Future Fossils

Lydia Violet Harutoonian is a badass Armenian-American violinist and folktronica artist who has played with some of today’s juiciest crossover acts, including Rising Appalachia and The Polish Ambassador, in addition to launching her own solo project this year. She also works with the supremely wise Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects, and leads singing workshops in which she applies her lifetime of music and work with Macy to teach music as a form of collective healing.Links:https://lydiafiddle.comhttps://workthatreconnects.orgWe Discuss:• How being monogamous in San Francisco is practically a form of bondage – a delicious kind, one expression of love in a whole ecology of relational styles;• The collaborative and improvisational super powers of the unique musical instrument we call a violin;• How can we use music to metabolize our fear and grief as communities?;• The power of song in building resilience;• Working with Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects;• How the expanded, int

This episode’s guest is Arthur Brock, currency design expert and lead visionary behind the Holochain project – which just might be the basis for the truly free, encrypted, peer-to-peer, surveillance-resistant, voluntary, non-exploitative Web we’ve all been dreaming about since the 1990s.Described by many as a “blockchain killer,” Holochain offers users an endlessly scalable and secure decentralized platform for our lives online, inspired by the fractal branching flows and emergent order we observe in nature.You don’t have to be a cryptocurrency enthusiast or economics wonk to appreciate the smarts and wisdom that Art brings to his work – or to understand why he’s spent the last ten years teaching people about a new paradigm of currency and governance.This is an introduction to a whole new way of thinking about what matters most to you – whatever that might be – as well as how Art and the Holochain team are working day and night to help us ditch the scarcity mindset, and to give us the tools for building a mor

This week’s guest is George Dvorsky, futurist, science journalist, and long-time contributing editor at legendary sci/fi blog io9 at http://gizmodo.com.http://twitter.com/dvorskyhttp://kinja.com/georgedvorskyhttp://www.sentientdevelopments.com/https://io9.gizmodo.com/20-crucial-terms-every-21st-century-futurist-should-kno-1545499202We Discuss:• Today’s explosive evolution of AI personal assistants, and where it’s heading…• Will children today, immersed in a world of AI dolls and smarthome devices that speak to them by name, grow up with a different idea of what entities deserve our moral concern?• The pressing cybersecurity and surveillance problems we encounter in the process of filling our lives with internet-connected devices.• Autonomous vehicles and weapons and the ethics of machine intelligence.• The history of our attempts to suppress or prevent the industrialization of warfare.• AI as proxy selves that we can deputize to act as us, on our behalf…• What kind of literacies will we need to have in a worl

This week’s guest is James Eggleston, research and business development at Power Ledger, a blockchain software company helping the world build a resilient decentralized electrical utilities networks that’s more resistant to the turbulence of our century – and lets all of us participate in and earn from distributed power production.Power Ledger:https://powerledger.io/https://twitter.com/powerledger_io?lang=enJames:https://twitter.com/jamesbychance?lang=enWe Discuss:• The history of dematerialization and the shift from things to data;• The logic and practice of decentralizing our infrastructure;• Why solar makes more sense than coal, no matter what you believe;• How we’re going to build a distributed global renewable energy market;• How we can have a tech-positive attitude and answer to existential risk (ie, the Yellowstone Supervolcano, super solar flares, massive cyberattacks, etc.);• How James integrates the principle of resilience into his whole life – in particular, his commitment to intense physical train

Visionary artist Archan Nair joins Future Fossils this week for an infectiously fun conversation about the new creative opportunities of the digital age.http://www.archann.net/• How learning to use new tools is a little like dying;• Archan’s history of using computers for art;• The feedback loop between evolving tools and evolving artists;• How to stay clear-eyed and full-hearted about the always-on awesomeness of the world, and not let the daily BS drag you down;• The role of the nondual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta in his life and creative process;• The exclusivity of the present when we investigate subjectivity (“The past and future don’t exist; only now exists”)• How is the all-encompassing now of eastern mysticism different from the “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” of our eidetic and prophetic virtual existences?• What does the practice of Vedanta teach us about how to receive rapid change as an opportunity for transformation rather than as an overwhelm and assault on what we hold dear?• The

“The best anti-virus is common sense.”This episode’s guest is Dylan Curran, a cybersecurity specialist who recently went viral after his exposé tweets about the personal information Google and Facebook collected about him were shared by Edward Snowden. Strap in for an uncomfortable close look at just how little privacy we have online – it’s even worse than you already knew – but also, some straight, practical advice for how to navigate the “glass house” we all live in now, with safety, dignity, and savvy.Dylan:https://twitter.com/iamdylancurranhttp://dylancurran.netHere is his epic Twitter thread about how “The internet knows more about you than you do”:https://twitter.com/i/moments/977591863732527106Dylan works with two privacy-focused search engines:http://duckduckgo.comhttp://presearch.org• Why there isn’t any good way to hide who you are online anymore;• The difference between anonymity and pseudonymity, and why that matters to everyone investing in blockchain tech and crypto assets;• Why our notions of p

Self-aware machines, organs on a chip, brain-entangled meta-human military units, smart-sensor-gridded coral reefs, drone flocks, DNA-based computing, robots having baby robots…the line between the “made” and “born” is getting blurrier and blurrier each day. What does it mean to be alive in a time when we already treat the corporation as a legal person, fall in love with chat bots, and “possess” telepresence robots in virtual reality for work?This talk is a three-part argument:1 - The Internet is usefully understood as a psychedelic substance, in that it remixes what we ordinarily think of as “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “other.”2 - The psychological effects of the Internet are, then, usefully addressed through the methods of psychedelic harm reduction (like MAPS’ Zendo Project, techniques developed by the Women’s Visionary Congress, or KosmiCare in Europe).3 - Because the Internet remixes everything, it casts our categories of “made” and “born,” “alive” and “mechanical” into question – and suggests a m

This episode’s guest is David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute – the world’s pre-eminent research center for complexity science. We discuss SFI’s new Interplanetary Project and how they are weaving scientists, engineers, science fiction authors, concept artists, and musicians together into a new collaborative storytelling and visioning project about how we can sustainably scale human civilization beyond Earth – and help spark a renaissance of Big Picture thinking and Big Problem solving worthy of our species in this century.About SFI and the Interplanetary Project:https://santafe.edu/research/initiatives/interplanetary-projectAbout the Interplanetary Fest:https://interplanetaryfest.org/lineupCool local news coverage about David & The Interplanetary Project:https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2017/07/11/out-of-this-world/“Part of my job, and SFI’s job, is to not allow people to imagine that they’re living in isolation – IN ANY SENSE. Right? Socially, intellectually, economically, tech

Terry Patten is a lifelong practitioner of both contemplative spirituality and real-world activism whose new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide To Inner Work for Holistic Change, gives us lucid instructions for how we can start to ask the hardest questions and engage the toughest problems in our age of global transformation.https://www.terrypatten.com/a-new-republic-of-the-heart/I met Terry in 2005 when he was teaching how to recognize and integrate the psychological “shadow,” our repressed unconscious, at a seminar for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. His warmth, humility, and generosity of spirit is palpable in this conversation, and reflects the decades of experience that has inspired his latest writing…it’s an honor to have Terry on the show, thirteen years after he transformed my life by teaching me how to engage and love the hardest, most unpleasant parts of my own mind.In one of Future Fossils Podcast’s most vulnerable episodes yet,We Discuss:- How to deal with new

Patricia Gray is an animal music researcher, working with all kinds of creatures (humans, whales, songbirds, bonobos, even coral reefs) to understand what functions pitch and rhythm have in animal communication, how the sound of our living planet is actually a symphony of hidden meaning, and how to improve our lives by embracing the innate musicality of our human brains.https://research.uncg.edu/patricia-gray/We Discuss:• How she went from being a concert pianist to the chamber music director for the National Academy of Sciences to the piano-playing lead of a National Science Foundation-funded research lab;(http://www.wildmusic.org/research)• How our understanding of animal communication has shifted over the last few decades from using human language to using music as the orienting metaphor;• The evolution of (and scientific study of the evolution of) music-making in our species;• Pitch discrimination, beat entrainment, and musical memory (rhythm and frequency pattern detection, musical memory and capacity fo

Biological Time Travel: Organ Regeneration & Brain Reanimation – Turning back time in cells and tissues with the new medical techniques of bio-logics, simulating “t = 1” in the human body...This week’s guest is Ira Pastor, CEO of the revolutionary biomedical firm BioQuark in Philadelphia. I had no idea who these people were until Ira messaged me about appearing on the show…and I’m so glad he did, because otherwise I don’t k now when I would have learned about their work with new techniques that enable truly miraculous treatment of brain trauma, catastrophic organ failure, and other complex and confounding issues. We’re on the cusp of another moment in history when we have to redefine what it means to be “dead,” and how far someone can go before they’re irrecoverable. And at the prow of that epochal shift is BioQuark’s method of simulating ooplasm – in other words, “tricking” our cells into thinking that they’re fertilized ova at the very beginning of embryonic development, so they’ll do amazing feats that

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupThis week’s episode features returning guest JF Martel, film-maker, culture critic, and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. In his first appearance on Future Fossils, we discussed art as an opening to the transcendent and his awesome three-part essay on the philosophy of Netflix’s Stranger Things, “Reality Is Analog”…so it only made sense to have him back to weigh in on Stranger Things 2 and the extremely artful Blade Runner 2049, both of which speak directly to the evolution of the soul and “the human tragedy” in an increasingly digital age. It’s ultimately a discussion of The Sequel, and how what distinguishes good simulacra from bad is all in the label, “Made With Love”…JF’s book and blog:http://reclaimingart.comJF’s podcast:http://weirdstudies.comWe Discuss:- The humanization of replicants (and the “animalization” of a previously monstrous demogorgon) as empathetic characters in these stories, and

“Ah, eventually you DO plan to TALK ABOUT dinosaurs on this dinosaur podcast, right? Hello? Yes?”- Ian Malcolm about this episode.This week’s guest is professional dinosaur hunter Steve Brusatte, paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.https://twitter.com/stevebrusatteSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupBeyond being a totally awesome – and more importantly, FRESH – take on the Mesozoic Era that weaves vital updates from the last twenty years of discovery into the official story, this book also paints a rich and lively portrait of the human beings who actually do dinosaur science. Their stories moved me as much as the story of how the dinosaurs evolved, came to dominate the landscape, and then disappeared. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs offers more than the “what” of prehistory; it also offers us the “who” and “how” and “where” and “why,” and it will be

Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ continuous unfolding creativity.http://timfreke.com/http://timfreke.com/ONLINE-TOUR/COSTS.aspxSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupWe take a deep dive into the nature of time, reality, and creativity:• Is spiritual awakening the “leading edge” of evolution? (Not technology, as proposed by Kevin Kelly et al.?)• How story may be more fundamental to reality than we’ve believed• Is evolutionary “novelty” created, or simply discovered lying in wait?• A psychedelic vi

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 reality of America’s homeless, his journey of healing and recovery working with entheogens and military veterans, and how facing and embracing our darkness with humility and courage may be the only way we can prepare ourselves to make a meaningful contribution to our world. Get ready for a heady brew of grit, dark humor, grief and relief, and the luminous truth that awaits us on the other side of suffering…Support these vital conversations with a small monthly contribution:http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion Group––––––––––––––––Part O

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 college Introduction to Film class (which is how you know my teacher was, in fact, cool). His book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now was one of the core inspirations for this podcast and its examinations of time in the digital age remain some of my most frequently-recommended writing. More recently his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus launched a vital conversation about how to make sure that the “superabundance” of digital society actually MAKES IT TO THE PEOPLE. And his podcast Team Human offers new insightful conversations every week about how we can sculpt a future for the 100%-ers – a world that welcomes

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/robot-sexhttp://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.comhttp://thefutureofsex.netChances are good you’ve seen the “Don’t Date Robots!” public service announcement from the cartoon Futurama, and probably Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” music video. Maybe you’ve seen Her or Ex Machina or Spielberg’s AI. And let’s not forget the Femmebots in Austin Powers. But does any of this media, for or against, paint a realistic portrait of the impact of machines on human intimacy?Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion Group!In this episode, John and I talk about:• “The cognitive nich

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 quest to appropriate the mysteries of the goddess…Here’s John’s Blade Runner 2049 essay:http://cinemadiscourse.com/blade-runner-2049/John’s awesome YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5B4tbk3U40S4q_3Qt-cVgQJohn has a knack for connecting very different sources across civilizations and millennia, anchoring this conversation about a modern science fiction masterpiece in a transcultural Big Story of the evolution of human consciousness. (Listen if you liked Episodes 42 & 43 with William Irwin Thompson on planetary culture, Episode 38 with Marya Stark on reclaiming the feminine mysteries, Episode 18 with JF

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 technology and wisdom.Barry's Essays:http://medium.com/@barryvacker Subscribe:Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion Group!We Discuss:• How contemporary science fiction (including Blade Runner 2049) fails to live up to the promise of 2001: A Space Odyssey and articulate a transcendent vision for the future of humanity.• The role of the machine in a complete science fiction spirituality.• The different “übermenschen” presented in 2001, Altered States, Lawnmower Man, and Watchmen.• How Ancient Aliens hijacked the 2001 narrative about extraterrestrial involvement in human evoluti

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 the life-changing experiences that brought him to his current understanding and role in helping bring about a saner and more loving world…Subscribe to this show:Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • SpotifyJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupDavid:https://www.drbronner.com/about/ourselves/the-dr-bronners-story/https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/dr-bronners-magic-soap-david-bronner-gmo-hemp/Donate to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies:http://maps.org/donateWe Discuss:• The visionary science fiction novels of Olaf Stapledon, Last & First Men and The Starmaker• How David reconciles a sweepin