Future Fossils

This week I commune with psychedelic integration counselor Daniel ‘Sitaram Das’ Shankin, founder of Tam Integration and The Psilocybin Summit, in a soulful conversation on grace versus good works, taking multiple perspectives, being the kindest version of yourself (rather than the smartest), belief systems as spirit possessions, his journey from yoga teacher to psychedelic integration counselor, personality types as insurance strategies, the good, bad, and ugly of memes, and how to live with the worst parts of psychedelic capitalism.Learn more about Daniel at tamintegration.com, sitaramdas.com, Instagram, and Twitter.Get 10% off your ticket for the The Third Annual Psilocybin Summit (16-20 September 2021) and enjoy my live Future Fossils panel with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy — as well as presentations by dozens of other amazing contributors — at psilocybinsummit.com/garfield.✨ Housekeeping• If you value this show and would like to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please

 This week’s guest is one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, and someone I’m honored and delighted to know. I can hardly express how strange and exciting it was when I reached out to Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk and Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University, and found out he was already a fan of my podcasting…so this episode is a seriously chummy session of mutual discovery by two people perhaps already a little bit TOO familiar with one another’s work. Tyson inhabits an awesome position at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems, complexity science, cultural criticism, multimedia art and design, and dreaming and scheming on applications for ancient wisdom in the digital and post-digital eras.Check out the EXTENSIVE full liner notes at Patreon, where you can also support the show for extra episodes each month, invites to our book & film club, and new writing, art, and music. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on

This week we welcome back anthropologist and science writer Eric Wargo, for a conversation about his book Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self — as well as: how tautology (not paradox) rules a time travel universe, what it means to become a time-faring species, the future of precognitive technologies, the concern of a quantum computing financial singularity, why lying to yourself about your own future-sight might be of evolutionary benefit, why retrocausalists don’t believe in randomness, how culture is a tesseract and dreams are future fossils, the controversy of divinatory astrology, and how pre-shocks of future traumas explain some of the more puzzling facts of history.✨ Housekeeping:If you value this show and would like to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get two extra episodes a month, invites to our book club, and new writing, art, and music.• Meet great people and have equally great conversations in the Discord Ser

This week’s episode is a true return to form, in which my old friend Michael Jacobs (aka The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo, aka Void Denizen) and I talk about pretty much everything — including plenty of things I honestly can’t believe I spoke about so freely.Every once in a rare while I have a discussion on Future Fossils that truly exemplifies the spirit in which this show was born — the truly omnivorous amateur enthusiasm that pervaded it before I started worrying about defining these investigations for an audience.Here is just a set of sampling slices from our most heartfelt and epic yarn, in which Michael talks about taking care of his father, who suffers Alzheimer’s; about getting back out of city life and onto the road in the American Southwest, communing with the landscape; about nonduality and artistry and memory and transpersonal somatics and their implications…It is an honor to meld with this guy, especially as my first not-exactly-post-pandemic, back-in-person podcast with a friend in the same room s

This week we talk to Leidy Klotz about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.Leidy Klotz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Business. His wide-ranging, prolific, and highly-awarded research is filling in unexplored overlaps between design and behavioral science. Nationally recognized as one of 40-under-40 professors who inspire, Leidy has taught thousands of students, including 21 Ph.D. advisees, whose designing and teaching shapes the world. He founded and directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which brings together scholars, funders, media, and practitioners to advance behavioral science for design.We discuss the human cognitive bias to try and solve a problem by adding new elements rather than by subtracting pieces from the problem; how deeply-rooted and pernicious this is in both our evolution and our economics, and how it has contributed to the complex and compounding crises in which we find ourselves today; t

If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! Patrons gain access to a secret feed of biweekly episodes, unreleased music, our monthly book club, and many other wondrous things. And join us in the Discord!This week I talk with Mikey Lion, music producer and co-founder of Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about the pandemic’s distortions of time and community, flow states and festival time, gatherings in the No New Normal, running a festival and record label at the same time, comparing the potentials of festivals and urban nightlife, the impact of stage design and architecture on how community events shape individual experience, the tension between intimacy and scale, my hatred of silent disco and multiple simultaneous competing sound systems, DMT and other life-changing experiences, the good parts of tribalism, psychedelic int

This week we talk with Robert C. Jacobson, entrepreneur and space industry enabler, advocate, and investor. Jacobson is the founder of Space Advisors, a strategic and financial consulting firm for space startups and organizations looking to establish a space strategy. He also works at the Arch Mission Foundation, which is dedicated to creating civilizational backup libraries, and Space Angels, the world’s first space-focused angel investment group. His new book is Space Is Open for Business: The Industry That Can Transform Humanity (sample it | buy the hardcover).In this episode, we discuss the bright and dark sides of the emerging space industry — from the inspirational and unifying 1970s visions of Gerard O’Neill to the 2020s’ clash of barons, SpaceX vs. Blue Origin, and the challenges of regulation in a space of blindingly fast innovation and massive inequality. If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please rate and review Future Fossils

This week we’re joined by Anna Riedl, a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum and organizer at Effective Altruism Austria, currently studying Cognitive Science at Universität Wien. We discuss behavioral economics, bounded rationality, computational rationality, and other formal ways of thinking about how to do the most good, given great uncertainty about most things. We ask whether “cognitive biases” are really fairly understood as biases when they’re the result of a rational learning process, we explore links to the quantified self, and we advocate for epistemic humility — and the need, no matter our incomplete understanding, to nonetheless still Do Something…If you agree this show should thrive, become a Patreon supporter and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! You can also buy the books I talk about from indie stores at bookshop.org/shop/futurefossils.Other Links:Anna on FB: “Rationality ≠ Rationalism”Anna’s Cognitive Science MapEffective Altruism AustriaEffective Altruism Redbubble Design Shop80,000 Hou

“The most expensive part of making this book was time. I spent my time, which is my scarcest resource. For every one of the nearly 9,000 images in this book, I was standing directly behind the camera. I had to get there. It’s not just a long way from the US to Asia, it was usually a long way from the airport to the local town in the countryside. And then it took time to reach the right village. And then it took time to find the ceremony. And then I would have to wait. Then wait some more. More than money, or photons, this book is made from time.”“Our religion, which is the religion of quantification and measurement” has transformed the world. This week on Future Fossils, we talk to Kevin Kelly about his three-volume photojournal Vanishing Asia, a style archive collected over 50 years and countless miles, winnowed down from 200,000 pictures.We talk about what it is to remember, to preserve, to capture, to restore, to reimagine… Preservation bias in the archaeological history of technology,Cosmology and religio

This week we talk to artist, musician, and community organizer Violet Luxton, who works and lives at the intersection of Indigenous wisdom traditions and Indigenous rights movements, #LandBack and #BlackLivesMatter, afro-futurism, yoga, and visionary biotechnological speculation. In a conversation far shorter than the subject matter deserves, we explore some of the themes in and related to her profound academic paper, "Transtemporality and The Technology of Indigenous Kinship: The Science of Remembering Ourselves."If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our monthly book club, and many other wondrous things.Music by Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder.Enjoy, and thanks for listening!_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_Also Discussed In This Episode:Violet Luxton at LinkedInSaki Mafundikwa —

This week we’re joined by evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers and Bitcoin entrepreneur Brandon Quittem for an interdisciplinary trialogue on the analogy between digital currencies and the so-called Wood Wide Web. Toby studies fungal economies in the lab, and her research challenges the commonly-held assumption that mycorrhizal networks are socialist utopia hippie love-fests. Brandon evangelizes “The Internet of Money” as an exemplary instance of biomimicry and argues that Bitcoin is doing for human finance what mycelial networks have done for terrestrial biology. And I wade in with more than my usual helping of paradoxically-critical enthusiasm to ask if “natural” really equals “healthy” or “desirable” in our rush to serve the evolutionary algorithm of technological development.  This one should appeal to anybody on the “Transhumanist Bitcoin Bro to Luddite Biodynamic Farmer” spectrum…share your thoughts about the episode in ourFuture Fossils Discord server or Facebook group, where it’s easy to link up with ama

This week, I embark on a new experiment and respond to three "advice column" questions from the Future Fossils listening audience:• How do I know if aliens would like my music?• How do I talk to my five-year-old about death?• How do I be creative without training or experience?This was a lot of fun and I'll definitely do this again. Enjoy, and thanks for listening!Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon. Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and many other great things as they spill out of my overactive imagination.We’d also love to have you in our thriving little Discord server, if you’re interested in meeting other members of our awesome scene. (And if you’d like to edit Future Fossils Podcast transcripts, please drop me a line at futurefossilspodcast[at]gmail.com.)Show theme music is by original Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder

This week I talk play, innovation, noise, disruption, cryptocurrency, and trickster creativity with Michael Phillip, host of sister podcast Third Eye Drops, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102, 88, 58, 44 with Doug Rushkoff, 38 with Niles Heckman, 28 with Bruce Damer, 21 with Erik Davis, 9 with Shane Mauss, 4 with Erik Davis, and this special mashup episode. This one was originally recorded as Third Eye Drops Episode 239, but I went ahead and painstakingly edited out over ten minutes of filler language and head-scratching to give you the sharpest and most-polished conversation possible. If you appreciate these conversations and the extra work I put in to make them shine, please support Future Fossils on Patreon! You'll find the full, extensive show notes for this episode there. 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 ac

It’s time for humankind to grow up — but it might also be more important than ever that we reconnect with our inner children and play like our lives depend on it (because they do). And so, given the in-progress BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s masterful fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, it feels like a great time to talk about this coming-of-age story and its cosmological questions. This week on Future Fossils, we link up with my friends Stephen Hershey and Kynthia Brunette, whose perspectives from acting and the study of human-computer interaction, as well as their deep fanship of Pullman’s writing, add up to a refreshingly fun and casual discussion of some of the biggest questions human beings ever thought to ask themselves.We talk about how translations from one medium to another affect the way we tell our stories; the media theory and logic of reinterpretation; C.S. Lewis and the important critiques of The Chronicles of Narnia; how Lyra Silvertongue is like and unlike Anakin Skywalker and other co

2021 comes in hot with Michael Dowd, ecumenical Christian preacher turned climate grief advocate, whose Post Doom Conversations are a well of wisdom for anyone prepared to stop fighting the inevitable* and start celebrating what actually can be done in these weird, scary, precious years to come. We discuss his time as an evolutionary biology evangelist and his friction with techno-optimists, what it means to live sustainably within a mature religion of place, urban scaling and collective action problems, a general theory for the collapse of market-based civilizations, and how to reorient one’s faith to planetary and secular values that allow us to accept reality as it is and avoid doing further evil to the Biosphere and each other. (*We spend a lot of time in this encounter digging underneath the surety to ask not “Is there hope,” but “Where am I still doomed by my conditioning?”)Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, su

This week I’m delighted to bring The Teafaerie (ep. 100) and Ramin Nazer (ep. 120) back to Future Fossils Podcast! These are two of the funniest, weirdest amateur futurists I know, and I hope you agree this discussion was worth the wait while I spent hours making it sound like we didn’t just talk over each other like overexcited dorks for two-plus-hours.In this episode, we discuss the virtualization of live events as relates to the science fiction of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi, the stratification of class according to who can afford to be somewhere in person, and my writing on AR and telepresence for H+ Magazine (“Best Seat In The House”) and the Body Hacking Conference Blog (“Being Every Drone”). We talk about the perverse incentives of social media as an outrage generator and surveillance capitalism pit trap, and how we might be able to redesign the social Web so it doesn’t drive us all (even more) insane. Plus:• The world being transformed into an unending series of limnoid events• Having “an affin

This week I’m honored to speak with musicologist Phil Ford, co-host of Weird Studies, on a voyage that takes us from elevator muzak to aquarian cults to Disneyland to the future of magical warfare. We discuss what it means to be (or want to be) “primitives of an unknown culture,” the staging of nature, what happens when your aesthetic commitments become your reality commitments, ontological anarchy, and The Super Mario Bros Movie’s influence on the 2016 presidential election. Keep your ears peeled for deep cuts on Fight Club, the Alt-Right, Les Baxter, William Irwin Thompson, Jurassic Park, and Burning Man…Read Phil’s essay, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica.” And while you’re at it, read my comments on his essay about Time Binding & Music History on The Long Now Blog.Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon. Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our bo

“There’s a Mormon Tabernacle Choir inside of everyone. It’s just better to include and embrace all these facets of identity.”I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain Stuart Davis. He’s been a guiding star for me and presumably many other irrepressibly nondisciplinary artists for over a decade, one of the founding figures of my adult psyche in its pluriform contortionism. Musician, painter, poet, talk show host, stand-up comic, film-maker, and depth psychologist, the man knows no bounds and it’s all I can do to follow closely and listen carefully, which I have since I first encountered his work in 2004.Stuart is long overdue to be on the show, but the timing is perfect, because we’re here to talk about ALIENS. Not the admittedly excellent film, but the living reality of them and their astonishingly intimate relationship to us, as disclosed by the growing archive of guests on his show, Aliens and Artists.We discuss the ethics of withholding advanced technologies like zero-point energy from the general

This week I chat with film-maker Michael Morgenstern about his latest transmedia project, I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life, which takes young adults down a mind-bending and immersive narrative vortex about weaponized synthetic media to teach vital 21st Century literacies and the society-threatening implications of #deepfakes.While I’ve been speculating on the ominous (albeit numinous) social and psychological consequences of deepfakes since my 2017 sci-fi short “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’” and discussed the more hopeful possibilities in last week's episode with Stephanie Lepp, this conversation takes the futurist speculation to a whole new level to examine:• How convincing and deceitful information-age fictions pose a risk not just to the fabric of society but even our personal relationships;• How deepfakes will turn the logic of waking life from something sober and tangible to something more like a dream or shamanic journey;• How Michael and his team based the execution and roll-out of thi

This week I chat with artist Stephanie Lepp, producer of Infinite Lunchbox, the Reckonings podcast, and — most excitingly, for me — Deep Reckonings, a stunning new project exploring the “pro-social” uses of AI-generated “deepfakes” and other synthetic media for education, therapy, and other beneficial outcomes. While I’ve been speculating on the ominous (albeit numinous) social and psychological consequences of deepfakes since my 2017 sci-fi short “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, it never really occurred to me that these tools aren’t just dangerous but potentially healing and transformative. Stephanie, however, has made it very clear in her new videos, and in her extensive statement for the project, that sometimes all we need to imagine a better world is to see it faked convincingly. In this discussion, we explore how deepfakes can expand and enrich the potent benefits of earlier media like theater and the novel; why it’s so controversial to portray wrongdoers finally accepting accountability and mo