Humans On The Loop

(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

This week we're joined by Daniel Rozenberg aka DADARA for a thoughtful discussion about Art in Virtual Realities, Information Overload, and Flow States. The creator of Exchangibition Bank, Like4Real, and the upcoming Solipmission installation at Burning Man, as well as countless concert posters and album covers, DADARA has been one of my favorite artists for a while - in no small part because of how his works combine deep, challenging investigations with light-hearted play.  Click here to learn more about the Indiegogo Campaign for Solipmission We discuss his work's overarching philosophical explorations and our age of proliferating realities… • The breakdown of narrative and consensus reality in the virtual spaces of new media; • Virtual Reality as the new frontier, now that we’ve mapped the surface of the planet – and the potential problems of considering a space a “frontier” (especially if it is already inhabited); • The twin archetypes of the “Black Box” and the “Tabula Rasa” as they appear in science fiction, religion, technology, and philosophy; • The relationship between Virtual Reality and psychedelics, and the consideration of VR as a psychedelic in its own right; • What replaces narrative structure in VR storytelling, and how it relates to neuromarketing, cybernetics, and mind control; • How humankind is struggling to maintain coherence in the barrage of contradictory realities online; • How the sciences are coping with increasing specialization and the explosive proliferation of data, complicating the establishment and communication of expertise; • The relationship between VR and floatation/isolation tanks, and why floatation tanks are more necessary now than they have ever been; • Flow states and nondual awareness as a possible solution to information overload – and how we may have come to the end of the ego’s evolutionary usefulness; • Does Virtual Reality as a medium for philosophical inquiry even stand a chance in this commercial environment? Books We Mention In This Talk: (Buy any of these books through these links, and Amazon will pay me a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.) • Ready Player One: A Novel by Ernst Cline • Neuromancer by William Gibson • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley • Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams • The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly • The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank by John C. Lilly • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal Other References: • Neuralink (brain-technology interface currently in development by Elon Musk) • Inside Out (Disney movie) • WNYC’s Note To Self Podcast • Nathan Jurgenson, Social Media Theorist for Snapchat • Maria Popova’s Brainpickings.org • Android Jones & Anson Phong’s Microdose VR DADARA Quotes: “Imagination is this endless unknown territory. We think we might have discovered it, but if we look, I don’t know…” “Nowadays we think a photo shows how something really is. That that’s reality. But it’s just a surface. And that’s something that I love. Maybe stories show reality in a more realistic way.” “People twenty, twenty-five years ago thought the world would be more defined [with the Internet] because we could find all the facts. But what’s interesting now is that it’s almost impossible to find any facts that we agree on, on the Internet.” “Inside the box [of the Solipmission installation], it may be more Burning Man than the outside.” “When people go to a city, they take photos of all the touristy [stuff] – it’s like the bucket list – but if you go to a place, and maybe if you haven’t seen any building but you’ve met this amazing person or gone through an amazing experience, doesn’t that give you a better understanding of that city than just seeing everything that’s there?” “I think floatation tanks now, in this period of time, are probably more important than ever…we’ll have implants [soon] and how can you be in a floating tank when the Internet is in your brain?” “Do you actually exist when you don’t Tweet? It almost feels like people, sometimes nowadays, if they haven’t posted that they’ve been somewhere, then they feel they haven’t been somewhere. But I think often, if you post that you’ve been somewhere, I don’t know if you’ve been there. Because you somehow were distracted. You only go to places when you DON’T post about them.” Coinage of a new term: “information potato.” “Art is about focusing our attention, and entertainment is about distracting our attention.” “Zapping [TV remotes] and scrolling [social media] at the same time is probably also a kind of flow. It’s just not MY flow.” Michael Quotes: “Much as we, in the United States anyway, marched westward under this insane banner of Manifest Destiny into what we were calling the ‘frontier,’ it wasn’t actually a frontier. There were people living there already! And what was unfamiliar to us, what was unknown to us, was already this mature ecosystem. And so there’s this relationship between virtual reality and psychedelics that people like Android Jones have been exploring, that makes me wonder if, in our exploration of what it is that we can manifest into these spaces, if we aren’t somehow causing an ecological catastrophe of the imagination. You know? That there’s stuff there already, and we’re paving over it.” “We assume that life is just given, but we’re actually involved in it, in its creation.” “We’re in the machine already, and so the machine entering us is not that big of a leap.” “Maybe a floatation tank isn’t enough. Maybe we need a Faraday cage, so you can go into this room of your house where it’s actually blocking electromagnetic radiation from entering the room and you can have your own thought for the first time in your whole life.” “Maybe the problem is that we’re so preoccupied with narrative, so preoccupied with history and prediction and who we think we are…that there is a ‘real real,’ but it’s not something that can be understood through the interpretive lens of the self.” More Links: Reality Sandwich Interviews DADARA about SolipmissionAbout DADARA’s “Art as Money” Project from 2012 Hanging out with DADARA and his son at Boom Festival 2016 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 Daniel Zen, former Google engineer, technology instructor at zen.digital, NYC Regional Coordinator for Burning Man, coordinator for the Angular.js NYC Meetup, and general high-tech wizard. https://zen.digital/https://twitter.com/danielzenhttps://medium.com/@danielzenhttps://github.com/danielzen Some of the topics we discuss:• The curses – and blessings! – of runaway technological surveillance (and sousveillance, and coveillance…).• How adolescence and sexuality have changed for children growing up with the Internet.• The future of festival culture and how it is a testbed for disaster relief technologies.• The danger of putting your medical devices online (the hackability of the Internet of Things)• What happens when we RECORD EVERYTHING• The isolating effects of Virtual Reality and how to create interactive spaces that allow us to share in the experience.• The collapse of VR, AR, and MR into just: “reality”• How TV, digital photography, and streaming video has changed the way we think about sharing our lives, perceptions, and emotions.• Adapting to an age of accelerating change by staying curious and loving learning• Concerns about technology’s role in widening the gap between the poor and the ultra rich.• The internet as a kind of “planetary cathedral” and re-envisioning our lives in light of a project that extends beyond the horizons of our individual lives. Daniel Quotes:“The festival world has changed, where now everybody has a cell phone and the ability to take pictures. And very much I believe, and the community I’m in believes, in consent when it comes to photography. Especially when people are in maybe a greater state of undress. Now we’re in a world where surveillance is much more prevalent…”“I’m a believe in bringing off-line technology to Burning Man. I don’t like the concept of being online at Burning Man, but I do like the concept of technology at Burning Man. I’d love to see an INTRANET at Burning Man…without any connection to the outside world. And such a system, if it were implemented well, could be of use in disaster situations.”“Unfortunately, we are a society that enjoys convenience – and we are all too ready to give up our privacy for that convenience.”“I’m not one of these guys that’s like, ‘Hey, the Singularity’s happening, Oh My God!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, OF COURSE it’s happening, duh, I mean can’t you see that?’ It’s so blatantly obvious to me I don’t feel the need to argue it. It’s just part of my reality. I accept it as much as the air I breathe.”“The haves and the have-nots is a really scary situation.  Michael Quotes:“If the sea level rises, we want the city to rise with it.”“The way that people play poker when you can see someone else’s hand is fundamentally different. There’s no body shame in a nudist colony. We’re going to have a much healthier relationship to living in public, in a few decades, than we do today.”“I don’t really know which version of the future is better: one in which we can keep our secrets, or one in which we can’t.”“We’ve been living in an audio-only virtual reality since the invention of the Walkman.”“I hold out hope that it’s the desire to keep everyone in the game that ends up that ends up winning this for the human species.”“Couldn’t we maybe upgrade it from Burning Man to Composting Man?” Mentions:• Kevin Kelly, author of The Inevitable• David Brin, author of The Transparent Society• Dadara (aka Daniel Rozenberg of Solipsmission)• Google Latitude• Burning Man• Gregory Bateson• William Gibson (“Cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the phone.”)• Lynn De Rothschild’s proposed Universal Income  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 switching it up this week to present my recent talk on psychedelic futurism at the first weekly meeting of the Australian Psychedelic Society (Fitzroy Beer Garden, Melbourne, Victoria).The Chinese have a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” The Irish have a toast: “May you be alive at the end of the world” I’m more Irish than Chinese, and I know this because even though we’re living through total chaos these days, that means unprecedented opportunity for wonder, creativity, discovery, and growth. - How to enjoy life in an age of mass extinction and the imminent transformation of the human species through genetic engineering- CRISPR and evolution “in real time,” within the lifespan of “individual” organisms- The self as a multitude of distinct neural “motifs” and how each of us is a village (or a bouquet)- Living through “a trans-technological, trans-nature” renaissance- The sharing economy, nonmonogamy, global citizenship, access vs. ownership as symptoms of a global transition to more freely exchanged modular selfhood- How each of us is basically the sexually mature larval form of our ancestors and how staying “childlike” has empowered us with special powers as a species- The future of work as a world in which there are as many different kinds of work as there are people- The spiritual and philosophical implications of “teledildonics”- What replaces “privacy” in an age of universal coveillance and mutual accountability- Why we shouldn’t judge the world and lives of our software based digital human descendants- Tim Leary’s “Just Say Know” as a better approach to technologies (since all technologies are psychoactive, and so tech and drugs should merit similar approaches) Memorable Quotes:“To the extent that we recognize that who we believe ourselves to be is a story our brain is creating instinctively and automatically, we can be more conscious about that, and we can inhabit different self-concepts as it suits us.”“What we’re learning about the origins of life is that it wasn’t like suddenly the cell occurred, with a membrane already on it, and credit card debt, and alimony payments. This happened in stages. And the first stage, what we believe the first life form to be…was a soup of self-reproducing molecules that didn’t really have clear self-other division. And even now, bacteria are very promiscuous and free about the exchange of their own genetic information with one another.”“When everyone has a 3D printer at home, you’re not going to go to a dealer. You’re going to print your own drugs.”“Each of us is the still point at the intersection of colliding infinities.”“It’s not so much that we’re coming to ‘The End of Jobs’…it’s that we’re coming to a world in which everybody’s jobs is basically unique to them. “What is a human being? A human being is a pattern that occurs within a field of organization. You’re never the same stuff from moment to moment. Even the same atoms are blinking in and out of virtual particle states. So what are you more fundamentally than a pile of soup and bones? You are the pattern of information that exists within this electromagnetic field. And then…as Gregory Bateson said, information is ‘the difference that makes a difference.’ Information doesn’t exist unless it’s observed. Unless it’s understood. Information and consciousness are two perspectives on the same thing. So to recognize ourselves as, more fundamentally, fields of information, is to recognize ourselves as more fundamentally a nonduality of material and immaterial.”“The story that we tell about ourselves is something that can be tweaked, hacked, reprogrammed, assumed, dropped. These identities end up becoming more like costumes that we are are able to remove and wear as appropriate.”“This is part of the anxiety of modern existence: that as we become more and more transparent to one another, as we become more connected, we’re becoming more vulnerable, and our definitions of security have to change accordingly.”“A good idea is better shared.” EPISODE ART BY ADAM SCOTT MILLER: http://adamscottmiller.com/ 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 travel guide Simon Yugler – named one of Open World Magazine’s “Top 30 Adventurers Under 30,” Simon facilitates initiatory experiences as the leader of experiential education journeys for young adults.http://travel-alchemy.comHere’s Simon talking to UpliftConnect about the difference between “wanting to help” and “wanting to be of service”:https://youtu.be/JzIwXy4l4lY - “What cultural exchange looks like from a place of transformation and healing.”- Decolonizing Festival Culture.- Right Relationship & the difference between “Citizen Diplomacy” & “Mission Work.”- What it means to be a respectful guest.- The difference between tourists and locals: tourists look up (novelty and wonder).- What travel has to teach us about navigating our turbulent and transformational age.- How rootless modern people (digital nomads, refugees, wandering Jews, and so on) can reconnect with a sense of place and become a “person of place.”- How to RECEIVE people with respect and be a good host for travelers and displaced peoples.- Avoiding the dark side of entrepreneurialism, the exploitation and instrumentalist thinking, and turning our hunger into the fuel for something beautiful… The Five Principles of Right Relationship:• Give Offerings of Respect• Shut Up & Listen• Know Your History (Do Research About Where You’re Going/Are)• Love of Language• Sharing From The Heart “Travel will leave you speechless and then turn you into a storyteller.”- Ibn Battuta Quotes:“I think there’s something almost archetypal and profound about leaving your home, country of origin, about leaving your comfort zone and traveling OUT into the world…let’s just start there. Initiation 101.”“Coming to terms with my own liberal conditioning of wanting to save the world…all these things we’re raised to think in America these days, and learning to let that all go. And realizing that all I can do as an individual is build authentic relationships with people.”“One thing Right Relationship ISN’T is wanting to come in and FIX.”“If we don’t have anything to give – which I doubt – we can give the gift of silence.”“Once you start on the initiatory path it continues for your whole life. Eventually, part of that is initiating others.”“We can share stories about how the world is burning down and imploding, or we can share stories about how the world is being created. We can play a part in that.”“For me, to put it lightly, travel has been an initiatory path.”“Everything that could go wrong while traveling in Africa DID go wrong. I had no money, I had one contact in the town I was showing up in whose phone happened to be out of commission, my phone credit ran out and I didn’t know how to recharge it because I didn’t know how to speak Swahili, and here I am in the middle of the country in this dusty little savannah town with no-one I know in a thousand miles and no money and no language skills and nothing…”“Knowing that people across the world are good, for the most part, and for the most part want to help you, is one of the most powerful and transformative messages that we can experience and share. Because if you turn on the news – I don’t know why you’d do that, these days – but if you were to turn on CNN, you would get barraged with information about how dangerous and terrible the world is. Travel can instill these experiences in your life that prove the complete opposite of that.” Referenced in this episode:Michael Mead, writerLewis Hyde, author of The GiftNelson Mandela, politicianDavid Abram, author of The Spell of the SensuousRolf Potts, author of Vagabonding: A Guide to the Uncommon Art of Long-Term World TravelIbn Battuta, legendary explorerVictor Turner, anthropologistBruce Chatwin, author of The SonglinesThe Sierra Leone Refugee All-StarsDavid Dang Vu, serial entrepreneurPaul Levy, writerSeth Godin, marketing expertTim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour WorkweekChris Guillebeau, author of The 100 Dollar StartupDuncan Trussell, comedianDebbie Millman, host of Design Matters PodcastDrew Dillinger, poet, “The Hieroglyphic Stairway” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is the artist, gallery owner, podcaster, web designer, and musician Aunia Kahn! Among her many notable achievements, she curates Alexi Era Gallery in Oregon, hosted the Create & Inspire Podcast, and survived eleven years housebound with disability to emerge more creative, passionate, and powerful than before.http://auniakahn.comhttp://alexieragallery.comIn one of this podcast’s more rambling conversations, we discuss:- Internet & Cellphone Addiction (and the problem of “gameifying” everything to seize attention).- How the internet has changed the ways we present ourselves to one another online, splintered our identities, and changed our sense of time…- Using technology (especially social media) instead of letting technology use you.- Comparing the Internet and Organized Religion, and how institutions serve the role of “tigers” in the modern “jungle” of society.- Looking at the historical context of disability and the relative nature of contemporary problems.- How disease can shock us into a deeper sense of mortality and urgency with respect to our creative work.- How sometimes the big life events change us…and sometimes, they don’t. —Quotes from Aunia Kahn:“Stop worrying about people judging you. Just make it.”“If you people don’t like it, I’m sorry, stop following me. I’m not living my life to please you…I’m not going to sit there and pretend that I’m three different people, and that’s kind of what this digital age has created.”“Where is that fine line? I’m taking it [the smartphone] to the dinner table and I’m not even paying attention to what I’m eating, I’m posting something to Instagram while I’m shoving food in my mouth, and I’m wondering why I’m choking! It’s dinner time. We’re going to put the phone somewhere else. It’s not work time.”“Where do you get your value? Do you get your value from social media or do you get your value from true real conversations with people, like we’re having? Where is that true interaction?”“I don’t think a lot of people are technologically consumed yet that they realize they’re missing out on the human, the real, the not-virtual. And having already gone through that, I just want to grab people and say, ‘PUT IT DOWN AND EAT YOUR DINNER!’ Everywhere you go, it’s always cellphone-to-your-face. Nobody’s looking at the trees, at each other…over time, people will start to crave the more-real, the tangible, the touching…we need that.”“EVERYBODY’S valid. Everybody’s creativity is valid. I don’t care if I dislike it or not. Every human being on this Earth has value. Old people…are just like, ‘I’m going to live my life and if you don’t like it, kiss my ass.’ We should adopt that earlier on.” 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 spend some time with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, "Swiss-born British socialite," host of the Future Primitive Podcast, and author of Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story.Michael on Joanna’s 500+ Episode Podcast: http://www.futureprimitive.org/2016/11/the-crossroads-of-the-unexpected/Check out her archives. They’re amazing."God IS A Sense of Humor""Know That You're Everything"“To me, people are mushrooms. My claim to fame was the fact that I found the mushroom Timothy Leary in the forest. And I had to eat that mushroom so I could really start to flex the accordion of my being.”“I don’t even know that there IS a past and a future. The numerous psychedelic experiences I have been gifted with by life have told me that there is NO past and there is NO future.”“Everything lives. Everything wants to live. Nothing dies, it just becomes composted and intertwined with each other.”“When I make a soup, it’s like painting. Getting all these ingredients together is so exciting, it’s so alive. Somebody says to me, ‘That’s so delicious. Can you give me the recipe?’ ‘I can’t give you the recipe! Don’t be crazy! It’s impossible! It just happened in this moment and it will be forever, because it’s inside of us. Okay?’”“There are several parts of myself looking at what’s going on, and it’s like, I used to be depressed by the committee going on inside of me but now I ALWAYS have fun with the committee! I mean, I’ve got my own theater going on here…” [laughs]“At my age, either you amuse yourself with knee replacements, or…gratitude becomes the greatest element of your life. That’s the key. I mean, THAT’S the key.”“Instead of choosing your work, I would highly recommend that you choose your play.”“The play, at the end of the day, is a lot more important than the work.”“This person you are talking with, what do they long for? And how can I participate in this longing?”On getting Timothy Leary out of prison:“It was useful to the left because he was a martyr. And it was useful to the right because he was a scapegoat. So I quickly saw that that situation was absolutely practical for everyone involved. Except for this young woman who was LONGING for this interesting man. I’m always longing for somebody I can have a good conversation with. And just doing it in prison wasn’t enough…It was impossible. And in a sense, I love that.”“They stripsearched me because I was the paramour of the good doctor. But it was clear to me that the best place to hide the drugs was my ‘innie’ belly-button. They never thought of that.” 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