Humans On The Loop

I don't even know where to start with this amazing episode. Henry Gee is the Senior Editor of Nature, the author of many cool science books including his latest, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth; an accomplished musician; a riveting storyteller and humorous fellow; the Founding Editor of Nature's Futures sci-fi series; and a total joy in conversation. We met to discuss his brilliant tour of evolutionary history past and future, and did, but also occupied a fair bit of our two hours together sharing stories about paleontologists, talking music, gabbing about our love of science fiction, and being ridiculous.I've decided to not bother editing this one because (1) I'm finally getting bold enough to give not-editing a shot; and (2) it was SO VERY ENJOYABLE that I am not sure I could survive a second listen without a second conversation already on the calendar. Consequently, you don't get the normal intensely-detailed show notes, but among the many things we discusses are: synthesizers; feathered dinosaurs; symbiosis as the defining feature of the future of the biosphere; the relationship between good science and good science fiction; why Olaf Stapledon is one of the most important sci-fi authors of the 20th Century; and as I've already said, much else.Visit the episode page on Patreon for a heap of related episodes if this one lights a fire in your mind...✨ Housekeeping• If you want to see these conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get extra podcasts each month, book club calls, early access to new writing, art, and music, and special access to our exclusive (and very active) Facebook group and Discord server.• Find and obtain all the books we discuss on this show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.• When you’d rather listen to music, follow me on Bandcamp and (if you must) Spotify. 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

Find the complete show notes and support the show at Patreon.This week on Future Fossils, Orpheus is in the building for a soulful and visionary conversation with Grammy-winning blues singer-songwriter Mike Mattison and inveterate English professor Ernest Suarez of Catholic University, co-authors of the new book Poetic Song Verse: Blues-based Popular Music and Poetry.  Their book explores the history of the complicated love affair between literature and rock, tracing the tangled roots back through slave work songs and Beat poetry into the age of the mythic rockstar through the definitive contributions of acts such as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, and with inspiration from The Merry Pranksters, Walt Whitman, and many more.This is the story of the cultural air we're all breathing and taking for granted. As a lifelong disciple of songwriting and poetry, I DEVOURED this book and this DELIGHTED in this conversation; and in the tense atmosphere of current events I can't think of a better way to emphasize what makes life worth living and what beauty grows from hardship than by turning our focus to the fruits of human creativity across and between cultures. 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

Microbiologist, independent scholar, ritualist, equestrian therapist, and overall badass Siv Watkins joins the show this week to discuss right relationship with the world of the invisibly small: mood-altering gut flora, the COVID-19 pandemic, Lyme disease, AIDS, and other chronic ailments…as well as with the all-encompassing tapestry of microbial life from which we evolved and within which we exist from birth to death. It’s turtles all the way down! Tag an anti-natalist friend and have them give it a listen…Learn more about and register for Siv's 2022 course on Thinking Like A Plague.Find the complete, extensive show notes — and support the show for superb extras — on Patreon. 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

Get the AMAZING full show notes on Patreon (free public post).Jim Rutt joins us this week to explore the pre- and post-history of “GameB”, an antidote to the social script of rampant ecocidal profit maximalization. Of course, Jim himself is an optimizer par excellence, a true Boomer if there ever were one who saw the wave of personal computing coming in and rode it like a champion surfer from one tech company to the next. What is the relationship between making it big by connecting people and fighting the entropic onslaught of externality production? We take it back to the middle of the 20th Century to find out: from kid gangs in the DC Beltway to MIT to writing computer models of the atmosphere of Jupiter, car salesman and college textbook peddler, suddenly we’re talking about building planet-wide networks of gravity wave detection telescopes and mutually non-commensurable village sex cults? Rivalry and non-rivalry in companies and governance. Holocracy and sociocracy. Are we prophets or fools? Or perhaps more importantly, How do you steal back the train from GameA? The code is simple: intellectual honesty and “a war on politics”. I had a blast talking with Jim and hope you have as much fun listening. Can’t wait to hear what conversations come from this…Yours in systems poetry,Michael 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 talk with four brilliant people working in and around the study of complex systems about the World Wide Web’s co-evolution with cryptocurrencies and other distributed ledger technologies: the promise AND the peril; the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a hugely complicated topic and there wasn’t enough time in this panel for Complexity Weekend (recorded on 14 November 2021) for everyone to get on the same page, much less come to a final agreement about anything — but the real value of discussions like these lies in the tension between perspectives, and the intertidal zone is fertile, here, indeed.You can watch the unedited panel recording on YouTube (but I recommend listening instead, as the work that went into editing this was immense).For the COMPLETE show notes, including copious additional learning resources, find this episode on Patreon.More About Our Guests:Park BachRESEARCHER AT FIGMENT.IO; LIBRARIAN AT GITCOINCoordination Problems • Initial Conditions • Emergent Intent • Group PrioritySiddhant ShrivastavaRESEARCHER AT SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN’S iTRUST CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN CYBER SECURITYCyber-physical Systems Security • Extended Reality • Distributed Teams • Workforce Training • TeleroboticsAvel Guénin-CarlutFOUNDER AT KAIROS RESEARCH; RESEARCH COORDINATOR AT ACTIVE INFERENCE LABPhysics of Life • Cultural Evolution • Epistemology • Active Inference • Consciousness Shirley Bekins, MPAINDEPENDENT WRITER AND RESEARCHERSystems Feedbacks • Path Dependence • Poverty • Homelessness  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 on Future Fossils, metamodern magick ritual artist, yogini, songwriter, and delicious weirdo Scout-Lieder Wiley and I ask: “How are you supposed to repair the darkness if you don’t own the darkness?” And we have much fun and profound exploration besides, into the performance of expertise, the virtue of naïveté, integral theory without the jargon, being unfinished, speaking the unspeakable, heyoka medicine, astrology, the enneagram, the tarot, hermes the scientist versus hermes the communicator, the “flaveregore”, a speculative science dao that can and will fund taboo research, how the street finds its own uses for things, time binding and prediction and tarot and algorithmic policing, the divine value of boredom, and more.Scout on Twitter | FacebookFind the COMPLETE show notes for this episode here.✨ Housekeeping• If you want to see these conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get extra podcasts each month, book club calls, and early access to new writing, art, and music.• Meet great people and have awesome conversations in our Discord Server & Facebook Group, which is going to convert to patrons-only in January 2022.• When you’d rather listen to music, follow me on Bandcamp or Spotify. (Here are my listening recommendations.)✨ Music by Michael Garfield• “Transparent,” “Always Catching Up,” “You Don’t Have To Move,” “Life Finds A Way,” “Hyperstition” from The Age of Reunion✨ Other ways to support the work that goes into Future Fossils• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0xfD2BC66586FA4FBA189992E9B0037CD5cb9673EF• NFTs: Rarible | Foundation | Voice | Hic Et Nunc | Mint Songs 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

The longest-incubated episode of Future Fossils ever! "Vanthropologist" Chris Ryan and I discuss his book, Civilized To Death: The Price of Progress, and the conflict between human beings and our institutions. What is the bright side of collapse? What syntheses of wilderness and culture can we foster in the years to come? This was a blast...✨ Housekeeping• If you want to see these conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get extra podcasts each month, book club calls, and early access to new writing, art, and music.• Meet great people and have awesome conversations in our Discord Server & Facebook Group, which is going to convert to patrons-only in January 2022.• When you’d rather listen to music, follow me on Bandcamp or Spotify. (Here are my listening recommendations.)✨ Music & Art by Michael Garfield• Intro music from the Martian Arts EP. • Outro music: "Seeing Like A State" available soon to Patreon and Bandcamp supporters.✨ Other ways to support the work that goes into Future Fossils• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0xfD2BC66586FA4FBA189992E9B0037CD5cb9673EF• NFTs: Rarible | Foundation | Voice | Hic Et Nunc | Mint Songs 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

Last autumn, as part of the Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds. We discussed archaeoacoustic design as a form of extended cognition, the continuity between the ancient and postmodern worlds, biomimicry, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.I’m doing this again tomorrow (11/14) for a panel on complex systems science and the evolution of Web3 — more info here. Hope you can join us!Dig into the complete show notes for this episode on Patreon. 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, in a powerful panel discussion at the Psilocybin Summit, we reflect on the lessons of magic mushrooms with three of the smartest, wisest trippers I’ve ever met: Penn State author and English professor Richard Doyle, Inner Traditions author and mythologist Sophie Strand, and Imperial College London ecologist and psychedelics researcher Sam Gandy.We talk about the history of the superb trip preparation algorithm “ecodelic,” how psychoactive plants and fungi are once again calling for the innovation of new language, and the urgency of helping people reconnect to the sacred wilderness that ecodelics reveal is not simply “outside.” It's brief but glorious.If you want to see these conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and leave a good review on Apple Podcasts!Dig up the full show notes at https://www.patreon.com/posts/58002643/. 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 talk to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen (objectionable.net | @add_hawk) of the University of Utah, author of Games: Agency as Art and many fascinating papers on social knowledge and the psychology of games, transparency in society, and the philosophy of science — the very philosophical concerns with which I’m obsessed and to which I have devoted much of this show. I met him at Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute this July and immediately knew I had to have him on for what turned out to be one of my favorites yet. Get ready to unravel what you think you know about the ways you come to your decisions, allocate your trust, and sort the chaos of experience…Due to some inexplicable technical nonsense I can't add the full liner notes here, so please find extensive additional resources (including all of the papers, books, and podcasts we mention) at Patreon (where, by the way, your membership grants you extra podcasts each month, book club calls, and early access to new writing, art, and music).✨ Support the work that goes into Future Fossils• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0xfD2BC66586FA4FBA189992E9B0037CD5cb9673EF• NFTs: Rarible | Foundation | Voice✨ Music by Skytree“Navigator” & “Silmaril” off Infraplanetary 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