • And why it’s essential to teach children music!See Also:Bernie Krause, Roger Payne, Mark Tramo, Peter Cook, Ani Patel(http://www.musicmendsminds.org/mark-tramo) Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2 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/ Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils Support 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

Biological Time Travel: Organ Regeneration & Brain Reanimation – Turning back time in cells and tissues with the new medical techniques of bio-logics, simulating “t = 1” in the human body...This week’s guest is Ira Pastor, CEO of the revolutionary biomedical firm BioQuark in Philadelphia. I had no idea who these people were until Ira messaged me about appearing on the show…and I’m so glad he did, because otherwise I don’t k now when I would have learned about their work with new techniques that enable truly miraculous treatment of brain trauma, catastrophic organ failure, and other complex and confounding issues. We’re on the cusp of another moment in history when we have to redefine what it means to be “dead,” and how far someone can go before they’re irrecoverable. And at the prow of that epochal shift is BioQuark’s method of simulating ooplasm – in other words, “tricking” our cells into thinking that they’re fertilized ova at the very beginning of embryonic development, so they’ll do amazing feats that even stem cells won’t do.I have to admit, I went into this conversation a skeptic. And everything is still bracketed by a big “IF” – but I’m considerably more willing to believe that this is coming, soon, and that it’s going to be a good thing. Get ready to have your mind blown by a conversation about the miracles that might be commonplace in just a few more years…http://bioquark.comSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupWe Discuss:• Why do some other organisms (like jellyfish and amphibians) demonstrate such awesome regenerative abilities, but human beings don’t?• How to reset a cell’s internal “clock” to zero and induce extraordinary regenerative abilities;• How this research builds on existing science dating back to the 1950s (and retrieves “lost knowledge” from other animals we’ve been evolutionarily separated from for hundreds of millions of years);• How biology as a lab science has changed over the last century, and how that (in part) reflects changing sentiments about the relationship between masculine and feminine, physics and biology, waves and particles;• Neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation research and the link to The Immaculate Conception and our lineage’s trend toward increasing neoteny and pedomorphism;• Regarding Liz Parrish, Aubrey DeGrey, and other death-resisting transhumanists…where does work like Bioquark’s fit into the picture of radical life extension and its current genomic/pharmaceutical bias?• What’s the worst that could happen? Is this going to be affordable for everyone? Ira addresses issues of unequal access and (“access for everybody, it’s not just for the billionaires”) and puts Michael at ease about other possible negative outcomes. (Including ZOMBIES.)• The Future of the Medical Industry: a decrease in pharmaceutical company dominance and the business of endless management, and the rise of a business of CURES – no lifelong dependence on medication, no 3D printed transplant organs, just good old-fashioned “miraculous” healing, along with electroceuticals, microbiome supplements, parasite-based treatments, • The Future of Medical Research: international alliances, Right To Try, navigating a complex menu of potential regulatory environments for research, and how Merck partnered with China to create a tropical island hub for medical research tourism…• And more! 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

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupThis week’s episode features returning guest JF Martel, film-maker, culture critic, and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. In his first appearance on Future Fossils, we discussed art as an opening to the transcendent and his awesome three-part essay on the philosophy of Netflix’s Stranger Things, “Reality Is Analog”…so it only made sense to have him back to weigh in on Stranger Things 2 and the extremely artful Blade Runner 2049, both of which speak directly to the evolution of the soul and “the human tragedy” in an increasingly digital age. It’s ultimately a discussion of The Sequel, and how what distinguishes good simulacra from bad is all in the label, “Made With Love”…JF’s book and blog:http://reclaimingart.comJF’s podcast:http://weirdstudies.comWe Discuss:- The humanization of replicants (and the “animalization” of a previously monstrous demogorgon) as empathetic characters in these stories, and how that provides a vital contrast to our future-shocked insistence on hard categorical divisions between made and born, human and non-human;- Carl Jung and Jungian therapist James Hillman, The Velveteen Rabbit, and “earning one’s soul” through individuation of the self (soul as connection to the imaginal contrasted with soul as individuality);- Where does order come from in the evolutionary process?;- The theological angle on the soul as digital because it is the soul as the absolute appearance of a singular (non-evolutionary) form;- Do things need to happen for a reason?;- Is it better to act as if you’ll die tomorrow or to act as if you’ll live forever? (And does thinking “only now exists” make you a lousier person?);- Balancing the two poles of “soul” in philosophy: that which exists beyond cause and effect, and that which is made through tribulation; - Looking at our lives from the perspective of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return and Alan Watts’ notion of the life as a symphony, comprehensible only from the outside;- The genius horror writing of Thomas Lugatti (sp?);- Why it’s so important not to spoon-feed your audience the plot points of a film, to invite them into an interactive process with the narrative;- Donna Haraway, John David Ebert, body hacking…and the shadow form of posthuman philosophy in the peril of ironic hipster detachment to human incarnation;- Rachel Nagelberg’s book The Fifth Wall and how she figures our postmodern dissociation from self through a matrix of surveillance technologies and the out-of-body experiences they induce (see also Erik Davis and Technobuddhism);- The difference between a good sequel and a bad one is “Made With Love” – and how the character of “Luv” in Blade Runner 2049 can be read as a statement on the evils irony is capable of;- The Strong Female Lead as a major trope in recent cinema, from Silence of the Lambs to The X Files to Arrival, and what it means about femininity and institutions in our current Zeitgeist;- An update on the writing process of Michael’s book, How To Live in the Future;- More gushing about James P. Carse’s book, Finite and Infinite Games;- Dungeons & Dragons. ;)- And more! Quotes:“There’s no reason why something can’t happen for no reason at all. The only way you can prove the Principle of Sufficient Reason - that things happen for a reason - is by presupposing the principle.”“The universe might have come about in all its complexity ten seconds ago, and might disappear in another ten seconds for no reason at all.”“We don’t know what death means, so we don’t know what it means to live your last day, in that context. But the idea to live as if you’re already dead – that to me has a lot of resonance, because it means that you live your life in such a way that the story of your life has been written somewhere. For me it resembles Nietzsche’s idea of The Eternal Return: it’s that every action you take should be something you would will yourself doing for the rest of time, for eternity, so that everything resonates at the deepest level.”“Good stories don’t really work in such a way that everything has its place, morally, in the universe. It’s more like everything makes sense at the aesthetic level. It’s like everything fits together aesthetically somehow, through some weird synchronicity. And I think that it’s possible to look at life that way, and to experience life that way.”“I would compare Jurassic World to one of those Old West roadshows that used to travel around in the 1910s and recreate the battles of the Wild West in the kitschiest, most facile way possible – and Stranger Things is more like a Pre-Raphaelite painting to me. It’s SO hyper-aware of what it’s doing, and at the same time it’s not ironic. It REALLY IS nostalgic. It REALLY IS pining for that lost time.”“I don’t think technology is helping a lot of people ‘make a soul.’” 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

“Ah, eventually you DO plan to TALK ABOUT dinosaurs on this dinosaur podcast, right? Hello? Yes?”- Ian Malcolm about this episode.This week’s guest is professional dinosaur hunter Steve Brusatte, paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.https://twitter.com/stevebrusatteSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupBeyond being a totally awesome – and more importantly, FRESH – take on the Mesozoic Era that weaves vital updates from the last twenty years of discovery into the official story, this book also paints a rich and lively portrait of the human beings who actually do dinosaur science. Their stories moved me as much as the story of how the dinosaurs evolved, came to dominate the landscape, and then disappeared. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs offers more than the “what” of prehistory; it also offers us the “who” and “how” and “where” and “why,” and it will be a spiritual experience for anyone as into dinosaurs OR science OR science writing as I am.Plus, Steve’s great fun to talk to. He’s totally contagious.WE DISCUSS:• How we’re living through a worldwide renaissance of paleontology, a “Golden Age of Dinosaur Science” – and how itis related to deeper historical and economic trends – such as the opening of new international trade routes, increasing access to science education, and accelerating global development (the movement of wealth discovers dragons);• How the technology and methods of dinosaur science have advanced dramatically over the last few decades – but it’s still “a discovery science” that requires people out in the field, opening the ground and looking for new fossils;• Steve’s legendary globetrotting professors Paul Sereno and Mark Norell, and how their generous mentorship launched his career;• How paleontology remains one of the most awesome lifestyles for anyone with the spirit of an adventurer;• The role of landscape in stimulating the imagination – especially for bored Midwestern children whose imaginations fill the empty space with visions of lost worlds;• What it’s like to BE a paleontologist and to know about the history of the land where you are, to have insights into the Deep Time Big Story and how it relates you to the ground on which you walk;• How time perception changes when you’re in the badlands doing paleontological field research;• Michael’s childhood mentor and role model, rockstar revolutionary “heretical” paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, who had a habit of weaving Bible scripture and Broadway musical numbers into his energetic and engaging dinosaur ecology talks;• The major role that contingency plays in mass extinctions and the rise and fall of groups that otherwise seem dominant (like dinosaurs, and humans) – ie, “How do you become dominant? How do you rise up from nothing and become a BRONTOSAURUS?”• And the major role that MYSTERY plays in our understanding of the ancient world;• Oh, and we also talk about dinosaurs! For like half an hour. About Tyrannosauroidea, specifically, and how T. rex rose to greatness. And how to survive a mass extinction. But you’ll just have to listen for the rest.QUOTES:“I’m always thinking about, ‘Where is this area, where was it during the Mesozoic Era, what was it like when Pangaea was still around, what kind of environments were there, what kind of dinosaurs were living there?’ Just having this perspective, when you travel around on the Earth, of looking at landscapes and being able to see the looooooong history of those landscapes. Being able to see in the shapes of hills, and the types of rocks that are exposed, and the colors of those rocks, being able to see deep distant pasts, reconstructing vanished worlds. And I think that’s part of the magic of sciences like paleontology and geology…and probably nobody that’s not a paleontologist or geologist thinks like that. I’m sure we just think really strangely.”- Steve Brusatte“Nobody in science ever does anything alone. MAYBE in mathematics you can be a lone genius and figure out some great proof just sitting alone in your boxers in the dark, or whatever, but MOST science is NOT LIKE THAT. It’s collaborative, you work with teams, you NEED teams, and you need good mentorship when you’re student. So now that I run my own lab, I just hope I can provide for my own students what my mentors did to me.”- Steve Brusatte“There’s something just indescribable about that feeling of finding and holding and appreciating fossil objects. And that never gets old. A new fossil discovery never gets old.”- Steve Brusatte“Studying dinosaurs isn’t going to save the world, of course…BUT…”- Steve Brusatte 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

Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ continuous unfolding creativity.http://timfreke.com/http://timfreke.com/ONLINE-TOUR/COSTS.aspxSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupWe take a deep dive into the nature of time, reality, and creativity:• Is spiritual awakening the “leading edge” of evolution? (Not technology, as proposed by Kevin Kelly et al.?)• How story may be more fundamental to reality than we’ve believed• Is evolutionary “novelty” created, or simply discovered lying in wait?• A psychedelic view of time in which the present is a “handshake” between all possible pasts and all possible futures• Can we change the past, or merely our interpretation of it?• Soul as the fundament or medium of our intersubjectivity• Does the imagination operate as an information platform distinct from biology and physics?• Is Heaven an evolutionary emergent?• Is mind, imagination, and soul a different level of a hierarchy of being, or is it the interior experiential dimension ofwhat we call body and matter?• The relationship between subjective and objective in the time-stream• The ongoing trialogue between MG, Ken Wilber, and Bruce Damer on the origins of life and co-enactment of mind and matter “all the way down” through orders of complexity to the very quanta of our cosmos• The role of landscape and material agency in prebiological and postbiological inheritance (what comes before and after DNA?)• The Invention of Death• The proposed/hypothetical symbiosis of the soul and body • Tim’s critique of artificial consciousness and mind uploading• Can we ensoul technologies? If bodies can provide a vehicle for these nonphysical information patterns, can we engineer new bodies that invite souls into novel forms of incarnation?• Can you give something a soul by loving it?• The Question of Death• Evolution as the movement from unconsciousness unity through individuation into conscious individuated unity.Quotes:“Fundamentally, it’s a flow. It’s a process. The universe is not made of things.”“The philosophy that I’ve been exploring is that we have the wrong metaphor of time. That time doesn’t pass…but rather, time accumulates. And there is more past now than when we started this conversation…and the past hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s actually present, because everything that has ever happened is implicit in this moment.”“Every moment is the meeting of the possible, the ground of being, the potentiality, and everything that has been. But what this next moment can be, it’s limited. It must contain everything that’s happened before.”“The potentiality for the rainbow was there before eyes. But there was no rainbow.”“Technology is brilliant, but it’s nothing compared to the imagination.”“What I’m suggesting is that there is information on the soul level, which is nonphysical, which is a separate domain….we can’t reduce the body to physics, and we can’t reduce the soul to biology.”“The immortality of the soul has evolved as a continuation of the emergent and evolutionary universe. If you look at the history of what people have said about death, it’s almost like it’s evolving.”“There is no objective reality. There is, rather, objective information objectively and subjectively perceived.”“The body is discriminating information sensually, and then over the top of that, imagination is discriminating conceptually.”“Evolution itself has evolved. The physical universe did not happen through genetic mutation and natural selection.”“The more individual we become, the more we can understand the oneness.”“The whole philosophy, really, is a way of intellectually shoring up some almost childlike insights that arrived for me when I feel most deeply awake.”“Life is Good. Death is Safe. And what really matters is Love.”Support these vital conversations with a small monthly contribution: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 week we go deep in part two of my epic four-hour conversation with documentarian and gonzo journalist Charles Shaw – one of this show’s most requested return guests.In part one, Charles laid out the map of the problem: a world in crisis, an age of epidemic trauma and addiction. In this episode, we get into his self-experimentation with sleep deprivation to understand the hallucinatory reality of America’s homeless, his journey of healing and recovery working with entheogens and military veterans, and how facing and embracing our darkness with humility and courage may be the only way we can prepare ourselves to make a meaningful contribution to our world. Get ready for a heady brew of grit, dark humor, grief and relief, and the luminous truth that awaits us on the other side of suffering…Support these vital conversations with a small monthly contribution:http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion Group––––––––––––––––Part One:https://www.patreon.com/posts/16862172Charles on Youtube & Vimeo:https://www.youtube.com/user/UnheardVoicesArchivehttps://vimeo.com/nomadcinema“Meeting The Self You Aren’t,” excerpts from my talks with Charles on the 2010 Light & Shadow Tour:https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/meeting-the-self-you-arentIn October and November 2010, I traveled to thirty cities across the United States with journalist and documentary film-maker Charles Shaw on what we called "The Light & Shadow Tour." Half our time was spent filming interviews for his documentary about the War on Drugs and prison industrial complex; half our time was spent engaging audiences in deep discussion on the role of what psychologists call "the shadow" in personal and cultural transformation. The shadow is the part of ourselves so profoundly disowned that it shows up not as a quality of the self, but a trait of other people - not a choice that we are making, but a fate that imposes itself upon us. And to whatever degree we continue to refuse acknowledgment of our shadows, we remain the desperate victims of life instead of its joyous collaborators. It isn't easy to write a new story of the self - and to constantly re-write that story, when new truths come to us in the form of disarming companions, rude awakenings, and other surprises. But it is the work set out before us, if we are to live as whole people and give the most of ourselves to the birthing of a new and better world.––––––––––––––––IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:- How seeking validation for his work made him miserable, but he moved through the crisis and the victimhood into a new sense of completeness;- How service to other people in the trauma and addiction healing process as an intake and integration facilitator at ibogaine clinics accelerated his own healing;- The puzzle of figuring out how to use psychedelics as part of the healing process for people with diagnosed mental disorders, for whom the action of psychedelics is still poorly understood;- The homelessness and drug addiction situation in San Francisco, a city in crisis and an “open-air asylum”;- How he took a personal journey into the insanity and delusional states of America’s growing homeless population through a gonzo journalist’s approach of firsthand speed use and sleep deprivation (up to nine days at a time, under clinical supervision);- What he learned from three years of intense work with entheogens about the experience of death and the emotional process of moving through epochal transitions;- Hanging out with the “shadow people,” the characteristic hallucinations that externalize our own repressed internal voices when we start to lose our minds;- Our resistance to treatment and medicine, because keeping things the way they are is easier, because healing is an ordeal that challenges our identities;- Getting to the heart of the inquiry of “Why am I doing what I’m doing, here?” and “What do I WANT?”- What it is to lose touch with the young and hungry, eager and determined artist that we used to be and then to find it in a painful retrospective, and to realize it was because we were out there seeking validation, hustling, instead of giving our lives to the work;- Is the conversation to identify the problem, or to critique by creating and move toward solutions?- How do we even TRY and turn the global conversation toward concerted action for positive and universal (planetoid) change?- We manage to sneak some Blade Runner 2049 in there…- Aging and growing older in our culture, which nobody wants to talk about;- A Luke Skywalker-esque critique of now-institutional festival culture;- The Pluto Transit (!!!);- Hungry Ghosts;- Going into the heart of darkness with veterans on ayahuasca and understanding what teamwork can do for psychedelic healing;- His dialogue with ayahuasca about visiting his late sister in the underworld, and how he found his peace with her passing;- Dodging the psychedelic messiah complex;- The astrology of Jesus and Piscean martyrdom;- How study of the archetypes inform our passage through the phases of our lives;- The truth about how being a prophet is a difficult, unappreciated act, not this glamorous role we imagine it to be;- How his film The Plastic People, on Tijuana and the deportation crisis, led to sweeping reforms in Mexico and pissed off countless Trump supporters on Netflix;- The challenges of documenting the secret history of the ibogaine underground;- The futility of protest in the postmodern information warfare landscape;- What Charles thinks was REALLY going on at Standing Rock, and how it’s related to the infiltration and disruption of the Women’s Movement;- How the government collects and processes intelligence on protesters and other political dissidents;- Can you have fun and still effect social change?- How learning the surprising hidden story of his own family changed how Charles thinks about identity and the human condition;- Big Mind Process and listening to the voice of “The Damaged Self”;- And more!––––––––––––––––CHARLES QUOTES:“I thought I was doing the right thing the whole time. I thought I was fighting the good fight. But at some point, you have to ask yourself why you keep ending up in the same situations.”“We are way too liberal with our use of the word ‘insane’ in our culture. Most of what people call insane is just plain suffering. End of story.”“Power is power for a reason. You want to take that shit on firsthand, you’re going to get hurt. A lot of young people don’t realize that.”“Healing’s an ordeal, and that’s the thing: most people check out too early. They actually make a decision on some level to just rather live their lives in dysfunction and unhappiness and keep repeating patterns and cycles rather than go through it, and go through the ordeal… Healing Land requires a stay in Shadow Land. If you want to heal, you gotta go through Shadow Land first.”[With homeless delusional behavior] “The drugs aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of sleep.”“Hoffman tested the acid, Shulgin tested the MDMA, I tested the insanity.”“Even Elon Musk cannot save the world, and frankly, I don’t think he’s a very palatable human being to begin with, but people love him and he’s kind of a sacred cow and you can’t criticism him, but I say ALL these billionaires are shifty and you can’t trust any of them.”“I’m not very good at killing myself. I should probably STOP.”“I don’t have to know how to do it right to know you are doing it wrong.”“Being a prophet means you’re never going to experience the things other people experience in life…it means you’re going to be alone and your whole existence is defined by your alienation from the status quo. But if you can accept it…”“Anybody who thinks there aren’t informants in the Native American community does NOT know the history of the Native American community.”“What is healing all about? So much of it is about accepting shit you can’t control.”“I’m not saying I’m better than anyone. I’m unique. I serve a unique function. And right now my unique function is to try to make the people that are the least understood in our culture more understood. I can do that. And I’ve sacrificed everything – my life, my body, a family, stability, everything – in pursuit of this, now across my fifth platform, the fifth group of despised subcultures. And I’m just going to keep going until we get to all of them. I may put the brakes on when we get to pedophiles – I’m not sure I can make an argument for that – but I study the people that do. Because it’s all about compassion. It is ALL about learning compassion.” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. 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This week’s guest is media theorist, culture critic, author, graphic novelist, documentarian, and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff! Chances are you’re a “digital native” banking on “social currency” and consuming “viral media” – which means that you are living in the world Doug prophesied for all of us back in the 1990s. I watched his debut documentary on social marketing, Merchants of Cool, in my college Introduction to Film class (which is how you know my teacher was, in fact, cool). His book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now was one of the core inspirations for this podcast and its examinations of time in the digital age remain some of my most frequently-recommended writing. More recently his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus launched a vital conversation about how to make sure that the “superabundance” of digital society actually MAKES IT TO THE PEOPLE. And his podcast Team Human offers new insightful conversations every week about how we can sculpt a future for the 100%-ers – a world that welcomes everybody, that lets everyone in, that finds something meaningful for all of us to do and be.Doug’s written shelves on our new media environment and how the digital surround retrieves our magical antiquity. He’s issued potent cautions to us, that we must Program Or Be Programmed. He’s spent his entire life helping us find the bottom-up to complement the top-down that we’re stuck with…to help everyone be literate enough to make it in this modern world.And in this episode, he looks back on his life’s work, and forward to the great responsibility we bear to help imagine systems, cultures, and relationships for a more humane and equitable future…Doug’s podcast:http://teamhuman.fmDoug’s website:http://www.rushkoff.com/This week we’re also joined by guest co-host Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops, our sister podcast, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102, 88, 58, 44 with Doug Rushkoff, 38 with Niles Heckman, 28 with Bruce Damer, 21 with Erik Davis, 9 with Shane Mauss, 4 with Erik Davis, and this special mashup episode – and who has appeared on Future Fossils to talk about Westworld in Episode 14 and the Blockchain in Episode 52.We Discuss:• the ethical necessity of finding planet-scale solutions that work for ALL of us, not just a certain economic class; • the externalized ecological costs of Bitcoin; • how sigils and other ancient magical practices have been modernized for info warfare in the modern age; • how the culture of our global information economy retrieves the gods of antiquity; • the conflict of interests between our present and future selves; • the problem with futurists as propagandists and how we use “the future” as a way to manipulate people;• and more!Doug Quotes:“The aspect of the blockchain that is the most real at this point is the environmental destruction…the smartest scientists I know have given up on the environment. They’re saying, ‘Let’s just have dinner. This is it.’ If that’s the case, then it feels like every conversation about blockchain has to start and end with that. It’s like, ‘Okay, while we’re destroying the planet with technology, isn’t it an interesting model for this and that…?’”“It’s all just sigil magic on a certain level…although now you can express it through code, instead of just alchemy.”“As far as the virtual is actual, the virtual is tied to our actual well-being. So thanks to cyberspace, we have a place where all of that symbolic activity becomes real – or at least as real as we’re willing to make this stuff. Your FICO score is on there. This is the landscape that’s defining our reality. So it turns programmers into potential magicians of unprecedented power.”“The gods that we are looking at today a re subsets of capitalism. They are really more unintended consequences of people looking to game the system, than they are the natural flowering of some higher power, higher agenda. So we’re in a similar relationship to those things, but we don’t want to be re-enacting those things. We want to be, if anything, recognizing them and creating alternatives.”“Psychologically, they found that people relate to their own future selves the same way they relate to a stranger. So the person you’re saving retirement money for is just some old guy. So on some level, I don’t really care so much if that person is suffering in the cold, because I want an iPhone X. So screw him.” “Especially in the heady days of early WIRED Magazine, where they’re saying, ‘Look! Everything’s changing! The tsunami’s coming! You better hire some futurists to tell you where it’s going or you’re all going to die’…I was arguing that it’s fine, that all futurists are propagandists of a certain sort. So if I’m going to be a futurist, I’m going to propagandize a world of peace and love and the egalitarian sensibility that we’re all moving into, NOT a long stock market boom of infinite wealth for venture capitalists.” 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 chat with the philosopher and sociologist John Danaher about the book Robot Sex: Social & Ethical Implications, a fascinating collection of academic articles on our sexbot future he just co-edited with Neil McArthur. (John also runs the blog Philosophical Disquisitions, which has been an awesome resource for deep thinking online for over a decade.)https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/robot-sexhttp://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.comhttp://thefutureofsex.netChances are good you’ve seen the “Don’t Date Robots!” public service announcement from the cartoon Futurama, and probably Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” music video. Maybe you’ve seen Her or Ex Machina or Spielberg’s AI. And let’s not forget the Femmebots in Austin Powers. But does any of this media, for or against, paint a realistic portrait of the impact of machines on human intimacy?Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion Group!In this episode, John and I talk about:• “The cognitive niche” and what separates human beings from other species and (maybe) AI• How would a world of sexbots change dating and marriage?• The de-coupling of sex for intimacy and companionship and sex for reproduction• …and how sexbots might actually bring us BACK to a more naïve or primitive state in which we don’t regard sex and fertility as primarily associated• What happens if we can hack the brain to make anything an erogenous zone?• The radiating diversity of sexual strategies as we move into crazier transhuman terrain…• The breakdown of heteronormative society and the emergence of LGBTQ sexbots• Will sexbots make human sexwork more or less desirable?• Can sexbots help sexual deviants channel their socially unacceptable urges into more acceptable behaviors?• What about LOVING robots? Can we ever be convinced the love is mutual?• Is the question of robot free will moot because we don’t even have free will??• Is our dismissal of robot consciousness just like the earlier forms of dismissal of personhood in racism and sexism and speciesism?• Is robot sex a red herring?• Loving AI would not be compatible or sensible with the goals of transhumanists, who want perfect control over their environment…• And more!“As soon as we’ve been making things, we’ve been making things for sexual reasons. You can pretty much trace this throughout history: we get the first mechanical vibrators at pretty much the same time as the Industrial Revolution…the technology of sex has always gone hand in hand with other developments in technology.”“All the doubts and skepticism you could have about a relationship with a sufficiently sophisticated robot…you could have all the same metaphysical doubts and worries about a human partner.”STAY TUNED for next week's episode with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops Podcast! 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