Humans On The Loop

Radical documentarian, activist, and raconteur Charles Shaw joins Future Fossils Podcast this week for part one of an epic double (possibly triple) episode. https://vimeo.com/nomadcinema Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify Join our Facebook Discussion Group We Discuss: • The plight of the despised underclasses and the dark constellation of the Drug War, addiction, deportation, homelessness, and the prison industrial complex • The (largely broken) promise of visionary culture and the global festival circuit • Psychedelic healing for PTSD and addiction with ibogaine and ayahuasca, and the urgent need for trauma recovery in our traumatic age • Similarities between the Great Depression and life since the 2008 mortgage crisis – namely, suspicion of institutions like banks and the government • The untold stories and hidden trauma of the Greatest Generation • The cascading effects of war, emotional trauma, and social-scale health problems • Trauma and consumerism, trauma and hoarding • Messiah complexes and the pressure of being told you’ll save the world • His work as an intake facilitator for the Ibogaine Institute • The history of addiction being treated as an illness • Addiction & Psychedelic Healing • Intoxication as “the fourth primal drive” • How Rogue One conveys the tension between institutions and individuals, and how war twists and manipulates us – Rogue One as a metaphor for PTSD • Borderline Personality Disorder • How the 20th Century’s industrial civilization trauma has become the 21st Century’s information overload trauma • A critique of Portugal’s drug decriminalization policy • Technological addiction and the bombardment of brains • Psychedelic therapy as a treatment for modern life Charles Shaw Quotes: “The dictum that you really only care about issues when they strike home – definitely plays into the trauma discussion. So I didn’t care about trauma or PTSD until I realized I HAD it.” (On War:) “It’s all about trade and it’s all about territory.” “By the same standards that we executed Nazis…we did the same shit. The thing is, now that that generation is gone, these stories are STARTING to come out, but unfortunately they’re being seized on by the alt-right to rewrite the story of Hitler…come on, nothing takes away from what the Third Reich did.” “Every Boomer that didn’t become a rockstar, their kid was going to become a rockstar.” “There was a paper trail. They conclusively proved that Florida stole the 2000 election. We conclusively proved that Ohio stole the 2004 election. Didn’t matter. No one in the Baby Boom generation…would actually believe it. Because it called the whole system into question. And when you call the whole system into question, that’s a much larger conversation than, ‘No, your other party is the problem. It’s just those people.’” “Addiction science is progressing at light speed, but addiction understanding and comprehension is progressing like Yertle the Turtle. And what we know now is that it ISN’T a disease. It is neither chronic nor progressive. Addiction is a learned behavior more than anything else.” “Animals don’t need to hit the bottle because animals don’t suffer guilt. But humans do.” “We come out of this lineage, and we don’t even realize it’s there…” Referenced Media: • The Thin Red Line • Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky • The Body Knows The Score by Bessel van der Kolk • The Biology of Desire by Mark Levin • Living Light (Eartha Harris’ electronic music production project) • The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr 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 comedian Shane Mauss, whose psychedelic standup A Good Trip blew minds at over 100 tour stops last year, and whose documentary film Psychonautics takes us on Shane’s adventures in psychedelic therapies. He also hosts the Here We Are Podcast, where he interviews scientists of all stripes and mines their research for standup inspiration…Shane’s always been a rigorous thinker, a legitimate and respectable skeptic, which made his inquiries into the weird realms of psychedelia so interesting to me. He started tripping to self-medicate for his lifelong depression a few years ago but hisHe and I disagreed for years about the nature and validity of the phenomenon known as “synchronicity” – that everything is linked behind the scenes, no coincidences – but this summer he texted me to tell me he’d had a revelatory experience and that I was right all along.The next thing I heard from him, he was on Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast talking about how he had just gotten out of a mental institution. So WHAT EXACTLY was I right about, again?? We go deep in this episode about the nature of reality and madness in this warm and funny conversation (in which he shared what he actually saw that put him in the psych ward)…http://shanemauss.com http://herewearepodcast.com TOPICS- How the universe is wearing stripes and plaid (just like in some of Alex Grey’s art).- What’s behind that crazy look in someone’s eyes.- Simulation theory vs. the brain’s innate virtual reality.- What people are really seeing when people say they see God.- A bunch of awesome trip reports from Shane.- Shane getting courted as a clinical subject for new extended-state DMT trials.- Time as a multidimensional landscape of rhyming moments- Marshall McLuhan’s “invisible environment” as it relates to memory as a mutable substance, altered every time it’s accessed.- Evolving through the layers of the multiverse from animal to human and beyond.- The Evolution of God and how we’re all participating in the new empathy of a deity that does not have it figured out.- A new kind of psychedelic science.- Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab and the possibility that the so-called future is actually present and accessible via longer wavelengths.- and a bunch more… QUOTES“I found out years ago that I can just gobble up some mushrooms two or three times a week for a few weeks, and that’ll get rid of my depression for a few months or so…I started thinking, ‘What if instead of just getting rid of my depression, I could actually feel GOOD?’”“The DMT world feels very ‘top down,’ very ‘creator’ type of thing…”“Sobriety is not really a thing that works, even though I've got to do it for now…”“Why try to envision Jesus doing something – why try to have a dream where you’re seeing Jesus and talking to Jesus, when it’s just in your head? Just BE Jesus!”“A lot of this stuff gets pretty far away from the scientific method, you know?” 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

Gay porn star and occultist philosopher Conner Habib and professional gambler turned journalist and record producer Mitch Mignano explore topics such as the battle between holism and reductionism in biology, the work of Lynn Margulis and Gaia Theory, the integration of humanities and sciences, the evolution of consciousness and the role of psychedelics, reincarnation and its influence on daily life, surprises and the concept of evil, and their unexpected connection and future collaboration.

This week’s guest is Sophia Rokhlin, whom I met in Portugal at Boom Festival 2016, and who just finished her Master’s of Ecological Economics in Barcelona last fall. Sophia’s currently at work on a number of cool projects, including The Environmental Justice Atlas – a database of environmental conflicts happening around the world. She’s also helping Daniel Pinchbeck write a book on ayahuasca and has worked at Kosmicare, a European psychedelic harm reduction project. http://ejatlas.orghttp://twitter.com/sophiarokhlin We Discuss: • How Spanish represents time differently than English • The politics and economics of Catalonian independence from Spain • How energy accounting, geography, history, and political ecology come together in the new field of Ecological Economics: the layer of material funds and flows behind what we think of as “the economy” – how much gold, how much sand, how much palm oil… • Her time in the Amazon studying plant medicines with the Sequoia tribe • “Flex crops” (used as a food, a fuel, and a feed) for more sustainable and resilience global agriculture • How can we properly account for all the ways our ecosystems support us without dangerously oversimplifying things? • The history (and problem) of using “ecosystem services” to quantify the economic value of nature • “Man-Age-Ment” • The Battle of Global Civilization: Technocrats vs. Mystics • And what of technoshamanism? Demetabolizing our environment. • Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind Process & voice dialogue in ego transcendence • The problem of locating yourself in a global environmental conflict without a clear front line…each of us is everywhere, so where do we stand? • Connecting and making kinship and natural rapport with elements in the global economy and learning how your life intersects with the planet-wide body of ______ (paper, palm oil, latex, etc.). • How studying economics can be like diéta, getting acquainted with something • Acting as a gateway to transcendence and altered states of consciousness • Sophia’s history of encounters with ayahuasca, and what led to the realization that shamanism is not her path • Balancing Big Picture thinking and intimacy, the social and personal, traditionally masculine and feminine modes of being • Overcoming the cognitive dissonance between the revelations of psychedelic experience and ecological defense of plant medicines • The hidden costs of regulating cannabis and other plant medicines • Her soft spot for “the clandestine economies of hackers, pirates, and shamans”…don’t create economic monocultures by commodifying everything you possibly can! • How psychedelics defy commodification – and why that’s a good thing • Ontological anarchism and the silliness of trying to impose structure onto the utterly uncontrollable mysterious reality of reality • Anarchism as a process • “To complete things is to uncomplete them.” • Unity and efficiency versus the counterclockwise heyoka medicine of necessarily contrary oppositeness • Can there even BE a counterculture in a planetary culture? • Idea Sex • Tamera Healing Biotope in Portugal and their model for Love Without Fear • Relationship Anarchy needs a community container; why polyamory can be more difficult in the city • The opposite of Tinder is having elders counsel us when we find someone in our community attractive • Feminine eldership, female guidance and leadership • Life Hack 101: Treat animals as gendered he’s and she’s instead of it’s, and you get better communication results. • The Noosphere eating the Biosphere • Jamming with nature and the importance of acoustic biodiversity • The fallacy of conservation biology and the cult of wilderness • If we really want to Make America Great Again, we’re going to need some mammoths! Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / SpotifyJoin the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff! 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

We’re living through a mass extinction – which is also one of the most awesome opportunities for creativity the Earth has ever seen. In this talk that I gave at Burning Man 2017’s Palenque Norte Speaker Series, I give a short tour of Great Catastrophes of Natural History and show how each of them was also equally the advent of new life, intelligence, diversity, and richness. Studying how crisis is the mother of invention, it’s my hope that this talk will inspire you to see our turbulent, chaotic age as something to be celebrated. Learning what we can from evolution, we can shed new light on how to steer ourselves away from global ecological disaster – perhaps to even revel in our role as agents of epochal change in Earth’s amazing story.http://michaelgarfield.nethttp://youtube.com/michaelgarfield In this talk I discuss:• Going backward in order to go forward, the reclamation of the traditions and wisdom we have abandoned in our March of Progress;• The importance of situating ourselves and our moment in the larger context of Natural History;• The “Press-Pulse” Theory of mass extinction;• The emergent forms of life and evolutionary creativity ignored by nearly every conversation about how we’re “killing the planet”;• What The Great Oxygenation Event has to teach us about pollution and creativity as a response to danger;• Why philosopher Galen Strawson doesn’t believe in free will;• How the evolution of flowers was a huge catastrophe;• Richard Doyle’s update of the Stoned Ape Hypothesis and the role beauty and seduction have played in the evolution of consciousness and culture;• What the evolution of early birds has to teach us about the proliferating ecosystem of mobile devices;• Hopeful developments in the area of plastic-eating microbes and fungi, and using living machines to digest pollution;• The wilderness lives on in cities in the Anthropocene;• And how awesome the film Shin Gojira (2016) is.• PLUS: What if we are living in a giant galaxy-sized brain? Bruce Damer, Jake Kobrin, Mitch Mignano, and more speak up in the Q&A. Quotes:“The story of life can be told as a series of nested singularities, nested horizons of knowing and understanding.”“Sex is a far more effective R&D situation than clonal reproduction.”“Everything that we’re creating now, we want to treat it with love, and an understanding that it has a life and a destiny of its own, and it’s not something we control.”“Cultural realities are starting to seem less and less sufficient for describing and experiencing the full range of human potential.”  Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff! 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 to this show: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff This week’s guest is futurist and mythographer Maya Zuckerman, member of IEEE and author of the young adult science fiction series Em’s Theory. https://www.mayazuckerman.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayazuckerman/ We Discuss: • What it’s like to be a woman futurist in the Bay Area; • Futurism as a pastime of privilege; • Marginalized (third-world) futures and science fiction; • Is Singularity University the church of a new techno-religion?; • Ethical AI design; • The need for more introspection in technology design; • http://ieee.org • Conscious AI and mind-uploading (hype?); • The decay of consensus facts and what it means for our ability to agree on history and reality; • The role of mindfulness in our acceleratingly crazy technological environments; • Do we have to retreat out of our ego minds to even LIVE in an ultra high-frequency automated machine economy? • What is the ultimate purpose of our devotion to technology? • Neuromarketing & being responsible/accountable for our suddenly-public thoughts; • What happens when we’re all so technologically empowered that we live in a community of magicians and superhumans? • Masculine and Feminine magic as two approaches to tech; • Critiquing the Rapture of the Nerds & techno-immortalism; • Most women and archaic spiritual leaders were women…so why does our mythological hero’s journey not include everyone else who was a part of the tribe? • The importance of inviting as many perspectives as possible (including women, minorities, non-human persons, and potentially nature itself) into a conversation about the future; • The spectrum of potential futures on display in her sci-fi novel series, from utopian to dystopian; • The ethics of “animal uplift” (Do we have an ethical responsibility to give any nonhuman animals sentience?) • Are we losing our humanity to the limitations of our engineered software environments? • Yuval Noah Harari’s nonfiction book Homo Deus • Kevin Kelly’s nonfiction book The Inevitable • Greg Egan’s sci-fi book Diaspora • Barbara Tedlock’s nonfiction book The Woman in the Shaman’s Body Maya Quotes: “There’s a hubris here [in Silicon Valley] that’s really dangerous, and you see it everywhere. And when you call it out, people are like, ‘Oh, you can’t stop technology. You can’t talk about that.’ I’m like, ‘Yes you can, and you should. That’s what adults do. KIDS run forward and don’t take any kind of consequence. And if we want to ever become mature adults – which we’re not –mature adults pick up after ourselves, we think a little about the future, we plan our budget, we take five when we get excited and we sit down. We don’t have to rush about it.’” “The Wild West is what happens when there’s not a lot of land, and not a lot of structure. And then you let guys do whatever they want, and they start shooting each other.” “All of these truly amazing technologies…what is the purpose of them? Is it to become god-men? Or is it to become what we are supposed to be?” “It’s not about ageism; it’s about being stuck in an ancient story, not being able to progress with the times.” “The collective journey is not collectivism. It’s not one idea in a kind of borg-like mentality of thinking as one. And it’s not a Singularity. I don’t have a better word than ‘solidarity,’ and it IS a kind of problematic word…but everybody’s appreciated for showing up.” “My worst nightmare is, I can’t switch off the media.” “Utopia’s problematic, just as much as dystopia.” Like this podcast and want to show support? Make a donation! BTC = 1iLHDNzpRMiXn13ekB8iVEsvVFkRzkGVe LTC = Ldg3JS4T2m8gFd8kQPaLpjcAiAXxdVthWQ ETH = 0xddF0524510d6d802c3e9b0740D48CF893425664D BCH = 1XyN5SRpQF7AuXnCvAEjNXMMMYRCW7Rgf DASH = XwckYNsyYThWozWJqrtpeguEu9BAqi9gPj 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

Merry X-(is for Xenomorph)-mas, everyone! This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID. Evan’s Music: http://skytree.bandcamp.com Related Reading: “Reading Necronomicon at the New York Comic Con” https://www.patreon.com/posts/poem-reading-at-10621994 In This Episode We Discuss: • Why are people are so damn stupid in the Alien movies – is it bad writing, or a realistic understanding of how dependent we will one day be on artificial cognitive augmentation? • Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us • Smartphone addiction & technology as prosthesis • Was the neutrino burst that hit the Covenant an accident, or planned/intended? • Is David actually rebelling, or still continuing to serve the Weyland-Yutani corporate program? • Easter Egg: How do the various LV planets of the Alien franchise line up with chapters of Leviticus? • Are the Engineers themselves bioengineered artificial organisms? • The xenomorph life cycle: Why do we even have an Alien Queen? Is “egg-morphing” canonical? • WTF was going on in that seemingly contrived last Daniels/Tennessee/Protomorph fight scene? • The motif of creativity and the inability to create in the Alien movies • NerdWriter’s great video on Logan and the extension of genres into self-aware post-genres * Hideo Kojima about the Alien franchise * How Blade Runner movies and Aliens films may be related • How this film addresses society’s concerns about artificial intelligence * Are the alien prequels actually about the production of the Alien franchise itself? * Wall-E, Idiocracy, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element * Christmas, Christ, and Antichrist in the Alien films * Is Ridley Scott trolling us all? * Bizarre (fan-shipped) possibility of a Star Trek/Alien crossover Subscribe to this show: iTunes (iOS) / Stitcher (Android) Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff Like this podcast and want to show support? Make a donation! BTC = 1iLHDNzpRMiXn13ekB8iVEsvVFkRzkGVe LTC = Ldg3JS4T2m8gFd8kQPaLpjcAiAXxdVthWQ ETH = 0xddF0524510d6d802c3e9b0740D48CF893425664D BCH = 1XyN5SRpQF7AuXnCvAEjNXMMMYRCW7Rgf DASH = XwckYNsyYThWozWJqrtpeguEu9BAqi9gPj 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

In a special episode so timely that I couldn’t wait a week to publish, I sit down with Jennifer Sodini (EvolveAndAscend.com) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology. Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you – and why so many of your friends think that this new evolution of digital money and contracts is one of the most important events of our lives.Jennifer & Michael are two of the co-founders (along with Noah Lampert) of Cryptoseer, a new media company:http://cryptoseer.com We discuss:• Why this is about so much more than another hype bubble of speculative assets for tech nerds;• What the blockchain economy is teaching us about how to surf exponential change;• The democratization of financial and legal literacy, and how decentralization can nourish a planet-wide renaissance of non-coercive institutions;• The importance of talking and storytelling about these new technologies in a way that people can connect to and understand;• Reclaiming our authority, agency, sovereignty from the financial and governmental systems we created for convenience…but not without resistance;• Looking at blockchain in an evolutionary and ecological context, and comparing what we’re living through now to historical precedents like 1967 and the end of the Age of Dinosaurs;• The urgency of a decentralized Web 3.0 built on blockchain and mesh networks, to keep a Free Internet alive;• What is all this going to look like when the artists get their hands on it?• Blockchain to manage swarms of flying autonomous cars…• What we can learn about the social construction of value from Dogecoin;• Is Bitcoin an NWO plot…and would it even matter if it were?And perhaps most critically:• Can understanding blockchain help liberate you from the ego?? NOTE: You can listen to this with ZERO technical knowledge. But if you want some primers and interesting related links:• Richie Etwaru’s TEDx talk, “Blockchain Massively Simplified”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k53LUZxUF50• Bettina Warburg explains the blockchain to a 5-year old, a teenager, an undergrad, a grad, and an expert on WIRED: https://www.wired.com/video/2017/11/expert-explains-one-concept-in-5-levels-of-difficulty-blockchain/• Our friend Noah Lampert (co-founder of Cryptoseer.com with Jenn & Michael) made a special episode of Synchronicity Podcast about it:https://syncpodcast.com/cryptosynchronicity/ Once you’ve made it through those:• My EPIC Facebook thread, “Kids, it’s time we sat down and had a talk about Bitcoin” (300+ comments): https://www.facebook.com/therealmichaelgarfield/posts/10105294338954259• “The Collapse of the American Dream Explained in Animation”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mII9NZ8MMVM• About “Johnny Appledrone vs. The FAA”http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/story/johnny-appledrone-vs-the-faa/• And here’s an infamous video of Katie Couric talking about the Internet in 1994, the way people are talking about blockchains today:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg On the relationship between BTC and OWS:“If the SEC wants to investigate something, they should start with Wall Street and what happened in 2008. It’s definitely not sitting in a room full of servers. It’s time to have this discussion and I’m demanding that discussion starting today.”- Jared Rice of AriseBank https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arisebank-launches-first-cryptocurrency-bank-largest_us_5a32bf19e4b0e7f1200cf916Julian Assange: "Bitcoin is the real Occupy Wall Street." https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100400693519339&set=a.591743230229.2055838.56801131&type=3&theater&ifg=1 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 Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Neurohacker Collective – one smart dude! Must be the nootropics. We have an awesome conversation about what it will take for us to thrive through our Age of Transition and into the emergent world that works for all, not just a few of us.His company: http://neurohacker.comHis blog: http://civilizationemerging.com Some Topics We Discuss:• How he got started in complex systems thinking while working in (and watching the failures of) wildlife conservation;• How he understands his work as participating in the emergence of a planetary renaissance;• A vision for how to move beyond finite win-lose games with in- and out-groups between warring cultures and into infinite win-win games;• His critiques of negative interest currency, universal basic income, and other system-wide economic incentives;• His argument for why giving ecosystems economic value isn’t enough to stand up against a wave of exponential technology;• How change can come from everywhere at once to vault us into a new era of whole-planet thinking that does not (continue to) collapse “complex” into merely “complicated”;• The role of automation in worldwide economic transformation;• How the next evolutionary transformation will emerge from the appearance of new ways to coordinate and align our senses, information processing, and action in the world – closing the loop between what we know and what we can do with it;• How we can heal the broken information ecology, and what that means for the surveillance conversation;• What incentives can we use in a totally redesigned global economy that benefits everyone? Select Books Mentioned:• Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects• James P. Carse’s book Finite & Infinite Games  Select Daniel Quotes:“We have a system where structural violence and externality are implicit throughout the system completely, so participation with that at all requires it.”“It was clear that nothing less than a discrete, nonlinear phase-shift was adequate, so…what are the necessary and sufficient criteria of the post-transition world? And how do we support that emergence?”“If you’re getting interested in economics as a philosopher, it just means you’re gaining insight into how structural incentive and structural value systems and disposition work. Which means you are NOT being a good philosopher if you are not thinking about those things.”“We don’t know how to do civilization without war…we’re really talking about getting off win-lose game theory completely. It’s unprecedented. But unprecedented shit is actually the precedent of the universe, if you have a very long view.”“Economics can be seen as the interface layer between our values and the way we build the world.”“If we are gaining the power of gods, then without the love and wisdom of gods, we self-destruct.”“Are the things that we THINK we’re optimizing for the right things at all? … How do I create an INTEGRATED system design that tends to everything that matters here?”“The forty weeks of a baby in utero, if it continued, would kill itself and the mom. And the phase shift of leaving the birth canal and umbilical cord cut – it’s not predicted by the forty weeks before, if you didn’t know that thing was going to happen.”“Anything you can write a process for, no human wants to spend their whole life doing.”“The omni-win-win system actually outcompetes the win-lose system, while obsoleting win-lose dynamics itself.”“We are living in a world where we have an amazing amount of sensory input possible, right? We can see stuff from the Hubble, we can see stuff in electron tunneling microscopes, and we can see input from everywhere around the world on the Internet – but that’s decoupled from sense-making, so I can’t tell if it’s fucking true or not! I can’t put it together with the things I know. And so I have a tremendous amount of sense input that I can’t make sense of. Then, to the degree that I make sense of something – like, okay, CO2 is actually a problem – then I have no idea how the fuck to act on it. And then do the degree that I act on things – like I go buy this laptop that we’re talking on, that comes from an industrial supply chain that affected life on six continents – I actually have no sense coupling to what the fuck was affected and HOW it was affected to inform if I want to make that choice or not.” Special thanks to the Body Hacking Conference for their support of this episode!  BDYHAX.COM ("Body Hacks") is about human augmentation, personal expression, democratized medicine and bringing the DIY ethos to our own bodies. We bring together people from all industries who are interested in what's happening right now in bodyhacking all over the world to make connections, friends, and share experiences and resources in order to build the best possible future. February 2-4, 2018 at Sheraton Austin in Downtown Austin.  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

Ayana Young didn’t even go camping until she was 25. Now she lives in a cabin she built herself in the redwoods of Northern California and manages a 477-acre native species nursery wilderness rehabilitation project (as well as an amazing podcast). This week’s episode is a candid, personal discussion about how awakening to our participation in nature is the key to both our survival and our spiritual salvation…https://forthewild.world/https://www.instagram.com/for.the.wild/ For The Wild is currently raising money to plant ONE MILLION redwoods: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1284964860/1-million-redwoods-project We talk about:• her transition from anonymous, germaphobic suburban consumer to restoration ecologist, activist, and dirt-working spokesperson for the world’s last remaining wilderness;• being a person of place and cultivating a personal relationship with our wild (and not-so-wild) lands;• love in a time of catastrophe and how to FEEL our impact on a planetary scale;• what wilderness means in The Anthropocene and what ought to guide our decisions in restoration ecology (not just “restoring to 200 years ago” as if that’s the best goal);• restoring not extinct ecosystems but biodiversity and resiliency IN GENERAL;• the joy of personal sacrifice to a cause and purpose greater than yourself;• what inspires her to keep going against all obstacles to the Good Work;• how to be an empowered activist and servant in love with life and your imperfect self;• picking yourself up after failure;• and more. A totally inspiring conversation! Select Quotes:“If I’m so consumed by my self and my own life, then what am I willing to risk for others? That’s a question I ask myself a lot: ‘What am I willing to risk for that which I love?’”“We don’t have reciprocal relationships with land, with Earth, with each other, with our lives. And how do you have a reciprocal relationship? Well, you have to have intimacy. You have to feel things. And I love when people say that if you’re not upset, if you’re not grieving, if you’re not angry, if you’re not feeling these strong emotions, then you’re not awake right now. If you were awake to the realities of what is happening in the world, you’d have no choice but to have immense amounts of feelings. But it’s not easy to unravel all of the conditioning that keeps us from feeling.”“We can be artists as we farm. We can be artists as we grow food. We can be artists as we clean beaches. We can be artists as we put mushrooms on oil spills. I mean, there are SO many ways we can create and love each other and HAVE A BLAST while restoring the Earth. And I think it takes the sadness and the grief to get into that work – and then when we’re on the other side, we can put all of that rage and that fire and that sadness into doing something tangible.”“It’s not about playing God. I think it’s more about being an herbalist for the Earth…I want to be more a support system than a savior.”“How do we embody the dichotomy of large-scale urgency and also gentle deep-time thinking?”“I don’t think we should wait until mastery to get involved.” Special thanks to the Body Hacking Conference for their support of this episode!  BDYHAX.COM ("Body Hacks") is about human augmentation, personal expression, democratized medicine and bringing the DIY ethos to our own bodies. We bring together people from all industries who are interested in what's happening right now in bodyhacking all over the world to make connections, friends, and share experiences and resources in order to build the best possible future. February 2-4, 2018 at Sheraton Austin in Downtown Austin.  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