Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies

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 AI Complexity, Culture & Consciousness - a M...

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 th...

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...

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, econom...

✨  Subscribe and review at  Apple Podcasts  and/or  Spotify . 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 mo...

✨ Subscribe and review at  Apple Podcasts  and/or  Spotify . 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 div...

Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. 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 di...

Subscribe and review at  Apple Podcasts  and/or  Spotify . 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 tr...

Subscribe and review at  Apple Podcasts  and/or  Spotify . 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 whi...

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 Dreamtim...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com This week on the show I share a reading and panel discussion with three amazing psychedelic thought-leaders I facilitated as a satellite event during the MAPS 2023 Psychedelic Science Conference! Samantha Sweetwater (author of The Wisdom of WTF?!? and the forthcoming book True Human) , Jahan Khamsehzadeh (au...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com This week I’m glad to share a special Future Fossils Live recorded at one of the coolest places I have ever seen, the Junkyard Social Club in Boulder, Colorado! It’s a menagerie of interesting brilliant weirdos, including my old friend and original co-host/robotics engineer Evan Snyder , soul-searching seria...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com ...about AI, art, culture, celebrity, identity, and trauma. Before we begin: I’m teaching a six-week online course on science, philosophy, economics, media, and dinosaurs! Join me at NuraLearning.com for Jurassic Worlding, a psychedelic deep dive into self-fulfilling techno-thrillers and the analog-digital t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com Before we begin: I’m teaching a six-week online course on science, philosophy, economics, media, and dinosaurs! Join me at NuraLearning.com for Jurassic Worlding, a psychedelic deep dive into self-fulfilling techno-thrillers and the analog-digital transition, starting August 1st! Use discount code FUTUREFOSS...

This week we talk with Jamie Joyce of The Society Library! ✨ SOME References: An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’ Regina Rini and the Epistemic Backstop Stephanie Lepp Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens Alison Gopnik The Hyperion Cantos The Internet Archive Ed Bernays ✨  Support Future Fossils: Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts. Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on  Substack...

Pardon the delay, as I’ve been gathering more conversations than I’ve shared. Future Fossils is about to go into the rapids with three amazing back-to-back episodes! The next will be with Jamie Joyce of The Society Library and then it’s Greg Thomas of The Jazz Leadership Project with producer/futurist Stephanie Lepp (formerly The Center for Humane Technology and The Institute for Cultural Evolutio...

In this episode I welcome Caveat Magister , resident philosopher of Burning Man, to Future Fossils to discuss his latest book, Turn Your Life Into Art ! We talk about transformational cross-country and urban adventures, psychomagic, and the difference between two kinds of experience design — one of which structures something fun but easily consumable and the other which demands our personal transf...

This week we talk about the intersections of large language models, the golden age of television and its storytelling mishaps, making one’s way through the weirding of the labor economy, and much more with two of my favorite Gen X science fiction aficionados, OG podcaster KMO and our mutual friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut. In this episode — a standalone continuation to my recent appearance on The KMO...

Welcome to episode two hundred of Future Fossils! On this episode, I'm joined by Ehren Cruz ( LinkedIn , Instagram , Website ) and Daphne Krantz ( LinkedIn , Instagram , Website ) to discuss transcendence, trauma, and transformation. We talk about the festival world, our individual journeys, the rise of psychedelics in therapeutic applications, the potential of these substances, and their cultural...

This week I have one of the most vulnerable, personal, and profound conversations ever shared on the show — and it’s one that speaks directly to the deepest and most persistent themes addressed on Future Fossils. Android Jones  is one of the world’s pre-eminent digital painters and an utterly singular and inimitable visionary artist. He’s also a loving husband and father of three, an old friend (e...

“We want to be careful when we’re in conflict on the internet.” – Tadaaki Hozumi Tadaaki Hozumi, member of Japan’s oldest surviving lineage of royal Shinto priests, is back for the second part of our three-hour conversation on animism in the ancient-future technological construct-wilderness of the 21st Century! In this episode we discuss the ongoing battle between the spirits of the analog “realm...

This week and next, we talk to returning guest Tadaaki Hozumi about the crossroads between the esoteric history of Japan and its Indigenous peoples and royal family; the mysterious convergence of ancient records from around the world on stories of lost civilizations and extraterrestrial encounters; and how animism and magic seem ripe for retrieval as we barrel down the chute of the Technological S...

Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts Browse my newsletter, original art, prints, merchandise, etc. “Notice more. Let go. Use everything.” I’ve decided Future Fossils is going to double down on its commitment to helping people navigate uncharted waters by focusing explicitly on improvisation in 2023, and our first stop together on this journey is a marvelously soulful and profound discussion...

Complete show notes at Patreon Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts Browse my newsletter, original art, prints, merchandise, etc. ✨ About This Episode: This week we dig down as what W.J.T. Mitchell called “paleontologists of the present” to explore the ramifications of A.I. on the creative economy as lensed through two notorious William Gibson quotes: “The future is already here, it’s just...

Complete, EXTENSIVE show notes at Patreon Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts Browse my newsletter, original art, prints, merchandise, etc. How much of natural history is inevitable, and how much is the result of chance? Do mass extinctions slow the evolution of the biosphere, or speed it up? These are two of the six great questions of biology explored by Simon Conway Morris, famous evoluti...