FUTURE FOSSILS

I’m honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity.

✨ Mentioned & Related Links:

Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson

✨Support The Show:

•Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes•Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal•Buy the music on Bandcamp•Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers•Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work

✨Related FF Episodes:

14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere

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

If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!

Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.

Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.

It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we’re doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it’s well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.

Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!

✨ Mentioned & Related Links:

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki’s Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow

✨Support The Show:

•Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes•Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal•Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp•Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers•Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work

✨Related FF Episodes:

213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone)

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 speak with Jingmai O’Connor (Staff Page | Instagram), Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles (a.k.a. Priestess of Dead Dino-Birds) at The Field Museum in Chicago, about the magnificent strangeness of Mesozoic flying reptiles, the perverse anthropology of paleontologists, and much else. Contrary to expectations for a show with “fossils” in its title, I don’t ordinarily interview people who actually dig up prehistoric creatures, but as I make perhaps too obvious in this enthusiastic get-to-know-each-other session, I still care deeply for the treasured mysteries that lie in store beneath our feet and love the people who devote their lives to studying the ancient biosphere —even if the system’s crooked and we fight about as much as dinosaurs themselves.

Here’s to Jingmai and her singular life and mind! Do yourself a favor and acquire her book When Dinosaurs Conquered The Skies, truly a treat for all ages, and then if you want to leap like Microraptor into the thicket of her publications you can scope her work on Google Scholar. (And shout out to her friends Rextooth, who do in fact make awesome dino comics.)

✨Support The Show:

•Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!•Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal.•Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.•Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I’ll get a cut.•Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!

✨PLUS! New Single & Music Video “Indecision” from The Age of Reunion

Listen on Bandcamp/Spotify or Watch on YouTube/Instagram.

This one's a Jon-Brion-inspired riff on the phenomenology of near-death experiences and the neurophysiology of 5MEO-DMT, a quick trip up above the plane of normal waking life to see the panoply of possibility exfoliating from the Godhead in each moment. How do you choose your next life? (Trick question.)

Join my small but gorgeous mob by preordering the entire album at Bandcamp (or subscribe on Substack/Patreon to have it all at once right now), and then go talk to integrate your experience with Daniel Shankin.

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 speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams (Twitter, LinkedIn) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence — new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges. And the time for this work is definitely NOW. As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological systems, humankind migrates from an Earth on which most events seem impossibly distant and irrelevant to an Earth defined by nonlinear, often exponential impacts of seemingly-trivial developments anywhere on the planet. This is the century —and the decade— in which many of us have no choice but to learn, the easy way or the hard way, the consequences of our increasing vulnerability to and power over one another. And one of the places this is most vividly apparent is in how truths and untruths ripple at unprecedented speeds across the globe, forcing us into a new and intense cosmopolitanism. In the 1940s, the message was “Loose lips sink ships.” Perhaps the message for the 2020s is “Cognitive biases spread mind viruses.”

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve likely read my 2017 science fiction short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together. We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt — to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale — and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard. 2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense: fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality. I’d be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology: a sane and healthy global brain.

Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. I’ll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.

✨ Mostly-Complete List of Citations:

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)

✨Support My Work:

•Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!•Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal.•Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.•Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I’ll get a cut.•Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!

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

✨Subscribe and review atApple Podcastsand/orSpotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!

Merry Christmas, Future Fossils! This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 214 of the podcast that explores our place in time — and as demonstrated in the Dr. Who and Aliens franchises, Blade Runner 2049, and Batman Returns, Christmas is a fruitful backdrop for the pondering of big ideas — a moment in which we can see with greater clarity than usual the unity of everyday mundane humanity and transcendental cosmic matters. In other words, perfect timing for this episode’s conversation about cybernetics and the philosophy of the weird with Megan Phipps, Phil Ford, and J.F. Martel.

Megan studies new media at the University of Amsterdam and writes immensely trippy and insightful papers on topics like Brian Eno, circuit bending, and surveillance capitalism. Phil is an author and musician who teaches musicology at IU Bloomington and infuses his curricula with the profundity he has polished through years of committed Zen practice. J.F. is an author, film-maker, and para-academic online course instructor in media studies and magick, who runs Dungeon and Dragons campaigns on the side. Together, J.F. and Phil host the delicious Weird Studies Podcast, every episode of which triggers in me the Holy Grail of podcast affective listener programming: namely, that I wish I were in the room and part of these discussions. Luckily, I’ve had that opportunity before, to talk about my writing on the material agency of glass in our scientific era…and both of them have been on Future Fossils also, both alone and together. But getting all four of us on one call is a rare and precious thing — and now’s the perfect moment to rap about the emergence of the cybernetic era as a kind of numinous event in human history, a divine invasion that transfigures us and forces us to think about which boundaries *should* melt away and which should stay where evolution learned to put them.

You see, we live in an age of multilayer networks —and when our view of humankind transmogrifies from the static image of divine forms to a fluid wash of interweaving processes, the self becomes a metamorphic fugitive and a work of art. When everything’s connected, politics is an aesthetic act and art acquires moral force. Advanced technologies have granted us godlike powers to reshape the world in our image…but “life finds a way” and there are always gremlins, aliens, dinosaurs, and elves lurking latent in the tidy systems diagrams. The beauty of progress necessarily conceals the ugly externalities, the entropy exported in our efforts to arrange wild nature into an image of our lost garden.

So what does cybernetics as a way of seeing change for us in terms of how we live? What does it mean to be human in an age of very lively, seemingly intelligent machines?

But before we dive headlong into this recording of a conversation so good our first attempt was erased by trickster intervention, let me express my thanks to everyone who has helped me and Future Fossils through a year of (what I hope remains) extraordinary challenge. This show is weird and obstinate in its refusal of clear definition. I follow my muses where they lead me and leave these discussions and soliloquys as fossils of a process of discovery and creativity…and staying true to this defies the logic of the market, which would have us classify ourselves as tidily as possible so we are pre-chewed for the algorithms that determine whether what we make is ever noticed by those over the horizon of organic peer-to-peer suggestion networks. If you’re listening, chances are a friend told you about this show —I’d be surprised if you just found it randomly, and definitely not because a sponsor amplified it. I started Future Fossils under pressure from my friends but keep it going as a kind of Benedictine prayer. However it might seem, it’s lonely work — but every now and then I find I’ve reached somebody where it counts, that I’ve inspired a major life change or just helped you orient yourselves amidst the wider movements of a transformation that once seemed chaotic and now seems symphonic. That’s why I keep this going. Every single time I check my email to discover someone else finds value in my work and shows appreciation with a Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp sub, it makes my day and takes a little of the sting away from my ongoing balancing of kids and unemployment. I’d like to make this work sustainable in 2024 but I’m still very far from that…so thank you, each and all, for everything you do to help me run this ultramarathon.

New patrons I would like to thank include Ian Benouis, EGH2128, Lynn Amores, Robert Cummings, Katie Teague, Slow Dancing Fool, and Brian Mapes.

Thank you! And thank you to EVERYONE who chips in every month, or who has left or will ever leave a good review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or who shares this show with your friends…and a special thanks to Suzy Lanza of Ahara Rasa Ghee for shipping me a sweet little care package with her delicious ghee as a gesture of appreciation for this show —she’s not a sponsor but I do endorse her work and recommend you check out iloveghee.com. Lastly, thanks to Noonautics.org for inviting me to join their advisory board and for their continued support of efforts to explore and map and understand the realms beyond.

And now onto the main course! Let’s start somewhere else: in the “trash stratum” of a dirty manger, in the mess of our kinship and identity with the nonhuman (animal, vegetable, AND mineral). In the revelation of our contiguous, nested, and modular interbeing — we begin our conversation…guided here by visitations from a higher realm in which communication and control are aspects of some secret third thing that transcends duality. The information age is one in which we cannot separate the bomb from the computer from the drug and in this way, in spite of all the grimy cyberpunk and body horror of our media environment, the trillion-eyed panopticon the Web became appears to us like the archangel Gabriel: “Be not afraid,” dear listeners. Enjoy this awesome conversation, and enjoy your holidays!

✨Support My Work:

•Subscribe onSubstack,Patreon, and/orBandcampfor MANY extras, including ainsiders-only discussion groupand extra channels on our publicDiscord Server.•Browse my art andbuy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).•Show music: “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp,Spotify).•Buy the books we mention on the show atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.•Make one-off donations directly at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal.•Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.

✨ Related Weird Studies Episodes:

26 - Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield

42 - On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O’Brien

131 - Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

151 - The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster

153 - Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

157 - Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

160 - The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'

✨ Related Future Fossils Episodes:

18 - JF Martel (Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny Awesomeness)

65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)

71 - JF Martel (On Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2)

117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural Realities

157 - Phil Ford on Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel

212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere

✨ Additional Mentioned & Related Media:

Zygmunt Bauman - Liquid Modernity

Mitch Waldrop - The Dream Machine

Michel Houellebecq –The Elementary Particles

William Shakespeare – Othello

Mark Fisher – Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

Ezra Klein interviews Erik Davis — “The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here’s Why That Matters.”

Richard Brautigan –“All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”

Megan Phipps interviews Erik Davis — “New Cybernetic Psychedelia”

Brian Eno – “The Studio As A Compositional Tool”

Michael Garfield’s “Reader’s Rig” pedalboard teardown feature at Guitar Moderne

Michael Garfield – “Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement”

Phil Ford waxes poetic about Wagner’s Ring Cycle on the Brute Norse Podcast

Dror Poleg on the future of a highly automated economy on Infinite Loops Podcast

Erik Wargo – “The Passion of The Space Jockey”

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)

Man of Steel (2013)

Digibarn.com

Jeffrey Kripal

Michael Levin

Dada

Sam Arbesman on Coding As Magic and The Magic of Code

Thank you for listening and for your support!

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

✨ Subscribe and review atApple Podcastsand/orSpotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!

This week I speak with two of the most thoughtful people I know in tech, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and systems engineer Michael Zargham (Founder & CEO of BlockScience) —who work together on tools for building trust between tech users and tech companies at the Superset DAO and each contribute diverse value to society through myriad creative projects in their own right (like Amber’s totally fabulous music group Glo Torch!). Thanks to the generous invitation of Regen Foundation CEO Gregory Landua, I met Amber and Michael for an in-person recording at the Regen Summit —easily one of the most inspiring Web3 events I’ve ever attended — in between jam sessions with a few dozen others working at the intersections of regenerative finance, ecosystem stewardship, distributed ledgers, and civtech.

This episode only catches a tiny sliver of the awesome conversations that we had while gathered face-to-face, but it’s a potent morsel nonetheless. We talked about the market’s perverse fascination with talking appliances as a failed attempt to reboot animism, how good design empowers and bad design deprives by making choices possible or not, and why it’s time for a new kind of terms-of-service agreement that allows users to migrate en masse from platforms that have violated people’s trust…along with much else. A very lucid and articulate, yet very playful, trialogue on matters that deserve sincerity but also benefit from childlike curiosity and warmth!

Enjoy…

✨Support My Work As A Public Good:

•Subscribe onSubstack,Patreon, and/orBandcampfor MANY extras, including ainsiders-only discussion groupand extra channels on our publicDiscord Server.•Browse my art andbuy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).•Show music: “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).•Buy the books we mention on the show atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.•Make one-off donations directly at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal.•Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.

✨Related Links For The Intellectually Voracious:

Amber’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium.

Michael’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Google Scholar.

Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Reviewby Sidney Redner

How Design is Governanceby Amber Case

We Need More Control Over Our Own User Databy Amber Case

The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputeesby Michael Garfield (on technology as an other-controlled prosthesis and the vulnerability of cyborgs)

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”by Harlan Ellison

✨SOME Upcoming Episodes:

•Jingmai O’Connor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Chicago, on her singular life and work.

•J.F. Martel & Phil Ford of Weird Studies Podcast and Megan Phipps of The University of Amsterdam on Weird Cybernetics.

•David Jay Brown and Sara Phinn on their field guide to the entities of DMT hyperspace, published next year by Inner Traditions.•Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs on social science and collective intelligence tools for a memetic immune system.

•Michael Skye of VisionForce on his work to help confront the crises faced by contemporary boys and men.

•Neil Theise, professor of pathology at NYU, on complex systems science and his new book, Notes on Complexity.

✨Related Archive Episodes:

211 - Adam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet

207 - Tech & Community LIVE at Junkyard Social Club with Evan Snyder, Ryan Madson, Roger Toennis, Aaron Gabriel, & Juicy Life

204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together

197 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Lost Civilizations, and The Singularity (Part 1)

180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend

177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan

176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit

141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations

106 - Stowe Boyd on The Future(s) of Work and How to Thrive Amidst Accelerating Change

80 - George Dvorsky on Strange Days Ahead: Ethics for Autonomous Machines

29 - Sara Huntley (Raising Robots Right)

✨Thanks to Noonautics.org& Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!

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

Subscribe and review atApple Podcastsand/orSpotify. Or wherever!

This week on the show I speak with physicist Geoffrey West (SFI) and evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler (ASU, SFI) about the transformations that our geosphere, biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere are undergoing as the “extended phenotype” of human innovation runs rampant across the surface of Planet Earth. These two distinguished scientists are some of the most profound thinkers I’ve ever encountered, helping midwife a new understanding of what it means to be human and a planetary citizen. I have wanted Geoffrey West on Future Fossils since well before I even started working for SFI in 2018, so this episode is the consummation of a years-long journey and I cannot be more excited to share it with you! It feels a little like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, but we live in an increasingly-intertwingled world, so let’s make the best of it! I wouldn’t be where I am today without these two fine minds and their important work. Enjoy…

“The consequences of the Anthropocene are the product of innovations, and yet somehow we think the way out is through EVEN MORE innovation. This is a predicament…Innovation has to be looked at critically. One of the interesting things in the history of life is the OPPRESSION of innovation.”– Manfred Laubichler

✨Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

•Become a patron onSubstack,Patreon, and/orBandcampfor MANY extras, including amembers-only FB Groupand private channels on ourDiscord Server•Donate directly:@futurefossils on Venmo•$manfredmacx on CashApp•@michaelgarfield on PayPal•Browse my art andbuy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)•Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page•Show music: “Sonnet A” from my 2008 Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify)•Followmy musicandawesome, eclectic playlistson Spotify

✨Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!

✨Your Anthropocene & Technosphere Syllabus:

More Is Different:Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.Phil Anderson

Population growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine' that's changing the planetManfred Laubichler

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionJaeweon Shin et al.

Policies may influence large-scale behavioral tippingKarine Nyborg et al.

Teaching the Anthropocene from a Global Perspective (2014!)Manfred Laubichler &Jürgen Renn

More from them:Seminar: Co-Evolutionary Perspectives on the TechnosphereAnthropocene Campus | Technosphere / Co-Evolution, presented by Jürgen Renn and Manfred LaubichlerThe Growth and Differentiation of Metabolism: Extended Evolutionary Dynamics in the Technosphere

SFI Community Event - Panel discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of the AnthropoceneSander van der Leeuw, D.A. Wallach, & Geoffrey West, moderated by Manfred Laubichler

Welcome to the Future: Four Pivotal Trends You Should Be Aware OfEd William on the work of Dror Poleg

The Future is Fungi: The Rise and Rhizomes of Mushroom CultureJeff VanderMeer, Kaitlin Smith, & Merlin Sheldrake, moderated by Corey Pressman

Does the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer?John Pepper at SFI

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and NightmaresRe: TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru & Émile Torres

Complexity Literacy for a Sustainable Digital Transition: Cases and Arguments From Transdisciplinary Education ProgramsGerald Steiner

Relevant episodes from my past life as the host of SFI’s Complexity Podcast:

Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryMelanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationChris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionThe Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten SchefferScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey WestMichael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

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

Subscribe and review atApple Podcastsand/orSpotify. Or wherever!

This week on Future Fossils we pierce the veil with Adam Aronovich, cultural anthropologist and psychedelic integration therapist, to talk about the strange brew of web-connected healing and web-inflicted paranoia and delusions of grandeur, conspiracy epistemics, how people are being treated as robots, and robots are being treated as people, and engaging reality directly versus engaging through the manipulation of symbols. Among other things! It’s a perfect treat for tricky times…

Adam’s Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Re Precision Health Page

✨Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

•Become a patron onSubstack,Patreon, and/orBandcampfor MANY extras, including amembers-only FB Groupand private channels on ourDiscord Server•Donate directly:@futurefossils on Venmo•$manfredmacx on CashApp•@michaelgarfield on PayPal•Browse my art andbuy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)•Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page•Show music: “Autocatalysis” (Live Extended Remix) coming this Friday to my Bandcamp!•Followmy musicandawesome, eclectic playlistson Spotify

✨Special thanks to my friends atNoonautics.orgfor supporting both the show and pioneering research!

✨A mostly-but-not-entirely-complete list of references:

An Oral History of The End of RealityMAPS Psychedelic Science 2023“A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology” by Geoffrey West, James Brown, Brian EnquistNew Religions of the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari’s Google Tech Talk)The Matrix (franchise)A Glitch in The Matrix (documentary)Doug Rushkoff “fractalnoia” (FF 67)Stanislav Grof“So You Want To Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers?” on The Emerald PodcastWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or BorgesJorge Luis Borges - On Exactitude in ScienceJean Baudrillard - Simulacra and SimulationsChatGPTDouglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Encyclopedia Galactica)Simon DeDeo on plural epistemology (interviewed by MG on Complexity Podcast 72)Erik Davis (FF 132)Bruce Damer (FF 109)Ken Adams (FF 209)Shane Mauss (FF 58)What the heck happened to Reality Sandwich?Mondo 2000 + R.U. Sirius

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

Subscribe and review atApple Podcastsand/orSpotify. Or wherever!

This week I welcome back psychedelic film-maker and culture-cultivator Mitch Schultz, Director of the legendary documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule, alongside our mutual co-conspirator, experience design consultant and psychedelic provocateur Shanta Stevens. The two of them have formed a nucleus at Uniphi Studio around which a new transmedia documentary project is emerging —The Conscious Molecule — which will reflect on the decade-plus since Schultz’s groundbreaking documentary on the science and philosophy of DMT to look at these themes through a MUCH wider aperture. The three of us go deep and broad on a very far-ranging constellation of topics:

(0:00:01) - AI, Psychonautics, Digital Media, Language Models, and The Third Western Psychedelic Revolution(0:17:25) - The Future of AI-Human Cooperation(0:26:42) - Consciousness, Complexity, and Panpsychism(0:31:28) - Randomness, Entanglement, Decentralization, and The Conscious Molecule(0:38:46) - Exploring Consciousness and Futures(0:42:23) - The Future of Journalism and The Role of Independent Documentaries(0:47:55) - Psychedelic Therapy and The Overview Effect(0:51:43) - Transcension Hypothesis, UFOs, and Quantum Physics(0:57:43) - Altered States, Self-Reprogramming, Initiations, and Integration(1:03:32) - Technology's Impact on Consciousness and Humanity(1:13:08) - DataViz, Hyperdimensional Passports, The Future of Identity, and The Role of Community

If that sounds like a whirlwind, it is! Find a cozy recliner — and maybe an eye mask— and book an appointment with your favorite peer support/integration counselor, because this is going to be a ride…

NOTE: I’m delighted to drop this episode in the midst of a smoking hot debate about what does and does not qualify as “pseudoscience” in the research of consciousness (see coverage by Flora Graham and Erik Hoel). LOL

✨Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

•Become a patron onSubstack,Patreon, and/orBandcampfor MANY extras, including amembers-only FB Groupand private channels on ourDiscord Server•Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo•$manfredmacx on CashApp•@michaelgarfield on PayPal•Browse my art andbuy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)•Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page•Buy the show’s soundtrack (recorded live at Psychedelic Science 2023) onBandcamp•Followmy musicandawesome, eclectic playlistson Spotify

✨Special thanks to my friends atNoonautics.orgfor supporting both the show and pioneering research!

✨Mentions:

“Cognition All The Way Down” by Daniel Dennett and Michael Levin James Oroc Seth Lloyd David Chalmers DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman Infoboros: Recursion Across Mind, Matter, and Information by Vidur Mishra Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard DoyleAlfred North Whitehead Gregory Bateson John Conway Bruce Damer Reggie Watts Melissa Etheridge Tommy Pallotta Klee Irwin ESPD ’55 Wade Davis Dennis McKenna Psychedelic Science 2023 “Corporate Metabolism” by Paco Xander-Nathan William Shatner Mark Nelson Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game by Andrew Gallimore “The transcension hypothesis: Sufficiently advanced civilizations invariably leave our universe, and implications for METI and SETI” by John Smart Ramana Maharshi Ken Wilber The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life by Robert Kegan Michael Persinger Luminarium by Alex Shakar“Why Ibogaine Is Not The Answer To The Opioid Crisis” by Jonathan Dickinson and Dimitri Mugianis R. Buckminster Fuller Liv Boeree Meditation Death Match

✨Keywords:

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Reality, Panpsychic Perspective, Materialist Neurobiological Model, Daniel Dennett, Michael Levin, Cognition All the Way Down, Ethical Implications, Human Development, Information Bombs, Digital Media, Psychonauts, Cyber Culture, Third Western Psychedelic Revolution, Kickstarter, Future Fossils, Album, AI Music Videos, Patreon, Substack, Evolution of Human Beings, Data Streams, Complexity of Systems, Empathy, Life System, Documentaries, Journalism, Hollywood Strike, Unions, Documentary Funding, International Multi-Billion Dollar Psychedelic Industry, UFO Phenomenon, Altered States, Self-Reprogramming, Technology Impact, Humanity, Hyperdimensional Passport, Metaphysical Stamps, Media Ecosystem, Visualizing Data Structures, Neurological Alignment, Spirit Taking Form

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 have the joy of sharing a long-overdue discussion with legendary psychedelic media pioneer Ken Adams (Vimeo | LinkedIn), one of the first people I ever interviewed on record years before Future Fossils and whose influence on my own creative life cannot be overstated. Two of Ken’s main claims to fame are the films he created in collaboration with Terence McKenna, namely Alien Dreamtime (mediocre fan upload, archived references to) and Imaginatrix (rental page). This June was the thirtieth anniversary of Alien Dreamtime’s theatrical release, a major if initially under-appreciated moment in the history of digital film-making, and I had the good fortune to meet up with Ken here in Santa Fe for his commemorative screening at The Jean Coctea Cinema. What followed was an EPIC storytelling download about bold underground innovation told by one of the most soulful, thoughtful, heartfelt, humble, humorous, and generous people I know.

✨Support Future Fossils:

•Become a patron onSubstack,Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Groupand private channels on our Discord Server!•Buy the show’s soundtrack (recorded live at Psychedelic Science 2023) on Bandcamp.•Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).•Dig my reading list at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!•Followmy musicand awesome, eclectic playlistson Spotify.

✨Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo •$manfredmacx on CashApp •@michaelgarfield on PayPal

✨Chapters, Summary, & Keywords provided by Podium.Page:

(0:00:00) - Reminiscing on Psychedelic Underground and Filmmaking(0:10:07) - Ken’s Childhood & Early Adulthood(0:25:04) - Screenings and Influence of Psychedelic Movie(0:30:06) - McKenna and Psychedelic Community Influence(0:35:24) - Nature, Doubt, Validation(0:44:23) - Late Night Studio Discovery and Reflection(0:49:30) - Non-Human Encounters and Embracing the Weird(0:57:17) - Encounters With Terence McKenna After His Passing(1:10:46) - Spiritual Experiences and the Need for Change(1:18:51) - Life, Legacy, and Creative Expression Reflections

Join me as I host Ken Adams, an experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and psychedelic explorer. We journey through his life from his childhood in Louisiana, his graduate studies in sociology and anthropology, to his discovery of LSD, and his eventual meeting with Terence McKenna. Ken shares his experiences with psychedelics and computers, and we discuss the impact these have had on his life and work. He provides insight into the psychedelic world in San Francisco, shedding light on the risks people took to make psychedelia accessible.

This episode offers a fascinating look into the world of psychedelic filmmaking, with Ken Adams sharing how he created a business model from showcasing his experimental film. From the Adobe theater in Austin to the Roxy in San Francisco, Ken reveals how his work was embraced in the psychedelic space. He further explores the influence of Terence McKenna, discussing how Terence navigated the expectations of being a celebrity, his thoughts on psychedelics, and his ability to unite the psychedelic community.

Finally, we examine Ken's experiences with non-human entities in altered states of consciousness, as well as his ideas on serving the common good. Ken shares his unusual encounters and his belief in the need for imaginative solutions to the issues facing the planet. We also reflect on the sadness and loneliness of the digital era, and discuss how digital arts are changing our world. Join us as we traverse the path of creativity, courage, and psychedelic exploration.

Psychedelic, Filmmaking, Terence McKenna, San Francisco, Digital Filmmaking, Louisiana, Sociology, Anthropology, LSD, Art World, Austin, Digital Arts, Transmutation of Trauma, Winter Solstice 2012, Non-Human Entities, Altered States, Spiritual Experiences, Imagination, Transformation, Existential Issues, Melancholia, The Digital Age, Oral History, Unborn, Dreaming, Noble Things, Valuable Mistakes

Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!

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