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

This week I talk with environmental philosopher and Santa Clara Clara Assistant Professor Kimberly Dill , an old friend of mine from Austin, Texas whom I met at Bouldin Creek Coffee over lemon maté sours and a deep dive into Eastern nondual traditions while she was in school studying arguments against free will under acclaimed analytic philosopher Galen Strawson. She has since grown into a formida...

This week I go solo and get reflective on age, noise, loss, mystery, stars and angels, dreams and seasons, modern science and the retrieval of magic... Read the ✨ EXTENSIVE ✨ show notes, and join the Future Fossils community, at Patreon. cataract (n.)  early 15c., "a waterfall, floodgate, furious rush of water," from Latin  cataracta  "waterfall," from Greek  katarhaktes  "waterfall, broken wate...

Subscribe wherever you dig podcasts Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts Browse my newsletter, original art, prints, merchandise, NFTs, etc. Dig into the complete, extensive show notes (and join our online community) at Patreon This week on the show I chat with the storied, insightful, multidimensional Roland Harwood ( Twitter | LinkedIn | Liminal | Participatory City Foundation ) — a “compu...

Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts Dig into the complete, extensive show notes at Patreon This week we’re joined by Lauren Seyler, Assistant Professor of Biology at Stockton University ( Lab Website , Twitter @darkmicrobio , Google Scholar ), who studies the microscopic living world that flourishes in dark places: the mud of coastal marshes, inside rocks, and in sediments at the bottom of...

This week on Future Fossils, we sync up with globe-trotting (Singapore-based) futurist Parag Khanna, author of several internationally best-selling books on the shifting landscape of human geography and technological evolution. My acquaintance with Parag dates back all the way to 2011 when I found his Hybrid Reality Institute, and started writing for his BigThink blog, thanks to the writing of Jas...

Complete, EXTENSIVE show notes at Patreon.com/michaelgarfield ! As guest 0xZakk says at the very end of this conversation, most of the construction projects throughout the history of civilization have been coercive. What does it look like when we actually build things in a really cooperative way? This episode was recorded in November 2021 when the cryptocurrency markets were insanely bullish and t...

Find the complete show notes for this episode on Patreon . This episode was recorded live in Austin, Texas at the West China Tea House in partnership with EFF-Austin , a non-profit committed to the establishment and protection of digital rights and defense of the wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology. Founded in 1991 as a local sub-chapter of The Electronic Frontier Foundation...

or, “Why Isn’t There A Science of X?” or, “Alchemy is to Chemistry as Astrology is to…?” “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.” “It’s time for a new era, for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture, for future study, and — if the findings are correct — what they say about our basic scientific attitude.” – Ro...

Don't waste another minute here. Go read the full show notes on Patreon! Be forewarned: This latest episode is some extremely heady stuff. But thankfully, it's also full of heart and soul... Back in February, Jonathan Rowson posted two clips ( here and here ) from his latest in-progress writing tlimito Twitter, where it succeeded in baiting a bunch of the folks with whom I regularly interact as me...

I don't even know where to start with this amazing episode. Henry Gee is the Senior Editor of Nature , the author of many cool science books including his latest, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth ; an accomplished musician; a riveting storyteller and humorous fellow; the Founding Editor of Nature 's Futures sci-fi series; and a total joy in conversation. We met to discuss his brilliant tour...

Find the complete show notes and support the show at Patreon. This week on Future Fossils, Orpheus is in the building for a soulful and visionary conversation with Grammy-winning blues singer-songwriter Mike Mattison and inveterate English professor Ernest Suarez of Catholic University, co-authors of the new book Poetic Song Verse: Blues-based Popular Music and Poetry .  Their book explores the hi...

Microbiologist, independent scholar, ritualist, equestrian therapist, and overall badass Siv Watkins joins the show this week to discuss right relationship with the world of the invisibly small: mood-altering gut flora, the COVID-19 pandemic, Lyme disease, AIDS, and other chronic ailments…as well as with the all-encompassing tapestry of microbial life from which we evolved and within which we exis...

Get the AMAZING full show notes on Patreon (free public post). Jim Rutt joins us this week to explore the pre- and post-history of “GameB”, an antidote to the social script of rampant ecocidal profit maximalization. Of course, Jim himself is an optimizer par excellence, a true Boomer if there ever were one who saw the wave of personal computing coming in and rode it like a champion surfer from one...

This week I talk with four brilliant people working in and around the study of complex systems about the World Wide Web’s co-evolution with cryptocurrencies and other distributed ledger technologies: the promise AND the peril; the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a hugely complicated topic and there wasn’t enough time in this panel for Complexity Weekend (recorded on 14 November 2021) for everyon...

  This week on Future Fossils, metamodern magick ritual artist, yogini, songwriter, and delicious weirdo Scout-Lieder Wiley and I ask: “How are you supposed to repair the darkness if you don’t own the darkness?” And we have much fun and profound exploration besides, into the performance of expertise, the virtue of naïveté, integral theory without the jargon, being unfinished, speaking the unspeaka...

The longest-incubated episode of Future Fossils ever! "Vanthropologist" Chris Ryan and I discuss his book, Civilized To Death: The Price of Progress , and the conflict between human beings and our institutions. What is the bright side of collapse? What syntheses of wilderness and culture can we foster in the years to come? This was a blast... ✨  Housekeeping • If you want to see these conversatio...

Last autumn, as part of the Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds. We discussed archaeoacoustic design as a form of extended cognition, the continuity between the ancient and postmodern worlds, biomimicry, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation. I’m doing this again to...

This week, in a powerful panel discussion at the Psilocybin Summit , we reflect on the lessons of magic mushrooms with three of the smartest, wisest trippers I’ve ever met: Penn State author and English professor Richard Doyle , Inner Traditions author and mythologist Sophie Strand , and Imperial College London ecologist and psychedelics researcher Sam Gandy . We talk about the history of the supe...

This week I talk to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen ( objectionable.net | @add_hawk ) of the University of Utah, author of Games: Agency as Art and many fascinating papers on social knowledge and the psychology of games, transparency in society, and the philosophy of science — the very philosophical concerns with which I’m obsessed and to which I have devoted much of this show. I met him at Diverse Inte...

This week we're joined by robotics engineer, electronic music producer, and Future Fossils co-founder Evan “Skytree” Snyder — who has recently been asked to help design the sounds made by the next wave of Amazon warehouse robots. In this first part of our discussion, we explore the evolutionary and psychological considerations for designing human-compatible robot sounds, talk brilliant birds and t...

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, p...

  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 disco...

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 o...

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 om...

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...