Future Fossils

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 romantic relationship. In our conversation we talk about why this is such a widespread issue, how people are fumbling their attempts to connect with one another, and what to do about it.Her Website:nurturinghumantouch.comPrinted Book:amazon.com/gp/product/1732879206?pf_rd_p=c2945051-950f-485c-b4df-15aac5223b10&pf_rd_r=VGPWK0WEF50A2TD8YA3T  E-Book:amazon.com/Somebody-Hold-Me-Persons-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B07MM6FFBD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=somebody+hold+me&qid=1550610978&s=gateway&sr=8-2Support Future Fossils on Patreon and get access to secret episodes, our sci fi book club, and more:https://patreon.com/michael

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 internet work, open office co-working spaces, enormous distributed online collaborations, and other novelties that seem to be more about the infinite capacity of our electronic tools than the finite reality of our minds and bodies.Stowe Boyd has been studying and reporting on the future of work for over a decade, and his blog Work Futures is one of my cherished news sources for understanding how “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Talking with him is a blast of cool reason and warm humor about the insanity of the modern work environment and the impossible demands that it makes on us – pointing toward more luc

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 Guests:Michael Aaron Kaminshttps://twitter.com/michaelaaronkJohn David Eberthttps://twitter.com/johndavidebertIkkyu Sojunhttps://twitter.com/mimeticvalueSubscribe to Future Fossils on any platform you desire:https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossilsSupport this show on Patreon. It’s good for you and makes you feel good:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldWe Discuss:How everyone gets their own language once we invent the universal translator.Addressing the question of hyperspace “entities” from nonduality and landscape agency.Clown/Harlequin Theory in the psychedelic realm.JDE:“Now I don’t wanna do DMT. You’ve ruined it for me, b

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 minds I know…The Guests in Order of Appearance:Michael Aaron Kaminshttps://twitter.com/michaelaaronkJohn David Eberthttps://twitter.com/johndavidebertIkkyu Sojunhttps://twitter.com/mimeticvalueSupport this show on Patreon. It’s good for you and makes you feel good:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldWe Talk About:Michael Aaron Kamins:“Shigiro Miyamoto is the Dante of the Hypermodern Age.”Mario is a shaman, Link is Percival of the Round Table…NextNature.net, the Anthropocene, and the Wood Wide WebAre videogames more effective than books as a form of storytelling?John David Ebert likes Grand Theft Auto: “Video games ar

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 hour of passage, insight, integration…Tricia’s Sites:psychedelicjourneys.cominstagram.com/psychedelicjourneysWe Discuss:How she became a plant medicine practitioner through the festival psychedelic harm reduction undergroundLeaving a husband, four houses, and all of her possessions to be of service to humanityOvercoming her severe, debilitating eating disorders with ibogaine, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO DMTHow to smuggle the sacred into the global shopping mallReviving the ecstatic mystery schools and other lost spiritual traditionsCoping with the aftermath of collectively “waking up in a burning house” as we make last-minu

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 and politics. A friend of Joanna Macy’s, founder of the Sacred Earth Network, and leader of hundreds of spiritual ecology workshops, Bill has dedicated his life to being a bridge between Native American & Siberian cultures, between alienated humans and the wisdom of the Earth, between heart and mind, future and past.https://billpfeiffer.org/biohttp://www.sacredearthnetwork.netSupport Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon to join our book club, access secret episodes, and more:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldIn this episode, we discuss:Reconnecting to nature, to the bodyHow political activism for nuclear disarmamen

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 change in the Internet Age, and how to live the best lives that we can amidst these transformations...Support the show for exclusive episodes, music, a book club, and more:patreon.com/michaelgarfieldMichelle Shevinmedium.com/@micheboxMichaelangelovoidandimagination.comWe Discuss:• Kronos & Kairos, revisited• Re: JF Martel – Episodes 18 & 71 • The information science of innovation and why Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero may not be TOTAL hogwash• Book: Geoff West - Scale• Re: “An Oral History of the End of ‘Reality’” – Episode 91 • IS our time unique at all?• WJT Mitchell paraphrase: “We’re all constantly feeling

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 person, aid worker, live-action storyteller, toy inventor, app designer, street performer, and party promoter. She is a frequent contributor to the worlds most excellent psychedelic information site Erowid.org. She also regularly volunteers as a festival trip sitter with the Zendo Project and RGX medical.Her most recent essay on Erowid:https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2016/05/17/mapping-the-source/My favorite of her essays:https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/page/18/More about psychedelic harm reduction:https://www.zendoproject.org/We Discuss:Why it’s okay that the Elon Musk will get (to beta-test) immortalit

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 be my number one most-listened podcast of all time.Erik is a native Californian Gen X mystic who played no small part in the explosive West Coast visionary cyperpunk scene in the 1990s alongside folks like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Doug Rushkoff, and Jaron Lanier. But he’s taking a profoundly different stance these days, with a Religious Studies PhD in hand and a new book at the printers, drawing on his thirty-plus years experience investigating modern life’s weird marginalia to help us navigate a world in which the weird’s no longer marginal.https://techgnosis.comhttps://mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-

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 are this week’s fabulous guests:Emaline Friedman of Holochainhttps://herlinus.com/Sarah Johnstone, COO of The NuMundo Projecthttps://numundo.org/aboutJacob Devaney of Unify http://www.culturecollective.org/about/“Raven” Mitch Mignano, loosely “of” Reality Sandwich & Institute of Ecotechnicshttps://facebook.com/mitch.mignano.77––Support this show, and Michael's many other awesome projects, on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on any platform you desire:https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossilsJoin the Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsRecommend a sponsor:futurefossils@protonm

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 need for a new human story that includes both modernity’s rigorous scientific inquiry and postmodernity’s revelation of how everything we know is framed by language, culture, and perspective. Without some clever, soulful balance of the two we’re stuck in a “post-truth” era where our need for answers to our fundamental questions leads us backwards into “isms” instead of forwards into something more good, true, and beautiful than what has come before.Zak’s answer (like so many other guests on Future Fossils) is to get MORE rigorous about the scope and limits of the world disclosed by science, MORE honest with ourselves

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 corporate commodification of “nightlife” and its dangerous side effects.Her website-as-thesis-project will eventually be live (circa May 2019) at:http://partyprotoolkit.comWe Discuss:Gentrification and corporatization of nightlife versus community-led celebration, What urban nightlife can learn from Burning Man and festival culture, The disavowal of mundane time in spaces of celebration and how party culture does and does not need to accept the realities of our organic rhythms,Mentorship, moderation, self-control, personal agency, Reconciling the nomadic and sedentary strains of humanity,Taking responsibility for your own

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 experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture. I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. Mark’s tale of his two years living under glas

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 in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture. I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass wit

This week’s guest is one of my favorite living musicians, acoustic guitarist Andreas Kapsalis. We linked up at the magical experimental city of Arcosanti, Arizona last year during their Convergence event, at which we both performed, and talked about life as itinerant musicians drawing on a wealth of world cultures and traditions. This is a humbler and more human episode of Future Fossils – hope that you enjoy it!http://www.akguitar.com/https://www.facebook.com/Andreaskapsalisguitar/Watch a video of Andreas playing his composition, “Ethnos”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnogdfXyWIoWe Discuss:Being raised in a musical family and how being musical changes one’s experience of time.The cultural influences of Greece and Andalusian musics and their vocabulary of odd time signatures and harmonies and energies.His love for the Old West and Arizona’s cowboy movie landscape…and the “freaking weird mutation” of Arcosanti’s aberrant European retro-future architecture in the desert.Why is the West Coast of anywhere like

This week’s a treat – not one, but FOUR amazing guests, in Future Fossils Podcast’s first live taping at EFF-Austin, 10 July 2017. Heather Barfield (Head of EFF-Austin Digital Arts Coalition and Director of Development, Vortex Theater); Maggie Duval (Chief Experience Liaison, 7th Generation Labs & Senior Developer, Polycot Associates, LLC); Paul Toprac (Associate Director of Game Development at UT, RTF Department, and Senior Lecturer); and Kevin Welch (President of EFF-Austin, Fullstack Web Developer at Texas Legislative Council) joined me for one of the most visionary conversations this show’s ever published – and certainly the most politically aware episode to date, as well.Yes, this is about “The Pre- and Post-History of Virtual Reality, Surveillance, and Swarm Intelligence” – and a lot more else, to boot. Just strap in and enjoy…The whole event was streamed live if you’d rather watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2hNX9eM6kFull bios for each panelist and more info about EFF-Austin:https://www.meetu

This week’s episode is an experiment in science fiction storytelling – the author-read short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality.’” Originally released to Patreon supporters (without the intro or musical soundtrack) last November, this story brings together many of the core themes of Future Fossils: the challenges of navigating overwhelming and contradictory information online; the new literacies that will emerge in response to AI-assisted “deep fakes” that make conventional evidence inadmissible in courts or scientific journals; the thinning veil between our physical senses and the ethereal realm of data; and the experience of time in a future when possibility, prediction, and recording stretch out in all directions (but unreliably).My first adult foray into the world of science fiction, this piece was inspired – nay, made necessary – by the recent news about new vocal synthesis AI that lets consumers edit audio and video and manufacture wholly new, convincing forgeries that sound and look exactly

This week we chat with science writer (and former laser physicist) Kate Greene, whose writing explores everything from Big Data to boredom to brain scans, and whose fascinating and eclectic life is brightly punctuated by the four months she spent living inside a Mars base simulation on Hawaii.http://www.kategreene.net/about/We Discuss:How she became a scientist, and then a science writer.The importance of good teachers and mentorship and encouragement along a person’s developmental journey.“Everything that I’ve done is the result of network effects.”Her time as a guinea pig in a simulated Mars colony on Hawaii…Why astronauts love hot sauce.Knowing your purpose - feeling the intuitive hit that lets you know you’re on the right path.Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab and the scientific evidence for the influence of intention on the outcome of random events.Kate’s fascination with brain scans.“I often wonder, what the hell is my brain doing right now?”Terence McKenna’s vision of posthuman, cephalopod skin telep

This week we have a roundtable discussion (which took place around an actual table in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, José Soler, and Jacob Aman, the hosts and producers of Future Primitive Podcast (600+ episodes and going strong!). Joanna, as you may remember from episode 0020, has been a psychedelic raconteur for her entire adult life, famously snuck LSD into prison for her lover Timothy Leary, and wears her age with an incomparable flair and zest that ought to be an example to all of us. She’s joined with her current partner and Future Primitive co-founder José Soler, as well as our mutual friend and Future Primitive co-host Jacob Aman (who is also close friends with Future Fossils guest and friend Bruce Damer).It’s a conversation about…well, everything, really. But mostly breakdowns and breakthroughs, and what it’s going to take for us to steer civilization toward the better of those options. Enjoy!https://futureprimitive.org/about/We Discuss:Intergenerational communication & listeni

This week we’re blessed to chat with living legend, ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna – one of the most rigorous scientific intellects working with psychedelics in the modern era, responsible with his late brother Terence for popularizing the techniques for cultivation of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms, co-author of numerous books on psychoactive plant and fungal medicines and their curious effects on consciousness, and an outspoken advocate for cognitive liberty psychedelic research.(Dennis has appeared, subliminally, on nearly every episode of Future Fossils – one of his talks was sampled by my original co-host Evan "Skytree" Snyder for his track “God Detector” – in which I also appear as a guest guitarist – which I still use as the intro and outro music.)In this conversation we push into a DIFFERENT kind of conversation about psychedelic science – not the science of psychedelics as a tool for therapy, but science using psychedelics the way we use telescopes or MRI machines – to let us see in ways we ordinarily