Future Fossils

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 exist from birth to death. It’s turtles all the way down! Tag an anti-natalist friend and have them give it a listen…Learn more about and register for Siv's 2022 course on Thinking Like A Plague.Find the complete, extensive show notes — and support the show for superb extras — on Patreon. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

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 tech company to the next. What is the relationship between making it big by connecting people and fighting the entropic onslaught of externality production? We take it back to the middle of the 20th Century to find out: from kid gangs in the DC Beltway to MIT to writing computer models of the atmosphere of Jupiter, car salesman and college textbook peddler, suddenly we’re talking about building planet-wide networks of gravity wave detection telescopes and mutually non-commensurable village sex cults? Rivalry and non-rivalry in companies and governance. Holocracy and sociocracy. Are we prophets or fools? Or perhaps mo

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 everyone to get on the same page, much less come to a final agreement about anything — but the real value of discussions like these lies in the tension between perspectives, and the intertidal zone is fertile, here, indeed.You can watch the unedited panel recording on YouTube (but I recommend listening instead, as the work that went into editing this was immense).For the COMPLETE show notes, including copious additional learning resources, find this episode on Patreon.More About Our Guests:Park BachRESEARCHER AT FIGMENT.IO; LIBRARIAN AT GITCOINCoordination Problems • Initial Conditions • Emergent Intent • Group PrioritySidd

 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 unspeakable, heyoka medicine, astrology, the enneagram, the tarot, hermes the scientist versus hermes the communicator, the “flaveregore”, a speculative science dao that can and will fund taboo research, how the street finds its own uses for things, time binding and prediction and tarot and algorithmic policing, the divine value of boredom, and more.Scout on Twitter | FacebookFind the COMPLETE show notes for this episode here.✨ Housekeeping• If you want to see these conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get extra podcasts each month, book club

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 conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get extra podcasts each month, book club calls, and early access to new writing, art, and music.• Meet great people and have awesome conversations in our Discord Server & Facebook Group, which is going to convert to patrons-only in January 2022.• When you’d rather listen to music, follow me on Bandcamp or Spotify. (Here are my listening recommendations.)✨ Music & Art by Michael Garfield• Intro music from the Martian Arts EP. • Outro music: "Seeing Like A State" available soon to Patreon and Bandcamp suppo

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 tomorrow (11/14) for a panel on complex systems science and the evolution of Web3 — more info here. Hope you can join us!Dig into the complete show notes for this episode on Patreon. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

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 superb trip preparation algorithm “ecodelic,” how psychoactive plants and fungi are once again calling for the innovation of new language, and the urgency of helping people reconnect to the sacred wilderness that ecodelics reveal is not simply “outside.” It's brief but glorious.If you want to see these conversations thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and leave a good review on Apple Podcasts!Dig up the full show notes at https://www.patreon.com/posts/58002643/. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a p

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 Intelligences Summer Institute this July and immediately knew I had to have him on for what turned out to be one of my favorites yet. Get ready to unravel what you think you know about the ways you come to your decisions, allocate your trust, and sort the chaos of experience…Due to some inexplicable technical nonsense I can't add the full liner notes here, so please find extensive additional resources (including all of the papers, books, and podcasts we mention) at Patreon (where, by the way, your membership grants you extra podcasts each month, book club calls, and early access to new writing, art, and music).✨ Support th

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 their mimicry of people and machines, and riff on the manipulative utility of cuteness for both good and evil.In part two, available to Patreon supporters later this week, we talk about Evan’s work to reconstruct the soundscapes of The Age of Dinosaurs, his experiments with using radioactive mineral samples to control modular synthesizers, and his reflections on the use of sound for deep-time communication with future humans and/or extraterrestrials…✨ Go Deeper• If you value this show and would like to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you ge

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, personality types as insurance strategies, the good, bad, and ugly of memes, and how to live with the worst parts of psychedelic capitalism.Learn more about Daniel at tamintegration.com, sitaramdas.com, Instagram, and Twitter.Get 10% off your ticket for the The Third Annual Psilocybin Summit (16-20 September 2021) and enjoy my live Future Fossils panel with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy — as well as presentations by dozens of other amazing contributors — at psilocybinsummit.com/garfield.✨ Housekeeping• If you value this show and would like to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please

 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 discovery by two people perhaps already a little bit TOO familiar with one another’s work. Tyson inhabits an awesome position at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems, complexity science, cultural criticism, multimedia art and design, and dreaming and scheming on applications for ancient wisdom in the digital and post-digital eras.Check out the EXTENSIVE full liner notes at Patreon, where you can also support the show for extra episodes each month, invites to our book & film club, and new writing, art, and music. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on

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 own future-sight might be of evolutionary benefit, why retrocausalists don’t believe in randomness, how culture is a tesseract and dreams are future fossils, the controversy of divinatory astrology, and how pre-shocks of future traumas explain some of the more puzzling facts of history.✨ Housekeeping:If you value this show and would like to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get two extra episodes a month, invites to our book club, and new writing, art, and music.• Meet great people and have equally great conversations in the Discord Ser

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 omnivorous amateur enthusiasm that pervaded it before I started worrying about defining these investigations for an audience.Here is just a set of sampling slices from our most heartfelt and epic yarn, in which Michael talks about taking care of his father, who suffers Alzheimer’s; about getting back out of city life and onto the road in the American Southwest, communing with the landscape; about nonduality and artistry and memory and transpersonal somatics and their implications…It is an honor to meld with this guy, especially as my first not-exactly-post-pandemic, back-in-person podcast with a friend in the same room s

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 who inspire, Leidy has taught thousands of students, including 21 Ph.D. advisees, whose designing and teaching shapes the world. He founded and directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which brings together scholars, funders, media, and practitioners to advance behavioral science for design.We discuss the human cognitive bias to try and solve a problem by adding new elements rather than by subtracting pieces from the problem; how deeply-rooted and pernicious this is in both our evolution and our economics, and how it has contributed to the complex and compounding crises in which we find ourselves today; t

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 Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about the pandemic’s distortions of time and community, flow states and festival time, gatherings in the No New Normal, running a festival and record label at the same time, comparing the potentials of festivals and urban nightlife, the impact of stage design and architecture on how community events shape individual experience, the tension between intimacy and scale, my hatred of silent disco and multiple simultaneous competing sound systems, DMT and other life-changing experiences, the good parts of tribalism, psychedelic int

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, the world’s first space-focused angel investment group. His new book is Space Is Open for Business: The Industry That Can Transform Humanity (sample it | buy the hardcover).In this episode, we discuss the bright and dark sides of the emerging space industry — from the inspirational and unifying 1970s visions of Gerard O’Neill to the 2020s’ clash of barons, SpaceX vs. Blue Origin, and the challenges of regulation in a space of blindingly fast innovation and massive inequality. 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

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 biases” are really fairly understood as biases when they’re the result of a rational learning process, we explore links to the quantified self, and we advocate for epistemic humility — and the need, no matter our incomplete understanding, to nonetheless still Do Something…If you agree this show should thrive, become a Patreon supporter and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! You can also buy the books I talk about from indie stores at bookshop.org/shop/futurefossils.Other Links:Anna on FB: “Rationality ≠ Rationalism”Anna’s Cognitive Science MapEffective Altruism AustriaEffective Altruism Redbubble Design Shop80,000 Hou

“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. And then it took time to find the ceremony. And then I would have to wait. Then wait some more. More than money, or photons, this book is made from time.”“Our religion, which is the religion of quantification and measurement” has transformed the world. This week on Future Fossils, we talk to Kevin Kelly about his three-volume photojournal Vanishing Asia, a style archive collected over 50 years and countless miles, winnowed down from 200,000 pictures.We talk about what it is to remember, to preserve, to capture, to restore, to reimagine… Preservation bias in the archaeological history of technology,Cosmology and religio

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 profound academic paper, "Transtemporality and The Technology of Indigenous Kinship: The Science of Remembering Ourselves."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 over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our monthly book club, and many other wondrous things.Music by Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder.Enjoy, and thanks for listening!_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_Also Discussed In This Episode:Violet Luxton at LinkedInSaki Mafundikwa —

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 Internet of Money” as an exemplary instance of biomimicry and argues that Bitcoin is doing for human finance what mycelial networks have done for terrestrial biology. And I wade in with more than my usual helping of paradoxically-critical enthusiasm to ask if “natural” really equals “healthy” or “desirable” in our rush to serve the evolutionary algorithm of technological development.  This one should appeal to anybody on the “Transhumanist Bitcoin Bro to Luddite Biodynamic Farmer” spectrum…share your thoughts about the episode in ourFuture Fossils Discord server or Facebook group, where it’s easy to link up with ama