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

This week we go deep in part two of my epic four-hour conversation with documentarian and gonzo journalist Charles Shaw – one of this show’s most requested return guests. In part one, Charles laid out the map of the problem: a world in crisis, an age of epidemic trauma and addiction. In this episode, we get into his self-experimentation with sleep deprivation to understand the hallucinatory realit...

This week’s guest is media theorist, culture critic, author, graphic novelist, documentarian, and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff! Chances are you’re a “digital native” banking on “social currency” and consuming “viral media” – which means that you are living in the world Doug prophesied for all of us back in the 1990s.  I watched his debut documentary on social marketing, Merchants of Cool , in my col...

This week we chat with the philosopher and sociologist John Danaher about the book Robot Sex: Social & Ethical Implications , a fascinating collection of academic articles on our sexbot future he just co-edited with Neil McArthur. (John also runs the blog Philosophical Disquisitions, which has been an awesome resource for deep thinking online for over a decade.) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/...

This week’s guest is independent culture critic John David Ebert – mythologist, philosopher, art historian, author of twenty-six books, and co-founder (with John Lobell) of http://cultural-discourse.com .  We talk about the rich mythological references of Blade Runner 2049 in light of the larger – and very urgent – matter of mechanizing human reproduction and the (actually rather ancient) male que...

This week: Science Fiction Übermenschen & A Critique of Space Colonization with film scholar Barry Vacker, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. We talk about the critique of contemporary science fiction cinema in his new book, Specter of the Monolith – pointing past the spiritual shortcomings of our relationship to space, and toward a future human being that has both grown in both...

This week’s guest is David Bronner, grandson of Dr. Emanuel Bronner and the heir to and CEO (“Cosmic Engagement Officer”) of Dr. Bronner’s Soap Company. He’s also an outspoken advocate for psychedelic medicines and visionary culture, and has used his wealth and influence in awesome ways to support the collective healing of American society. In this episode we discuss his advocacy and activism, and...

[NOTE: We had a publishing error last week and most subscribers missed Episode 61 with Jamaica Stevens on Crisis, Rebirth, and Transformation! Definitely worth going back to listen to this awesome chat.] David Krantz is a personal nutrition and genetics coach, sound therapy technician, and electronic music producer based in Asheville, NC.   http://david-krantz.com   Subscribe to this show: Apple P...

This week’s guest is the inspirational badass Jamaica Stevens, key organizer for the Reinhabiting the Village project and Lucid University, and this show’s first pregnant guest (at the time of recording). We dive immediately into the deep end of our half-finished collective birthing process and how to navigate the difficult transition we’re all going through…   http://www.jamaicastevens.com/ http:...

  Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the sharpest and most insightful people I know, and an globally-recognized expert and pioneer in the emerging meta-discipline of integral theory and practice.   The former chair of John F. Kennedy University’s Integral Studies department, co-author (with Michael Zimmerman) of Integral Ecology, co-founder (with Mark Forman) of the international Integral Theory Confe...

Radical documentarian, activist, and raconteur Charles Shaw joins Future Fossils Podcast this week for part one of an epic double (possibly triple) episode.  https://vimeo.com/nomadcinema  Subscribe to this show:  Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify Join our Facebook Discussion Group  We Discuss: • The plight of the despised underclasses and the dark constellation of the Drug War, addiction, depor...

  This week’s guest is comedian Shane Mauss, whose psychedelic standup A Good Trip blew minds at over 100 tour stops last year, and whose documentary film Psychonautics takes us on Shane’s adventures in psychedelic therapies.  He also hosts the Here We Are Podcast, where he interviews scientists of all stripes and mines their research for standup inspiration… Shane’s always been a rigorous thinker...

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion Group This week I’m lucky to sit with two extremely cool occultist philosophers: gay porn star Conner Habib & our mutual old friend, professional gambler turned journalist and record producer Mitch Mignano. We have a conversation about how life is observed and understood by occult philosophies - how organisms are perce...

This week’s guest is Sophia Rokhlin, whom I met in Portugal at Boom Festival 2016, and who just finished her Master’s of Ecological Economics in Barcelona last fall. Sophia’s currently at work on a number of cool projects, including The Environmental Justice Atlas – a database of environmental conflicts happening around the world. She’s also helping Daniel Pinchbeck write a book on ayahuasca and h...

We’re living through a mass extinction – which is also one of the most awesome opportunities for creativity the Earth has ever seen. In this talk that I gave at Burning Man 2017’s Palenque Norte Speaker Series, I give a short tour of Great Catastrophes of Natural History and show how each of them was also equally the advent of new life, intelligence, diversity, and richness.  Studying how crisis i...

Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion Group Support this show and get cool stuff  This week’s guest is futurist and mythographer Maya Zuckerman, member of IEEE and author of the young adult science fiction series Em’s Theory.  https://www.mayazuckerman.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayazuckerman/  We Discuss: • What it’s like to be a woman futu...

Merry X-(is for Xenomorph)-mas, everyone! This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird f...

In a special episode so timely that I couldn’t wait a week to publish, I sit down with Jennifer Sodini ( EvolveAndAscend.com ) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology.  Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new...

This week’s guest is Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Neurohacker Collective – one smart dude! Must be the nootropics. We have an awesome conversation about what it will take for us to thrive through our Age of Transition and into the emergent world that works for all, not just a few of us. His company: http://neurohacker.com His blog: http://civilizationemerging.com   Some Topics We Discuss: • How...

Ayana Young didn’t even go camping until she was 25. Now she lives in a cabin she built herself in the redwoods of Northern California and manages a 477-acre native species nursery wilderness rehabilitation project (as well as an amazing podcast). This week’s episode is a candid, personal discussion about how awakening to our participation in nature is the key to both our survival and our spiritua...

This week’s guest is visionary artist Jake Kobrin, whose digital paintings explore a gorgeous, dark, evocative terrain of non-ordinary human experience and twist religious iconography into a metamorphic form well-suited to our psychedelic modern era. We discuss his painting “Black Madonna” and the return and healing of the repressed feminine – not just women, but the body, the psychological shadow...

Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group Support Future Fossils on Patreon This week’s guest is my friend Lindsay, a professional mermaid who uses her performances to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. She also boasts 60 pushups in two minutes and the ability to transform phone-addicted schoolchildren into avid gardeners. https://www.facebook.com/mer...

In one of the most QUOTABLE episodes of Future Fossils yet, this week’s guest is Eliot Peper – a “novelist and strategist” writing fiction and consulting businesses about the social implications of disruptive technologies. In addition to writing a steady stream of sci-fi inflected techno-thrillers like True Blue and Cumulus, he’s an editor at Scout. AI (one of the cooler speculative fiction websit...

This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network.    Bloom Network: http://bloomnetwork.org   Magenta’s Personal Website: http://www.imaginationhealer.com/   We discuss:   - The adoption of regenerative culture practices; - Cultivating planetwide resiliency in an age of thousands of years of unprocessed grief and trauma; - Web native...

This week’s guest is philosopher Kerri Welch, whose doctoral thesis from CIIS (and current book-in-progress) explore a fractal model of time. If you have ever wondered about time, this episode is for you. Instant classic.   Kerri’s Academic Papers & Talks: https://ciis.academia.edu/KerriWelch   Kerri’s Blog: https://textureoftime.wordpress.com   We take a wild tour through the layers of the hu...

This week’s guest is tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan, who regards his practice as a sacred act and tattoo as a kind of binding of time in the body. https://www.mountaintempletattoo.com/   We talk about: • how he became a tattoo artist and came into “transformational tattooing” as a way of communicating with and programming the subconscious mind; • other ways we bind time into matter with earthwo...