Future Fossils

[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 Podcasts • Stitcher • SpotifyJoin our Facebook Discussion Group This week we chat about genetics – specifically how different gene variations in people affect the way we experience cannabis. We’re coming up on a revolution in biotech and agriculture that will soon make it a possibility to grow gene-tailored strains of cannabis to suit YOUR DNA specifically…until then, though, here is your primer on how to dance with Mary Jane in ways that work WITH, not AGAINST, you.(David is a repeat guest from Future Fossils Episode 0010, when he chatted with us about the future of electronic music, plant intelligence, and tripping with c

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://reinhabitingthevillage.com/jamaica-stevens/https://www.facebook.com/LucidUniversity/ We Discuss: • The collective ass-kicking and humbling and veil-lifting that’s upon us• Can America break up with itself and stay friends?• What is “the global village” in an age as splintered as ours?• Cooperative leadership and transcending the hero’s journey with its emphasis on individual growth and development• How to let go of a dream or vision when it’s time to let it die• How to process the grief of our ancestors, of our alienation and loss of place and undigested trauma• Grief as a teacher and a healer• Being born and reborn,

 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 Conference, and now in his post-academic life, head of MetaIntegral a training and consulting company specializing in the design of wisdom economies. “Expand your story! Expand your position! Expand your sense of self identity as to what you’re doing and why. Because you’re already doing it.”Become conscious of the value and benefits you’re already providing the world – and then amplify that – by digging this great conversation…http://metacapital.net/iceland-seminar/ https://integrallife.com/integral-ecology-uniting-multiple-perspectives-natural-world/ https://www.amazon.com/Integral-Ecology-Uniting-Multiple-Perspectives/dp

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, deportation, homelessness, and the prison industrial complex • The (largely broken) promise of visionary culture and the global festival circuit • Psychedelic healing for PTSD and addiction with ibogaine and ayahuasca, and the urgent need for trauma recovery in our traumatic age • Similarities between the Great Depression and life since the 2008 mortgage crisis – namely, suspicion of institutions like banks and the government • The untold stories and hidden trauma of the Greatest Generation • The cascading effects of war, emotional trauma, and social-scale health problems • Trauma and consumerism, trauma and hoarding • Messia

 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, a legitimate and respectable skeptic, which made his inquiries into the weird realms of psychedelia so interesting to me. He started tripping to self-medicate for his lifelong depression a few years ago but hisHe and I disagreed for years about the nature and validity of the phenomenon known as “synchronicity” – that everything is linked behind the scenes, no coincidences – but this summer he texted me to tell me he’d had a revelatory experience and that I was right all along.The next thing I heard from him, he was on Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast talking about how he had just gotten out of a mental institution.

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 perceived in, as, of, and beyond spacetime; the human and inhuman forms of evil in a discarnate taxonomy; and the very existence of that hidden ecosystem… Conner: http://connerhabib.comhttp://twitter.com/connerhabib Mitch: http://realitysandwich.com/u/mitch-mignano/https://www.facebook.com/mitch.mignano.77 (http://shamanikagenda.com coming soon) In this episode we reference an episode of Conner’s podcast in which he had a portentous chat with comedian Duncan Trussell – who it happens is a friend of new Mitch’s also, and convinced him he should start a podcast – and the metaphysical implications of this are at the begin

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 has worked at Kosmicare, a European psychedelic harm reduction project. http://ejatlas.orghttp://twitter.com/sophiarokhlin We Discuss: • How Spanish represents time differently than English • The politics and economics of Catalonian independence from Spain • How energy accounting, geography, history, and political ecology come together in the new field of Ecological Economics: the layer of material funds and flows behind what we think of as “the economy” – how much gold, how much sand, how much palm oil… • Her time in the Amazon studying plant medicines with the Sequoia tribe • “Flex crops” (used as a food, a fuel,

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 is the mother of invention, it’s my hope that this talk will inspire you to see our turbulent, chaotic age as something to be celebrated. Learning what we can from evolution, we can shed new light on how to steer ourselves away from global ecological disaster – perhaps to even revel in our role as agents of epochal change in Earth’s amazing story.http://michaelgarfield.nethttp://youtube.com/michaelgarfield In this talk I discuss:• Going backward in order to go forward, the reclamation of the traditions and wisdom we have abandoned in our March of Progress;• The importance of situating ourselves and our moment in the la

Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport 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 futurist in the Bay Area; • Futurism as a pastime of privilege; • Marginalized (third-world) futures and science fiction; • Is Singularity University the church of a new techno-religion?; • Ethical AI design; • The need for more introspection in technology design; • http://ieee.org • Conscious AI and mind-uploading (hype?); • The decay of consensus facts and what it means for our ability to agree on history and reality; • The role of mindfulness in our acceleratingly crazy technological environments; • Do we have to retreat out of our ego minds to even LIVE in an ultra high-frequency automated machine economy? • What is the

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 fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID. Evan’s Music: http://skytree.bandcamp.com Related Reading: “Reading Necronomicon at the New York Comic Con” https://www.patreon.com/posts/poem-reading-at-10621994 In This Episode We Discuss: • Why are people are so damn stupid in the Alien movies – is it bad writing, or a realistic understanding of how dependent we will one day be on artificial cognitive augmentation? • Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage:

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 planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you – and why so many of your friends think that this new evolution of digital money and contracts is one of the most important events of our lives.Jennifer & Michael are two of the co-founders (along with Noah Lampert) of Cryptoseer, a new media company:http://cryptoseer.com We discuss:• Why this is about so much more than another hype bubble of speculative assets for tech nerds;• What the blockchain economy is teaching us about how to surf exponential change;• The democratization of financial and legal literacy, and how

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.comHis blog: http://civilizationemerging.com Some Topics We Discuss:• How he got started in complex systems thinking while working in (and watching the failures of) wildlife conservation;• How he understands his work as participating in the emergence of a planetary renaissance;• A vision for how to move beyond finite win-lose games with in- and out-groups between warring cultures and into infinite win-win games;• His critiques of negative interest currency, universal basic income, and other system-wide economic incentives;• His argument for why giving ecosystems economic value isn’t enough to stand up against a wave of exponential technology;• How change can come from everywhere at once to vaul

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 spiritual salvation…https://forthewild.world/https://www.instagram.com/for.the.wild/ For The Wild is currently raising money to plant ONE MILLION redwoods: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1284964860/1-million-redwoods-project We talk about:• her transition from anonymous, germaphobic suburban consumer to restoration ecologist, activist, and dirt-working spokesperson for the world’s last remaining wilderness;• being a person of place and cultivating a personal relationship with our wild (and not-so-wild) lands;• love in a time of catastrophe and how to FEEL our impact on a planetary scale;• what wilderness means in The A

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, marginalized peoples, death, and transformation…We talk about Jake’s artistic intuition, nontraditional relationships, the reality of love, and my transformation from living in a haunted house to realizing the “ghost” was my own disowned soul…If you are, or love, a witch, you’ll dig this episode. Jake’s Website: http://kobrinart.com More Topics We Discuss:• The nonduality of the sacred and profane;• Intuition and the creative process, allowing the art to speak through you;• Eden & Apocalypse, with history in the middle;• Light & Dark, Good & Evil as “conceptual impositions” that don’t really exist “in na

Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on PatreonThis week’s guest is my friend Lindsay Loftin, 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/mermaidsforcleanwater/ We Discuss:• How mermaid performances can help us transform our relationship to nature;• Sea goats and other weird half-and-half creatures, and how the Capricorn’s ambitious in-between-ness was a prophesy of amphibians as an emblem of evolutionary “ascent”;• Remembering in our bodies the importance of the health of our environment and our right relationship to nature;• Ecology as a mystical experience or way of being awake;• The changing definition of nature once you think of the atmosphere as an artifact created by primordial ooze;• Epigenetics, landscape

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 websites I’ve seen out there). http://www.eliotpeper.com/http://scout.ai/ We Discuss:• The power of science fiction to help us imagine future scenarios;• The possible social impact of radical life extension (gerontocratic radical conservatives vs. an emergent mature wisdom culture);• The Superstar Effect and how it might play out in the digital age;• The awesomeness of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway;• Eliot’s skepticism of mind uploading and conscious AI;• The specter of technological unemployment;• Science fiction’s growing significance to corporate think-tanks and creative labs in a future-facing society;• How sci

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 permaculture psychedelic anarchy;- Communicating across HUGE political gaps (esp. with family);- Cool Bloom Network community initiatives happening around the world;- What will it take to adapt our technological environment to suit a more humane and grounded ecological society?- The relationship between the Wood Wide Web of interspecies partnerships and the maturing World Wide Web of human making.- How can we be good ancestors?- A “relational, omnidirectional nowness where we embrace as our own body the other organisms on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of stuff through space”- Synchronicity & Diachronicity- An academic an

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 human brain and mind, examining the correlations between different brain waves and their correspondent states of consciousness – and speculate on our experience of time as an evolved response to a far more complex and awesome world than we can possibly conceive!Twenty minutes in and we’ve already covered the fractal nature of time and we’re on to explaining what happens to the modern self and its boundaries in the torrent of novelty that awaits un in a digital age. Then we go deep for another hour and a half… DISCUSSED:• Fate vs Free Will in light of Chaos Theory• The relationship between technology and our experience of time,

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 earthworks art and pre-Columbian mounds;• the difference between choosing your own tattoos and the more traditional style of having them chosen for you by the artist;• the virtue and value of The Ordeal in personal transformation;• seeing skin art as a transcultural phenomenon connecting us to other tribes and traditions across time and space;• and the future of tattoo as an art form and a culture, in which skin art merges with speech as part of a new, richer, more embodied language… “If you had to put something in your bathroom mirror…what would you want in your bathroom mirror FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? That feedback loop with

This week we continue the special two-part conversation with historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson.  Author of dozens of sweeping works of synthetic insight, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community:  The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years.  In his latest and last book, Thinking Together at the Edge of History, Thompson looks back on the failures and successes of this project, which he regards as a “first crocus” budding up through the snow of our late-industrial dark age to herald the arrival of a planetary renaissance still yet to come.  This episode pivots from a contemplation of Lindisfarne’s history to our navigation of the turbulence between two world eras – how will we weather all this change, and what new life and worldview awaits us