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

“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 sha...

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 re...

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 corresponden...

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 tool...

This week’s guest is Bernie Taylor, whose novel interpretation of ancient cave paintings suggests an overlooked and deeply significant alternative take on the subjective experience and world-space of prehistoric human culture. Finding animals hidden in the interplay of paint and rock forms unnoticed by other archeologists, and corresponding with a diverse array of experts over decades (including l...

My graduate advisor Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the most consistently inspiring and refreshingly different thinkers I’ve ever met. In our first Future Fossils conversation, we discussed his work to apply a profoundly “meta” and pluralistic philosophy to the everyday work of organizational development and social impact. In this discussion, we turn over the rock and examine his decades of inquiry...

This week’s guest is professional psilocybin retreat host, long-time practicing Buddhist, and general good guy Mitsuaki Chi of Amsterdam. In this episode we get into the practices and benefits of psychedelic community, his unusual path from hardcore meditator to mushroom trip facilitator, and how he understands his life and purpose in light of a mysterious intelligence none of us can fully compreh...

Android Jones is one of the world’s hottest digital artists – even if it’s kind of a mistake to label him this way and limit his creative action to the digital. A master portraitist, designer, and explorer of new tools, Android made concept art for video games in his early years before becoming the creative consultant for the best-in-class Corel Painter software, touring the world while doing live...

Erick Godsey was almost my roommate in Austin, and even though I trust our destinies I still consider it a bummer that we didn’t. He is a nobler beast than I. He’s also the host of The Myths That Make Us, which is an excellent program for reasons that have nothing to do with my recent appearance on his show, but that’s nice too… What Erick IS is devoted to helping people live the absolute best sto...

Bruce Damer is a living legend and international man of mystery – specifically, the mystery of our cosmos, to which he’s devoted his life to exploring: the origins of life, simulating artificial life in computers, deriving amazing new plans for asteroid mining, and cultivating his ability to receive scientific inspiration from “endotripping” (in which he stimulates his brain’s own release of psych...

This week’s guest is Nadja Oertelt – research scientist turned film-maker and founder of Massive Science, a science communication community that cares about restoring care to the storytelling of scientific discovery. Not only is the website wonderfully both rigorous and easy on the eye, the writing takes you on a journey. Clearly she and her colleagues are doing something right by teaching scienti...

This week’s guest is Epiphany Jordan of Austin, Texas – a nurturing touch professional whose therapy sessions help triage the crisis of loneliness and touch-hunger facing billions of tech-immersed but intimacy-stranded people. In her new book, Somebody Hold Me: The Single Person’s Guide to Nurturing Human Touch, Epiphany explains how to get your basic touch needs met – consensually – outside of ro...

This week it's a deep dive into futurist Stowe Boyd's research on Social Scaling, Boundless Curiosity, Deep Generalists, Emergent Leadership, and other major features in the metamorphic landscape of the 21st Century workplace. We live in an age when our human cognitive limits are being tested against a proliferation of possibilities in the digital space – and we zealously rush into always-on inter...

This week is part two of the intense, bizarre, and wonderful roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we discuss the puzzling connection between clowns and DMT; John’s voyage into the strange realm of mediumship; and Michael’s life-altering series of UFO encounters right after college. Among other things… The Guest...

This week, we have a rad roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we talk Snow Crash, Linguistic Entropy, and The Metaphysics of Video Games; spoil Meow Wolf and Annihilation (warning!); and go deep on the origins of Hypnotherapy and NLP. It’s just part one of an intense three-hour hoedown with some of the sharpest...

Happy holidays! This week’s guest Tricia Eastman helps people find the holiness in every day by facilitating legal ceremonies in which ordinary membranes in between the different areas of thought and non-thought relax, and new or somehow ancient greater selves emerge appear whatever. It’s a solid conversation with a fascinating person doing very crucial work. I hope you get as much from this dense...

This week we sit with Bill Pfeiffer – deep ecologist, shamanic guide, and spiritual coach – whose life carried him from nuclear protests on the US East Coast to citizen diplomacy to Russia, where he first encountered Siberian shamans and became immersed, over decades and dozens of visits, in their traditions of ecstasy and communion, with realms and intelligences deeper than the world of identity...

This week's guests are two of the most limber and insightful minds I know, futurist Michelle Shevin and actor-artist "The Ungoogleable" Michaelangelo. Since this is episode one of a whole new hundred episodes – and since I'm a sucker for ceremony and round numbers – this week we're taking a whirlwind tour of this show's recurring themes: how life, mind, culture, psychology, art, and science all ch...

This week’s guest is The Teafaerie, my amazing friend and a true one-of-a-kind psychedelic superhero. The Teafaerie writes stories, poems, movies, plays and essays, makes videos, organizes flash mobs, and is one of the founders of Prometheatrics, a big beautiful Esplanade camp at Burning Man. At various times she has been a writer, nanny, actress, flow arts teacher, childbirth doula, homeless pers...

This week’s guest is Erik Davis – one of my great inspirations, someone who has influenced me and this podcast in immeasurable ways since I first encountered his amazing criticism, histories, and “seen it all” visionary cool – I still recommend his first nonfiction book (Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information) on a near-daily basis, and his show Expanding Mind has got to...

It’s a deep and wide investigation of decentralized networks of many kinds this week, drawing on the insights and wisdoms of five very different panelists in a discussion held at the legendary experimental city-under-construction Arcosanti, Arizona. Like it’s a rainforest, I don’t even know how to start talking about this conversation – too many points of entry, too many species living in it! Here...

This week’s guest is Dr. Zak Stein, an author and educator whom I met as fellow students of the work of philosopher Ken Wilber over ten years ago. Zak took the road of serious high academic scholarship while I was learning the less laudable and messier way through immersion in the arts and entertainment world, but here we are converging to discuss one of the most important issues of our time: the...

This week’s guest is the intriguing, talented, and amazingly well-organized Malena Grosz, who is currently traveling across the United States to interview party culture professionals for her multimedia thesis on community-led party culture to gain and share their perspectives on best practices and shared challenges in cultivating better life through celebratory gatherings – and to tackle the corpo...

This week’s episode is the conclusion of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert.  Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his expe...

This week’s episode is the first of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience...