Future Fossils

Merry X-(is for Xenomorph)-mas, everyone! This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID. Evan’s Music: http://skytree.bandcamp.com Related Reading: “Reading Necronomicon at the New York Comic Con” https://www.patreon.com/posts/poem-reading-at-10621994 In This Episode We Discuss: • Why are people are so damn stupid in the Alien movies – is it bad writing, or a realistic understanding of how dependent we will one day be on artificial cognitive augmentation? • Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage:

In a special episode so timely that I couldn’t wait a week to publish, I sit down with Jennifer Sodini (EvolveAndAscend.com) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology. Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you – and why so many of your friends think that this new evolution of digital money and contracts is one of the most important events of our lives.Jennifer & Michael are two of the co-founders (along with Noah Lampert) of Cryptoseer, a new media company:http://cryptoseer.com We discuss:• Why this is about so much more than another hype bubble of speculative assets for tech nerds;• What the blockchain economy is teaching us about how to surf exponential change;• The democratization of financial and legal literacy, and how

This week’s guest is Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Neurohacker Collective – one smart dude! Must be the nootropics. We have an awesome conversation about what it will take for us to thrive through our Age of Transition and into the emergent world that works for all, not just a few of us.His company: http://neurohacker.comHis blog: http://civilizationemerging.com Some Topics We Discuss:• How he got started in complex systems thinking while working in (and watching the failures of) wildlife conservation;• How he understands his work as participating in the emergence of a planetary renaissance;• A vision for how to move beyond finite win-lose games with in- and out-groups between warring cultures and into infinite win-win games;• His critiques of negative interest currency, universal basic income, and other system-wide economic incentives;• His argument for why giving ecosystems economic value isn’t enough to stand up against a wave of exponential technology;• How change can come from everywhere at once to vaul

Ayana Young didn’t even go camping until she was 25. Now she lives in a cabin she built herself in the redwoods of Northern California and manages a 477-acre native species nursery wilderness rehabilitation project (as well as an amazing podcast). This week’s episode is a candid, personal discussion about how awakening to our participation in nature is the key to both our survival and our spiritual salvation…https://forthewild.world/https://www.instagram.com/for.the.wild/ For The Wild is currently raising money to plant ONE MILLION redwoods: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1284964860/1-million-redwoods-project We talk about:• her transition from anonymous, germaphobic suburban consumer to restoration ecologist, activist, and dirt-working spokesperson for the world’s last remaining wilderness;• being a person of place and cultivating a personal relationship with our wild (and not-so-wild) lands;• love in a time of catastrophe and how to FEEL our impact on a planetary scale;• what wilderness means in The A

This week’s guest is visionary artist Jake Kobrin, whose digital paintings explore a gorgeous, dark, evocative terrain of non-ordinary human experience and twist religious iconography into a metamorphic form well-suited to our psychedelic modern era.We discuss his painting “Black Madonna” and the return and healing of the repressed feminine – not just women, but the body, the psychological shadow, marginalized peoples, death, and transformation…We talk about Jake’s artistic intuition, nontraditional relationships, the reality of love, and my transformation from living in a haunted house to realizing the “ghost” was my own disowned soul…If you are, or love, a witch, you’ll dig this episode. Jake’s Website: http://kobrinart.com More Topics We Discuss:• The nonduality of the sacred and profane;• Intuition and the creative process, allowing the art to speak through you;• Eden & Apocalypse, with history in the middle;• Light & Dark, Good & Evil as “conceptual impositions” that don’t really exist “in na

Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on PatreonThis week’s guest is my friend Lindsay Loftin, a professional mermaid who uses her performances to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. She also boasts 60 pushups in two minutes and the ability to transform phone-addicted schoolchildren into avid gardeners.https://www.facebook.com/mermaidsforcleanwater/ We Discuss:• How mermaid performances can help us transform our relationship to nature;• Sea goats and other weird half-and-half creatures, and how the Capricorn’s ambitious in-between-ness was a prophesy of amphibians as an emblem of evolutionary “ascent”;• Remembering in our bodies the importance of the health of our environment and our right relationship to nature;• Ecology as a mystical experience or way of being awake;• The changing definition of nature once you think of the atmosphere as an artifact created by primordial ooze;• Epigenetics, landscape

In one of the most QUOTABLE episodes of Future Fossils yet, this week’s guest is Eliot Peper – a “novelist and strategist” writing fiction and consulting businesses about the social implications of disruptive technologies. In addition to writing a steady stream of sci-fi inflected techno-thrillers like True Blue and Cumulus, he’s an editor at Scout.AI (one of the cooler speculative fiction websites I’ve seen out there). http://www.eliotpeper.com/http://scout.ai/ We Discuss:• The power of science fiction to help us imagine future scenarios;• The possible social impact of radical life extension (gerontocratic radical conservatives vs. an emergent mature wisdom culture);• The Superstar Effect and how it might play out in the digital age;• The awesomeness of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway;• Eliot’s skepticism of mind uploading and conscious AI;• The specter of technological unemployment;• Science fiction’s growing significance to corporate think-tanks and creative labs in a future-facing society;• How sci

This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network.  Bloom Network:http://bloomnetwork.org Magenta’s Personal Website:http://www.imaginationhealer.com/ We discuss: - The adoption of regenerative culture practices;- Cultivating planetwide resiliency in an age of thousands of years of unprocessed grief and trauma;- Web native permaculture psychedelic anarchy;- Communicating across HUGE political gaps (esp. with family);- Cool Bloom Network community initiatives happening around the world;- What will it take to adapt our technological environment to suit a more humane and grounded ecological society?- The relationship between the Wood Wide Web of interspecies partnerships and the maturing World Wide Web of human making.- How can we be good ancestors?- A “relational, omnidirectional nowness where we embrace as our own body the other organisms on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of stuff through space”- Synchronicity & Diachronicity- An academic an

This week’s guest is philosopher Kerri Welch, whose doctoral thesis from CIIS (and current book-in-progress) explore a fractal model of time. If you have ever wondered about time, this episode is for you. Instant classic. Kerri’s Academic Papers & Talks:https://ciis.academia.edu/KerriWelch Kerri’s Blog:https://textureoftime.wordpress.com We take a wild tour through the layers of the human brain and mind, examining the correlations between different brain waves and their correspondent states of consciousness – and speculate on our experience of time as an evolved response to a far more complex and awesome world than we can possibly conceive!Twenty minutes in and we’ve already covered the fractal nature of time and we’re on to explaining what happens to the modern self and its boundaries in the torrent of novelty that awaits un in a digital age. Then we go deep for another hour and a half… DISCUSSED:• Fate vs Free Will in light of Chaos Theory• The relationship between technology and our experience of time,

This week’s guest is tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan, who regards his practice as a sacred act and tattoo as a kind of binding of time in the body.https://www.mountaintempletattoo.com/ We talk about:• how he became a tattoo artist and came into “transformational tattooing” as a way of communicating with and programming the subconscious mind;• other ways we bind time into matter with earthworks art and pre-Columbian mounds;• the difference between choosing your own tattoos and the more traditional style of having them chosen for you by the artist;• the virtue and value of The Ordeal in personal transformation;• seeing skin art as a transcultural phenomenon connecting us to other tribes and traditions across time and space;• and the future of tattoo as an art form and a culture, in which skin art merges with speech as part of a new, richer, more embodied language… “If you had to put something in your bathroom mirror…what would you want in your bathroom mirror FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? That feedback loop with

This week we continue the special two-part conversation with historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson.  Author of dozens of sweeping works of synthetic insight, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community:  The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years.  In his latest and last book, Thinking Together at the Edge of History, Thompson looks back on the failures and successes of this project, which he regards as a “first crocus” budding up through the snow of our late-industrial dark age to herald the arrival of a planetary renaissance still yet to come.  This episode pivots from a contemplation of Lindisfarne’s history to our navigation of the turbulence between two world eras – how will we weather all this change, and what new life and worldview awaits us

This week’s guest is one of my greatest inspirations: the historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson. Author of sweeping works of synthetic insight like At The Edge of History (a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972), The American Replacement of Nature, and Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community: The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years. Lindisfarne’s roster reads like a who’s who of influential latter-20th Century thinkers: Gregory Bateson, Lynn Margulis, Ralph Abraham, Stuart Kauffman, Paolo Soleri, Francisco Varela, David Abram, Hazel Henderson, Joan Halifax-Roshi, James Lovelock, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Maurice Strong, and Michael Murphy were amo

This week’s guest is the visionary painter Hannah Faith Yata, whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once. We talk about her new show “Dancing in Delirium,” the role and life of wilderness in the Anthropocene – weather control and fear porn (eerily prescient, given recent events; this talk was recorded in July) – the feeling of living through a time of massive change and chaos (and clocking out with cute pet videos) – art as rebellion and the party as a revolution – the pagan conjunction of human and animal revived in cosplay and furry culture – and the ways our ideas are literally making impressions on the land )yet, we are something that the land itself is doing)… “The city, to me – that’s like a virtual reality made out of brick and steel.” “Wildness for me, means: leave it the fuck alone.” “I like to think of my work as this strange awakening of a rebellion…” “I’m n

This week’s guest is Andrew J. O’Keefe II – documentarian, archivist for Singularity University, devoted recordist of the emergent planetary culture, and a dear old friend I met back in the Dawn of Time when he was working as the personal assistant to Android Jones. http://www.andrewjokeefe.com/https://www.facebook.com/andrewjokeefehttps://twitter.com/andrewjokeefe?lang=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjokeefe/https://medium.com/@andrewjokeefe We talk about the motivations for preserving and reliving the significant (AND insignificant) moments of our lives. From the role of “tapers” in the success of The Grateful Dead & STS9, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson, and The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick…to how a donation of 600 books started Harvard University…to a vision of our artificial intelligence augmented descendants living in a world of totally recorded life and currently incomprehensible richness and insight…this is a conversation about why we “save” things, and why we should treat our record-kee

This week’s guest is Hunter Maats, host of the Mixed Mental Arts Podcast and co-author of The Straight-A Conspiracy. We talk about the future of education and human collaboration – moving past a world of routine factory-worker indoctrination and the “insane cargo cult” of the academic system, and into a new model for the transmission of knowledge that suits a truly planetary culture. https://twitter.com/huntermaatshttps://medium.com/@huntermaats The value of myth, ritual, and other deeply-ingrained but often-maligned premodern human activities. How to make sense of authority, expertise, and accreditation in a world where the dominance of academia (and the legitimacy of so many other institutions) is losing hold. How do we structure a “global village?” What is post-academic education? What comes after the fall of the Ivory Tower? How do we recruit premodern impulses into the project of contemporary life without repressing magic, ritual, and myth? We also talk a lot of smack on Richard Dawkins for being the tot

 This week’s guest is singer-songwriter and music therapist Marya Stark, whom I met at the Global Sound Conference in Los Angeles in 2008. We discuss the future of the feminine, relationships, and reproduction – and laugh a lot. • Linkshttp://marya-stark.comhttps://maryastark.bandcamp.comhttps://soundcloud.com/marya-starkhttps://www.facebook.com/maryastarkmusic • Topics- Long Distance Relationships in the Internet Age- The Pre-Trans Fallacy & Getting Back to The Land- The Future of Sex in the Age of Machines- Industrial Medicine & Birth Trauma- Terraforming & Artificial Wombs- Tradition vs. Innovation- Rudolf Steiner’s Lucifer & Ahriman- Artificial hormones in the drinking water feminizing songbirds- Intuition of Altitude- Dancing between the organic and digital: how can we hold both ends of this without succumbing to either?- Reclaiming the sacred traditions of premodern femininity- Bloodwork, Moon Lodges, and the revival of the Sacred Feminine- Adopting a “Bit Torrent” model to our mixed eth

“You were a paleontologist, originally.  I’ve always considered myself a ‘paisley-ontologist.’  A paleontologist will excavate the soil in search of fossils and a paisley-ontologist will excavate the present for fossilized perceptions.  So I’m always looking for these kind of nuggets, linguistic impressions or etymological traces that lead us from the present into this sort of timelessness, or this subconscious of words and symbols.  I look at the world as a sort of Rorschach Worship Workshop…”This week’s guest is “The Ungoogleable” Michaelangelo, who all-embracing creative life is as difficult to describe as he is to find via conventional web search.  The only person I’ve ever met – or could imagine – who could successfully pull off the marriage of “comedy,” “necromancy,” AND “rap” – and do it all in a convincing but false Scottish brogue as his alter ego Void Denizen – Michael is one of the wittiest, most hermetic guests this podcast’s ever had.  AND he has some thoughts about the show itself that take us d

Support Future Fossils on PatreonReview Future Fossils on iTunesReview Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupThis week is part 2 of our conversation with biohacking polyamorous geneticist and aspiring Australian politician Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry. Get ready for a chat so crazy you’ll think it’s 1999…we spend about 20 minutes arguing about modern art, 20 minutes arguing about the Singularity, and 20 minutes arguing about what’s in the box.• Meow Himself:https://www.facebook.com/meowludo• Biofoundry:http://foundry.bio/https://www.facebook.com/Bio-Hack-Syd-488627521201437/https://www.meetup.com/biohackoz/ • We Talk:- We compare campaigning for nuclear technology to bringing a stripper with a drug problem to family dinner;- IP as Art & The Shape of The Future;- Leveraging existing systems as scaffolding to transition back into a way of life more suited to our paleolithic environment;- Vantablack & the jerk who got an exclusive license to us

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 Homin

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 hypoth