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

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 Deser...

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, th...

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...

“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. An...

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 pr...

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...

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 Futur...

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 origin...

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...

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...

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 virtua...

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 anar...

“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, paint...

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) soci...

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 psychologic...

This week we bring together Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister (the author of The Scene That Became Cities , from Penguin Random House) together with anarchist community organizer Naomi Most of Noisebridge and Playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano for a conversation about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality — and how holdouts worldwide persisted in “IR...

“I know now that the rules of reality change by zip code.” In a conversation recorded nearly a year ago on September 27, 2019 (and now hilariously strange in light of months of pandemic quarantine), I speak with the ultra-talented, delightful, immediately relatable and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto — guitarist for the excellent band Circa Survive and solo project Psychic Babble , painter, wr...

For episode 151 we welcome Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter. Jon hit me up a couple months ago to participate in a documentary film he’s producing, interviewing artists about their creative visions, and our first conversation for his interview series was so solid and heartfelt I had to swap interviewer seats with him and have him on the show. In this...

For Episode 150 we welcome back Sean Esbjörn-Hargens , one of the most formidable and daring intellects I know, and the author of a new paper integrating over 650 books on UFOs and the paranormal, from over 150 disciplines, to trace the outline of a unifying meta-theory of the weird. In this episode, we discuss how Sean reconciles ten different hypotheses for the UFO phenomenon with his “mutual en...

“A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having. If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming.” – Emma Goldman Strap in for what might be the best Future Fossils episode yet: a four-way with guests Tada Hozumi and Dare Sohei of the Ritual as Justice School and guest co-host Naomi Most , in which we discuss how trauma manifests in posture and social interactions, how c...

This week we sit for a soulful chat with speaker, writer, and organizational development expert Sahana Chattopadhyay of Mumbai to discuss her essays “The Power of Communities in Uncertain Times” ( Part 1 , Part 2 ) and “ Befriending Uncertainty in a Post-COVID World .” Follow Sahana on Twitter & LinkedIn . If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossi...

This week is something different: author-read audio of the first four essays from my ongoing book-in-progress, How to Live in The Future . These essays are the first in my feature-length interrogation of the insufficient ways we think about the future…a poetic exploration of the fruitful interface between psychedelic mysticism, evolutionary theory, and critical futurism. For more along these lines...

Where do I even start explaining this week's episode? Probably with a vignette: someone came up to me after I was on this all-star panel discussion featuring five living legends — psychedelic researchers Ralph Metzner and Dennis McKenna , author Allan Badiner , film-maker Gay Dillingham , and former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson — and asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I was the young...

"We are living through a health crisis, an economic crisis, a racial crisis, and a democratic crisis. Each would be historic on their own. All of them are connected. That they have struck together in this way just might be what compels our transformation." – Anand Giridharadas This week’s episode is over three years in the making: my talk from Earth Frequency Festival 2017, about a revised narrati...

This week I talk with film-makers Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown about their bizarre and wonderful documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs — and how a creationist amusement park in Kentucky provides a lens through which to examine the tense relationship between science, religion, and business in America. This is a conversation about what happens when premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews d...