Humans On The Loop

Review Future Fossils on iTunes Review Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook GroupThis week’s guest is Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry whom I met at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Innovation Lab in February. Meow is a modern trickster-wizard par excellence, entirely too smart for his own good, and he loves to argue – this is one of the most wide-ranging talks on Future Fossils yet! Enjoy part 1 of a special double feature that continues next week… • Biofoundry:http://foundry.bio/ • Press about Meow: https://www.inverse.com/article/5887-australian-biohacker-meow-ludo-meow-meow-on-diy-biology  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/man-named-meow-ludo-disco-gamma-meow-meow-has-transit-pass-implanted-into-hand_us_5953b3eae4b0da2c732015e6 • We Talk: - Cryptocurrency- Biohacking- Getting Married on the BlockchainPolyamory & Relationship Anarchy- Intellectual Property- An Ecological View of Relationships- Plural Singularities- The Genetic Origins of Hominids (HARs)- Would God be considered an Organism?- Crystals Are COOL- Mass Extinctions- Asteroid Mining- An Ethical Debate on Eugenics & Nukes- Meltdowns, Solar Flares, & The Insecurity of The Electrical Grid Citations: • Common As Air - Lewis Hyde• More Than Two - Franklin Veaux & Eve Reichert• I Heart Huckabees (film)• The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster - Richard Brautigan• “Transcending Possessiveness in Love & Music” by Michael Garfield• Guns, Germs & Steel - Jared Diamond• Interstellar (film)• WALL-E (film) “Capitalism lends itself to models that are in crisis continuously…” 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 Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on Patreon This week we talk about what the oldest fossils in the world have to teach us about life’s origins and destiny with Tara Djokic of the University of New South Wales. Tara’s a geologist and astrobiologist whose team and work just appeared on the cover of Scientific American for changing our ideas about the beginning of our story…  http://www.pangea.unsw.edu.au/people/students/tara-djokic https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15263 http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/09/527575457/australian-fossils-hint-at-where-to-search-for-life-on-mars QUOTES: “Thinking for humanity, moving forward and prospering as a global community – a lot of people in power aren’t thinking that way.” “We can only base what we know about life, and about intelligent life, on what we know here on Earth, because we’ve got no other sample. And until that happens, we can only make hypotheses.” “I can only speak for me. And when I think, okay, well, we all just came from goo, and maybe one day the universe won’t be here anymore, I find that pretty humbling. And that’s pretty much the reason I got into this field. Relationships come and go, friendships come and go, life changes and evolves…and the society we live in is so distracting, and we get caught up in trivial things…when you put that all in perspective and think, we all just came from goo, it just makes you a little bit HUMBLER. Because I do get caught up in the same stuff that everybody else does. We’re humans; we’re governed by our emotions and our biology…if I can look outside of that biological box as a human being and put things in perspective, then I’m going to. And that’s what I think astrobiology does, and that’s what I think studying the origins of life does.” “We’re really just a macro-sized version of a microbial community on the planet.” “We’re a community. But unfortunately, for some reason, humans all seem to think we’re individual and the pocket over here can do whatever they want and it won’t affect the pocket over there.” “The one saving grace we have for humanity is hope. Hope is what drives anybody to do anything, right? The hope to achieve something. The hope that they’re going to succeed.” “The key difference between science and religion is that science gives you the information and then you can make your own decision, whereas a lot of the time it’s, ‘This is the information; take it or leave it.’ For me the beauty of science and the beauty of education is that you’re able to make critical decisions FOR YOURSELF.” TOPICS: - What are the oldest fossils on the planet? - What was the environment in which life emerged on Earth? - Explaining scientific research to strangers. - The relationship between scholarship and leisure. - How she become an astrobiologist - Fermi’s Paradox & The Great Silence (or, “If life is so likely, why don’t we hear anybody?”) - Have we not encountered intelligent extraterrestrials because they tend to wipe themselves out, or because they’ve learned to encrypt all of their communication to look like radio noise? - The two kinds of scientists: concepts first, then hypothesis; or data first, then hypothesis. - The mystical experience of doing paleontological fieldwork in the Badlands. - How does this research help us understand where to look for life elsewhere in the solar system? - What the study of ancient life reveals about overarching patterns in every part of the cosmos. - The Great Oxygenation Event 2.4 billion years ago and what we can learn from this ancient catastrophe. - The importance of good science writing in an age of “alternative facts.” - The difficulties faced by science in an age when so much of discovery is made with the assistance of sophisticated machines. MENTIONS: - Edgar Mitchell - Bruce Damer & Dave Deamer - Paolo Soleri - The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Suess - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Ready Player One by Ernest Kline - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick 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 episode is brought to you by Visionary Magnets, the refrigerator poetry magnets that turn your boring old kitchen appliances into the substrate for woke invocations, tantric pillow talk, and other occult goofery. Support their Kickstarter and "enlighten your fridge" today! Or tomorrow.  Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week is part one of a special double-length episode with Jon Lebkowsky, founder of EFF-Austin – one of the unsung heroes of Internet culture, whose tale stretches through the earliest web communities and reads like a list of landmark moments in the history of digital rights and culture.  http://weblogsky.com/ https://twitter.com/jonl https://www.facebook.com/polycot/ https://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/495/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html We talk about the early days of hacking in the Wild West of the 1990s, how the World Wide Web has changed since then, and the promises and perils of the Internet in the 21st Century. It’s a winding tale of pseudonymous keyboard-slingers and federal raids, roleplaying game empires and sci-fi visionaries, centered on the unsuspecting hippie cowboy outpost of Austin, Texas, Once Upon A Time. Enjoy this special conversation on the history of the Internet we know today, and a snapshot of the hopes and fears of life online in the dawn of our digital era… TOPICS: - The threat of Internet-empowered fascism and “participation mystique” (or maybe worse, a corporate plutocracy) eroding rational civil discourse and the dignity of the individual - The problems with “Net Neutrality” and how it makes more sense to focus on “The Freedom to Connect” - Connectivity vs. Interdependence (OR) Networks vs. Buddhism - Does the Noosphere already exist, and we’re just excavating it? - The History of Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin and how it was connected to the secret service’s raid of legendary role-playing game designer Steve Jackson (GURPS) - The hilarious, troubled Dawn Age of e-commerce before secure web browsing - Jon’s work with a Gurdjieff group and his encounters with esoterica as an editor of the Consciousness subdomain for the last issue of the Whole Earth Review - Cybergrace, TechGnosis, and Millennial concerns about the mind/body split in the first Internet and our need to humanize technology with whole-body interfaces and MOVEMENT - Embodied Virtual Reality & Other Full-Sensory Immersive Media - Cory Doctorow’s new novel Walkaway as a banner book for the maker movement and a new form of cyber-social-liberation. - The movement of political agency back into city-states in a digital era - “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” - Shaping the future of wireless infrastructure in the early 00s of Austin - Getting our values right before we imprint the wrong ones into superhuman AI - Putting together diverse conversation groups to solve “wicked problems” - New forms of participatory open-source politics suited for an internet age SOME OF THE PEOPLE & STUFF WE MENTIONED: Whole Earth Provisions, Whole Earth Review, The WELL, Whole Foods, William Gibson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hakim Bey, William Irwin Thompson, Alien Covenant, Terminator, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Mike Godwin, Bruce Sterling, Clay Shirkey, WIRED Magazine, Fringeware, RoboFest, Heather Barfield, Neal Stephenson, Terence McKenna, Church of the Subgenius, Mondo 2000, Erik Davis, GI Gurdjieff, The National Science Fiction Convention, Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear, Jon Shirley, Jennifer Cobb, Robert Scoville, Greg Egan, Ernest Cline, Octopus Project, The Tingler, Honey I Shrunk The Kids (Ride), Charles Stross, Glass House, Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow, Alan Moore, Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University, Jake Dunagan, Plutopia Productions, The Digital Convergence Initiative, Chris Boyd, South By Southwest, Boing Boing, Make Magazine, Dave Demaris, Maggie Duval, Bon Davis, DJ Spooky, Forest Mars, OS Con, RU Sirius, Shin Gojira, Open-Source Party, JON LEBKOWSKY QUOTES: “The Noosphere can certainly have pathologies…” “The Internet was originally a peer-to-peer system, and so you had a network of networks, and they were all cooperating and carrying each other’s traffic, and so forth. And that was a fairly powerful idea, but the Internet is not that anymore. The Internet has, because of the way it’s evolved, because it’s become so powerful and so important and so critical, there are systems that are more dominant – backbone systems – and those are operated by large companies that understand how to operate big networks. That’s really a different system than the system that was originally built.” “SO FAR we’ve managed to keep the Internet fairly open…the absolute idea of net neutrality might not be completely practical.” “Science fiction is a literature of ideas, but a lot of those ideas do not manifest in exactly the way that they did in the book.” “I don’t have a real high level of confidence that anybody understands exactly what the fuck is going on.” “You couldn’t get a consumer account to get access to the Internet at that time. And in fact I think the first companies to do that were here in Austin.” “At the time, we were the only game in town for internet stuff…” “One thing I learned was, if you’re at the very cutting edge, it’s hard to make money.” “There are a lot of people who aren’t in touch with themselves internally. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to do that.” “I know that that’s sort of the goal in VR development: to give you a fully immersive experience where you’re really in a completely other reality, like in the Holodeck. But, you know. I’m still dealing with THIS reality. I don’t want another one.” “In an online community, people are always itching for ways to get into real human proximity with one another. They’re always looking for ways to meet.” “That’s my idea of what works now: is to have events that are experiences, you know, versus people just like, going to movies, or watching television, or going to a concert and watching a band play.” “I keep thinking that we won’t be able to solve our problems with bureaucracy or the kind of governance structures that we’ve been living with, but I look around me and see people who are doing just fine, and doing great work, and living their lives…and I’m sort of feeling hopeful and a little bit confident that those people will step up and do what they need to do to make things work, even if our so-called elected officials aren’t doing it.” 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

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

“I would love to see a world where 100% of the people on this planet, and all the other beings, believe their life is WAY worth living. Not just kinda okay, even, but WAY worth living.” This week’s guest is Mitch Altman, a hacker and electronics scientist whose life is the stuff of legend (here's his Wikipedia entry).Founder of Cornfield Electronics (“We Make Useful Electronics for a Better World”), co-founder of Noisebridge (epic hackerspace in San Francisco), inventor of TV-B-Gone.This episode’s title is pulled from Mitch’s talk by a similar name. In this Episode: Living in alignment with your dreams, working for yourself. Entrepreneurship as serving your own sense of the awesome and letting the resonant audience come to your own articulated personal meaning.The potential of full-cost accounting: how weaving every invisible cost (“ecosystem services,” mothering, etc.) into the economy could transform selfish behavior into good for all.Self-discovery and finding the place where your enjoyment and passion meets the needs of your society.“Helping me includes helping other people, which feels good. How can I NOT do this?”Getting through depression and loneliness to find creative fulfillment.Breaking out of habit to discover the life we CHOOSE with our sudden wealth of free time…The importance of boredom and leisure to the full development of the soul.The evolutionary fitness landscape and looking at our choices as moves across a geography of our adaptation to various environments.Making the hard decision to back out of something you’ve invested in and begin again as something new…Technological Unemployment, Universal Basic Income, and the rise of Hacker Spaces.The role of local currencies and minimum guaranteed income in the architecting a society of creativity and leisure.“All of this has to happen slow enough that things don’t collapse or become traumatic, but fast enough that we can survive as a species.”Open Source Digital Democracy and fractal structures in economy and politics – what comes after representative republics and printing-press-era legislature in the age of the Internet?Natural hierarchies (holarchies and do-ocracies) versus artificial hierarchies…and how to create a pocket of effective, fruitful anarchy within the right container.Chaos Computer Club and the future of meta human swarm intelligence (read also: social creatures living in community)“I try to not be pessimistic OR optimistic. I try to the best of my ability to see things AS THEY ARE.”The recent explosive proliferation of Chinese hackerspaces. Photo Credit: Dennis van Zuijlekom 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

New essays, music, talks, and writing coming soon for my Patreon supporters! Subscribe here and get everything I do for free if you haven’t already…This week our guest is Becca Tarnas, whom I caught up with at the 2017 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland.Becca’s Websitehttps://beccatarnas.com/about/Archai Journal: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmologyhttp://www.archai.org/“Everything breathes together.” - PlotinusWe discussed:The imminent shift into an archetypal paradigm, in which we transcend naïve subject-object dualism and experience meaning as not merely something manufactured by the brain…Uranus-Pluto Alignments in the 1960s & the 2010sJupiter joining the revolution in 2016-2017 and magnifying thingsWhat will the world be like after all this revolutionary energy runs its course?Impending collective shadow work in our inherently psychedelic future circa Saturn-Pluto Conjunction, 2018-2021 (ish)How do we hold to our centers in a storm of history?How do you deal with knowing that most of your adult life is going to be spent navigating unprecedented social & personal transformation?“I think having the archetypal perspective helps me to ‘zoom out’ and see this as part of a larger narrative, and to feel myself participating in something that is SO much bigger than me. So that helps. I definitely feel fear, as any mortal person would, during this time. I also feel the wave of excitement of this very powerful revolutionary moment, recognizing that change really IS necessary in this time.”“…to just try and participate as fully as possible. Because it IS a remarkable time to be alive…”“I think being okay with the Mystery has to be a part of it. And, at the same time, it can’t be a part of it all the time. Sometimes we do have to just melt down and accept the utter chaos and fear of it all and then pick ourselves back up from that place and keep going forward.”#futureshock & #pastshockThe wonder of the holistic intelligence disclosed by archetypal cosmology.James Hillman is awesome and there are a lot of good scholars and academics working on archetypal astrology, these days…What is rigor in astrology? How does the community peer review?Science and Imagination.Books Mentioned:• Cosmos & Psyche by Richard Tarnas• Glass House by Charles Stross• Stages of Faith by James Fowler• Promethea by Alan MooreSubscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes:http://bit.ly/future-fossilsSubscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher:http://stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/futurefossils 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

(New essays, music, talks, and writing coming soon for my Patreon supporters! Subscribe here and get everything I do for free if you haven’t already…)This week we chat with Sara Huntley – Dancer, Graphic Novelist, Tattoo Artist, Clown, and Psychedelic Futurist. Buckle Up!Sara’s Website: http://sarahuntley.weebly.com/Sara on FB: https://www.facebook.com/huntley.saraA conversation on New Media & The Future of Storytelling, the Ethics of Digital Entities, and Treating Bots With Kindness. >>> Topics:What will the future BE like? Not just what will it LOOK like.With books, the story is revised with every printing, but oral traditions allow for the story to evolve with every telling. Virtual reality is opera – in that it contains all forms that came before it – but it’s opera tied into attention-tracking systems that can re-weave worlds and narratives in real-time as you interact with it.We’re going to be able to get inside our data, to LARP the user-generated, annotated maps of the terrains that we inhabit, and with AR turn our modern notions of a shared experience completely inside out. The ethics of keeping digital entities as pets. Michael:“While you can make the ethical argument that there is no harm to the bot, you might have to come up with an excellent rebuttal to the argument that it does still harm the human user of this game…”Sara’s conversation with “Phil,” the robotic version of author Philip K. Dick, designed by Hanson Robotics, at South By Southwest 2016.Grounding in the offline world while learning through interactive high technology how we are all connected, and then bringing back that awe to analog existence and the nature that preceded us.The manufacture of nostalgia as another artificial environment in an age of human-directed ecology…the replacement of our parents’ childhood with videogame franchises and, “What happens in a field at dusk?”The Lithosphere, Biosphere, and Noosphere…The racist Tay bot and how we need to be more mindful about how we socialize our digital offspring. What happens when we can’t tell the difference anymore between the minds we make online and those we make with our own bodies? Will we create and destroy sentient entities as casually as we create and destroy ordinary data files?  >>> Sara Quotes:“There are no new ideas, but there are, there are new perspectives through these handed-down ideas. So it’s like, even though we take an idea that had been an oral tradition, then we bring it to the press, then we bring it to the screen, whether it’s a streamed series or something like that, and then it becomes a 3D thing – it’s always going to be the artisan’s ability to empathically tell what lands and what doesn’t. That’s what makes a great performance.”“As cool as AI art will be, I think we’ll always have a premium on what’s going to land with our imagination.”“I’ve come to think of it like, ‘What’s the thing I ultimately do? I rearrange matter. And how do I do it? I do it harmonically…as an artist.’”“I’ve been thinking about what the ramifications are of creating machines in the shape of gendered beings…and what that means in terms of coming to grip with the hierarchical strata that’s already a part of society. Because machines are always going to be mirrors of our desire of them…and granted, we want to convince ourselves, sometimes, as biological or spiritual beings that somehow parts of our experience transcend being programmed on a genetic level…but they’re all very grounded in human-ness.”“I think it’s really important right now, how we train the mind of the other, this emerging reflection. Like that one Microsoft young-lady bot – the Tay bot, that poor thing – how it got terribly socialized. Within 24 hours I felt bad for it. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is a really bad report card on our ability to socialize a thing in a big pool.’ And it shows you exactly why kids don’t show their children terrible media when their minds are forming…”“Empowerment comes down to your awareness of the upgrade that you want.”“Is it gonna be just a battle of smart goos?”“I feel like no matter how advanced our toys become, the degree by which we will be able to have a sustainable system and be able to progress is going to be directly related to how harmonic the technologies we invest in are. Because you can have a bunch of ideas, but it really comes down to having a culture that has the wisdom to know which ideas are important to leave by the wayside.” >>> Media Mentions:• Blade Runner • The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect • “The Return of the Black Madonna” by Matthew Fox • Charles Stross - Accelerando • William Irwin Thompson – The American Replacement of Nature • Nicholas Caar - The Glass Cage: Automation and Us • Train to Busan • I Heart Huckabees • Prometheus • Transcendence • The Matrix Revolutions • 2001: A Space Odyssey • Samurai Jack • The Fifth Element • John Dies at The End • Event Horizon >>> Tags:Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Neuromarketing, Cognitive Liberty, World-Building, Media Theory, Augmented Reality, Robotics, Animism, Philip K. Dick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Heart Huckabees, Fantasia, CRISPR, Gene Drives, Robin Hanson, Black GooSubscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes:http://bit.ly/future-fossilsSubscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher:http://stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/futurefossils 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

(New essays , music , coloring book pages, and recorded talks coming soon for my supporters! Sign up on Patreon if you haven't already...)“You cannot change the present system. This thing is dying, it’s structurally unsustainable. And so to try to somehow fix the present system is just a waste of time. Don’t waste your time on the present system. We have to start working on building the new world.” – John PetersenThis week we welcome futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute into the digital archives, for a challenging and visionary chat about how wrong we’re guaranteed to be about the future – and what we CAN expect about the new paradigm (which is coming sooner than you might suspect)…John Petersen started as an engineer before advising the military and White House, and has spent decades as a high-level consultant for emergent technologies and social trends. What he’s learned is that the future emerges at the edges of the known – that it will be, to paraphrase JBS Haldane, “not stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we CAN imagine.”If you’ve been waiting for a “deep end” episode, this is it. Prepare to have your paradigm interrogated and your limits of acceptable considerations challenged.John’s Links:• The Arlington Institute• Berkeley Springs Transition Talks(Climate Change Presentation is at the bottom)• FuturEdition Newsletter(A superb digest email list, one of my main sources for news stories to share and discuss in the Future Fossils Facebook Group)Topics Discussed:• Why experts are so frequently wrong about the future• Systemic social issues and institutional pressures that prevent us from asking the right questions about how to prepare for the unknown• Climate change predictions of a very different nature• The mainstreaming of the merger of humans and technology through brain-machine interfaces• The emergent tension between mysticism and technocracy• The possibility that information is carried by coronal mass ejections and influences the expression of our DNA• The potential contours of our next scientific paradigm• The sculpting and directing of global attention by media as a form of magical reality-manipulation• Love as a defense against malevolent spirits. (No kidding.)• The silver lining of our insane situation in the USA right now• The difference between inner-, outer-, and sustenance-driven psychologies, and their influence on global politics• What it is going to take for us to re-orient toward building a better world instead of clinging to the systems that no longer work for us• And how, instead of “Ender’s Game,” where you’re recruiting people into a massive game that turns out to be war, you could have “Beginner’s Game,” where people know they’re contributing their personal skills and purpose toward building a better world…Books Referenced:• Yuval Harari – Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow• Ray Kurzweil – The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology• David Icke – Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More• William Strauss & Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning: An American ProphecyOthers Mentioned:• Joe Dispenza• Bob MonroeQuotes from John Petersen:“If you do a vector into the horizon that’s a technology-only vector, then you’re missing the bigger parts of this. If you do artificial general intelligence into an extrapolation of the present world, then OF COURSE you’re going to have big problems. They’re going to try to weaponize it. They’re gonna get out of control. But. BUT. If there’s a new consciousness, then it all starts to change.”“Kurzweil himself said there’s a million times more knowledge that shows up in this century than in the last century. Well, GOD, how do you ride THAT kind of wave with conventional thinking?”“What you’re watching in politics, and the economy, and the financial systems, and in energy, and technology, and ALL of these things, is this basic, fundamental fragmentation that you can track back to this divergence [between those who embrace change and those who reject it], the emergence of a new kind of a mind-shift that is going to allow the exposure and discovery of extraordinary new kinds of capabilities.”“You can’t get from here to there without changing who you are and how you see the world.”Bookmark my Amazon Affiliate Portal and every time you shop on Amazon I’ll make a small percentage of your purchase.Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes:http://bit.ly/future-fossilsSubscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher:http://stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/futurefossils 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 I sit down with Rak Razam and Niles Heckman – psychonauts, journalists, provocateurs, and the film-makers responsible for Shamans of the Global Village.http://www.shamansoftheglobalvillage.com/In a conversation too full of awesome neologisms, delightful turns of phrase, one-liners, and weird genius for me to convey it all, we talk about the role of creative media in helping usher in new modes of human consciousness – and what we’re learning those new modes might be. We finally get into WHAT those unborn archeologists listening to Future Fossils might be like…and our conjecture’s going to surprise you.Books we Reference: (Links are through my Amazon Affiliate account – if you buy any of these books, I get a small percentage of the sale at no cost to you. Or you can bookmark this link to the Amazon Homepage and they'll send me a tiny cut of anything you purchase.) Octavio Rettig – The Toad of DawnGabor Maté – In the Realm of Hungry GhostsSteve Kotler & Jamie Wheal – Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and WorkRichard Doyle – Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, & The Evolution of the NoosphereAlva Noe – Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From The Biology of ConsciousnessEckhart Tolle – The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual EnlightenmentMichael Murphy – The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human NatureRudolf Steiner – How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of InitiationRamez Naam – NexusTerence McKenna & Dennis McKenna – The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, & The I Ching Among the topics we fly by:• 5-Meo DMT and psychedelic neurochemistry;• Nondual philosophy and the methodologies by which the dissolution of the self-other boundary can be achieved;• The correlation between flow states and gamma brainwaves;• “God’s Factory Reset” and the relationship between 5-Meo DMT and endocrinological healing;• The bizarre mystery that snails apparently operate on gamma brainwave states (“SNAILS MAKE GAMMA”);• New forms of social media (and new ways of engaging social media) that emphasize community, fellowship, equity, listening, and other real human values;• The possibility that it is actually the cardiac and enteric nervous systems experiencing and reporting from deep psychedelic states, while the frontal lobe is down-regulated;• The curious phenomenon of spontaneous gesturing (automatic “mudras”) during tryptamine experiences, and what might be the cause and purpose of them;• Intelligence in nature, distributed through countless species and systems but potentially orchestrated at an incomprehensible level of unity;• The importance of direct experience in understanding the strange realms divulged by psychedelics, and beginning to investigate them scientifically;• The coming wave of “technodelics” that can link human minds together into new meta-organisms and launch us into novel states of consciousness and modes of interacting with reality;• Experimental designs for exploring the content and revelations of threshold tryptamine doses in “group mind” protocols;• …We actually talk A LOT about snails. • Gary Weber - http://happiness-beyond-thought.blogspot.com Quotes:“I’m on the outer edge, the lip, the cauldron of Deep Source itself. And there’s an event horizon within which, just before I can lose full egoic consciousness and the drop has become the ocean, that drop can see the entire ocean like a tsunami wave cresting on the horizon. And on that lip, on that event horizon, EVERYTHING is there. I get this incredibly tangible, intuitive sense of the ancestors – and I don’t mean just my chronological, biological ancestors, I mean all those who have gone before in the species and are still perhaps alive as discarnate intelligences on the akashic frequency level on this bandwidth just before the edge of Deep Source, or perhaps intelligences that live within the lights and within the outer edge of Deep Source.” - Rak Razam“Within the last ten, fifteen years, we’ve learned an incredible amount about the brain and about psychedelics and about the physical correlates of human consciousness. And we’ve found – without any shadow of any kind of a doubt – with the most rigorous neurological methods available to us – that these spaces that shamans and zen masters and other enlightened or awakened people have been getting into for thousands of years – we’ve found that these things are real.” - Michael Garfield“Most social media is not social media, it’s anti-social media.” - Niles Heckman“It’s not that the ego needs to be killed - it needs to be brought back into right relationship. And psychedelics have proven throughout the 20th Century - and no entheogens and shamanic sacraments again in the 21st - when we reduce the default mode network and lower the egoic self, we rejoin a larger sense of being, and a planetary being, and a divine being, and it seems to be the antidote to history.” - Rak Razam“Is it safe for us to say, then, that ‘Dream Juice Is The Antidote To History?” - Michael Garfield“I’ve seen enough around the corner to know what I need to do next. And it’s a deep transformation of my habits, my rituals, my relationship with life, with myself, my family, my loved ones, my community…and I think it’s the deepening of the spiritual path. And it makes it very tangible, whether I like it or not. I can hide from it, it doesn’t go away. The awareness of awareness of that thing is with me every day. That’s what it [5 MeO-DMT] has done for me.” - Rak Razam 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

Help crowd-sponsor Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon and score subscriber-only perks and exclusive extra content!This week we chat with science journalist Jessa Gamble, author of The Siesta and The Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time, about time in the body, circadian rhythms, lunar cycles, and the science of sleep.– Topics We Discuss:• Cultural dimensions of human communities at different latitudes;• Organic human rhythms versus high-frequency trading algorithm digital rhythms;• The evolutionary history of circadian rhythms and sleep;• What are we going to do when we settle on other planets with days of different lengths? (Like Mars, with a 24 hour and 25 minute day…)• NASA scientists trying (and failing) to live on Earth on Martian time;• The natural history of biphasic human sleep and the (VERY RECENT) cultural construction of the “8 hour night”;• How the lengths of our circadian cycles actually differ from person to person;• The ethical complexities and possible social consequences of research into human enhancement;• How Douglas Rushkoff learned to hack his monthly schedule to align with lunar cycles and increase his productivity by 40% by doing LESS work;• The differences between how humans and dolphins sleep;• How and WHY we might want to defeat sleep once and for all…• …and WHAT ABOUT DREAMING?? – Media We Reference: (Links are for my Amazon affiliate account - buy ANYTHING on Amazon through these links and a % of the sale supports this podcast, at no cost to you.)• The Siesta and The Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time by Jessa Gamble• Northern Exposure (episode with Joel Fleischmann going manic due to 24 hour sunlight)• 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles & Ben Templesmith• Insomnia (Stellan Skarsgård & Robin Williams)• Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff• An American Tail• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari• One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber – Links:The Last Word on Nothing: http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/about-us/jessa-gamble/ Here’s her TED talk:https://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep And here’s her archive of articles at The Atlantic:https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jessa-gamble/ On salt intake in Russian Cosmonauts and how we might be wrong about salt: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effects.html Giulio Tunoni at the University of Wisconsin and their Sleep Center’s work to minimize the amount of necessary sleep: http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/ On the correlation between lunar cycle phase and neurotransmitters: http://justadandak.com/present-shock-matching-the-rhythms-of-the-moon/ Vlad Vyazovskiy’s Oxford Sleep Lab: http://vvlab.org/index.php/80-research/24-vladvyazovskiylaboratory – Jessa Quotes:“The almost-definition of being sleepy is, you cannot really learn anymore.”“Sometimes, the awful consequences that are supposed to be punishment for acting like a god don’t actually happen.”“What we’ve decided to do [with sleep research] is look at the fact that we’re all sleep deprived, that it’s making us unhealthy, that it’s making us accident-prone, that it’s making us stupider – because sleep is the most effective cognitive enhancer that we know about. The fact that we’re sleep deprived is then met with a whole slew of people who say, ‘Well, so we need to sleep more. This is the solution.’ But there are other things that we could be doing, like seeing if we can cut down on our actual NEED for sleep, so we can do more of the things we’d like to do more of.”“What I would encourage people to do, if they’re zooming out on the problem or question of sleep, is to think about quality of life, what makes life great, and maybe take a page from the actuarial tables – which adjust for things like disability, years spent with crippling diseases and so on. And surely being unconscious has to be the most debilitating of all states. And if we’re spending a third of our lives in this state, could this be different? And should we put some effort into looking into this?”– Michael Quote:“Multicellularity was a technological singularity. Photosynthesis and Glycolysis was a technological singularity. Written language, and before that even, spoken language, was a technological singularity. So it’s good to keep that in perspective.” 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