Future Fossils

Multi-instrumentalist musician Anthony Thogmartin of Papadosio [band], EarthCry [solo project], and Seed to Stage [music production tutorials] joins us for the first time since Episode 10 to talk about navigating the exponentially expanding body of human knowledge, how interfacing with different media technologies yields new minds and selves at the intersection, and the profound creative evolution he and his band have undergone by embracing tools like Ableton Live. For the ten-plus years I’ve known him, Anthony’s optimism and enthusiasm have inspired me to seize the day and strive for new horizons, and whether or not you make music I have no doubt this conversation will inspire you as well.Future Fossils Podcast is entirely listener-supported. Support the show on Patreon for more inspiring extras than you probably have time for.Buy any of the books we mention in this episode through my Amazon Shop and I’ll receive a tiny kickback at no extra cost to you.Mentioned:Ishi Crew, Complexity Explorers Facebook Group

This week’s guest is mathematician and cosmologist Brian Swimme, faculty at CIIS’ Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program and author of several books, including The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story (which we discuss in this episode). Brian is a major voice in the conversation about the new myths required for us in an age of planetary culture, an articulate and approachable thinker whose warmth and generosity — virtues equal to his intellectual achievement — really shine through in this conversation.Brian at CIIS Brian at the Center for Humans and NatureBrian’s documentary, Journey of the UniverseBrian’s Coursera class“A lot of scientists will say, ‘I don’t have a metaphysics. I just deal with facts.’ But it’s not the case…”“Locating ourselves in time I think is the fundamental scientific or spiritual challenge.”“The Earth is closer to a living organism than it is a collection of objects.”“One of the fundamental errors of the modern period is RUINING this idea of Singularity…it’s th

This week’s guest is author, culture critic, and philosopher of the weird Erik Davis, whose work has been one of my main inspirations for almost ten years. His latest work of epic scholarship, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, is an exploration of topics I presumed inaccessible to academic inquiry so masterful I’ve been evangelizing it for months and basically forced a copy on my boss (David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, who was a guest in Episode 75). In this episode we peer into the intersection of psychedelics, madness, systems science, postmodernism, and religious studies to ask about the truly other that refuses to allow us a clean answer to the questions, “What is the Real?” and “Did that just really happen?” Strap in for one of the headiest and most important conversations that we’ve ever had on Future Fossils…Join the Future Fossils Podcast Patreon for exclusive perks like an extra 10 minutes of this conversation, in which Erik & Michael

What’s the line between being inspired and getting broken by transcendental experience? This week’s episode was recorded live at the Hook & Ladder at Minneapolis as part of a special multimedia event I did with the Psychedelic Society of Minneapolis, a group led by neuroscientist Jessica Nielson. Jessica and her PhD student Link Swanson were both dear friends of mine before they met each other and I cannot be happier that they’re doing psychedelic neuroscience research together now at UMN. In this conversation, which involves me definitely talking too much (but in the role of honored out-of-town guest, which makes it somewhat excusable), we talk about the effects of psychedelics on perception, the continua between inspiration and trauma, and what it might mean to make a machine learning algorithm trip balls. Among other things…Dr. Jessica Nielsonhttps://med.umn.edu/bio/psychiatry/jessica-nielsonLink Swansonhttps://swanson.link/The Psychedelic Society of Minneapolishttps://www.meetup.com/Psychedelic-Societ

This week’s guest is writer Lydia Laurenson, editor of The New Modality, whose beat explores how people find and make meaningful lives in our era of change, anxiety, and new opportunity. For years Lydia also wrote a popular BDSM blog under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, an experience that has profoundly shaped the way she understands plural and mutable identity in the digital age — and the importance of protecting our right to act behind created identities in the web’s cultural commons. In this episode, we discuss the years of weird and wonderful adventures she’s had as a writer and a researcher of digital society, and how those experiences have shaped her vision for a new print magazine…Join the show's proud roster of supporters: patreon.com/michaelgarfieldTheme music: “God Detector” by Evan Snyder feat. Michael GarfieldAbout The New Modality:Kickstarter • Medium • Facebook • TwitterRelated Writings:Lydia Laurenson:“My Year in San Francisco's $2 Million Secret Society Startup”The Atlantic article about intern

…in which I talk about Jurassic Park, Terminator, Pokémon, cat videos, Radiolab, Google, DARPA, Charles Stross, the Singularity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martine Rothblatt, Genesis P Orridge, neo-advaita nondual philosophy, and angels. (“Do you guys believe in angels?”)  DISCUSSED:Bringing Heart Back To Futurism. Technological Acceleration As Psychedelic Yoga. It Doesn’t Have To Be Either/Or. Scan Lovers. Can We Have Identity Politics In A Posthuman Society? Control or Liberation?Recorded at Boom Festival's Liminal Village, 16 August 2016 — here’s the official Boom Festival video of the talk.Originally published on my archive of public talks at bandcamp, this lecture became the basis for the essay series with the same name, which you can read on my Medium blog.Support The Show: patreon.com/michaelgarfieldTheme Music: “God Detector” by Evan Snyder feat. Michael GarfieldQUOTES:The future is an idea that is constructed socially, just as insanity is constructed socially.Most people spend most of their time thi

We live in an age of increasingly lively, intelligent, and responsive technologies, and have a lot of adjusting to do. This week’s guest is one of the major inspirations animating Future Fossils Podcast: Kevin Kelly, co-founder of the WELL, Senior Maverick at WIRED, author of numerous books that profoundly shaped my thinking about our coevolution with technology. After reading Kevin’s latest essay on the imminent challenges and opportunities of augmented reality – a superb rendering of the bizarre and wonderful new possibilities of a “mirrorworld” in which everything has an annotated digital double, constantly rewritten – I asked him to join me for a discussion of how our relationship to change is changing, what choice means in a world beyond control, how history becomes a verb amidst the metamorphosis, and how to properly engage these potent evolutionary tools we’re building…Kevin’s Website:https://kk.orgSupport Future Fossils on Patreon for over a dozen exclusive episodes, book club membership, original art

This week’s guest is Cory Allen – mindfulness instructor, audio engineer, host of The Astral Hustle Podcast, binaural beats factory, and now the author of Now is the Way: An Unconventional Approach to Modern Mindfulness. We talk about cutting through the noise and insanity of our overwhelmed digital transition age with simple presence, the rewards of even minor and incremental acts of awareness, and the richness of expressive work created from a place of calm alertness.Grab yourself a copy of Now is the Way from my Amazon storefront:https://www.amazon.com/shop/michaelgarfieldI’m on Cory’s show in episodes 72 & 92:http://www.cory-allen.com/theastralhustleCory’s on my show on episode 16:http://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/16Discussed:• What is the now?• Is mindfulness about getting better at achieving goals, or is it really about something else?• How has meditation practice changed in the age of always-on digital insanity? • The collapse of past, present, and future into NOW and living in the bardo afterlif

This week Future Fossils gets even weirder with guests Phil Ford and JF Martel, cohosts of the Weird Studies podcast. Weird Studies is one of my favorite shows, hands down. Phil and JF’s marvelous threading together of the joyful and the bleak, the transcendent and the hangdog, the gems of literature and the tentacles of the ineffable real, is a sorely needed tightrope walk in an era insistent on clean answers and decisive resolutions. The modern world is a VERY weird place, and these two gentlemen are some of my most trusted curators of places to look and ways of seeing for thriving amidst that weirdness. In this episode, we explore (among other eldritch horrors) the irreducibility and always-ness of the weird; the historical and metabolic forces that join beauty and trauma; and the value of the stubbornly unassimilated fact and its adherents.Dig into Weird Studies and become transformed:https://weirdstudies.com Support Future Fossils on Patreon for over a dozen exclusive episodes, book club membership, orig

This week’s guest is living legend, transdisciplinary scientist-philosopher Stuart Kauffman, whose pioneering work on self-organization and the emergence of order helped launch the field of complex systems science and has brought us to the very edge of understanding the origins and nature of life. Over his 50+ year career and six books, including this year’s The World Beyond Physics, Stu has done more than almost anyone to restore the historic union of science and philosophy, articulating a new spirituality for our secular age of systems thinking, and filing numerous patents on technologies of chemical synthesis and quantum mechanics.It's an epic conversation with a bold and boundary-less mind. In this episode we drive right to the heart of one of humankind’s biggest and most persistent mysteries: What is life?Stuart Kauffman’s EXTENSIVE & ILLUMINATING Google Scholar Page:https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yoPM0F8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdateThis week’s vocabulary word:

This week’s guest is Norman Katz, aka Dr. Blue – a lifelong practitioner of hypnotherapy and the impresario of 3SidedWhole, nine acres of magical weirdness in the desert outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve known Dr. Blue for nearly a decade and he’s deeply enriched my life over the years with his amazing stories, empowering mind hacks, and community of soulful southwestern weirdos. In this episode, he regales us with stories of psychological research into UFOs, past lives, fractals, and flow states; the history of hypnosis, his study under hypnotherapy pioneer Milton Erickson, the psychophysiology of laughter yoga, and – more broadly – the importance, and the surprising ease, of choosing the trance you want to be in…Dr. Blue’s Website:http://www.normankatzphd.com/curricula-vitae.html3SidedWhole Website:http://www.3sidedwhole.com/“We were doing LSD as the patient and the therapist simultaneously…it was quite interesting.”“There still is no study that verifies that hypnosis is a particular brain state or neur

This week we’re joined by David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Technology exploring the effects of technology on how we think. David’s led a fascinating and nonlinear life, studying Heiddeger as a young philosopher, working in marketing for high technology, working as a journalist, and authoring four books on technology, creativity, and knowledge. His new book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility, explores what changes for us in the age of machine learning.I have to admit, I was worried this was going to be just another technocratic puff piece when I started. Certainly it’s a Harvard Business Review Press volume, speaking largely to a business audience; but this is a book that doesn’t flinch at the weirdness of a world in which we know things we don’t know how we know. David’s argument is for a creative embrace of the complexity and mystery that has always surrounded us – that we are in fact made of – 

This week’s guest is Magenta Ceiba, Executive Creative Officer (ECO) for the Bloom Network, a worldwide constellation of regenerative design hackers working in ecology, economics, civil engineering, software design, restorative justice, organizational development, and more. Bloom is hosting Pollination, an “unconference” or immersive in-person hack-a-thon, this coming weekend in San Francisco – a place for this amazing extended international network (including you, potentially) to convene for design sprints for new practices and systems to restore the health and value of our world.I hope you’ll treat this episode as a gateway into an amazing profusion of awesome ideas and people, just the very tip of a very deep and well-furnished rabbithole.Here are some leads to get you started: • See the Pollination 2019 program on Bloom Network’s website.(If you have friends in the Bay Area who might like to come, here’s a promo code for a $50 discount: BLOOM50 so they can join for just $195. The Bloom Network also has lo

This week we dive into the troublesome, urgent, and underdiscussed issue of space ethics with planetary scientist and artist Divya M. Persaud. Can we transcend the traumatic conflict and exploitation that characterize human history, come together in compassionate mutual understanding and respectful discourse, and leave our children with better and more interesting problems? Or are we doomed to transmit the legacy of violence we inherited into fractured futures even more disparate, tragic, and unequal than our own time? A deep dive into the real stakes of space, and a preliminary exposition of the ethical discussions we will need to get there…Divya’s Website:https://divyampersaud.wordpress.com/about/Selected Writings:https://phdvolcanology.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/space-and-time-for-diversity/https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2018/02/talking-about-tesla-by-emily-lakdawalla.htmlhttps://twitter.com/Divya_M_P/status/1080310839465467909Intro Music: Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”ht

This week we surf the fun-gularity with the brilliant artist, standup comic, and podcaster Ramin Nazer! This episode is significantly less a heady philosophy-of-science discussion than usual and significantly more a wank-fest of two people who love each other’s shows going on about all the mind-blowing visionary notions contained therein. Kick back, light some incense, and prepare for a juicy conversation about where we stand in the Cosmic Order and what to do with all of our creative possibility…covering everything from universal basic income to celebrity schadenfruede, visionary art and science fiction to to the psychological impact of trying to stay original in the midst of a tech singularity. If you’re anything like I am, Ramin is going to inspire the hell out of you. Enjoy…Ramin’s Website:https://rainbowbrainskull.com/collections/printsMichael on Ramin’s podcast, Rainbow Brainskull:https://www.raminnazer.com/blogs/rainbow-brainskull-hour/michael-garfieldMentioned:Archan Nair, The Teafaerie, Nikola Tesla

“The human being is actually this kaleidoscope of different ways to relate to time and space. And to be present with it all, to be awake with it all, is what we’re doing.”Jean Gebser mapped the mutating structures of human consciousness, the topology of mind from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral. His work inspired generations of inquiry by authors like William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber. Now Jeremy Johnson’s latest book for Revelore Press expands into the truly visionary and unique “amensional” reality that Gebser posits as the next mutation for our planetary culture.  “We’re not just going to have an ‘archaic revival’ and dump what we’ve been doing with the nightmare of history. There’s something that’s been achieved in this kind of coalescing of the self and the emergence of spatial linear time that’s true, as well.”“The endgame of perspectivalism and the mental world…is eventually breaking down to the point where everyone has their own little perspectival ‘reality tunnel,’ where nobody’s

“I want to break the idea that housing is an investment vehicle. I mean housing is a f-cking HUMAN NEED.”This week’s guest is Australian futurist Nathan Waters, whose vision for a mobile, modular mashup of apartment living and driverless cars offers a solution to a trifecta of wicked problems in affordable housing, cost of living, and enjoyable work. We’re talking about a mature and equitable sharing economy that goes asteroid-to-dinosaurs on the exploitative systems of corporations like Uber and Airbnb…this is an episode for anyone who dreams of a fairer and funner world, a world that reconciles the yearning for flexibility and adventure with the desire for a nice place to call your own:Nathan’s popular essay on “driverless hotel rooms”:https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1?gi=cecb64856db9Nathan’s blockchain-based skill-sharing economy website:https://www.peerism.org/Nathan’s futures-oriented social media channel, Futawe: https://twitter.com/fut

This week’s guest is Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. Contrary to your most likely first impression based on the title of the book alone, this is a supremely carefully constructed argument that anticipates its critics, understands statistics and their abuse, appeals to our desire for simplicity in scientific explanations, and single-handedly reorganizes the entire field of parapsychological research beneath a new and rational umbrella that allows for major weirdness without sacrificing mechanistic causation or parsimony. Telepathy and spooky action at a distance, Jungian synchronicity and many worlds quantum physics all get re-evaluated under Wargo’s tesseract-brain model, in which there’s no such thing as entanglement, but living systems co-opt quantum post-selection to “steer” toward evolutionarily significant events. If you have ever dreamt of something that then happened in your waking life, this episode’s for you. And if you think that time’s an arrow a

This week is a watershed moment for Future Fossils Podcast: the show’s first guest host! My friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut is an engineer who creates occasional one-shot podcasts of fiction and nonfiction, and (according to him) worries about the future too much. We met at InterPlanetary Festival last year on the visit that inspired me to move to Santa Fe, and ever since we’ve had a rich correspondence of mutual far-future fiction recommendations and armchair philosophy chats.Kevin sent me his very cool readings of two essays with the same name, each portraying very different version of “The Next Ten Billion Years,” and both so provocative I felt like sharing them here on the show’s main feed – with my own commentary at the end, on blind spots in imagining deep time and our own psychedelically weird future.You can find Kevin active in the Future Fossils discussion groups at Facebook and Patreon.Professor Ugo Bardi blogs at https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com and http://chimeramyth.blogspot.com. You can read his

Eliot Peper (Episode 47) is back on the show this week to talk about the themes around and within his Analog trilogy of very adjacent and believable sci fi novels (Bandwidth, Borderless, and the new “conclusion” Breach): that is, about the complex interactions between people and technology, both the layer cake of deep utilities we take for granted and the new affordances that disruptive tools produce – and how we shape our lives within them.https://www.eliotpeper.com/“One of the most fun things for me as a novelist about writing fiction is that it is very much about the questions, rather than the answers…if the answer’s obvious, I don’t need to write a book about it.”“You can’t really tell history without the history of technology.”“Congress writes laws about what’s going on, not what might be going on ten years from now. Policymaking is largely a reactionary measure.”“We haven’t figured out the new societies we want to build, given the new realities we’ve already invented.”“If you start thinking about the en