✨ Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry. Our next call is this weekend, May 2, at 2 pm MDT!

This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.”

Mat is a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Cofounder (with Alja Isakovic) of the the inquiry-driven social venture Tethix and mission steward (with Gemma Palmer) of Collective Futurecrafting, Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. He also makes delightfully weird code-as-art projects like The Ministry of Futility, a bureaucratic adventure game where players navigate a maze of pointless decisions.

In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness.

Mat and I met in 2024 in the group chat that spawned the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server and immediately realized a common thread ran through both our lives: a commitment to fostering our collective imagination aimed at ecologically-grounded, mutualistic, more-than-human futures.

In today’s episode we riff on themes from the Tethix blog and podcast, including:

• How do we embrace the lunacy of tech?• What should we do with the time that new technologies save? (if they even do) and• How do we nuture weird online communal gardens where we can play together?

We also draw from the Tethix codesign principles, product ethos, and elemental ethics documents.

Along the way we explore the fundamental problems of scale and institutional misalignment, the value of ritual, and the return to embodiment.

✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations”

Chapters

00:00 Intro

06:02 Starting Over With Play

08:05 Mat’s Origin Story

13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety

18:24 How Tethix Began

40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care

46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions

47:05 Start With What Exists

48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics

50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community

57:42 Composting The Leviathan

01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care

01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing

In his book Death by Astonishment, Gallimore argues DMT expands the brain’s “representational reach,” enabling perception of high-dimensional structures and apparent interaction with non-human “intelligent agents,” challenging standard accounts that treat the experience as mere hallucination, dreams, or Jungian archetypes. What new shapes will we—and our sciences—take as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice “truly psychedelic” science? And what insights might we be able to bring “home” to the Flatland where we spend most of our waking lives?

Andrew has talked about this work in many, many other venues (his conversations with Jesse Michels and Danny Jones were especially good), so I wanted to carry the conversation into fresh terrain. Consider this episode the “200 level course”, or at least my best attempt ask a brilliant and provocative researcher some very complicated questions.

Over our two hours together we discussed neuroimaging findings that challenge the “dream” and “archetype” interpretations of DMT phenomenology, how criticality and noise in complex systems inform our understanding of the psychedelic experience, and the methodological problems inherent in studying ontologically shocking experiences while maintaining scientific rigor. We also probed the philosophical implications of DMT research—such as the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than matter—and the possible connections between DMT hyperspace and life in an era of advanced technology. Andrew also gave some context on the Noonautics research non-profit its partnership with the newly-launched Eleusis facility, a carefully-crafted venue for extended-state DMT work. But perhaps my favorite part of this conversation was spent in speculation, about how science and even language might evolve to meet the challenges presented by the ineffable high-dimensional reality that DMT reveals to us.

✨ Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

✨ Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.

✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations” & “City of Jewels”

✨ Contact me to collaborate or hire me as a consultant

Chapters

00:00:00 Intro00:08:15 Gallimore’s Origin Story00:13:00 DMT as a Technology00:20:01 “Entities” & Methodological Problems00:29:06 World Models and EEG Clues00:36:57 Why The Psychedelic State is Not a Dream00:44:11 Noise, Criticality, and New Order00:47:50 The Temperature-Noise Motif00:52:47 Metabolism & Dimensionality00:53:47 The Cortex & Representational Reach00:57:44 Do We Need New Language to Study The DMT Realm?01:00:45 Is There Only The Subject?01:09:31 Psychedelic Science As Altered Observation01:17:34 DMTx & Eleusis Plans01:21:55 The Future of Transdimensional Research01:31:44 A Call for Humility

Cited Works

Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEGby Christopher Timmerman et al.

The Overfitted Brainby Erik Hoel

The evolution of syntactic communicationby Martin Nowak et al.

The Transcension Hypothesisby John Smart

Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Societyfor Complexity Podcast

Ancient Extinction Events, Apocalyptic Cults, and DMT Entitieswith Michael on The Danny Jones Podcast

Other Mentions

Stephen SzáraNick SandDonald HoffmanKarl FristonJordi RibaDavid ChalmersWilliam BurroughsJohn LillyPhil DickTerence McKennaRobert Anton WilsonJohn D. Barrow

Mentioned & Related Podcast Episodes

“Certainly one of the world’s leading figures on ethics in practical applications.”— Fionn Delahunty, NLP Lab at University of Galway

As we frequently observe on this show, we need to rework our ideas of agency and identity to adapt them to advances in our understanding of complex systems. Decisions emerge within a nexus of nested, multi-scale dynamics, and our species flourishes or fumbles in intricate symbiotic relationships with the collective intelligences embodied in cultural technologies like states, markets, corporations, and social clubs — beings that, by any reasonable account, live in worlds alien to our own lived experience and demonstrate their own goals and values. Getting them to behave in ways that nourish us requires a much more nuanced theory of change than that which created them in the first place, perhaps even a radically different vision of the links between biology, psychology, society, and environment. And given that AI is a beast of a similar order to these other “egregores” — the entities of collective computation that arise from our efforts to coordinate at scale and then impose their own top-down causal influence on our thoughts and actions — learning how to align individual and organizational purpose can give us profound insight into how to live well alongside (or in the proverbial guts of) newer, more obvious forms of non-human intelligence like LLMs that amplify our biases through lossy compression and feedback, and shape both our desires and view of adjacent possibility.

In other words, the “intent-to-action” gap in corporate ethics and the “paperclip machine” problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can “tame” the secular gods of the modern industrial era , our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing.

If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas — and who isn’t? — this will speak to you, and I’m excited to share it.

✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Become a member for access to our study group and community calls, and for those recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.

✨ Become a founding member for access my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)

This is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a member:

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant

Referenced & Related

What’s trust got to do with it?Nathan Kinch

Three reasons why AI ethics is strugglingNathan Kinch

If ‘Trust is a must’ for AI governance — here are 3 things regulators should doHilary Sutcliffe

Bluesky and enshittificationCory Doctorow

Environmentally Mediated Social DilemmasSylvie Estrela et al.

FLD On Navigating Complexity in Education: A Conversation with Dave SnowdenTim Logan

The corporate cultivation of digital resignationNora Draper & Joseph Turow

William GibsonJohn VervaekeRajiv SethiMat MytkaNadia LeeBarronness Onora O’Neill

The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.

Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.

We can’t take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as “the way things are.”

Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!

✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Become a member to support the show and score myriad perks, like our book club: our next call is on Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words this Sunday, Feb 15th!

✨ Become a founding member for access to my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant

Referenced & Related

• The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)

• Bits and Bobs (Alex’s long-running archive of weekly notes)• Common Ground (Alex’s dialogues w/ Aishwarya Khanduja of The Analogue Group)

• The Iterative Adjacent Possible (Alex on Medium)

• The Runaway Engine of Society (Alex on Medium)

• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice (podcast w/ Lenny Rachitsky)

• Media and Machines by Anu Atluru at Working Theorys

• Accelerando & Glasshouse & Halting State (three books) by Charles Stross

• The Transparent Society by David Brin

• The evolution of Covert Signaling by Paul Smaldino

• Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul by Stefani Crabtree et al.

• The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov

• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

• Blindsight & Echopraxia (two books) by Peter Watts

• The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor

• Silicon Valley’s quest to remove friction from our lives by Rohit Krishnan

• The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon

• Bernhard Seefeld

• Situated Software by Clay Shirky

• Das Rad (animated short)

• Geoffrey West

• Mark Pesce

• Fred Turner

• Robert David Steele

Explore hundreds of related podcast episodes in the archives!

In his own words, Layman “used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but he’s feeling much better now.” He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs, hosts The Integral Stage, Soulmakers+, and (forthcoming) Untegral Stage podcasts, and provides unique online courses. He is also a founding member of several think tanks in the developmental psychology and spirituality space, senior editor of Emerge online & is allied to numerous institutes across the field. In addition to many journal and anthology articles, he is the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as an upcoming book about Nietzsche.

Layman is known for his philosophical work on the metaphysics of adjacency, complex nonduality, coaxial developmental stage theories, sacred naturalism, archaic futurism, embodied spirituality & the “integration-surplus model of religion and spirituality” for a post-postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises.

In this conversation we cover a lot of ground in a very short time, including: the nature of futurity and how humankind’s relationship to the future is changing; how to surf intense peculiarity'; the abiding sociocultural role of “shamanoid” personalities and other useful weirdos; “wartime” mobilization for The Big Us; and other deep and delightful subjects. It’s my honor to finally decant this year-old recording, now more pertinent than ever…

✨ If you enjoy this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider to help this work (and you!) find new allies: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Our next Humans On The Loop book club discussion is for Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words on Sunday February 15th! Become a member to participate in these calls, exclusive Discord members channels, and our monthly hangouts.

✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.

More links

• Explore the archives for nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Browse (nearly!) all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org•Dig into the Humans On The Loop pitch deck• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere• Contact me if you have burning questions!

Cited pieces by Layman

• The Soul of AI w/ Lee Chazen (YouTube)• The MetaModern Business Bureau (MMBB) (Substack)• Apocalyptarians (Substack)• The Society of Partial Deterritorialization (Substack)• The Two-Handed Demons (Substack)

Cited pieces by others

• Wendell Berry - Standing by Words• Hakim Bey - Temporary Autonomous Zone• Steven Johnson - The Revenge of the Humanities• Carol Dweck - Mindset• William James - On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake

Mentioned people with dialogues on my show

• Jim Rutt (181)• William Irwin Thompson (42, 43)• Erik Davis (99, 132, 140)• Timothy Morton (223)

Mentioned people without dialogues on my show

• Terence McKenna (although I’ve interviewed Terence’s brilliant close friends Ken Adams and Bruce Damer multiple times; check the archives for episodes 4, 109, 209)• Alexander Bard• Andrew Huberman• Harry S. Truman• Jacques Lacan• H.P. Lovecraft• Doug Irwin• Nassim Taleb• Friedrich Nietzsche

✨ Carl is currently teaching a course on Apocalyptic Hyperhumanism with Layman Pascal at Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal! More info and enrollment here.

✨ Our next Humans On The Loop members hangout is this Sunday January 18th at 10:00 am Mountain Time! Calendar invite coming soon for subscribers.

✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere• Contact me if you have burning questions

✨ Mentions

Max CooperHunter S. ThompsonDoug Rushkoff Friedrich NietzscheAndrew GallimoreJohn VervaekeK. Allado-McDowellDale PendellJoël de RosnayJoshua DiCaglioCharles EisensteinFred TurnerMark ZuckerbergMichael DouglasRichard BartlettGordon White

This week (actually, April) I speak with Rimma Boshernitsan (Website | LinkedIn), a speaker, interviewer, facilitator, and advisor who has partnered with senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies—including Google, Kaiser Permanente, Roche, TATA, and Aesop—guiding them through transformation and growth. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Tech Crunch and Forbes.

She began her career in management consulting at Deloitte, focusing on M&A and large-scale transformation, before moving into industry advising across healthcare, consumer business, and telecommunications. Later work in the art world taught her how cultural and political insights could drive innovation and transformation in business, leading her to found DIALOGUE in 2016.

She now combines strategic foresight, human-centered innovation, and interdisciplinary thinking to help her clients reframe challenges, identify opportunities, and lead with intention. She sits on the board of trustees at Headlands Center for the Arts and on the SECA Council Board at SFMOMA, and is also an advisor to Stanford’s Women in Design Program.

Her most recent focus is in co-intelligence: integrating human, machine, and planetary intelligence to build future-facing organizations.

I’m glad to have such an excellent partner in conversation to, as the Taoists say, “Feel our way across the river stone by stone” in a discussion about all of this and more: the re-emergence of nomadic populations and intentional communities, fumbling toward an idea of planetary culture, the role of intuition in leadership and biophilia in the design of our work spaces...it’s a marvelously nondisciplinary co-exploration.

There are well over a dozen episodes in the editing queue and founding members can access the entire trove of unedited conversations before they’re released:

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere

✨ Mentioned Media & People

In Threads’ dwindling engagement, social media’s flawed hypothesis is laid bare

In a Time of Stress, Neuroaesthetic Spaces and Places Create a Path to Healing and Hope

The Triad of Intelligences: Harnessing Machine, Planetary, and Human Intuition in The Age of AI

DIALOGUE Interviews: Ivy Ross

DIALOGUE Interviews: Susan Magsamen

DIALOGUE Interviews: Kevin Kelly

More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science

Nikki SilvaBruce LiptonEd BernaysKen Wilber

✨ About This Episode

This week I talk to Sam Arbesman, scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital, Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation, and host of The Orthogonal Bet, weaving together and plucking at the ideas in his delightful new book, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our World…and Shapes Our Future. Sam is a brilliant scholar, a maverick mind, and a good friend—so even though we don’t see perfectly eye-to-eye about just where the analogy of code as magic works and where it falls apart, that tiny bit of friction makes for a fascinating joint exploration into the liminal zones where our categories fray and their distinctions are constantly rewritten.

In this episode, we discuss:• Sam’s origin story as a code-lover (00:10:20)• Code as “algebra and fire” (00:14:17)• If code is magic, what is magic? (00:20:10)• Open-source development and open-ended innovation (00:25:48)• Rethinking the nature of “failure” in the so-called Technocene (00:32:12)• Navigating simplicity and complexity (00:38:44)• Acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices to the incomprehensibility of our technologies (00:45:02)• The squishy overlap between tech and biology (00:54:03)• The co-domestication of software bugs and people (01:03:22)• And the emerging age of ephemerality (01:15:55)

It was, as it always is with Sam, a joy. I hope you get as much out of it as we did.

This Saturday at 10 am PDT is the return of our monthly members hangouts. Join us!

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere

✨ Mentioned Reading & People

Steven Johnson - Everything Bad Is Good For YouWilliam Alonso - “Predicting Best with Imperfect Data”Danny Hillis - “The Enlightenment Is Dead, Long Live The Entanglement”Moses Maimonides - The Guide To The PerplexedRichard Brautigan - “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”Stewart Brand - The Clock of The Long Now

Lawrence Lundy-BryanClive ThompsonKevin KellyJose Luis BorgesLionel Snell (Ramsey Dukes)Nadia AsparouhovaUrsula K LeGuinWilliam GibsonDavid KrakauerMichael LevinChris LangtonJim LovelockLynn MargulisAlan MooreJessica FlackMonica AndersonJeremy UtleyAlan PerlisSteve Jobs

✨ Mentioned Episodes

This week we hear from Larry Muhlstein, who worked on Responsible AI at Google and DeepMind before leaving to found the Holistic Technology Project.

In Larry’s words:

“Care is crafted from understanding, respect, and will. Once care is deep enough and in a generative reciprocal relationship, it gives rise to self-expanding love. My work focuses on creating such systems of care by constructing a holistic sociotechnical tree with roots of philosophical orientation, a trunk of theoretical structure, and technological leaves and fruit that offer nourishment and support to all parts of our world. I believe that we can grow love through technologies of togetherness that help us to understand, respect, and care for each other. I am committed to supporting the responsible development of such technologies so that we can move through these trying times towards a world where we are all well together.”

In this episode, Larry and I explore the “roots of philosophical orientation” and “trunk of theoretical structure” as he lays them out in his Technological Love knowledge garden, asking how technologies for reality, perspectives, and karma can help us grow a world in love. What is just enough abstraction? When is autonomy desirable and when is it a false god? What do property and selfhood look like in a future where the ground truths of our interbeing shape design and governance?

It’s a long, deep conversation on fundamentals we need to reckon with if we are to live in futures we actually want. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Our next dialogue is with Sam Arbesman, resident researcher at Lux Capital and author of The Magic of Code. We’ll interrogate the distinctions between software and spellcraft, explore the unique blessings and challenges of a world defined by advanced computing, and probe the good, bad, and ugly of futures that move at the speed of thought…

✨ Show Links

• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts

✨ Additional Resources

“Growing A World In Love” — Larry Muhlstein at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

“The Future Is Both True & False” — Michael Garfield on Medium

“Sacred Data” — Michael Garfield at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

“The Right To Destroy” — Lior Strahilevitz at Chicago Unbound

“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” — Puja Ohlhaver, E. Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin at SSRN

✨ Mentions

Karl Schroeder’s “Degrees of Freedom”Joshua DiCaglio’s Scale TheoryGeoffrey West’s ScaleHannah ArendtKen WilberDoug Rushkoff’s Survival of the RichestManda Scott’s Any Human Power Torey HaydenChaim Gingold’s Building SimCityJames P. Carse’s Finite & Infinite GamesJohn C. Wright’s The Golden OecumeneEckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now

✨ Related Episodes

Today’s guest Taryn Southern is someone I consider a master surfer of technological change: a fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high chop. She’s better than I am at finding the pocket, has made a name for herself for riding some serious bombs, and seems to know precisely when to bail. Starting as an actor, Internet famous for being an early YouTube influencer and her album I Am AI, the first LP composed and produced with an LLM, she caught air at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 with the premier of her documentary I Am Human (co-directed with Elena Gaby), an intimate look at the lives of three people with implantable brain interfaces and the medical, ethical and societal implications.

She’s also produced an award-winning musical VR series for Google using Tiltbrush and Blocks, worked as Chief Storyteller for Blackrock Neurotech, minted the first song token on the Ethereum blockchain, spoken and consulted all over the world, operated as an angel investor, and survived breast cancer. In other words, she’s just the person to teach you how to hang ten instead of duck diving under the next pounder. Let’s drop in and grab the rail. Thanks for listening!

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.

Show Links

• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consulting

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: The Promise and Perils of Technology 01:07 Welcome to Humans On the Loop 05:57 Taryn's Early Fascination with Technology 08:55 Living with Constraints and The Spirit of Exploration 31:06 AI in Personal Growth and Communication 38:52 AI as a New Religion and Therapy Tool 42:04 The Ethical Dilemmas of AI and Big Tech 47:58 The Future of AI in Governance and Society 57:42 Empowering Individuals with AI and Community Involvement

Mentions

Moon RibasRolf Potts’ VagabondingDamien Walter’s “Modernity is Done”Jim O’ShaughnessySolo: A Star Wars StoryMichael Davis on Exploring the Intersection of AI & RomanceThe Evolution of SurveillanceCory Doctorow’s “enshittification”Howard Rheingold

We live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes…

This week’s guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold, wrote what I consider the best book available on the history and sociality of simulations: Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press) takes readers from the prehistory of modern computing through the post-war development of cybernetics and systems thinking and into the entangled relationship of video games, military info-tech, civil engineering, software-based education, and complexity science that forms today’s “invisible environment.”

Sim City is more than a legendary video game. It is case study in how the digital revolution reshaped the ways we think, teach, design, and govern…and how what simulation as a mode of discourse can hide and reveal, oppress and empower us. In this dialogue we explore the the tensions between games and play, the analog and digital, abstraction and tactility, and mysticism and colonialism in simulation-induced experiences. We investigate the rise and fall of Sim City game developer MAXIS, weave threads through the history of computing and software development, systems science, and the philosophy of technology, and ask:

What makes some abstractions better than others?

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.

Show Links

• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consulting

Mentions

Will WrightJohn Conway’s Game of LifeVannevar BushAlan Kay & Xerox PARCEd Catmull - Creativity, Inc.James Clerk MaxwellEthan MollickBrian Sutton-SmithGottfried LiebnizLarry OwensJay ForresterLauren F. KleinEdgar MitchellRusty SchweickertJulian of NorwichChris LangtonKen ForbisMark ZuckerbergElon MuskSam AltmanSam Arbesman - The Magic of CodeTimothy MortonDonna HarawayNick BostromJoshua DiCaglio - Scale TheoryStanislaw Lem - The CyberiadKevin Kelly - Out of ControlStewart Brand & The Whole Earth CatalogFred Turner - From Counterculture to CybercultureDe Kai - Raising AI

And in case you missed it:

This week I speak with Rufus Pollock (Website | Twitter | Wikipedia), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called “Liminal Web” and active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging changemaking organizations who, along with his wife Sylvie Barbier and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.

Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture — the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in a brave new world, the intertwingling of religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate (however necessary) as we face our crises of collective action. It’s an earnest, soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching extra-long conversation and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did.

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.

Show Links

• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consulting

Discussed

Four Types of Problem

Second Renaissance Whitepaper & Theory of Change

Technology as God

Getting over our Allergy to Religion

The Primacy of Being

David Sloan Wilson - Darwin’s Cathedral

William Irwin Thompson - Imaginary Landscape, The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur

Federico Campagna - Prophetic Culture

Alex Shakar - Luminarium

Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other Days

Joe Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the World

Jessica Flack - Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation Mechanism

Mentioned

Bayo AkomolafeSylvie BarbierLiam KavanaughBret Easton EllisJohn StewartCarl JungDoug RushloffKarl MarxGoetheJamie WhealSteven KotlerKen WilberRobert KeganSuzanne Cook-GreuterPaul LevyGeorge W. BushUrsula K. LeGuinIain McGilchristJim O’ShaughnessyNaval RavikantThich Nhat HanhW. Brian ArthurHazel HendersonJim RuttChristopher AlexanderJamie CurcioJordan PetersonW. B. Yeats

This week we speak with George Pór, mentee of Doug Englebart, Founder of Future HOW, Enlivening Edge, and Campus Co-Evolve, independent scholar with past academic posts at the London School of Economics, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Integral Studies, and Université de Paris, wisdom-guided AI advisor at River, and consultant who has worked with clients including the UN Development Programme, HP, Greenpeace, Intel, Ford, and the World Wildlife Foundation.

George has played vital roles our emerging understanding of collective intelligence, knowledge gardening, and online community. In this episode we explore his latest iteration as a Metamodern AI Shaman — what that means, why he’s promoting this approach for the cultivation of hybrid human-machine wisdom, and his theory of change for a reimagined human being in an age of collaborative planet-scale intelligence.

Links

• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes

Discussed

Extensive context and background summary provided by George here

Radio evolve #568 - Collective Wisdom and ChatGPT with George Pór

Prelude to the Rise of the Compassionate AI - George Pór

AI and Wisdom - George Pór

A Future of our Interactions with AI - George Pór

Nobel Prize in economics awarded to trio for explaining why some nations are rich and others poor (CNN)

Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA - Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, and Christopher P. Kempes

AI Attending Human Attending AI

Relationality - David Jay

Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott

Mentioned People & Episodes

Layman PascalFrederic LalouxTimothy MortonAri KushnerStephanie LeppDavid SauvageRoss DawsonStephen ReidTurquoise SoundKate RaworthMatt SegallFrancisco Varela

This week’s guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that constrains and formally specifies AI outputs, with reviewable intermediary results, collaborating across sectors to promote this radically different and more empirical approach to applied machine intelligence.

After completing his PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, Evan led research at Protocol Labs, creating their research grants program, and led the special projects team that created Hypercerts, Funding the Commons, gov4git, and key parts of Discourse Graphs and the initial Open Agency Architecture proposal.

In our conversation we talk about a wide swath of topics including regulatory scaling problems, specifying formal organizational charters, the spectre of opacity, and the quantification of trust — all, in some sense, interdisciplinary matters of “game design” in our entanglement with magical technologies and fundamental uncertainty.

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future.

Links

• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes

Discussed

• Atlas Computing Summary Slides• Atlas Computing Institute Talks (YouTube Playlist)• A Toolchain for AI-Assisted Code Specification, Synthesis and Verification• Also, a relevant paper from Max Tegmark:Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGI

Mentioned

Gregory BatesonDavid DalrympleK. Allado-McDowellTerence McKennaYuval Noah HarariCosma ShaliziHenry FarrellHakim BeyNatalie DeprazFrancisco VarelaPierre VermerschPlurality InstitutePuja OhlhaverSean Esbjörn-HargensAlfred North WhiteheadDe Kai

Primer Riff

Are we doing AI alignment wrong? Game designers Forrest Imel and Gavin Valentine define games as having meaningful decisions, uncertain outcomes, and measurable feedback. If any one of these breaks, the game breaks. And we can think about tech ethics through this lens as well. Much of tech discourse is about how one or more of these dimensions has broken the “game” of life on Earth — the removal of meaningful decisions, the mathematical guarantee of self-termination through unsustainable practices, and/or the decoupling of feedback loops.

AI alignment approaches tend to converge on restoring meaningful decisions by getting rid of uncertainty, but it’s a lost cause. It’s futile to encode our values into systems we can’t understand. To the extent that machines think, they think very differently than we do, and characteristically “interpret” our requests in ways that reveal the assumptions we are used to making based on shared context and understanding with other people.

We may not know how a black box AI model arrives at its outputs, but we can evaluate those outputs…and we can segment processes like this so that there are more points at which to review them. One of this show’s major premises is that the design and use of AI systems is something like spellcraft — a domain where precision matters because the smallest deviation from a precise encoding of intent can backfire.

Magic isn’t science in as much as we can say that for spellcraft, mechanistic understanding is, frankly, beside the point. Whatever you may think of it, spellcraft evolved as a practical approach for operating in a mysterious cosmos. Westernized Modernity dismisses magic because Enlightenment era thinking is predicated on the knowability of nature and the conceit that everything can and will eventually bend to principled, rigorous investigation. But this confused accounting just reshuffled its uneradicable remainder of fundamental uncertainty back into a stubbornly persistent Real that continues to exist in excess of language, mathematics, and mechanistic frameworks. Economies, AI, and living systems guarantee uncertain outcomes — and in accepting this, we have to re-engage with magic in the form of our machines. The more alike they become, the more our mystery and open-ended co-improvisation loom back over any goals of final knowledge and control.

In a 2016 essay, Danny Hillis called this The Age of Entanglement. It is a time that calls for an evolutionary approach to technology. Tinkering and re-evaluating, we find ourselves one turn up the helix in which quantitative precision helps us reckon with the new built wilderness of technology. When we cannot fully explain the inner workings of large language models, we have to step back and ask:

What are our values, and how do we translate them into measurable outputs?

How can we break down the wicked problem of AI controllability into chunks on which it’s possible to operate?

How can adaptive oversight and steering fit with existing governance processes?

In other words, how can we properly task the humanities with helping us identify “meaningful decisions” and the sciences with providing “measurable feedback.” Giving science the job of solving uncertainty or defining our values ensures we’ll get as close as we can to certitude about outcomes we definitely don’t want. But if we think like game designers, then interdisciplinary collaboration can help us safely handle the immense power we’ve created and keep the game going.

What the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophecies of [EDIT: Guy Debord’s] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillard’s simulation], the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts a kind of reversal as the movement of the Tao that challenges the dreams and ideals of the Enlightenment…it is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it all…or is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game?

Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news, my friend Rina Nicolae of Incognita swims comfortably as a thoughtful commentator. Riffing philosophically on network society and its discontents, the emergent spiritual traditions of digital natives, and the posthuman bestiary of our AI- and biotech-saturated century, Rina’s Substack is a handbook to the cyborg aesthetic, the imagistic/algorithmic complex of online identity, our entanglement with capital and the possession by and performance of meme-space.

How do we not become caricatures of ourselves in the world-creating and -destroying flood of remix culture? How do we cultivate roughness, fractality, wildness, illegigility? How do we stay, as Cadell Last put it in the previous episode, “in the gaps and cracks” instead of becoming prey to the new monsters of the unleashed imagination? How do we *befriend* those monsters?

William Irwin Thompson said noise characterizes the emergence of planetary culture — an age in which “Technology slays the victim” of the mind “resurrects it as art” in a new ecology of consciousness. If, then, the only way through is up and out, then join me as, once more, we dive into the noise and make music together with Rina…

Links

• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Join the Wisdom x Technology (open) & Future Fossils (legacy) Discord servers

Discussed

Prophets Of A Machine FutureWhat Is Posthumanism?The New MonstrousMilady Infiltrates The VaticanKim Kardashan Was Never HumanThe AI That Can Change Your Mind

Mentioned

Priya RoseDonna HarawayBobby AzarianDavid DeutschJack HalberstamJulia ChristevaTimothy MortonK. Allado-McDowellMary ShelleyBenjamin BrattonCharlotte FangMarshall McLuhanJimi HendrixTaryn SouthernJim O’ShaughnessyKevin Kelly

In this episode, we discuss self-actualization and self-transformation in our age of magical technologies — the domestication of the human being by AI and institutions, how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, navigating hybrid physical-virtual relationships, the importance of intergenerational learning, and how we can make a better argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value. In the climax of this conversation, Cadell makes a case for “staying with the lack” and “working the cracks in being” as ways of cultivating our agency in a highly-automated world.

Become a member to join our hangouts, salons, and study groups:

Project Links

• Explore this project’s essay and episode archives• Make tax-deductible donations (recurring pledges grant membership)• Join the Wisdom x Technology & Future Fossils Discord servers• Browse the books we discuss on the show• Explore the interactive model grown from over 250 episodes• Book me for speaking or consulting

Cadell’s Links

Website (with research and social media links)Philosophy PortalYouTube

(+ My recent appearance as a guest on Cadell’s Philosophy Portal show)

Relevant Papers

Human Evolution: Life History Theory and the End of Biological ReproductionSelf Actualization in the CommonsGlobal Commons in the Global BrainGlobal Brain and the Future of Human SocietyInformation-Energy Metasystem ModelAbstraction, mimesis and the evolution of deep learningLandian Exit and Hegelian LoveSystems & Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science & PhilosophyLogic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition

Mentions

Kevin KellyLawrence SteinbergNick LandNora BatesonJessica FlackThomas PicketyMichel BauwensLayman PascalDavid JayPhilip K. DickYanis VaroufakisChris CutroneAndrew TateBenjamin StudebakerGordon BranderAlan TuringKate Raworth

Related Episodes

In this conversation, we explore how to cultivate human agency at the frontiers where physical reality and the metaverse fold into one another and entangled human and machine intelligences unleash radical new possibilities for reflection and creativity. By the end of our discussion we start to trace the contours of a world in which everyone has a better chance to pursue their passions without having to worry about “product-market fit” — a future in culture stages a glorious insurrection against the dehumanizing division between passion and paid work.

If this episode stimulates or triggers you, please leave a comment here or on YouTube — I would love to learn from you and this project exists as a space for thoughtful discourse!

Upcoming Events

* 3 May @ 11 am Mountain– Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna(patrons-only discussion)

* 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere(five-week online course with ten sessions)

Project Links

• Explore this project’s essay and episode archives• Join the Discord server• Browse the books we discuss on the show• Explore the conversational mind-map grown from nine years of conversations• Book me for speaking or consulting

Dean’s Links

The Secret Architecture of Great EssaysTeleportation, $97/month, coming soonLas Vegas & the MetaverseA change of heartPrepping for the Editor G*dsMega-updateSungazerLucy in the Sky of Large Language Models4 Types of Material in Every Essay

Mentioned Books & Articles

Michael Garfield – Sacred DataJohn Smart – The transcenscion hypothesisJ.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor – The Computer as a Communication DeviceKevin Kelly – AR Will Spark The Next Big Tech Platform — Call It MirrorworldDouglas Rushkoff – Present ShockYoshija Walter – Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory

Mentioned People & Podcasts

J.F. MartelK. Allado McDowellDanielle BassettTyson YunkaportaMitch MignanoJaron LanierPeter DiamandisWilliam Irwin ThompsonBenjamin OlsenThe BeatlesTerence McKennaGrimesHolly HerndonTimothy LearyJake KobrinSara PhinnThe Ungoogleable MichaelangeloErik HoelMichael Crichton

This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration Robert Poynton, Founder of Yellow Learning, Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, and author of three beautiful short books — Do Pause, Do Improvise, and Do Conversation — full of his insights from decades of designing and leading Executive Education leadership programs and hosting creative retreats in Spain.

In Future Fossils Episode 196 Robert and I discussed how important it is to learn the principles of improvisation as a way of life. And as he notes in his latest book, most of us are already skilled improvisers because we spend our lives in conversation — not just with each other, but with our environments. How does trying on this frame transform the ways that we relate to them?

In this episode we explore conversations as an art form and as a technology, technology as a conversation, and how weird this all gets when so many of us are having what feel like literal conversations with technology itself.

Some of our topics:

• How do we create fertile “conversational fields”? • How do different media constrain and open conversational possibilities?• What does it mean to “be generous” with our improv partners?• What might the structure of good conversation teach us about engaging with AI — and help us “converse” with the entire history of a person or a culture?

At the heart of this project and this episode in particular is the belief that some things are worth doing not because they get us where we want to go, but because they’re pleasures in themselves. Good conversations are their own reward, and conversations with Robert are especially rewarding.

(Do yourself a favor and join a Yellow Learning cohort sometime…)

PS — A bonus for subscribers this week: an extra mini-episode behind the paywall! After Robert and I landed this discussion we kept talking for another hour. Most of it was off-topic but there were some choice bits in there too good to leave on the cutting room floor. If you don’t see it below the show notes, you know what to do:

Upcoming Events

* 24 April – Right Relationship with AI feat. Turquoise Sound and Michael Garfield at The School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator (free & public 90-minute discussion)

* 3 May – Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna (patrons-only discussion)

* 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere (five-week online course with ten sessions)

Project Links

• Explore my full podcast archives and this project’s writing/episode archives• Join the Future Fossils Discord for both public and members-only threads• Browse and buy the books we talk about on the show• Explore a map and chat bot grown from nine years of mind-expanding episodes• Meet new allies on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord• Dig into Humans On The Loop’s original pitch & planning document• Contact me if you want to work together

Mentioned Books

Robert Poynton — Do Conversation: There’s No Such Thing As Small TalkW. Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It EvolvesEthan Mollick — Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AIJennifer Cobb — Cybergrace: The Search for God in The Digital World

Mentioned People

K Allado-McDowellJ.F. MartelTom MorganDr. BlueKevin KellyErik DavisKen AdamsJake KobrinTheodore ZeldinChris KutarnaMike LargePlatoSam AltmanErothymeGurdjieffKrishnamurtiPeter BrookeFederico CampagnaIain McGilchristDavid BohmCosma ShaliziNick LandYuval HarariTom ChatfieldMax WalucasTerence McKennaJason SilvaAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonBaruch SpinozaGottfried LeibnizLudwig WittgensteinCarlo RovelliT.S. EliotCarlos Castaneda

Bonus Mini-Episode

On The Value of Noisy Media, Conversational Protocols for Scaling Interaction, The Joy of Provisional Lists, and Tech Companies as Networks of Relationships

“When Apple has a pile of cash of the size it has, it looks permanent. It looks forever. It looks untouchable, and people get attached by that kind of visible sense of scale. But there was a guy I knew many years ago who'd been around Silicon Valley long enough, and knew all the people, all these organisms that we call organizations or brands. And he always saw Silicon Valley as a network of personal relationships, which would every now and then explode into a visible platform or or company like Google or Apple. But he was kinda like, ‘That's not what's going on.’ He would always say ‘It's the mycelial network of the relationships between the individuals.’”– Robert Poynton

Here you go:

It’s a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it’s one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps and another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at once. We can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos, but scale makes it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside it all.

And this has enormous implications: contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity but an existential necessity. In an age of exponential AI, our future hinges on whether we can learn to overcome the tendency to colonize other scales with our abstractions and cultivate the capacity to recognize interdependency with the unthinkably small and large. How does truly understanding this change the way we live? Bewilderment is a rich place to start. Let’s simmer in it for a while…

If you find enjoy this conversation, please like, subscribe, and leave a comment at YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify and consider becoming a member here or making tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:12 - Intro Essay: Scale & AI Safety0:13:25 - You Can’t Paint Fractals0:21:29 - We Can Only Act on The Scale at Which We Exist0:23:10 - The Story of Scale Theory0:27:49 - Discovering Scale through Computer Science & Nanotech0:38:37 - Being One & Feeling Many0:44:29 - The Embodiment of Mind & Information0:59:55 - The Scalar Synecdoche: Are Organizations Really Organisms?1:18:32 - Why Does It Matter Where We Draw The Lines Around Individuals?1:33:49 - Responsibility in A World Out of Control1:53:51 - Closing

Announcements

Check out my new single and music video “The Big Machine” — along with an essay on songwriting as evolution and a list of my favorite sci-fi ballads. Switch it up from this week’s news by diving in for a trip into the scalar reconfigurations of selfhood:

Starting next week I’m hosting a members-only reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with a live call on Sat May 3rd:

Josh’s Links

Joshua DiCaglio’s Website + Google Scholar + X + LinkedInScale Theory Part 1 PDF (almost half the book!)Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of NanotechnologyLanguage and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis (unfortunately not open-access)

Project Links

Contact me if you have questions or want to work togetherHumans On The Loop’s living pitch & planning documentJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord serverFull episode and essay archives

Podcasts

Humans On The Loop 01 – Richard DoyleHumans On The Loop 06 – K. Allado McDowellHumans On The Loop 10 – J.F. MartelHumans On The Loop 12 – Matt SegallHumans On The Loop 14 – Jim O’ShaughnessyWeird Studies 36 — On HyperstitionFuture Thinkers Podcast – Daniel Schmachtenberger

Talks

Michael Garfield — AI-Assisted Transformations of ConsciousnessJacob Foster — Toward A Cultural Ecology of The Noosphere

Books

Chaim Gingold – Building Sim CityValerie Hanson – Haptic VisionsAndrew Pilsch – TranshumanismPlato – PhaedrusGilbert Ryle – The Concept of MindThomas Hobbes – LeviathanGeoffrey West – ScaleAnonymous – The Cloud of UnknowingDouglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Articles

Marc Andreessen – Why Software Is Eating The WorldDavid Krakauer et al. — The Information Theory of IndividualityWilliam Gibson – Google’s Earth

People

Carl SaganEric DrexlerRichard FeynmanNeal StephensonRay KurzweilPlotinusPseudodionysusStuart DavisRina NicolaeN. Katherine HaylesStuart KauffmanVannevar BushGregory BatesonNorbert WienerHeinz Von FoersterKurt GödelJill NephewHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaWilliam BurroughsDorion SaganLynn MargulisPierre Teilhard De ChardinLuigi MangioneIlya PrigogineDavid BohmRamana MaharshiNisargadatta Maharaj

After decades of success in wealth management, he left his company in the care of his son Patrick and launched O’Shaughnessy Ventures — a firm that combines “Jim’s deeply rooted interest in all things art, science, investing and tech with his long-held desire to establish positive sum scenarios designed to help promising creators and their inspiring ideas succeed, regardless of age, location, job history or level of education.”

Last fall when I was on his show, we played a game of mind-jazz about “how we can live curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.” For this discussion, I wanted to rotate the axis of our exploration and learn how Jim’s personal experiences have contributed to the frame through which he engages life. Sweeping across scales from candid autobiography to team inquiry into some of the wickedest problems — like how we foster meaningful relationships and balance achievement with humility — we covered a lot of new ground.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and benefit from a fresh take on the mind — and heart — of one of the most exemplary mavericks I know.

If you find value in this conversation, please like and subscribe (YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify), leave a comment, and consider supporting my mission to help us cultivate wisdom in an age of magical technologies. Humans On The Loop is fiscally-supported by my friends at HAPPI (Helping Awesome People Prosper Intentionally), so you can become a member here or make tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.

Project Links

Contact me if you have questions or propositionsProject pitch & planning documentFull episode and essay archivesJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord server

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:16 - Intro0:06:23 - Jim’s Backstory0:31:43 - Crisis Personalities + Creativity vs. Risk Mitigation0:46:28 - Networks of Trust + Bootstrapped Credentials0:53:37 - Incenting Trust: Mass Customization + Consensus Reality Collapse1:06:14 - The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma + Trust-Building in Social Networks1:13:25 - How Do We Design for Flourishing at Scale (or Can We)?1:21:22 - Markets as Complex Systems1:29:10- Using (Especially Local) AI to Accelerate Realizing Your Mistakes1:37:23 - Outro

Mentioned Reading, Listening, & People

From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and The Precognitive Imagination by Eric WargoThe Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchristFinite and Infinite Games by James P. CarseThe Status Game by Will StorrThe Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (John Minford, translator)Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Authority by John P. KotterOne Summer: America 1927 by Bill BrysonGödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas HofstadterThe End of Trust - McSweeney’s Issue 54

Bilawal Sidhu — How to Unite Reality with Imagination - Infinite Loops PodcastWill Storr — The Status Game - Infinite Loops PodcastBrendan McCord — AI and The Philosophy of Technology - Infinite Loops PodcastAdam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet - Future Fossils PodcastReimagining the PhD - Nadia AsparouhovaThe TPOT PhD - Priya RoseSo many music festivals have been canceled this year. What’s going on? - Greg Rosalsky for NPR

Cory DoctorowDoug RushkoffAlfred North WhiteheadJosiah WarrenJed McKennaJosh WolfeSocrates

Upcoming Events

* My new single and music video “The Big Machine” goes live on April 1st! Pre-save to Spotify or pre-order on Bandcamp here.

* I’m co-facilitating a session on “Right Relations with AI” for the School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator alongside a superb faculty. Cohort starts April 3rd!

* The book club is back! Join us for a group reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with asynchronous discussion in the Future Fossils Discord server and a live call on May 3rd.

Announcements:

* We will book club Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents on May 3rd, along with pre-game discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server’s members-only channels. This book is a masterpiece of thinking otherwise and just what we need to attend to as transition from one mode of worlding to another…I can’t wait to talk about it with you and hear everyone’s reflections!

* I am finally publishing “The Big Machine”, my anthem for the Screen Age, and will drop my new single and music video on April 1st, so dive into the show notes and pre-save it on Spotify, follow my YouTube channel for notifications when the song goes live, and prime yourself by meditating on the question:“How long can you go without looking at your phone?”

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)

Project Links

Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server is where we’ll do the book club discussions.Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries!

Reads

Harnessing the power of our subconscious mindShaping the future with fictional storiesSocratic SalonsAirpods are ruining the worldA case for strategic ignorance by designTranscendence: An Emergent Career LifeHow to know what to doTasty Morsels from Groovy Hubs

The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz

 Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock

Artificial You by Susan Schneider

The_Human_Roots_of_Artificial_Intelligence_A_Commentary_on_Susan_Schneider's_Artificial_You by Inês Hipólito

Other Mentions

Stephanie LeppAri KushnirSøren KierkegaardPeter Sheridan DoddsPriya Rose of Fractal UniversityNadia AsparouhovaMark Pesce on Erik Davis’ Expanding MindKatalin KarikóJim O’ShaughnessyEvan MiyazonoK. Allado McDowellAmber Case & Michael ZarghamPaul GrahamKurt VonnegutSrinivasa RamanujanCharles DarwinAlbert EinsteinWinston ChurchillDaniel KahnemannAlbert ClaudeAlfred AdlerGregor MendelAflred Russel Wallace

* What distinguishes the organismal and machinic?

* How can we support vital cultural activity without reducing the measure of our humanity to our economic productivity?

* What if we’re looking for mind in AI in the wrong places, and instead treat both technology and human consciousness as unified within one unfolding process of cosmic self-discovery?

We welcome your feedback and reflections — here, or in the Future Fossils Discord Server — and to join us in the inquiry about what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination we need to thrive there!

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Pardon the delay: inexplicable technical issues forced me to re-render this episode half a dozen times. Hopefully you appreciate the “staying up until 1 am to try and ship on time”!

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)

Project Links

Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordContact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:32 - Intro0:08:18 - About Matt0:15:19 - Nouns & Verbs, Machines & Organisms0:24:24 - Emergence & Epistemic Humility0:36:55 - The Relationship Between Cultures & Markets0:49:21 - What Are Markets & Can They Play?0:58:30 - Our Responsibility To What We Make1:06:42 - Is Conscious AI A Hyperobject?1:17:43 - Outro

Mentions

Matt’s Website & TwitterMatt Segall & O.G. Rose - Re-thinking Economics & The Meaning of ValueBrendan Graham Dempsey & Matt Segall - Physics, Metaphysics, Meta-MetaphysicsMatt Segall & Tim Jackson - The Blind Spot (2024): A Critical and Reconstructive ReviewFuture Fossils 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyMichael Garfield - Introducing Humans On The LoopAbraham Flexner - The Usefulness of Useless KnowledgeW. Brian Arthur - The Nature of TechnologyW. Brian Arthur - Economics in Nouns and VerbsMiguel Fuentes - Complexity and The Emergence of Physical PropertiesMichael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cris Moore - The Physical Limits of CommunicationSteven Johnson - Revenge of The HumanitiesAdam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson - The Blind SpotJessica Flack - Hourglass Emergence: Complexity Begets Complexity thru Information Bottlenecks (video)Richard Doyle - Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The NoosphereKevin Kelly - The Expansion of IgnoranceWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or Borges?Danny Hillis - The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live The EntanglementKevin Kelly - Out of Control

Kai EnnisCarl JungStephen HawkingFriedrich NietzschRichard DawkinsAlan WattsMichael SchwartzAlfred North WhiteheadSean Esjbörn-HargensFelix GuattariStuart KauffmanRudolf SteinerDavid WolpertRobert RosenMichael LevinNorbert WeinerKen WilberKarl FristonGilbert SimondonHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaJohn VervaekeTerrence DeaconPierre Teilhard de Chardin

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify

Please consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks.)

Project Links

Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:17 - Intro0:06:38 - Partial Agency & The Great Inversion0:11:53 - Three Generations of McLuhan Theorists0:21:51 - Poetry & Prose, Narratives & Networks0:34:43 - Artists Show Us The Way0:41:29 - The Persistence of Memory vs. The Web As Palimpsest0:51:36 - AI in The Tetrad0:58:19 - Opting Out & The Slow Food Media Diet1:05:40 - Outro & Announcements

Mentioned Media & People

Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford by Weird Studies PodcastNora BatesonGregory BatesonWilliam Irwin ThompsonFrom Nowhere by Eric WargoThe Ascent of Information by Caleb ScharfEverything Everywhere All At OncePresent Shock by Douglas RushkoffUnderstanding Media by Marshall McLuhanThe Interior Landscape by Marshall McLuhanEzra PoundPreface to Plato by Eric HavelockJay-ZT.S. Eliot

Here’s a clip from that piece:

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies”.

Maybe we ought to consider, like Bruno Latour, that We Have Never Been Modern. Or maybe, as Federico Campagna suggests in Prophetic Culture, each era’s inhabitants identify as “modern” and project the “likely story” produced by their process of “worlding” to imagine futures that recede like mirages or rainbows as we approach the horizon of our understanding? By the time we arrive, we have transformed and the mysteries of the ancient and future are conserved. Some Indigenous cultures believe that all animals identify as “people” — perhaps every world is mundane to its native observers, and yet all of them arise out of chaos and ineffability. Science can’t answer some questions because it depends on replicability and provisional consensus, and some questions ultimately force us out of attempts to get everything to make sense and into contemplative surrender to our own cognitive limits (no matter how much we augment ourselves).

Science will, of course, continue. As Ted Chiang wrote twenty five years ago in his short story “Catching Crumbs from The Table”, advancements in AI and biotechnology could foreseeably “[leave] journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language… Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings… Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.”

In 2025, living through the superexponential evolution of machine intelligence, this story hits close to home. What will we do when all breakthroughs are made by black box AI systems whose logic and insights evade us? We already have to take large language models on faith, doing our best to conserve a modest sliver of understanding as we resign ourselves to the practical benefits of successful but illegible prediction. But given that scientific progress has largely advanced through the proliferation of hyperspecialist experts who cannot understand one another’s research, we should again ask if it were ever the case that we could explain everything, or whether we’ve just been ignoring the central importance of textual interpretation as we puzzled over the riddles of a world that never owed us any satisfying final answers?

Whether we’re modern or not, it is time for us to reconsider the foundations of ideas like informed consent, agency, evidence, and personhood. Whether you think we’re still waiting around for the future or that we are living it, we live among an ecology of diverse intelligences and require a humbler approach…one strangely similar to that of Medieval serfs and jungle-dwelling foragers than first seems obvious…one that owes back pay to the dismissed disciplines of religion, magic, and myth. Which is why I’m excited to get weird with you in this episode.

This week I speak with one of my closest comrades in philosophical investigation, Canadian author and film-maker J.F. Martel. Co-founder and co-host (with Phil Ford) of the internationally-acclaimed Weird Studies Podcast and Weirdosphere online learning platform, tenured para-academic explorer of high strangeness and the liminal zones between the known, unknown, and unknowable, J.F. is a perfect partner with whom to refine inquiry into persistent and tricky questions like:

– What is the nature of technology and how does it change as our seemingly-discrete tools and built environments merge into a planet-scale thinking machine?

– How can we tell when AI achieves personhood, and what does it take to be “good parents” of beings that are fundamentally beyond our control?

– What can religion and fairy tales teach us about living well in a world where our explanatory frameworks fail us?

– How can we re-think and re-claim healthy institutions to serve human flourishing after the end of history as we know it?

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Please consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks.)

J.F.’s Links

ReclaimingArt.comWeirdStudies.comWeirdosphere.orgJF on X | Weird Studies Discord & SubRedditReclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice (book)

Project Links

Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:01 - Introduction0:09:32 - Revisiting Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice0:15:12 - What we lose and gain by automating culture0:31:12 - Wendell Berry’s poem “A Timbered Choir”0:36:50 - Transcendental, Machinic, Immanental, Imaginal, and Fractal0:46:21 - Black Box Personhood & AI as A 'Thou’1:00:00 - Is AI Magic?1:06:10 - Fairy Tales, Faith, and Submission after Modernity1:10:27 - Do we still need institutions?1:16:59 - Thanks & Announcements

Back Catalogue

FF 18 - J.F. Martel on Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny AwesomenessFF 71 - J.F. Martel on Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2WS 26 Living in a Glass AgeFF 126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural RealitiesJRS Currents 064: Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel on Art x AIFF 214 - J.F. Martel, Phil Ford, & Megan Phipps on Weird Cybernetics: Waking Up From The EcstasyFF 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-Time

Mentioned Media

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”Erik Hoel’s “Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture”New York Encounter (event)Art is dead. Long live Art with Android Jones | Mind Meld 323 Third Eye DropsCosma Shalizi & Henry Farrell’s “Artificial Intelligence is a Familiar-Looking Monster”Sigmund Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure PrincipleWendell Berry’s “A Timbered Choir”Henri Corbin’s “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal”William Irwin Thompson’s Imaginary LandscapesDanny Hillis’ “The Enlightenment Is Dead. Long Live The Entanglement”Neri Oxman’s “The Age of Entanglement”David Krakauer’s “Emergent Engineering”Kevin Kelly’s Out of ControlFF 150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-HargensFF 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyTop Aerospace Scientists Suspect UFOs are Biblical Time Machines | Diana Walsh Pasulka on The Danny Jones PodcastZiwei Xu et al.’s “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”Isaac Asimov’s FoundationGilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

Other Mentions

Donna TartMatt CardinMichael PhilipBenoit MandelbrotJames AllenGregory BatesonDavid HumeGottfried LeibnizL. Ron HubbardErik DavisCarl JungJacques LacanAlbert CamusJean-Paul SartreCurt JaimungalStafford BeerCarl SaganJames HillmanPhil FordMarie-Louise von FranzGK ChestertonEdmund Burke

If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way).

About This Episode

This week we speak with “strategic futurist and pattern navigator” Adah Parris, a London-based wizard and weirdo with whom I immediately hit it off over our shared interest in “cyborg shamanism” and an emphasis on being good ancestors. Forbes Brasil called her “one of the most important futurists in the world.” It’s hard for me to measure the impact she’s had on business leaders, tech startups, marketing and communications firms, arts schools, and in the lives of the countless other people.

We talk about the relationship between numbers, language, and the ineffable, ever-shifting human spirit. Adah’s work points past knowledge and history into the elemental nature of both human and machine, past our differences into the deep similarity worth celebrating and the mystery that we inhabit and embody. Join us for a yarn that is both silly and profound, present and far-reaching, about being uncategorizably creative, open, and curious amidst the wicked problems of our time…

Project Links

• Read the project pitch & planning doc• Dig into the full episode and essay archives• Join the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on Discord + Bluesky + X• Join the open, listener-moderated Future Fossils Discord Server• Contact me if you have questions (patron rewards, sponsorship, collaboration, etc.)• Browse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellers

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:00:49 - Intro0:05:24 - Feeling Seen & Heard0:09:54 - Adah’s Biography0:17:21 - Poetry & Number0:27:55 - Cyborg Shamanism & The Five Elements0:37:03 - The Foraging Neurotype of “Extremely Online”0:51:07 - Surrendering Agency to Systems0:55:14 - The Incremental Reclamation of Agency1:01:19 - Art after Modernity & Healing from Noise1:13:01 - Beyond Narrative & Into Dance1:17:30 - Thanks & Announcements

Adah’s Links

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | Medium | Chartwell Speakers

Finding Our Future in Ancestral Wisdom @ TEDxSoho

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want To Be? @ Think With Google

Cyborg Shamanism & The Case for Elemental AI @ Atmos

Mentioned Media

Refactoring “Autonomy” & “Freedom” for The Age of Language Modelsby Michael Garfield

223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyFuture Fossils Podcast

Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foragingby David L. Barack et al.

New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowellHumans On The Loop

Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Futureby De Kai

Technoshamanism: A Very Psychedelic Century! at Moogfest 2016by Michael Garfield

Proteus (film)

Sonic restoration: acoustic stimulation enhances plant growth-promoting fungi activityby James M. Robinson et al.

Ada Twist, Scientistby Andrea Beaty & David Roberts

Oppenheimer (film)

Dante’s Infernoby Dante Alighieri

Mentioned People & Institutions

Ford Motor Co.TelefonicaWayraAT&TAugusta Ada Byron LovelaceCharles BabbageMarshall McLuhanDr. Kate StoneErnst HaeckelTada HozumiLewis MumfordJohn Taylor GattoPaul TillichAlan Turing

Guest Recommendations

Emalick NijeAnjuli BediCharlie MorleyAmichai Lau-Lavie

If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way).

Our next members hangout will be Saturday Feb 15th at 3 pm Mountain Time and I would love to see you in the mix! Expect details on how to join the call by Friday.

About This Episode

We live in a time defined by the agency of what author, critic, and teacher Howard Rheingold famously described as “tools for thought” — media that expand our minds and enhance our ability to learn and collaborate, both for good and ill. But just because we’re on the Web doesn’t make us “net smart”, another term from Rheingold’s extensive catalogue of pithy idioms.

As anyone with a pocket supercomputer can attest, having information on tap doesn’t necessarily result in better attention management, boost our critical thinking, or confer a greater capacity to engage in prosocial collective action…but we can choose to allocate ourselves to developing the skills we need to thrive on this electronic frontier. And who better to help us than Rheingold himself, a legendary figure whose reporting and counsel from the frothy edge can teach us all great volumes about how to deepen our humanity in technologically-augmented worlds.

Disclaimer: the audio and video on Howard’s end of the recording drifted unevenly and sometimes minutes away from each other…and while I put in several extra days of effort to repair it all, you will notice moments where they don’t line up.

Project Links

• Read the project pitch & planning doc• Dig into the full episode and essay archives• Join the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on Discord + Bluesky + X• Join the open, listener-moderated Future Fossils Discord Server• Contact me if you have questions (patron rewards, sponsorship, collaboration, etc.)• Browse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellers

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:50 - Intro0:07:15 - Howard’s Story0:15:59 - Technology as Psychedelic & The New Selves of The Web0:26:42 - Attention Management as A 21st Century Literacy0:39:29 - Making Life Online a Lucid Dream0:52:17 - New Architectures of Participation1:01:51 - The Importance of Art & Play1:12:16 - Making Room for Innovation1:17:05 - Howard’s Guest Recommendations1:18:24 - Thanks & Announcements

Howard’s Links

Website | Patreon | X | Mastodon | WikipediaAttention: And Other 21st Century LiteraciesNet Smart @ Google Tech Talks (video)Tools for Thought: The History & Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (also on Digital Library for The Commons)Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (also on JSTOR)The Peeragogy Handbook (also public domain)Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (PDF here)Virtual Reality (also on Internet Archive)The Virtual Community: Homesteading on The Electronic Frontier (also on Internet Archive)Pataphysics.us

Mentioned Books & Papers

Douglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual FrameworkLinda Stone - Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial AttentionJacques Ellul - The Technological SocietyRegina Rini - Deepfakes and The Epistemic BackstopPuja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl - Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s SoulJoseph Henrich - The Secret of Our SuccessElinor Ostrom - Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective ActionJ. Stephen Lansing - Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in BaliAnanyo Bhattacharya - The Man from The Future: The Visionary Life of John von NeumannGarrett Hardin - The Tragedy of The CommonsManuel Castells - The Rise of The Network SocietyAnnie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Mentioned People & Institutions

Timothy LearyJoe KamiyaAlan KayClay ShirkyRichard DoyleRay KurzweilLinda StoneIain McGilchristClifford Nass Stanislas DehaeneTim O’ReillyCory DoctorowAndreas WagnerDavid PasiakDave SnowdenMircea EliadeEd CatmullJohn LasseterAlan TuringXeroc PARCScientific AmericanThe WELLThe Whole Earth ReviewThe Institute For The FutureThe Macarthur FoundationNapsterBurning ManHewlett PackardPixarIndustrial Light & MagicLucasfilmStanford Institute for Innovations in Learning

Guest Recommendations

Joe HenrichAnnie Murphy PaulBrian AlexanderAthena Aktipis

This week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that’s carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica to the Center for Media and Social Impact to The New America Foundation to The Association of Independents in Radio and beyond, and now she oversees a refuge for social innovators working at the intersections of philanthropy, media, arts and culture, and futurism. We need dot connectors more than ever if we are to trace the shape of what’s emerging, and I look to Jessica as an example of how to weave research, experience design, production, strategy, and culture-building into something like the raft we need to make our way through vast uncertainty to thriving futures just over the horizon. In this episode we discuss the ideas shared in her book with Kamal Sinclair, Making A New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Futures and how to rethink storytelling in new media.

Project Links

Pitch and planning documentHire me to help you make senseMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server + Bluesky List + X Community

Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:40 - Intro0:07:51 - Who is Jessica Clark?0:10:42 - “New Media” Means New Kinds of “Reality”0:15:18 - Storytelling & Social Power0:25:07 - Overcoming Groupthink / Problems in The Creative Economy0:32:39 - Fairness in New Media0:40:38 - What Do We Measure While Incubating Creativity?0:48:32 - Post-Institutional Credentials0:55:01 - How Do We Support “The Interstitionaries”?1:02:14 - Intergenerational Wisdom & The Value of Conflict to Truth1:08:59 - What Biases Do We Want?1:14:29 - The Future Voice of Fandom1:18:03 - Acknowledgements & Next Guest

(Most) Mentions

Making A New Reality’s Toolkit for Change ResourcesKamal Sinclair & Jessica Clark discuss Making A New RealityVictor Pickard’s “We Need a Media System That Serves People’s Needs, Not Corporations’”William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”Ward Shelley’s Who Invented The Avant Garde Redux, 2020Michael Garfield’s “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”Doug RushkoffSep KamvarJulie Ann CrommettStephanie LeppAri KuschnirMaureen FanEugene ChungZebras UniteMetalabel Maureen GiovanniniShannon GilmartinNicole AnandEd CatmullLeslie Fields CruzDavid JayCenter for Humane TechnologyWilliam Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement of NatureC Thi NguyenThomas FrankJennifer BrandelBrian EnoTracy Van SlykeThe Center for Media & Social ImpactMIT Open Documentary LabTrista HarrisPatricia AufderheideInternet ArchiveWikimedia FoundationMalka OlderGlobal VoicesDark Trek

This week we speak with K Allado-McDowell, artist, musician, and co-founder of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human-computer co-authorship with the book Pharmako-AI, as well as Air Age Blueprint, Amor Cringe, and the graphic novel Outside, plus works in opera and ritual. Their work reveals the human as inherently relational and ecological, technology as something nature’s doing, and the new vistas made legible by technology as a fertile zone within which we can redefine identity and story from a radically transformed awareness. Pharmako-AI, the first book to be co-written with GPT-3 in 2020, sets the tone: mutually interdependent co-arising of selfhood through linguistic interactions between animal, vegetable, and mineral intelligences, AI as an adjunct to our awakening sense of co-imbrication in and as a plural and evolving world.

Project Links

Plans, invited thinkers, and needsHire me for consulting or advisory workMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersTend a community knowledge garden in the Wisdom x Technology Discord serverMeet delightful fellow weirdos in the private Future Fossils Facebook group

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:34 – Intro0:06:54 – Who is Kenric Allado-McDowell?0:13:12 – Entering Linguistic Hyperspace0:31:36 – Neural, Network, Immersive, Broadcast Media0:48:10 – The Poison Path of Machine Intelligence1:05:10 – Post-Cyperpunk Love & Nonduality1:17:55 – Recommendations1:21:02 – Outro

Mentions

K’s “Neural Interpellation”K’s “Designing Neural Media”Dale Pendell’s Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and The Poison PathPharmako-AIK in conversation with Erik Davis at The AlembicJacques Vallee’s The Invisible CollegeJohn KeatsRichard DoyleEduardo KohnSETIDavid Abrams’ The Spell of The SensuousRobert RauschenbergJohn CageBell LabsFred Turner’s The Democratic SurroundStanford UniversityThe Committee for National MoraleMargaret MeadGregory BatesonCharles & Ray EamesEdward SteichenStan VanDerBeekTerence McKennaReplika AIRay KurzweilMidjourneyJoseph SchumpeterJakob Johann von UexküllJean BaudrillardMiike SnowJohn DanaherSpikeRudolf SteinerTimothy MortonKrishnamurtiAlexander Von HumboldtAndrea WulfNick LandNora Khan Paul Preciado

This week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound, one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and raises questions like:

Where is the line between technology and magic?What is a computer, really, and do humans qualify?How wrong might we be about the future?How do stories shape reality, and what happens when we have to make room for the stories of the more-than-human world?

A crucial point of note: this is “hard science fiction”, but it’s not the kind you’re used to. At a time when even the most square, prosaic suits are quick to quote Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, it is appropriate that sci-fi as a kind of thinking-through of our condition would reflect the cultural retrieval of premodern tropes like wizards, dragons, talking animals, and sacred swords.

What follows is a rich discussion of how Robin and I both enjoy traversing and interrogating those familiar boundaries between the lost and found, the sensible and the ineffable, wildness and city, born and created, sleep and waking, care and power…

Project Links

Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:38 – Intro0:06:50 – Robin’s Story0:08:35 – The Care and Feeding of AI0:13:38 – Magical Technologies vs. The (Other) Powers of Nature0:21:46 – Persistent Wildness in The Post-Apocalyptic Future0:28:57 – Mapping Everything & Getting Lost0:32:30 – The City of Transformation: Ephemeropoli from Burning Man to Rath Varia0:37:48 – Tuning Longevity to the Duration of our Interests0:41:49 – The Loss of Self in Data & The Metamorphic Self0:49:02 – Beaver Governance is Better Governance0:54:23 – Living Robots & Sleeping Institutions in Liquid Modernity1:02:16 – How Do We Keep Healthy Rhythms While Scaling?1:10:35 – Life at The College of Wyrd1:18:01 – Recommendations for Good Discussion & Book Takeaways1:23:09 – Thanks & Outro

Mentions

Eliot Peper (Re: FF 47, 115)Eliot Peper’s interview with Robin Sloan, “Binding The Moon”Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBitsTim Morton’s Hell: In Search of A Christian EcologyThe Long Now FoundationKevin Kelly’s “The Expansion of Ignorance” (Re: FF 128, 165, 204)Star WarsTyson Yunkaporta (Re: FF 172)Adventure TimeThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of The KingdomMichael Crichton’s Jurassic ParkJack VanceM. John HarrisonHerbert SimonJames C. Scott’s Seeing Like A StateRichard Doyle’s Darwin’s PharmacyKim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue)Neil Gaiman’s Long Now talk “How Stories Last”Jonathan Rowson/Perspectiva’s antidebateThe Templeton FoundationZygmunt Bauman’s Liquid ModernityAlexander RoseJohan Chu & James Evans’s “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science”Michael Garfield’s “The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, and Economies of Scale”Erik Hoel’s “The Overfitted Brain”JF Martel (Re: FF 18, 71, 126, 214)Phil Ford (Re: FF 126, 157, 214)Erik Davis (Re: FF 99, 132, 141)The WeirdosphereBell LabsMagic: The GatheringComplexity Podcast 42: “Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West on Calling Bullshit”Inna Semetsky’s “Information and Signs: The Language of Images”The I ChingPhilip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)Iain McGilchristClaire EvansJames BridleQuanta Magazine

This week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp (Website | LinkedIn), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our limitations of perspective. Stephanie is the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural Evolution and former Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. Her work has been covered by NPR and the MIT Technology Review, supported by the Mozilla Foundation and Sundance Institute, and featured on Future Fossils Podcast twice — first in episode 154 for her project Deep Reckonings and then in episode 205 with Greg Thomas on Jazz Leadership and Antagonistic Cooperation.

Her latest project, Faces of X, pits actors against themselves in scripted trialogues between the politically liberal and conversative positions on major social issues, with a third role swooping in to observe what each side gets right and what they have in common. I support this work wholeheartedly. In my endless efforts to distill the key themes of Humans On The Loop, one of them is surely how our increasing connectivity can — if used wisely — help each of us identify our blind spots, find new respect and compassion for others, and discover new things about our ever-evolving selves (at every scale, from within the human body to the Big We of the biosphere and beyond).

Thanks for listening and enjoy this conversation!

Project Links

Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser0:00:48 – Intro0:06:33 – The Black, White, and Gray of Agency0:10:54 – Stephanie’s Initiation into Multiperspectivalism0:15:57 – Hegelian Synthesis with Faces of X0:23:53 – Reconciling Culture & Geography0:29:02 – Improvising Faces of X for AI0:46:34 – Do Artifacts Have Politics?0:50:04 – Playing in An Orchestra of Perspectives0:55:10 – Increasing Agency in Policy & Voting1:05:55 – Self-Determination in The Family1:08:39 – Thanks & Outro

Other Mentions

• Damien Walter on Andor vs. The Acolyte• William Irwin Thompson• John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration for The Independence of Cyberspace”• Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell’s “Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster”• Liv Boeree• Allen Ginsberg• Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch• Singularity University• Android Jones + Anson Phong’s Chimera• Basecamp• Grimes• Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”• Ibram X. Kendi• Coleman Hughes• Jim Rutt

This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen. If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io, an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communicate legible impact metrics to stakeholders. Or, in the parlance of our times, she is a master of negotiating the complexities of human communication and community.

She has deep, lived experience of what it takes to subvert the toxic status quo, cultivate the health of teams, and rethink our “social” spaces so they actually work for human beings. She also introduced me to the world of “mycopunk”, an earthier and more distributed alternative to solarpunk that places more priority on our relationships and narrative construction as an inherently collective project.

This is a warm and grounded dialogue with someone I respect immensely as a force for betterment. Here is how her team describes their work and principles on their own website:

Our greatest challenges as a global civilization will require an unprecedented amount of cooperation and may have been caused in large part by unmitigated competition. We have founded Socialroots on a few key principles, summarized below, to support this shift into a more healthy future.

* Efficient coordination across groups enables more decentralized organizing and greater innovation.

* Data is a commons and must be treated as such. Platform users need to be empowered when it comes to their data.

* Power stays healthier when shared. We are dedicated to fair, transparent, and consent-driven work, enabling participatory communities to share values and approaches, and to approach teamwork informed by insights from healthy living systems.

There you have it. I highly recommend you reach out to her and her team if you are trying to do better work in groups.

Special Announcement: Join me for the first in a new series of live hangout calls for patrons on Saturday, January 18th at 2 pm Mountain Time! Let’s foster real and lasting collaborations in a safe place for collective inquiry.

Thank you and enjoy this episode!

Project Links

Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

Browse my reading list and support local booksellers

Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server

Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group

Hire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:31 – Intro0:06:58 – Meet Christina Bowen0:08:54 – Scaling Social Networks Without Burning Out0:14:00 – Working Out Loud in Small & Large Groups0:19:25 – Social Protocols of Coordination0:22:44 – Healthy Boundaries Online0:30:10 – Supporting Invisible or Illegible Labor0:40:50 – Subverting The Status (More-Than-Human) Pyramid0:51:44 – Salience Landscapes & Safe/Brave/Inclusive Spaces0:53:35 – AI-Augmented Communication & Spacemaking1:01:34 – Edge-Based Coherent Sensemaking vs. Toxic Hierarchies1:09:11 – Mindful Tech Use & Recommended Guests1:12:38 – Outro

Mentioned Media

Mycopunk Principles

Build Capacity: Scaling your network without burning outby Socialroots, Christina Bowen, Naomi Joy Smith

What is coordination and why is it so important to effective networks?by Ana Jamborcic, Christina Bowen, Socialroots

Intimacy Gradients: The Key to Fixing Our Broken Social Media Landscapeby Socialroots, Ana Jamborcic

Let's subvert the status pyramidby Socialroots, Ana Jamborcic

Working and learning out loudby Harold Jarche

Alyssa Allegretti on Sacred Domesticity and Hard Times in The Liminal WebFuture Fossils Podcast 225

Descartes’ Errorby Antonio Damasio

Seeing Like A Stateby James C. Scott

C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as ArtFuture Fossils 175

Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As GovernanceFuture Fossils 213

Stephen Reid on Technological MetamodernismFuture Fossils 226

Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold EquationsFuture Fossils 141

The Dawn of Everythingby David Graeber & David Wengrow

Generative Team Design: Innovation, Psychological Safety, and Empathyby Dara Blumenthal

Being Glueby Tanya Reilly

Identity Is Such A Dragby Luis Mojica and Sophie Strand on Holistic Life Navigation

The future is fungi: The rise and rhizomes of mushroom cultureby ASU Center for Science and The Imagination with Merlin Sheldrake, Kaitlin Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, and Corey Pressman

Other Mentions

• DWeb Camp• Responsive.org• Jeff Emmett• Plato• Bayo Akomolafe• Douglas Rushkoff• John Fullerton• Capitalinstitute.org• Cris Moore• Friedrich Hölderlin• Interspeciesinternet.io• Kumu.io• Joe Edelman• Pri Bertucci

When technology gets byzantine, when the heady early years of cybernetic mysticism give way and our software engineers become the new priests of the Catholic institutions of Big Tech, maybe we can learn a thing or two from a Byzantine Catholic who’s made Responsible Technology their life. This week’s guest is just that person. Benjamin Olsen is the Head of Windows Responsible AI & Data Compliance at Microsoft, where he also pioneered their first AI & Ethics education programs. He’s also an advisor for AI and Faith and has worked as co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Responsible Learning & Education program and member of their Responsible Development and Deployment of Technology steering committee; the former Responsible Innovation Lead at Meta; and a part of the IEEE’s working group on Responsible AI. His online courses in Analytics, Data Science, and Responsible Technology have been taken by millions of students in more than 120 countries.

But it’s his writing at the intersection of religion, spirituality, technology, and human flourishing that caught my eye. I met Ben through Andrew Dunn of the School of Wise Innovation, where I was on the faculty for a course on Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI with Josh Schrei, and was immediately taken by the clarity and heart he brings to places I have always guessed were, frankly, soulless. Speaking with him gave me hope that maybe all this hype is actually the evidence of earnest and concerted effort — in some corners, anyway — to do the future right and not just big. I hope that you enjoy your conversation.

Links

“The Inner Life of Responsible Innovation” by Benjamin Olsen

“Monsters and Moderation in Respsonbile AI” by Benjamin Olsen

“Super-responsible AI” by Benjamin Olsen

“Mission Impossible: Perfectly Responsible AI” by Benjamin OlsenLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

Browse my reading list and support local booksellers

Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server

Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group

Hire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser Quote

0:01:34 – Episode Intro

0:03:58 – Introducing Benjamin Olsen

0:08:20 – Toward Omni-considerate Corporate Ethics

0:17:18 – Practicing Super-responsibility

0:27:32 – Between The Scylla of Censorship and The Charybdis of Underblocking

0:36:26 – Doing The Lord’s Work inside The Leviathan

0:43:09 – Consent between Company & Customer

0:54:07 – How Do We Exercise Agency Within Social Constraints?

0:58:10 – Who Does Benjamin Recommend?

1:00:21 – Closing Remarks

Mentions

* Yolanda Gil

* Kevin Kelly

* Martin Luther King Jr.

* Henry David Thoreau

* William Gibson

* Stafford Beer

* James P. Carse

* Hans Moravec

* Father Walker Ciszek

* Catherine Dougherty

* Larry Muhlstein

* Danny Go

* Timothy Morton

* Carl Jung

* Amber Case

* Michael Zargham

* Chip and Dan Heath

* Bayazid Bastami

* Shannon Valor

*  Dan Zigmund

* Zvika Krieger

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When, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts?

After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.”

I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I’d rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…

Links

Richard Doyle’s faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

Browse my reading list and support local booksellers

Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server

Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group

Hire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser

0:03:36 – Episode Intro

0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle

0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation

0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace

0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection

0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism

1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn’t A Professional Service (??)

1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace

1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”

1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of Science

1:22:17 – AI-Enabled Extraction vs. AI-Enabled Abundance

1:38:40 – Closing Remarks

Reflections

Much of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are “in the loop” or “out of the loop” — whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them, if we ever do…and yet evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the way that humans are always-already intertwingled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops — as focal points of conscious agency dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we’ve been people we have never really “called the shots” but rather cultivated our response-ability within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque…and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves.

And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human. Like the telescope and microscope before them, language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. We do not need to leave our solar system to find “strange new worlds” awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation lately seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. “What can I do?” becomes “Who am I?” and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry. To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just “connected” but precipitate as aggregates, in fields of constellated data, prompts a figure-ground reversal in which selves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.

Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing “human” and “non-human” as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility: we find the opportunity to question what we’re trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own “source code” and adjust our goals accordingly.

If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh, distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity. Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask “What do we want to do, and why is that desire substantiated?”

This kind of meaning-making isn’t just a luxury but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn’t working. It’s time to ask if, maybe, this is due to “user error” and the answer doesn’t lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world — and, this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well-adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful.

In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are both Towers of Babel and fingers pointing to the Moon. They are weird, unprecedented, and sublime — and they are business as usual on Planet Earth, where we have always come awake in medias res amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity and the place from which we can, at last, engage the question of “What Now?” with discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face.

Digital technologies are psychedelic. We’ve been on a bad trip. It’s time for us wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the oars together in whatever novel wonders may arise — to neither “give way to astonishment” nor let our fears steer us into the rocks. Humans On The Loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be, right now, to fully give in to the paradox, and notice how its knots untie in hyperspace, and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding — and more lucid (dare I say, productive?) questions.

One of those questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now found ourselves swirling. Maps of the World Wide Web look very much like brain scans of the amped-up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down — when every node has edges with each other node, and average path length drops to one — how do we prioritize? What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent “intertwingularity”? Which apparitions do we honor, and which do we ignore? (And how?) Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us: “test your drugs”, “get grounded”, “set and setting”, “integration counseling”…

Mentions

Generated by NotebookLM. Please let me know if you notice any errors or omissions!

* Richard Doyle

* Michael Garfield

* Gary Weber

* Shankara

* Trey Conner

* Nora Pandoro

* Erik Davis

* Joshua DiCaglio

* John Perry Barlow

* Naomi Most

* Nate Hagens

* Daniel Schmachtenberger

* Tyson Yunkaporta

* Martin Luther King Jr.

* Mahatma Gandhi

* John Von Neumann

* Subhash Kak

* Iain McGilchrist

* Timothy Morton

* Stuart Kauffman

* Dean Radin

* Brian Josephson

* Monica Gagliano

* Christoph Koch

* Gregory Bateson

* Elon Musk

* Robert Rosen

* H.P. Lovecraft

* Philip K. Dick

* Herbert Simon

* Douglas Rushkoff

* Sri Aurobindo

✨ About This Episode

“The best academic lecture/slam poetry/sermon/magical invocation/attunement and invitation to engage I’ve experienced in a long while.”– Daniel Lindenbarger

Next week, after nearly nine years of development, this show grows up to become Humans On The Loop, a transdisciplinary exploration of agency in the age of automation. For long-time listeners of Future Fossils, not much will really change — philosophical investigations in the key of psychedelic futurism, voyages into the edges of what is and can be known, and boldly curious riffs on the immeasurable value of storytelling and imagination have always characterized this show. Many of the episodes I’ve shared in this last year especially were, effectively, preparations for this latest chapter and play as large a part in my ongoing journey to synthesize and translate everything I’ve learned from years of independent scholarship and institutional work in esteemed tech, science, and culture orgs…

But we are no longer waiting for a weird future to arrive. We’re living in it, and shaping it with every act and utterance. So in this “final” episode of Future Fossils before I we bring all of these investigations into the domain of practical applied inquiry, it felt right to ramp from FF to HOTL by sharing my talk and discussion for Stephen Reid’s recent online course on Technological Metamodernism. This was a talk that left me feeling very full of hope for what’s to come, in which I trace the constellations that connect some of my biggest inspirations, and outline the social transformations I see underway.

This is a rapid and dynamic condensation of the big patterns I’ve noticed in the course of over 500 hours of recorded public dialogue and a lively primer on why I’m focusing on the attention and imagination as the two big forces that will continue to shape our lives in the worlds that come after modernity.

It is also just the beginning.

Thank you for being part of this adventure.

✨ Support & Participate

• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon(15% off annual memberships until 12/21/24 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy (most of) the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP• Read “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, my story mentioned in this episode.

✨ Chapters

Chapter 1: Reflections & Announcements (0:00:00)Chapter 2: Co-Evolution with AI and the Limits of Control (0:12:49)Chapter 3: Poetry as the Beginning and End of Scientific Knowledge (0:18:06)Chapter 4: The American Replacement of Nature and the Power of Narrative (0:24:05)Chapter 5: The End of “Reality” & The Beginning of Metamodern Nuance (28:58)Chapter 6: Q&A: Myths, Egregores, and Metamodern Technology vs. Wetiko & Moloch (0:34:52)Chapter 7: Q&A: Chaos Magic & Other Strategies for Navigating Complexity (45:59)Chapter 8: Q&A: Musings on Symbiogenesis & Selfhood (0:50:18)Chapter 9: Q&A: How Do We Legitimize These Approaches? (0:55:42)Chapter 10: Q&A: Why Am I Devoting Myself to Wise Innovation Inquiry? (0:61:01)Chapter 11: Thanks & Closing (0:63:22)

✨ Mentioned Individuals

A mostly-complete list generated by Notebook LM and edited by Michael Garfield.

* William Irwin Thompson - Historian, poet, and author of The American Replacement of Nature, which argues that American culture is future-oriented. (See Future Fossils 42 & 43.)

* Evan “Skytree” Snyder - Electronic music producer, roboticist, and co-founder of Future Fossils who departed after ten episodes. (See Future Fossils 1-10, 53, 174, and 207.)

* Stephen Reid - Founder of the Dandelion online learning program and The Psychedelic Society; host of a course on “Technological Metamodernism” in which Garfield presented this talk. (See Future Fossils 226.)

* Ken Wilber - Author of numerous books on “AQAL” Integral Theory. (See Michael’s 2008 interview with him on Integral Art.)

* Friedrich Hölderlin - German poet who famously said, "Poetry is the beginning and the end of all scientific knowledge.”

* George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - Authors of Metaphors We Live By, which explores the role of embodied metaphor in shaping thought.

* John Vervaeke - Philosopher who, along with others, uses the term “transjective” to describe the interconnected nature of subject and object.

* Sean Esbjörn-Hargens - Integral theorist who taught Garfield at JFK University. (See Future Fossils 60, 113, and 150.)

* Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch - Embodied mind theorists and authors of On Becoming Aware, a book about phenomenology.

* Kevin Kelly - Techno-optimist Silicon Valley futurist and author on “the expansion of ignorance” in relation to scientific discovery. (See Future Fossils 128, 165, and 203.)

* Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and David Bohm - Paradigm-challenging physicists mentioned who, by science to its limits, developed mystical insights.

* Timothy Morton - Philosopher who coined the term “hyperobjects” to refer to entities so vast and complex they defy traditional understanding. (See Future Fossils 223.)

* Caleb Scharf - Astrobiologist, author of The Ascent of Information, in which he coins the term “The Dataome” to refer to the planet-scale body of information that constrains human behavior.

* Iain McGilchrist - Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary, known for his work on the divided brain and the importance of right-brained thinking.

* Eric Wargo - Anthropologist and science writer who suggests that dreams are precognitive and the brain binds time as a four-dimensional object. (See Future Fossils 117, 171, and 231.)

* Regina Rini - Philosopher at York University who coined the term “epistemic backstop of consensus” to describe what photography gave society and what, later, deepfakes have eroded.

* Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky - Philosophers and authors who explored the implications of the loss of a universal moral order grounded in religion.

* Duncan Barford - An author and figure associated with chaos magic.

* Lynn Margulis - Evolutionary biologist known for her work on symbiogenesis and the importance of cooperation in evolution.

* Primavera De Filippi - Co-author of Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code with Aaron Wright and technology theorist who theorized the "Collaboration Monster."

* Joshua Schrei - Ritualist and host of The Emerald Podcast who produced episodes on Guardians and Protectors and on the role of The Seer. (See Future Fossils 219.)

* Hunter S. Thompson - American journalist and author known for his gonzo journalism and the quote, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

* Tim Adalin - Host of the VoiceCraft podcast, on which Garfield discussed complex systems perspectives on pathologies in organizational development. (See Future Fossils 227.)

✨ Support & Participate

• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon (15% off annual memberships until 12/21 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP, coda “You Don’t Have To Move → 8:33” from The Age of Reunion

✨ About This Episode

In this penultimate episode of Future Fossils before we transform into Humans On The Loop, I bring two of my favorite guests and comrades in the so-called “Weirdosphere” back for their first-ever conversation together — and it’s a real banger! Probably the most inspired and provocative conversation I’ve ever had on the nature of time and human creativity.

Joining me for this trialogue are Eric Wargo, author of From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination (previously on FF episodes 117 and 171), and J.F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice and co-host (with Phil Ford) of Weird Studies podcast (previously on FF episodes 18, 71, 126, and 214).

Our discussion centers on the concept of precognition — the ability to perceive future events — as the mechanism of all human creative activity. Both Eric and J.F. argue that art, like shamanistic practices, acts as a means of accessing and expressing precognitive experiences, often manifesting as seemingly coincidental events or uncanny correspondences between art and reality.

We talk about the role of trauma and dissociation in stimulating creative breakthroughs — why there seems to be a direct biological and psychological link between suffering, displacement, and the discovery of radical new insights and modes of being. Can we create without destroying, or are rupture and connection one thing?

We also examine how emerging media through the ages have shaped our experience of time. Starting with the earliest Paleolithic artifacts and the role of cave art in facilitating or encoding ecstatic experience, we trace the evolution of art through to how the development “the cut” in modern cinema led to new ideas of causality. Each new medium provides novel ways of thinking about leaps across space and time, and their study offers new points of entry into a unifying philosophy of rupture and discontinuity.

Lastly, we explore some of my own most potent and disquieting precognitive experiences in light of Eric’s argument that the UFO phenomenon may actually be the braided precognitive experiences of future human beings and symbiotic artificial intelligences — a thesis that sheds new light on everything from the lives and work of Philip K. Dick, Jacques Vallée, Carl Jung, Andrei Tarkovsky, to The Book of Ezekiel.

Where we’re going, we won’t need roads…

Speaking of art, UFOs, psychedelic experience, and time machines, here’s the standalone music video for the song we discuss in this episode that was inspired by my UFO (or were they time machine) experiences in 2007. I threw it back in as a coda to the episode but in case you want to view it in its original resolution and in the context of the entire album, here you go. The “8:33” section starts around 3:58:

✨ Chapters

Chapter 1: Introduction (0:00:00)

Chapter 2: Precognitive Imagination in the Arts (0:08:57)

Chapter 3: The Personal is Precognitive (0:13:34)

Chapter 4: The Cut and the Leap (0:22:15)

Chapter 5: The Brain as a Fast-Forwarder (0:30:38)

Chapter 6: Campfires, TVs, and Flickering Consciousness (0:38:57)

Chapter 7: The Trauma of Truth (0:48:04)

Chapter 8: Prophecy and The Trash Stratum (0:54:33)

Chapter 9: UFOs as Time Machines, The Disappointment of Destiny (1:14:39)

Chapter 10: Closing and News on Upcoming Releases (1:20:28)

✨ Other Mentions

An inexhaustive list of people, places, and key works mentioned in this episode.

* Morgan Robertson: Author of a novel that is believed to have predicted the sinking of the Titanic.

* Hunter S. Thompson: Author and journalist.

* William Shakespeare: Playwright who wrote Macbeth.

* Comte de Lautréamont: A French poet who talked about "the cut" in his work.

* Jean Epstein: Author of the book on the philosophy of cinema, The Intelligence of a Machine.

* Carl Jung: Psychoanalyst who developed the concept of synchronicity.

* Sergei Eisenstein: Filmmaker, and film theorist.

* Gilles Deleuze: Philosopher who argued that “difference is more fundamental than identity.”

* Cy Twombly: Artist whose work is discussed by Eric Wargo.

* Andrei Tarkovsky: Filmmaker who wrote a diary entry quoted in From Nowhere.

* Philip K. Dick: Science fiction author whose experiences with precognition and synchronicity are discussed in From Nowhere.

* Jacques Vallée: Scientist and ufologist, author of a book about the UFO phenomena called Passport to Magonia.

* Diana Pasulka: Academic who studies the UFO phenomenon.

* Johnjoe McFadden: Scientist who works on quantum biology.

* Henri Bergson: Philosopher known for his work on time and consciousness, is quoted as saying “the universe is a machine for the making of gods.”

* Octavia E. Butler: Science fiction author.

* Harlan Ellison: Science fiction author.

* James Cameron: Filmmaker who directed The Terminator.

* Max Simon Ehrlich: Screenwriter who wrote the Star Trek episode The Apple.

* Megan Phipps: Guest on the Future Fossils podcast (episode 214).

* Michelangelo: Guest on the Future Fossils podcast who discussed Paisley Ontology and precognition with Michael Garfield.

* Björk: Musician, whose song "Modern Things" is mentioned.

* Greg Bishop: UFO historian.

* Terence McKenna: Ethnobotanist and writer who coined the term "immanentize the eschaton.".

* Phil Ford: Co-host of the Weird Studies podcast.

* Richard Wagner: Composer who was arrested in 1837.

* Zozobra: a hundred-year-old effigy burn in Santa Fe, NM.

* Esalen Institute: the center of the Human Potential movement, in Big Sur, CA.

* The Fort-Da Game: A game observed by Sigmund Freud in which a child throws a toy away and then retrieves it, demonstrating an understanding of object permanence.

* The Third Man Factor: A phenomenon experienced by explorers and mountain climbers in extreme survival situations, involving the feeling of a presence accompanying them.

This week I talk with Jamie Curcio to ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power, and to whom do we give ours? Where does that power come from? To whom do we sell our stories?

We explore the world behind the world, linking Jamie’s writing and game world-building in the domain he calls myth punk, and the equally Eldritch complex systems wicked problem of climate action.

Studying that link, we can trace the outlines of emergent 21st Century religions — the reinterpretation of axial traditions suited to the digital era, the metamodern revival of land-based animistic traditions, and even weirder novel forms that arise at the end of one world and the effloresence of many others.

✨ Jamie's Links

Fallen Cycle Podcastmodernmythology.net“Investing In The Unknown”“The Cascade” Part 1, 2, 3Tales From When I Had A Face: B&W EditionTales From When I Had A Face info page

✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene

• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Chapters

1. Jamie's Background (0:05:46)2. Embracing the Unknown and the Role of Artifice (0:11:14) 3. Prometheus, Intentional Mystery, and the Nature of Agency (0:16:21)4. Introducing the Fallen Cycle and its Mythological Framework (0:21:57)5. Exploring Thematic Elements: Gods, Myths, and Consumerism (0:27:32)6. Climate Change, Hyperobjects, and Societal Inertia (0:33:36)7. Festivals, Dionysus, and the Value of Liminal Spaces (0:40:26)8. AI as a Creative Tool and Collaborator (0:46:05)9. Mythology, Role-Playing, and Enacting Change (0:52:16)10. Engaging with Jamie's Work and Final Thoughts (0:56:03)

✨ Other Mentions

FF 195 — A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesA Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLandaJoseph CampbellFriedrich NietzscheArthur SchopenhauerBuddhismWestern EsotericismEvolving Media NetworkWeird Studies Podcast (with Jamie, with Michael)Tom MorganGilles Deleuze“The Soldier and The Hunchback” by Aleister CrowleyPrometheus (Movie)Alien Romulus (Movie)Eric WargoJohn KeatsUnweaving The Rainbow by Richard DawkinsFF 53 — A Very Xeno Christmas with Evan SnyderStephen BatchelorSamurai Jack (TV show)Fern Gully (Movie)Jitterbug Perfume by Tom RobbinsAmerican Gods by Neil GaimanSandman by Neil GaimanJosh SchreiHell by Timothy MortonThe Book of ExodusThe Demon-Haunted World by Carl SaganCyndi CoonDavid Bowie

This week on Future Fossils I welcome back Sara Phinn Huntley (help her fight cancer!), a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher who has spent the last two decades exploring the intersection of psychedelics, technology, and philosophy.

An intrepid psychonaut and cartographer of hyperspace, her current focus involves using VR to represent visual/spatial imagination in real-time. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she documents and maps the states revealed by dimethyltriptamime and other psychedelics, cargo culting higher dimensional artifacts through the intersection of chaos mathematics, Islamic geometry, and 3D diagrammatic performance capture.  

Her work has been published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and featured in Diana Reed Slattery's Xenolinguistics. She is the art director for The Illustrated Field to the DMT Entities with David Jay Brown (forthcoming at Inner Traditions, 2025).

✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene

• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Main Points + Big Ideas

* The Entanglement of Language and Being: DMT entities reveal a profound connection between language and the construction of reality, echoing themes found in esoteric traditions and the emergence of AI.

* The Cartography of Hyperspace: The book serves as a guide to the vast and uncharted territory of DMT experiences, highlighting the challenge of classifying subjective encounters and the potential for mapping a multidimensional reality.

* The Reproducibility Problem and the Power of Big Data: While acknowledging the inherent challenges of studying subjective experiences, we point to the potential of emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and large-scale data analysis to offer new insights.

* Embodied Bias and the Nature of Evolution: The nonlinear and multidimensional nature of DMT experiences challenges our understanding of time, evolution, and even anatomy, prompting a re-evaluation of our assumptions about reality.

* Attention as a Currency: We emphasize the importance of attention in navigating both the DMT space and the rapidly evolving technological landscape, posing critical questions about who or what deserves our focus.

* The Question of Human Survival: The episode ends by urging humanity to confront its self-destructive tendencies and leverage its collective wisdom to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the future.

✨ Chapters

Chapter 1: Sara's Psychedelic Journey and the Genesis of the DMT Entities Field Guide (00:00:00 - 00:10:00)

* Sara's fascination with DMT from a young age.

* Her exploration of DMT through various artistic media, including performance art and xenolinguistics.

* The inception of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities book, inspired by classic field guides to nature.

* The decision to leverage AI in the book's creation due to the vastness of the subject matter.

Chapter 2: Language, Being, and the AI Oracle (00:10:00 - 00:20:00)

* The role of language in shaping and interpreting DMT entities, drawing parallels to esoteric traditions like the concept of the Logos.

* Sara's process of interacting with AI, describing it as "talking to it" to curate the visual representations of DMT entities.

* The blurring of categories and the subjective nature of interpreting the raw data of DMT experiences.

* The challenge of reconciling diverse and often conflicting perceptions of the same entities.

* Language as a compression tool for expressing ineffable experiences.

* The increasing relevance of AI in understanding consciousness, particularly with future advancements in brain modeling.

Chapter 3: Navigating Ontological Shock and the Nature of DMT Entities (00:20:00 - 00:30:00)

* The challenge of reconciling DMT experiences with our "meat space" understanding of reality.

* Sara's personal experience of gaining knowledge through DMT, challenging James Kent's view on the limitations of such knowledge.

* The neurological basis for some common DMT hallucinations and its implications for understanding the experience.

* The interplay of cultural and personal projections in shaping DMT entity encounters.

* Exploring the possibility of psychedelics as a way to interact with a simulated reality.

* The existence of phenomena that defy current scientific understanding, pointing to the need for open-mindedness.

Chapter 4: The Cartography of Hyperspace and the Specter of Evolution (00:30:00 - 00:40:00)

* The possibility of DMT entity encounters revealing more about the observer than about independent beings.

* The existence of consistent archetypes across different DMT experiences and their overlap with other paranormal phenomena.

* The intriguing connection between DMT entities and cross-cultural mythological figures.

* Examining the role of genetic lineage and the intergenerational transmission of unusual experiences.

* The book as a tool for intellectual curiosity, humility, and exploring the vastness of hyperspace.

* The influence of culture in shaping our perceptions of both traditional and modern entities.

* Sara's personal stance on the reality of DMT entities - acknowledging their potential existence while remaining open to other interpretations.

Chapter 5: The Machine in the Ghost: Folklore, AI, and the Urge to Classify (00:40:00 - 00:50:00)

* The blurring lines between insectoid and mechanical entities in both folklore and modern UAP narratives.

* The impact of technology and the idea of a simulated reality on our perception of entities.

* Sara's view on the potential taxonomic shift in our understanding of entities due to technological advancements.

* Exploring the limits of AI in understanding consciousness and the potential for using it as a tool for self-reflection.

* The challenge and importance of maintaining a sense of awe and wonder amidst scientific inquiry.

Chapter 6: The Problem of Reproducibility and the Potential of Big Data (00:50:00 - 01:00:00)

* Acknowledging the inherent limitations of scientific inquiry into subjective experiences.

* The promise of machine learning and big data in identifying patterns and correlations across diverse DMT experiences.

* The potential for reconstructing visual fields from brain data to gain further insights into the DMT experience.

* The potential for utilizing blockchain technology, quadratic voting, and other advanced tools to address researcher bias and context in large-scale data collection.

Chapter 7: Embodied Bias and the Non-Linearity of Time (01:00:00 - 01:10:00)

* The idea of anatomy as an encoded representation of environmental features and its implications for understanding non-human entities.

* Challenging the linear concept of time and evolution in light of the multidimensional experiences offered by DMT.

* The vastness and complexity of "meat space" reality and its potential to hold hidden dimensions and Easter eggs.

* The potential for AI and advanced computation to unlock deeper understanding of reality in conjunction with psychedelic exploration.

Chapter 8: Sara's Breakthrough Experience and the Reverence for Mystery (01:10:00 - 01:20:00)

* A detailed description of the experience, including encountering cloaked entities, a 12-dimensional brain diagnostic tool, and a neurosurgeon-like being.

* The intensity and reality-shattering nature of the experience, surpassing previous encounters with DMT entities.

* Sara's decision to take a break from psychedelics after this experience.

* The importance of reverence and respect when engaging with the DMT space and its mysteries.

* The continuing potential for breakthroughs and the limitlessness of the DMT rabbit hole.

Chapter 9: Attention, AI, and the Question of Human Survival (01:20:00 - 01:30:00)

* The book as a shared tapestry of experiences, honoring the work of other artists and researchers.

* The importance of acknowledging both shared archetypes and individual variations in DMT experiences.

* The potential for AI to evolve beyond human comprehension and the need for humans to adapt.

* The question of AI's attention span and its potential implications for human-AI interaction.

* The need for humanity to overcome its self-destructive tendencies in order to harness the potential of technology and navigate the future.

* Sara's personal mission to inspire progress and wonder through her art.

✨ Mentions

* David Jay Brown - Author of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities

* Diana Reed Slattery - Author of Xenolinguistics

* Ralph Abraham - Chaos theoretician at UCSC who taught Sara about wallpaper groups

* James Kent - Author of Alien Information Theory

* Aldous Huxley - Author of the essay "Heaven and Hell"

* K. Allado-McDowell - Co-director of Google’s Artists and Machine Learning program

* Roland Fischer - Experimental researcher and pharmacologist

* Iain McGilchrist - Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary

* William Irwin Thompson - Historian and poet-philosopher

* The Tea Faerie - Psychonaut and harm reduction expert

* Terence McKenna - Known for his ideas on the Logos and the psychedelic experience

* Andrés Gomez Emilsson - Director of Qualia Research Institute focusing on the mathematics of psychedelic experiences

* Chris Bledsoe - Known for his family's experiences with entities in a waking state

* Stuart Davis - Host of "Aliens and Artists" and known for his encounters with mantis beings

* Graham Hancock - Author who encountered "big-brained robots" during a psychedelic experience

* Adam Aronovich - Curator of Healing From Healing

* Rodney Ascher - Director of the documentary "A Glitch in the Matrix"

* Ian McGilchrist - Author and researcher who studies hemispheric specialization in the brain

* René Descartes - Philosopher known for his mind-body dualism and views on animals

* Helané Wahbeh - Researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, discussed the reproducibility problem in science

In this conversation we start by exploring some of his discoveries and insights as an intuition-guided laboratory biomedical researcher and follow the river upstream into his synthesis of emerging theoretical frameworks that might make sense of PKD’s legendary VALIS experiences — the encounter with high strangeness that drove him to write The Exegesis, over a million words of effort to explain the deep structure of time and reality. It’s time for new ways to think about time! Enjoy…

✨ Support This Work

• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Go Deeper

Bill's Academia.edu pageBill's talk at the PKD Film FestivalBill's profile for the Palo Alto Longevity PrizeBill's story on Facebook about his biochemistry researchBill in the FF Facebook group re: Simulation Theory, re: The Zero-Point Field, re: everything he's done that no one else has, re: how PKD predicted ChatGPT"If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" by PKDThe Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup by Eric WargoMy first and second interviews with William Irwin ThompsonMy lecture on biology, time, and myth from Oregon Eclipse Gathering 2017"I understand Philip K. Dick" by Terence McKennaWeird Studies on PKD and "The Trash Stratum" Part 1 & Part 2Weird Studies with Joshua Ramey on divination in scienceSparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert & Michele Root-BernsteinDiscovering by Robert Root-Bernstein

“How geometry expresses the Second Law of Thermodynamics” by Chris Jeynes”Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience” by Neven et al.

✨ Mentions

Philip K. Dick, Bruce Damer, Iain McGilchrist, Eric Wargo, Stu Kauffman, Michael Persinger, Alfred North Whitehead, Terence McKenna, Karl Friedrich, Mike Parker, Chris Jeynes, David Wolpert, Ivo Dinov, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schroedinger, Kaluza & Klein, Richard Feynman, Euclid, Hermann Minkowski, James Clerk Maxwell, The I Ching, St. Augustine, Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Alexander Vilenkin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Timothy Morton, Futurama, The Wachowski Siblings, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonard Euler, Paramahansa Yogananda, Alfred Korbzybski, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Claude Shannon, Ludwig Boltzmann, Carl Jung, Danny Jones, Mark Newman, Michael Lachmann, Cristopher Moore, Jessica Flack, Robert Root Bernstein, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Ruth Bernstein, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Diane Musho Hamilton

✨ Support This Work

• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Takeaways

* Wise innovation requires reconnecting with the purpose and mission of organizations and cultivating a field that allows for the ripening of ideas and contributions.

* The tension between exploration and exploitation is a key consideration in navigating large networks and organizations.

* Play, creativity, and the integration of holistic, playful, and noisy approaches are essential for innovation and problem-solving.

* Deep and authentic relationships are crucial for effective communication and understanding in a world of information overload.

* The need for wisdom to keep pace with technology is a pressing challenge in the modern world. Innovation is a crossroads between the need for integration and the obsession with novelty and productivity.

* Different types of innovation are needed, and movement in one dimension is not equivalent to movement in another.

* The erosion of values and the loss of context can occur when organizations prioritize innovation and novelty.

* A tripartite regulatory structure, consisting of industry, art/culture/academia, and government, is necessary to prevent the exploitation of power asymmetries.

* Small-scale governance processes and the importance of care and balance in innovation are key to a more sustainable and wise approach.

✨ Mentions

Alison Gopnik, Iain McGilchrist, Brian Arthur, Bruce Alderman, Andrew Dunn, Turquoise Sound, John Vervaeke, Naomi Klein, Erik Davis, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Mignano, Rimma Boshernitsan, Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, Jim Brown, Elisa Mora, Chris Kempes, Manfred Laubichler, Annalee Newitz, Venkatesh Rao, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Yanis Varoufakis, Ferananda Ibarra, Josh Field, Michel Bauwens, John Pepper, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Landua, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Kevin Clark, Stuart Kauffman, Jordan Hall, William Irwin Thompson, Henry Andrews

✨ About This Episode

How can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation?

How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly dominated by anxiety and technological determinism?

This week on Future Fossils (as a teaser for the kind of conversations I am having for my upcoming spin-off Humans On The Loop), I meet with Stockholm-based transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator, complexity researcher, founder of The Psychedelic Society, and once upon a time the youngest-ever board member of Greenpeace UK, Stephen Reid to discuss the importance of taking a more values-driven approach to technology development. Stephen and I agree that it’s crucial to consider the potential consequences of technological advancements and to promote a more thoughtful approach to innovation…but for the sake of playing with tension, he places more of an emphasis on our capacity for axiological design whereas I feel more of a need to point out that the rapid evolution of technology can outpace our ability to predict its consequences, troubling efforts to design an enduringly sustainable future. One thing we agree on, and model in this episode, is the value of deeper conversations about the role of technology in society…and how to integrate their transformative potentials.

PS — I’m guest lecturing for Stephen’s upcoming four-week course on Technological Metamodernism soon, along with Alexander Beiner and Hanzi Freinacht and Ellie Hain and Rufus Pollock. We'll engage critically with ideas like Daniel Schmachtenberger's axiological design and Vitalik Buterin's d/acc. As usual I'm probably the odd duck in this lineup, going hard on epistemic humility and the injunction of digital media to effect a transformation of the modern self-authoring ego into networked, permeable, transjective sub-agencies arising spontaneously and fluidly from fundamentally noncomputable interactions of rapid information flows... Anyway, the point is we'd love to have you join us and sink your teeth into these discussions! I absolutely promise to bring up voting cyborg ecotopes. Big thanks to Stephen for inviting me to play!

PPS — Here is another really good, very different conversation between me and Stephen and Alistair Langer on Alistair’s show Catalyzing Radical Systems Change.

(Editorial Correction: It was Mike Tyson, not Muhammad Ali, who said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.")

✨ Support This Work

• Hire me as a consultant or advisor• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backers for Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Chapters

(0:00:00-0:10:29) Stephen's Background and Interests in Technology and Metamodernism (0:10:29-0:18:03) Navigating the Complex Relationship Between Technology and Human Values (0:18:03-0:25:18) The Limits of Axiological Design and the Importance of Community Oversight (0:25:18-0:34:29) Defining and Defending Axiological Design (0:34:29-0:45:03) Exploring Alternative Governance Structures: Guilds and Rites of Passage (0:45:03-0:56:36) Vitalik Buterin's "Defensive Decentralized Accelerationism" (0:56:36-1:06:04) Integrating Humor and Recognizing Irony in the Technosphere(1:06:04-1:12:17) Recovering Awe, Curiosity, and Playfulness in a Tech-Saturated World (1:12:17- 1:12:56) Finding Lightness in the Face of Existential Questions (1:12:56-1:13:28) Exploring The Future and A Call to Action

✨ Mentions

Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Hanzi Freinacht, Josh Schrei, Ken Wilber, Vitalik Buterin, Bayo Akomolafe, Cory Doctorow, Nora Bateson, Dave Snowden, W. Brian Arthur, J. F. Martel, Stafford Beer, Rene Descartes, Bill Plotkin, Joe Edelman, Ellie Hain, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Kegan, Aldous Huxley, Andrés Gomez Emilsson

✨ Select Related Episodes (also available as a Spotify playlist)

223 - Timothy Morton, 220 - Austin Wade-Smith219 - Joshua Schrei217 - Gregory Landua and Speaker John Ash214 - Megan Phipps, JF Martel, Phil Ford213 - Amber Case, Michael Zargham212 - Geoffrey West, Manfred Laubichler187 - Kevin Welch, David Hensley178 - Chris Ryan176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, Sam Gandy174 - Evan Snyder172 - Tyson Yunkaporta166 - Anna Riedl165 - Kevin Kelly163 - Toby Kiers, Brandon Quittem141 - Nora Bateson122 - Magenta Ceiba109 - Bruce Damer094 - Mark Nelson086 - Onyx Ashanti080 - George Dvorsky076 - Technology as Psychedelic Parenting066 - John Danaher060 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens056 - Sophia Rokhlin051 - Daniel Schmachtenberger050 - Ayana Young042 - William Irwin Thompson017 - Tibet Sprague

✨ About This Episode

If you’re wondering why this episode came later than I promised, well…look no further than the text and subtext of this very rich discussion: it ain’t easy being a scholar when your kids keep banging down the door. This week I speak with professional organizer, single mother, and badass independent public intellectual (in no specific order) Alyssa Allegretti (Website | Substack | Facebook) about making one’s way in the Wild West of the digital realm as someone balancing the seemingly-opposed responsibilities of parenthood and philosophy.

Herein we discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age, particularly for those navigating non-traditional career paths, parenthood, and the search for authentic connection.

This conversation touches on the themes of invisible labor, particularly the often-unrecognized contributions of women and caregivers; the limitations of traditional institutions in recognizing and supporting diverse voices and lifestyles; and the importance of finding the sacred in the mundane aspects of daily life. We also grapple with the complexities of online communities, acknowledging both their potential for fostering connection and their tendency to amplify social divisions and reward performative behavior. Ultimately, my riffs with Alyssa underscore the importance of personal responsibility, self-awareness, and strong relationships in navigating the ever-evolving liminal zones of our metamorphic century.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

✨ Support This Work

• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Episode Breakdown (Provided by NotebookLM)

Chapter 1: Introductions and Invisible Labor (0:00:00-0:10:01)

Alyssa’s Background: Alyssa discusses her experience as a “Facebook Intellectual” and the limitations of traditional paths to intellectual and creative pursuits for women, particularly mothers.

Sacred Domesticity: Alyssa introduces her work, which focuses on “sacred domesticity,” viewing housekeeping and homemaking as a microcosm of larger social issues and a valuable space for personal growth.

Alyssa’s Work: Alyssa details her work as a professional organizer and house cleaner, emphasizing its therapeutic aspects, particularly for women and those struggling with executive functioning.

Chapter 2: Marginalized Voices and the Liminal Web (0:10:01-0:20:00)

Michael's Story: Michael shares his personal journey to becoming an independent scholar and the challenges of navigating financial instability while pursuing non-traditional intellectual work.

Value of Marginalized Perspectives: Both speakers acknowledge the unique insights offered by individuals outside traditional academic and professional structures.

The Liminal Web and Gender Imbalance: Alyssa recounts her experience with a perceived gender imbalance in online intellectual communities, using the “liminal web” as an example.

Chapter 3: Work-Life Integration and Alternative Spaces (0:20:00 - 0:30:00)

Motherhood and Intellectual Pursuits: Alyssa describes the difficulties of pursuing a career in intellectual fields as a young, single mother. She highlights the inherent unfriendliness of these spaces to parents and those with marginalized identities.

Alternative Solutions: Alyssa argues that viable solutions for work-life integration are emerging in female and queer-dominated spaces, like the coaching industry, that prioritize alternative education and self-employment.

Critique of Traditional Institutions: Alyssa critiques the inaccessibility of traditional academic institutions for individuals facing socioeconomic barriers, neurodiversity, and past trauma.

Chapter 4: The Sacred in the Mundane (0:30:00-0:40:00)

Domestic Realm and Personal Growth: Alyssa discusses the importance of recognizing the domestic realm as a legitimate space for personal growth and mental health support, regardless of gender.

Blurring Boundaries: Alyssa highlights her efforts to integrate her work life and home life, finding inspiration in the mundane aspects of parenting and domesticity.

Seeking Community and Authenticity: Alyssa expresses her grief over the separation between the “best parts of life” and her children. She desires more inclusive and accepting spaces where individuals can be their full selves.

Chapter 5: Intergenerational Knowledge and Societal Fragmentation (0:40:00 - 0:50:00)

Invisible Labor and Gender Roles: Alyssa and Michael discuss the concept of invisible labor, particularly within the context of traditional gender roles. They acknowledge the complexities and nuances of labor distribution in modern families.353637

Reconciling Parenthood and Personal Pursuits: Alyssa shares her personal approach to balancing her writing with the demands of motherhood, emphasizing the importance of presence and self-awareness.

The Loss of Intergenerational Transmission: Michael laments the fragmentation of families and the loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer due to the separation of work and family life.

Chapter 6: The Planetary Layer and Rethinking Community(0:50:00-1:00:00)

Online Communities as Extensions of Family: Michael discusses his transition away from generic online communities towards local groups, emphasizing the importance of grounded, real-world connections.

The Unhealthy Influence of Globalist Thinking: Michael critiques the tendency of globalist thinking to prioritize abstract ideals over the needs of individuals and communities.

The Trad Wife Phenomenon and the Moralization of Domesticity: Alyssa and Michael discuss the rise of the “trad wife” phenomenon and the dangers of romanticizing and commodifying domestic life.

Chapter 7: Embracing Imperfection and Domestic Liberation (1:00:00-1:10:00)

Domestic Liberation: Alyssa challenges listeners to envision “domestic liberation,” reclaiming home life from external pressures and embracing its inherent value.

Finding Inspiration in Imperfection: Alyssa acknowledges the limitations and imperfections inherent in both online and offline communities, advocating for a more compassionate and accepting approach to social change.

The Power of Difference: Alyssa believes that true social progress relies on acknowledging, accepting, and integrating differences, rather than striving for unattainable ideals.

Chapter 8: Vulnerability, Transparency, and Digital Identity (1:10:00-1:20:00)

The Paradox of Online Domesticity: The speakers discuss the paradoxical nature of online platforms like YouTube, where individuals are encouraged to commodify their family lives for financial gain.

Counter-Narratives and Authenticity: Alyssa highlights emerging counter-narratives in the online domesticity sphere that challenge the romanticized and idealized portrayals of home life.

Transparency as a Tool for Healing: Alyssa shares her personal experience with using online platforms to challenge societal expectations and de-stigmatize taboo subjects.

Chapter 9: Navigating the Digital Age with Children(1:20:00-1:30:00)

The Impact of Technology on Parenting: Michael and Alyssa discuss the challenges of navigating technology's influence on family life, particularly the potential dangers of online exposure for children.

Teaching Digital Literacy and Boundaries: Alyssa highlights the importance of teaching children digital literacy, helping them understand the complexities of online spaces, and setting healthy boundaries.

Modeling Self-Awareness and Responsibility: Alyssa emphasizes the need for parents to model self-awareness and responsibility in their own online interactions, demonstrating healthy ways to engage with digital spaces.

Chapter 10: Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Accountability (1:30:00-1:42:49)

The Burden of Being the “Reasonable Adult”: Michael and Alyssa discuss the emotional labor involved in maintaining composure and promoting healthy discourse in online spaces, particularly given the lack of external validation for such efforts.

Redefining Accountability in Relationships: Alyssa advocates for a shift from externally imposed accountability to personal responsibility, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with individuals who prioritize self-awareness and growth.

Finding Sustainable Ways to Connect: Alyssa emphasizes the importance of strong friendships and chosen families in navigating the complexities of modern life and creating a more sustainable future.

✨ About This Episode

This week on Future Fossils we speak with Helané Wahbeh (LinkedIn), Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University, and author of over ninety peer-reviewed publications as well as the book The Science of Channeling. Our main course: a recent review in Frontiers of Psychology entitled, “What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models”.

In this conversation we take a thirty-thousand foot view of the history and future of the science of consciousness, the socioeconomic impediments to unflinching consciousness research, and the overwhelming weight of transcultural experience that make this such a promising domain for fundamental investigation.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

✨ Support This Work

• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Related Episodes

Dig into an extensive back catalog of consciousness-research-flavored episodes (psi phenomena, non-ordinary states, psychedelic neuroscience, oracular praxes, time and consciousness, etc.) at the Future Fossils Consciousness Research Spotify playlist or through the following Substack links:

03 Tony Vigorito05 Mitch Schultz20 Joanna Harcourt-Smith27 Niles Heckman and Rak Razam30 Becca Tarnas37 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo45 Kerri Welch57 Conner Habib and Mitch Mignano58 Shane Mauss69 Tim Freke78 Archan Nair88 Dennis McKenna99 Erik Davis100 The Teafaerie103 Tricia Eastman112 Mitsuaki Chi113 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens117 Eric Wargo119 Jeremy Johnson124 Norman Katz125A Stuart Kauffman (patrons only)126 Phil Ford and J.F. Martel127 Cory Allen131 Jessica Nielson and Link Swanson132 Erik Davis150 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens156 Stuart Davis170 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo171 Eric Wargo176 Sophie Strand and Richard Doyle and Sam Gandy179 Scout Wiley 186 Solo: A Manifesto for Weird Science218 Neil Theise222 Andrés Goméz Emilsson

✨ About This Episode

The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as an instrument for biospheric action? Reading the above probably generated more distress than motivation. Might Western civilization actually be better off reclaiming what the modern world felt it didn’t need — namely, the sacred? What if Christianity has ALWAYS at its core held teachings meant to stir up riotous love — the kind that gets us off our asses striving joyously to serve the living world we are?

Endlessly subversive author and Rice University Professor Timothy Morton (Twitter | Substack | Patreon | YouTube | Instagram) thinks so — and their new book Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology argues eloquently for a weird and wonderful postmodern nondual Christianity in which we give up trying to run the place and realign ourselves with Life. Hell is a rousing and reviving work I underlined extensively, and our discussion traces and retraces Tim’s characteristically good-lurid and good-florid, stark-but-dreamy, mystically mundane, paradox-rich writing. We soar into romantic numinosity and dwell in body horrors, throw curtains open to pure light and celebrate the stains we can’t erase. Trigger warnings plenty, here — but one of them is that in the high-brow, low-brow oscillations you might find yourself awakened to the nature of your being-as-the-God-shaped-hole-in-everything.

I’ll let them introduce what is easily one of the most potent episodes this show has ever published:

“A wonderful three-dimensional podcast. Like, I can't thank you enough for wanting to go all the way around the mulberry bush and then into the mulberry bush and then outside the mulberry bush, then pulverize the mulberry bush into powder, send it around a particle accelerator, and watch the diffusion cloud chamber patterns as you compose another symphony using fractal geometry. I just love this.”

If that’s the kind of conversation you enjoy, then buckle up. Tim knows precisely the poetic mind-keys with which we can find The Garden in the flames of Hell itself, and Heaven in the sinful body of the Technocene.

Over the next two hours, we round the bases on a Greatest Hits of all my favorite topics, all of which appear in some sublime form in Tim’s wonderful new book. And we perform embroidery and exegesis of this anthem to raves and William Blake and AI and facing childhood trauma on the way to saving the biosphere from one of its own most deliciously sinful experiments (namely, civilization), we cover a kaleidoscopic swirl of topics such as:

• Making climate action (and America) cool again• Nonduality, convergent evolution, and the sacred as the feeling of biology• When teleology goes bad, then redeems itself through pluralism• Flipped gnosticism and dispensing with master/slave thinking• What deals with the devil teach us about how to wisely wield AI• “The Black Goo” as a science fiction trope and how it relates to…• How to make the best of living in Hell, aka social media• The Peacock Angel Melek Taus and having sympathy for the devil• Failure as comedy, sin as a blessing, thinking as a kind of failure mode• Evolution as a Christic promise of possibility better futures, and yet…• Why we shouldn’t use “emergentism” to solve “the meaning crisis”

We also pay dues to a totally prodigious list of inspirations.

As per our custom, those of you supporting the show have subsidized the extra time it takes for me to organize a thorough bibliography with links to the books, papers, films, TV shows, podcast episodes, and historical figures mentioned therein.

Thank you for listening and for your contributions!

✨ Support This Work

• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Books & Articles

Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecologyby Timothy Morton

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after The End of The Worldby Timothy Morton

Subscendenceby Timothy Morton

Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphereby Richard Doyle

A Beginner’s Guide To Constructing The Universeby Michael S. Schneider

The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selectionby Charles Darwin

Liquid Modernityby Zygmunt Bauman

Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Modelsby Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli

Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and The Appetite for Wonderby Richard Dawkins

Simplification, Innateness, and the Absorption of Meaning from Context: How Novelty Arises from Gradual Network Evolutionby Adi Livnat

The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous

The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Usby Nicholas Carr

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Nowby Doug Rushkoff

At Home In The Universe: The Search for The Laws of Self-Organization and Complexityby Stuart Kauffman

Complexity and The Emergence of Physical Propertiesby Miguel Fuentes

The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Centuryby Matthew Fox

The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissanceby Matthew Fox

Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Actionby J.F. Martel

✨ Podcast Episodes

SolPurpose Conversations 2 - Richard Doyle on The Cloud of Unknowing75 - David Krakauer on Thinking Interplanetary with The Santa Fe Institute132 - Erik Davis on Perturbations in the Reality Field174 - Evan Snyder on Sound Design for A Robotic Built Wilderness186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The TechnosphereWeird Studies 101 - Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'

✨ Movies & TV Shows

AlienWestworldBlade RunnerHellraiserFriendsCurb Your EnthusiasmThe SimpsonsPrometheusThe ShiningAlien ResurrectionInterstellarThe Wizard of Oz

✨ Other People

William BlakeCarl Hayden Smith Jeffrey KripalKurt GödelGeorg CantorAlfred North WhiteheadBertrand RussellGerald Manley HopkinsKarl MarxSlavoj ŽižekGregory BatesonGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelPhilip K. DickE.F. SchumacherAnna HollandPhoebe PlummerFrancisco VarelaHumberto MaturanaJacques DerridaJohn MiltonJulian of NorwichDilgo Khyentse RinpocheJón GnarrChögyam Trungpa RinpocheMurray Gell-Mann

✨ Objects Of Note

QAnonGoogle GlassThe Sex PistolsCambridge Analytica

In this episode we’re joined by Andrés Goméz Emilsson, President and Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), with whom we go deep on their computational approach to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the psychedelic experience — and thereby, perhaps, make the world a substantially happier place. Join us for an adventurous dialogue at the intersections of phenomenology, spirituality, and mathematics…with stops along the way to ask about the neurobiological construction of time’s arrow(s), the geometry of DMT space, and the ethical challenges of creating conscious computers. It’s a trip…!

00:00:00 Intro, Thanks, and News00:11:18 Dialogue Starts00:14:15 The Origins of Qualia Research Institute00:17:37 The Importance of Consciousness Research00:22:18 Phenomenology and Symmetry00:47:38 The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT00:54:12 Avoiding Dissonance in Psychedelic States00:56:09 Complexity, Music, and Cognitive Processing00:57:22 Future Shock and Technological Overwhelm01:04:28 Pharmacological Adaptations to Technology01:08:39 Temporal Perception and Psychedelics

✨ Support This Work:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Help me pitch my next big projects Humans On The Loop & Jurassic Worlding.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp — this episode features “You Don’t Have To Move” off The Age of Reunion & “Sonnet A” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org reading list.• Browse original paintings and prints or commission new work.

✨ Related Episodes:

212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West176 - Richard Doyle128, 165, 203 - Kevin Kelly99, 132, 140 - Erik Davis131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson42, 43 - William Irwin Thompson111, 199 - Android Jones14, 52, 161 - Michael Philip57, 140, 153 - Mitch Mignano60, 113, 150 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens

✨ Mentioned:

QRI Research LineagesAndrés’ Noonautics Advisory Board BioThe Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled ScenesThe Pseudo-Time ArrowNon-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography (Innovate)Digital Sentience Requires Solving the Boundary ProblemQualia Mastery (Guided Meditations, Part 1 & 2)Principia Qualia by Michael Edward JohnsonThe Psychedelic Transhumanists: A Virtual Round Table Between Legends Living & Dead by Michael GarfieldOne Half A Manifesto by Jaron LanierJürgen Schmidhuber’s HomepageThe Peripheral (TV series adapting William Gibson)Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 by Michael GarfieldAn ‘Integrated Mess of Music Lovers’ in Science by Michael Garfield for SFIWestworld (TV series adaptation)

Sean McGowanMike JohnsonDavid PearceAndrew GallimoreJim O’ShaughnessyJulio TononiKarl FristonRobin Carhart-HarrisIlya PrigogineJaron LanierSteven LeharRupert SheldrakeWilliam GibsonJürgen SchmidhuberAlain GorielyDarren ZhuHugh EverettSean CarrollIsaac NewtonStephen WolframChris LangtonJames C. ScottH. P. LovecraftNoonautics

This week I meet our guest Tom Morgan (LinkedIn, Twitter) in mid-leap as we both make giant bids to meet our destiny and better serve the world. Tom Morgan, who calls himself a “curiosity sherpa” and writes the superb blog What’s Important, worked for years in finance while he grew increasingly compelled by transcendental mysteries. His blog reflects a rare appreciation for the edges of our knowledge and his reputation is for getting high-performing businesspeople to ask deeper questions. In this conversation we discuss complexity and higher intelligences, the heroic metamyth, the alchemy of money, love as an organizing principle in transrational cognition, and holding other people through their personal encounters with the so-called “meaning crisis.”

If this discussion does it for you, look below to find scores more potentially life-changing (certainly mind-altering) talks and essays we discussed therein…

✨ Support The Good Work

• Learn about my new project on wisdom and technology, Humans On The Loop!• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts & “Tin Heart” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.• Read my pitch for Jurassic Worlding, my next book on the future of evolution!

✨ Mentioned Media

Looking Over The Edge – Tom Morgan

For The Person Who Has Everything – Tom Morgan

Adventure Capital: An Interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy – Tom Morgan

Heresies of The Heart – Tom Morgan

The Great Betrayal – Tom Morgan

Tom’s recent five-minute talk at the Sohn Investment Conference

Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 – Michael at SFI in 2019

Intimations Of A New Worldview – Brett Andersen

The Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchrist

Cognition All The Way Down – Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett at Aeon Magazine

Animism Is Normative Consciousness – Josh Schrei on The Emerald Podcast

The Passion of The Western Mind – Richard Tarnas

Tech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting – Michael at CBA Innovation Lab

Exodus as Revolution – William Irwin Thompson at the Lindisfarne Association

Picbreeder

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned – Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman

Proof of Spiritual Phenomena – Mona Sobhani

The Phenomenon: Control System, or Developmental Driver? – Stuart Davis

Meditations on Moloch – Slate Star Codex

Studies on Slack – Slate Star Codex

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. – Michael for Complexity Podcast

✨ Related Episodes:

212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere

202 - Caveat Magister on Psychomagic, Amusement Parks, & Turning Your Life Into Art

196 - Robert Poynton on Improvisation As A Way of Life

191 - Roland Harwood on Learning To Be Liminal

186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science

161 - On Play & Innovation with Michael Phillip: Hermes, EvoBio, Bitcoin, and Good Noise

150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens

125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible

60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact

45 - Kerri Welch (Fractal Synchronicity & The Future of Time)

3 - Tony Vigorito (Synchronicity)

✨ Other Mentions:

William Irwin Thompson

Carl Jung

Joseph Campbell

Bill Plotkin

Dave Snowden & The Cynefin Framework

Stafford Beer

Frozen 2 (film)

The Matrix (films)

In this conversation we explore what Austin calls “a simple framework designed to expand the legibility of the ‘more than human world’ (such as ‘Nature’, Non-Humans, ‘More-than-Human Ecologies’, etc.) to various anthropogenic infrastructures and technologies, with the aim of increasing the ‘surface area’ through which non-humans directly exert influence on human-made systems.”

How can we make ecosystems more legible to the economic and political contexts in which they now exist?

Get ready for a conversation that up-ends conventional categories to hack open a new possibility space for human-machine symbiosis and technologically-assisted biospheric stewardship!

PS — I’m trying to launch a NEW podcast, Humans On The Loop, about how to use our new AI superpowers wisely. Here’s more info in case you’d like to help support this project or know someone who might!

✨ Relevant Links:

AustinWadeSmith.comTwitterLinkedInEssaysRegen Foundation“Legibility for Our Living World with Austin Wade Smith” on Ma Earth“Corporate Metabolism” by Xander Paco Nathan“The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi

✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.

✨ Select Related Episodes:

• 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet• 215 - Social Science & Collective Intelligence with Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs• 213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance• 212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere• 180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend• 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions• 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit• 76 - "Technology as Psychedelic Parenting at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017

If you enjoy this conversation, join us — and several dozen other awesome people — from 4/18-5/16 to learn and grow together and answer the call to better ourselves in service of this great historical unfolding!

(Big big thanks to former Center for Humane Technology Innovation Lead Andrew Dunn, founder of The School of Wise Innovation, for everything you’ve done to help inspire and organize all of this…)

✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp. This episode features:

Tålmodighed (from Live at The Chillout Gardens, Boom Festival 2016)Gamma Pavonis (from Pavo: Music For Mystery)The Cartographers (from Get Used To Being Everything)• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work

✨ Mentioned & Related Links:

“Modern culture is ‘ahead of the one.’ Modern culture is rushing to get somewhere.”

* Josh Schrei on Howl In The Wilderness Podcast Episode 120

Sam Arbesman’s Cabinet of Wonders

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky

Rick Rubin and Dan Carlin discuss magic

Michael Garfield w/ host Kiki Sanford on This Week In Science Episode 965

“Information overload is a personal and societal danger” by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr

Future Fossils 172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity

Center for Humane Technology

The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

“Scan Lovers” from How to Live in The Future by Michael Garfield at Boom Festival 2016

Wisdom 2.0 Summit

”The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreessen

Iron John by Robert Bly

“The Model Isn’t The Territory, Either” by Douglas Rushkoff

Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard Doyle

“Chief Philosophy Officer” by Peter Limberg

“The Next Tech Backlash Will Be About Hygiene” by Jonnie Penn at TIME Magazine

Douglas Rushkoff at Betaworks in 2023: “I Will Not Be Automated”

Zohar Atkins (Website, Twitter)

My comments on “Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” by Xu, et al.

“For The Intuitives” (Part 1, Part 2) on The Emerald Podcast

✨ Mentioned & Related Links:

Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson

✨ Support The Show:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work

✨ Related FF Episodes:

14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere

Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom. 

Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.

It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we’re doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it’s well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.

Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!

✨ Mentioned & Related Links:

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki’s Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow

✨ Support The Show:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work

✨ Related FF Episodes:

213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone)

Here’s to Jingmai and her singular life and mind! Do yourself a favor and acquire her book When Dinosaurs Conquered The Skies, truly a treat for all ages, and then if you want to leap like Microraptor into the thicket of her publications you can scope her work on Google Scholar.  (And shout out to her friends Rextooth, who do in fact make awesome dino comics.)

✨ Support The Show:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I’ll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!

✨ PLUS! New Single & Music Video “Indecision” from The Age of Reunion

Listen on Bandcamp/Spotify or Watch on YouTube/Instagram.

This one's a Jon-Brion-inspired riff on the phenomenology of near-death experiences and the neurophysiology of 5MEO-DMT, a quick trip up above the plane of normal waking life to see the panoply of possibility exfoliating from the Godhead in each moment. How do you choose your next life? (Trick question.)

Join my small but gorgeous mob by preordering the entire album at Bandcamp (or subscribe on Substack/Patreon to have it all at once right now), and then go talk to integrate your experience with Daniel Shankin.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve likely read my 2017 science fiction short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together.  We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt — to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale — and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard.  2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense:  fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality.  I’d be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology:  a sane and healthy global brain.

Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. I’ll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.

✨ Mostly-Complete List of Citations:

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)

✨ Support My Work:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I’ll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!

Merry Christmas, Future Fossils!  This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 214 of the podcast that explores our place in time — and as demonstrated in the Dr. Who and Aliens franchises, Blade Runner 2049, and Batman Returns, Christmas is a fruitful backdrop for the pondering of big ideas — a moment in which we can see with greater clarity than usual the unity of everyday mundane humanity and transcendental cosmic matters.  In other words, perfect timing for this episode’s conversation about cybernetics and the philosophy of the weird with Megan Phipps, Phil Ford, and J.F. Martel.  

Lecturer in Media and Information at University of Amsterdam and Phd Research Fellow at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt who writes trippy and insightful papers on topics like Brian Eno, circuit bending, and surveillance capitalism.  Phil is an author and musician who teaches musicology at IU Bloomington and infuses his curricula with the profundity he has polished through years of committed Zen practice.  J.F. is an author, film-maker, and para-academic online course instructor in media studies and magick, who runs Dungeon and Dragons campaigns on the side.  Together, J.F. and Phil host the delicious Weird Studies Podcast, every episode of which triggers in me the Holy Grail of podcast affective listener programming: namely, that I wish I were in the room and part of these discussions.  Luckily, I’ve had that opportunity before, to talk about my writing on the material agency of glass in our scientific era…and both of them have been on Future Fossils also, both alone and together.  But getting all four of us on one call is a rare and precious thing — and now’s the perfect moment to rap about the emergence of the cybernetic era as a kind of numinous event in human history, a divine invasion that transfigures us and forces us to think about which boundaries *should* melt away and which should stay where evolution learned to put them.  

You see, we live in an age of multilayer networks — and when our view of humankind transmogrifies from the static image of divine forms to a fluid wash of interweaving processes, the self becomes a metamorphic fugitive and  a work of art. When everything’s connected, politics is an aesthetic act and art acquires moral force. Advanced   technologies have granted us godlike powers to reshape the world in our image…but “life finds a way” and there are always gremlins, aliens, dinosaurs, and elves lurking latent in the tidy systems diagrams. The beauty of progress necessarily conceals the ugly externalities, the entropy exported in our efforts to arrange wild nature into an image of our lost garden. 

So what does cybernetics as a way of seeing change for us in terms of how we live?  What does it mean to be human in an age of very lively, seemingly intelligent machines?    

But before we dive headlong into this recording of a conversation so good our first attempt was erased by trickster intervention, let me express my thanks to everyone who has helped me and Future Fossils through a year of (what I hope remains) extraordinary challenge. This show is weird and obstinate in its refusal of clear definition. I follow my muses where they lead me and leave these discussions and soliloquys as fossils of a process of discovery and creativity…and staying true to this defies the logic of the market, which would have us classify ourselves as tidily as possible so we are pre-chewed for the algorithms that determine whether what we make is ever noticed by those over the horizon of organic peer-to-peer suggestion networks. If you’re listening, chances are a friend told you about this show — I’d be surprised if you just found it randomly, and definitely not because a sponsor amplified it. I started Future Fossils under pressure from my friends but keep it going as a kind of Benedictine prayer.  However it might seem, it’s lonely work — but every now and then I find I’ve reached somebody where it counts, that I’ve inspired a major life change or just helped you orient yourselves amidst the wider movements of a transformation that once seemed chaotic and now seems symphonic.  That’s why I keep this going.  Every single time I check my email to discover someone else finds value in my work and shows appreciation with a Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp sub, it makes my day and takes a little of the sting away from my ongoing balancing of kids and unemployment.  I’d like to make this work sustainable in 2024 but I’m still very far from that…so thank you, each and all, for everything you do to help me run this ultramarathon.

New patrons I would like to thank include Ian Benouis, EGH2128, Lynn Amores, Robert Cummings, Katie Teague, Slow Dancing Fool, and Brian Mapes.

Thank you!  And thank you to EVERYONE who chips in every month, or who has left or will ever leave a good review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or who shares this show with your friends…and a special thanks to Suzy Lanza of Ahara Rasa Ghee for shipping me a sweet little care package with her delicious ghee as a gesture of appreciation for this show — she’s not a sponsor but I do endorse her work and recommend you check out iloveghee.com. Lastly, thanks to Noonautics.org for inviting me to join their advisory board and for their continued support of efforts to explore and map and understand the realms beyond.

And now onto the main course!  Let’s start somewhere else: in the “trash stratum” of a dirty manger, in the mess of our kinship and identity with the nonhuman (animal, vegetable, AND mineral). In the revelation of our contiguous, nested, and modular interbeing — we begin our conversation…guided here by visitations from a higher realm in which communication and control are aspects of some secret third thing that transcends duality. The information age is one in which we cannot separate the bomb from the computer from the drug and in this way, in spite of all the grimy cyberpunk and body horror of our media environment, the trillion-eyed panopticon the Web became appears to us like the archangel Gabriel: “Be not afraid,” dear listeners. Enjoy this awesome conversation, and enjoy your holidays!

✨ Support My Work:

• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.

✨ Related Weird Studies Episodes:

26 - Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield

42 - On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O’Brien

131 - Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

151 - The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster

153 - Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

157 - Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

160 - The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'

✨ Related Future Fossils Episodes:

18 - JF Martel (Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny Awesomeness)

65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)

71 - JF Martel (On Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2)

117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural Realities

157 - Phil Ford on Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel

212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere

✨ Additional Mentioned & Related Media:

Megan Phipps — “Soundscapes of Possible Minds: Meditation Cybernetics in Brian Eno’s Ambient Music”

Zygmunt Bauman - Liquid Modernity

Mitch Waldrop - The Dream Machine

Michel Houellebecq – The Elementary Particles

William Shakespeare – Othello

Mark Fisher – Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

Ezra Klein interviews Erik Davis — “The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here’s Why That Matters.”

Richard Brautigan – “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”

Megan Phipps interviews Erik Davis — “New Cybernetic Psychedelia”

Brian Eno – “The Studio As A Compositional Tool”

Michael Garfield’s “Reader’s Rig” pedalboard teardown feature at Guitar Moderne

Michael Garfield – “Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement”

Phil Ford waxes poetic about Wagner’s Ring Cycle on the Brute Norse Podcast

Dror Poleg on the future of a highly automated economy on Infinite Loops Podcast

Erik Wargo – “The Passion of The Space Jockey”

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)

Man of Steel (2013)

Digibarn.com 

Jeffrey Kripal

Michael Levin

Dada

Sam Arbesman on Coding As Magic and The Magic of Code

Thank you for listening and for your support!

This week I speak with two of the most thoughtful people I know in tech, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and systems engineer Michael Zargham (Founder & CEO of BlockScience) — who work together on tools for building trust between tech users and tech companies at the Superset DAO and each contribute diverse value to society through myriad creative projects in their own right (like Amber’s totally fabulous music group Glo Torch!). Thanks to the generous invitation of Regen Foundation CEO Gregory Landua, I met Amber and Michael for an in-person recording at the Regen Summit — easily one of the most inspiring Web3 events I’ve ever attended — in between jam sessions with a few dozen others working at the intersections of regenerative finance, ecosystem stewardship, distributed ledgers, and civtech.

This episode only catches a tiny sliver of the awesome conversations that we had while gathered face-to-face, but it’s a potent morsel nonetheless. We talked about the market’s perverse fascination with talking appliances as a failed attempt to reboot animism, how good design empowers and bad design deprives by making choices possible or not, and why it’s time for a new kind of terms-of-service agreement that allows users to migrate en masse from platforms that have violated people’s trust…along with much else. A very lucid and articulate, yet very playful, trialogue on matters that deserve sincerity but also benefit from childlike curiosity and warmth!

Enjoy…

✨ Support My Work As A Public Good:

• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.

✨ Related Links For The Intellectually Voracious:

Amber’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium.

Michael’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Google Scholar.

Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Reviewby Sidney Redner

How Design is Governanceby Amber Case

We Need More Control Over Our Own User Databy Amber Case

The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputeesby Michael Garfield (on technology as an other-controlled prosthesis and the vulnerability of cyborgs)

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”by Harlan Ellison

✨ SOME Upcoming Episodes:

• Jingmai O’Connor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Chicago, on her singular life and work.

• J.F. Martel & Phil Ford of Weird Studies Podcast and Megan Phipps of The University of Amsterdam on Weird Cybernetics.

• David Jay Brown and Sara Phinn on their field guide to the entities of DMT hyperspace, published next year by Inner Traditions.• Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs on social science and collective intelligence tools for a memetic immune system.

• Michael Skye of VisionForce on his work to help confront the crises faced by contemporary boys and men.

• Neil Theise, professor of pathology at NYU, on complex systems science and his new book, Notes on Complexity.

✨ Related Archive Episodes:

211 - Adam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet

207 - Tech & Community LIVE at Junkyard Social Club with Evan Snyder, Ryan Madson, Roger Toennis, Aaron Gabriel, & Juicy Life

204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together

197 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Lost Civilizations, and The Singularity (Part 1)

180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend

177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan

176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit

141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations

106 - Stowe Boyd on The Future(s) of Work and How to Thrive Amidst Accelerating Change

80 - George Dvorsky on Strange Days Ahead: Ethics for Autonomous Machines

29 - Sara Huntley (Raising Robots Right)

✨ Thanks to Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!

This week on the show I speak with physicist Geoffrey West (SFI) and evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler (ASU, SFI) about the transformations that our geosphere, biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere are undergoing as the “extended phenotype” of human innovation runs rampant across the surface of Planet Earth.  These two distinguished scientists are some of the most profound thinkers I’ve ever encountered, helping midwife a new understanding of what it means to be human and a planetary citizen. I have wanted Geoffrey West on Future Fossils since well before I even started working for SFI in 2018, so this episode is the consummation of a years-long journey and I cannot be more excited to share it with you!  It feels a little like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, but we live in an increasingly-intertwingled world, so let’s make the best of it!  I wouldn’t be where I am today without these two fine minds and their important work.  Enjoy…

“The consequences of the Anthropocene are the product of innovations, and yet somehow we think the way out is through EVEN MORE innovation. This is a predicament…Innovation has to be looked at critically. One of the interesting things in the history of life is the OPPRESSION of innovation.”– Manfred Laubichler

✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my 2008 Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify)• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify

✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!

✨ Your Anthropocene & Technosphere Syllabus:

More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.Phil Anderson

Population growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine' that's changing the planetManfred Laubichler

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionJaeweon Shin et al.

Policies may influence large-scale behavioral tippingKarine Nyborg et al.

Teaching the Anthropocene from a Global Perspective (2014!)Manfred Laubichler & Jürgen Renn

More from them:Seminar: Co-Evolutionary Perspectives on the TechnosphereAnthropocene Campus | Technosphere / Co-Evolution, presented by Jürgen Renn and Manfred LaubichlerThe Growth and Differentiation of Metabolism: Extended Evolutionary Dynamics in the Technosphere

SFI Community Event - Panel discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of the AnthropoceneSander van der Leeuw, D.A. Wallach, & Geoffrey West, moderated by Manfred Laubichler

Welcome to the Future: Four Pivotal Trends You Should Be Aware OfEd William on the work of Dror Poleg

The Future is Fungi: The Rise and Rhizomes of Mushroom CultureJeff VanderMeer, Kaitlin Smith, & Merlin Sheldrake, moderated by Corey Pressman

Does the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer?John Pepper at SFI

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and NightmaresRe: TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru & Émile Torres

Complexity Literacy for a Sustainable Digital Transition: Cases and Arguments From Transdisciplinary Education ProgramsGerald Steiner

Relevant episodes from my past life as the host of SFI’s Complexity Podcast:

Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryMelanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationChris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionThe Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten SchefferScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey WestMichael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

This week on Future Fossils we pierce the veil with Adam Aronovich, cultural anthropologist and psychedelic integration therapist, to talk about the strange brew of web-connected healing and web-inflicted paranoia and delusions of grandeur, conspiracy epistemics, how people are being treated as robots, and robots are being treated as people, and engaging reality directly versus engaging through the manipulation of symbols. Among other things! It’s a perfect treat for tricky times…

Adam’s Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Re Precision Health Page

✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music: “Autocatalysis” (Live Extended Remix) coming this Friday to my Bandcamp!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify

✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!

✨ A mostly-but-not-entirely-complete list of references:

An Oral History of The End of RealityMAPS Psychedelic Science 2023“A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology” by Geoffrey West, James Brown, Brian EnquistNew Religions of the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari’s Google Tech Talk)The Matrix (franchise)A Glitch in The Matrix (documentary)Doug Rushkoff “fractalnoia” (FF 67)Stanislav Grof“So You Want To Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers?” on The Emerald PodcastWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or BorgesJorge Luis Borges - On Exactitude in ScienceJean Baudrillard - Simulacra and SimulationsChatGPTDouglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Encyclopedia Galactica)Simon DeDeo on plural epistemology (interviewed by MG on Complexity Podcast 72)Erik Davis (FF 132)Bruce Damer (FF 109)Ken Adams (FF 209)Shane Mauss (FF 58)What the heck happened to Reality Sandwich?Mondo 2000 + R.U. Sirius

This week I welcome back psychedelic film-maker and culture-cultivator Mitch Schultz, Director of the legendary documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule, alongside our mutual co-conspirator, experience design consultant and psychedelic provocateur Shanta Stevens.  The two of them have formed a nucleus at Uniphi Studio around which a new transmedia documentary project is emerging — The Conscious Molecule — which will reflect on the decade-plus since Schultz’s groundbreaking documentary on the science and philosophy of DMT to look at these themes through a MUCH wider aperture. The three of us go deep and broad on a very far-ranging constellation of topics:

(0:00:01) - AI, Psychonautics, Digital Media, Language Models, and The Third Western Psychedelic Revolution(0:17:25) - The Future of AI-Human Cooperation(0:26:42) - Consciousness, Complexity, and Panpsychism(0:31:28) - Randomness, Entanglement, Decentralization, and The Conscious Molecule(0:38:46) - Exploring Consciousness and Futures(0:42:23) - The Future of Journalism and The Role of Independent Documentaries(0:47:55) - Psychedelic Therapy and The Overview Effect(0:51:43) - Transcension Hypothesis, UFOs, and Quantum Physics(0:57:43) - Altered States, Self-Reprogramming, Initiations, and Integration(1:03:32) - Technology's Impact on Consciousness and Humanity(1:13:08) - DataViz, Hyperdimensional Passports, The Future of Identity, and The Role of Community

If that sounds like a whirlwind, it is!  Find a cozy recliner — and maybe an eye mask — and book an appointment with your favorite peer support/integration counselor, because this is going to be a ride…

NOTE: I’m delighted to drop this episode in the midst of a smoking hot debate about what does and does not qualify as “pseudoscience” in the research of consciousness (see coverage by Flora Graham and Erik Hoel).  LOL

✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Buy the show’s soundtrack (recorded live at Psychedelic Science 2023) on Bandcamp• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify

✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!

✨ Mentions:

“Cognition All The Way Down” by Daniel Dennett and Michael Levin James Oroc Seth Lloyd David Chalmers DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman Infoboros: Recursion Across Mind, Matter, and Information by Vidur Mishra Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard DoyleAlfred North Whitehead Gregory Bateson John Conway Bruce Damer Reggie Watts Melissa Etheridge Tommy Pallotta Klee Irwin ESPD ’55 Wade Davis Dennis McKenna Psychedelic Science 2023 “Corporate Metabolism” by Paco Xander-Nathan William Shatner Mark Nelson Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game by Andrew Gallimore “The transcension hypothesis: Sufficiently advanced civilizations invariably leave our universe, and implications for METI and SETI” by John Smart Ramana Maharshi Ken Wilber The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life by Robert Kegan Michael Persinger Luminarium by Alex Shakar“Why Ibogaine Is Not The Answer To The Opioid Crisis” by Jonathan Dickinson and Dimitri Mugianis R. Buckminster Fuller Liv Boeree Meditation Death Match

✨ Keywords:

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Reality, Panpsychic Perspective, Materialist Neurobiological Model, Daniel Dennett, Michael Levin, Cognition All the Way Down, Ethical Implications, Human Development, Information Bombs, Digital Media, Psychonauts, Cyber Culture, Third Western Psychedelic Revolution, Kickstarter, Future Fossils, Album, AI Music Videos, Patreon, Substack, Evolution of Human Beings, Data Streams, Complexity of Systems, Empathy, Life System, Documentaries, Journalism, Hollywood Strike, Unions, Documentary Funding, International Multi-Billion Dollar Psychedelic Industry, UFO Phenomenon, Altered States, Self-Reprogramming, Technology Impact, Humanity, Hyperdimensional Passport, Metaphysical Stamps, Media Ecosystem, Visualizing Data Structures, Neurological Alignment, Spirit Taking Form

✨ Support Future Fossils:

• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server!• Buy the show’s soundtrack (recorded live at Psychedelic Science 2023) on Bandcamp.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Dig my reading list at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify.

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Chapters, Summary, & Keywords provided by Podium.Page:

(0:00:00) - Reminiscing on Psychedelic Underground and Filmmaking(0:10:07) - Ken’s Childhood & Early Adulthood(0:25:04) - Screenings and Influence of Psychedelic Movie(0:30:06) - McKenna and Psychedelic Community Influence(0:35:24) - Nature, Doubt, Validation(0:44:23) - Late Night Studio Discovery and Reflection(0:49:30) - Non-Human Encounters and Embracing the Weird(0:57:17) - Encounters With Terence McKenna After His Passing(1:10:46) - Spiritual Experiences and the Need for Change(1:18:51) - Life, Legacy, and Creative Expression Reflections

Join me as I host Ken Adams, an experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and psychedelic explorer. We journey through his life from his childhood in Louisiana, his graduate studies in sociology and anthropology, to his discovery of LSD, and his eventual meeting with Terence McKenna. Ken shares his experiences with psychedelics and computers, and we discuss the impact these have had on his life and work. He provides insight into the psychedelic world in San Francisco, shedding light on the risks people took to make psychedelia accessible.

This episode offers a fascinating look into the world of psychedelic filmmaking, with Ken Adams sharing how he created a business model from showcasing his experimental film. From the Adobe theater in Austin to the Roxy in San Francisco, Ken reveals how his work was embraced in the psychedelic space. He further explores the influence of Terence McKenna, discussing how Terence navigated the expectations of being a celebrity, his thoughts on psychedelics, and his ability to unite the psychedelic community.

Finally, we examine Ken's experiences with non-human entities in altered states of consciousness, as well as his ideas on serving the common good. Ken shares his unusual encounters and his belief in the need for imaginative solutions to the issues facing the planet. We also reflect on the sadness and loneliness of the digital era, and discuss how digital arts are changing our world. Join us as we traverse the path of creativity, courage, and psychedelic exploration.

Psychedelic, Filmmaking, Terence McKenna, San Francisco, Digital Filmmaking, Louisiana, Sociology, Anthropology, LSD, Art World, Austin, Digital Arts, Transmutation of Trauma, Winter Solstice 2012, Non-Human Entities, Altered States, Spiritual Experiences, Imagination, Transformation, Existential Issues, Melancholia, The Digital Age, Oral History, Unborn, Dreaming, Noble Things, Valuable Mistakes

Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!

This week on the show I share a reading and panel discussion with three amazing psychedelic thought-leaders I facilitated as a satellite event during the MAPS 2023 Psychedelic Science Conference! Samantha Sweetwater (author of The Wisdom of WTF?!? and the forthcoming book True Human), Jahan Khamsehzadeh (author of The Psilocybin Connection), and Ian-Michael Hebert (founder of Holos Global) met in an intimate elixir bar high above the fray of the conference to riff on what it will take to have the psychedelic renaissance so many of us THOUGHT we were helping incubate and midwife (as opposed to what we got).

✨ Support Future Fossils:

• Subscribe to (and review!) Future Fossils anywhere you go for podcasts.• Then, support my work on Substack or Patreon for many, MANY extras, including our members-only Facebook Group and Discord Server’s special private channels!• You can also buy my artwork (or commission new custom art) and/or music.• Follow my music and annually-updated listening recommendations on Spotify.

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Chapters and keywords provided by Podium.Page:

(0:00:00) - Navigating the CollapseMidwifery, courage, acculturation, pleasure-seeking, True Human Reimagining Humaneness, gracefully facing collapse.

(0:08:04) - Foundations of Psychedelic Renaissance ExploringWe explore wholeness, psychoactivity, Samantha Sweetwater's journey, and David Bohm's quote on fragmentation and perception.

(0:26:10) - Psychedelics and the Evolution of WholenessPsychedelics, Maslow's hierarchy, Richard Doyle's work, and nature's evolutionary process are discussed to catalyze holotropic states of consciousness and unity.

(0:37:22) - Communion and the Circle of LifeWe explore the implications of our current ways of doing humanness on the life cycle of a complex life-bearing planet, and how to cultivate a mastery of relationship and the between.

(0:54:10) - Future of Meta-inviduality and BalanceWe explore academic prestige, decolonization, life-centrism, psychedelics, and the Luciferic/Ahrimanic balance.

(1:01:38) - Paradigms of Development and Igniting MomentsPsychedelics access animism, integrate individual missions, explore Stoned Ape theory, and set conditions for humanity's flowering.

(1:11:15) - Exploring AI, Technology, and DevolutionWe explore technology, AI, nature, and aging to find love, understanding, and elegant solutions.

✨ Keywords:

Consciousness, Psychedelics, Collapse, Humaneness, Wholeness, Psychoactivity, David Bohm, Stanislaw Grof, Abraham Maslow, Richard Doyle, Macroorganism, Interconnection, Ken Wilber, Terence McKenna, Decolonization, Biocentrism, Luciferic Principle, Ahrimanic Principle, Midwifery, Animism, Stoned Ape Theory, AI, Technology, De-evolution, Nature, Aging, Kate Raworth,

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and love it!• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• Musicians, let me recommend you get a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

📝 Transcript for Patrons:

This week I’m glad to share a special Future Fossils Live recorded at one of the coolest places I have ever seen, the Junkyard Social Club in Boulder, Colorado! It’s a menagerie of interesting brilliant weirdos, including my old friend and original co-host/robotics engineer Evan Snyder, soul-searching serial community-development entrepreneur Ryan Madson, former rocket scientist turned tech advisor Roger Toennis, former Google employee turned Director of Consciousness Hacking CO Aaron Gabriel Neyer, and “self-metaprogrammer” Tom Bassett aka Juicy Life.

In a rather fast-paced hour, we explore what is emerging in an age of learning machines and reimagined urban spaces and radical new modes of social order. This was one of those delightful in-the-flesh discussions that CLEARLY left us all enriched and hopeful for a world that, while out of our control, still shines with tasty possibility.

Chapters and keywords provided by my AI buddies at Podium.Page:

(0:00:00) - Exploring Interdependence and Community Dynamics(0:03:50) - The Responsibility of Technology and Parenting(0:15:48) - AI's Impact on Art and IP(0:23:21) - The Intersection of Technology and Physicality(0:31:25) - Exploring Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Shifts(0:41:00) - The Future of Technology and Ethics(0:45:58) - Technology and Interdependence in Society(0:50:19) - The Interplay Between Interdependence and Technology(0:55:47) - Technology, Culture, and Individual Impact(1:01:27) - Tensegrity and the Future of Work(1:05:37) - Exploring Hope and Creating New Paradigms

Interdependence, Community Dynamics, COVID-19, Human Connection, Urban Spaces, Technology, Parenting, Holistic Thinking, Future Tech, Corporate Power, Open-Source Language Models, Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Shifts, Individual Purpose, Operating System, Individualistic Consciousness, Tensegrity, Hope, Paradigms, Funemployment, Fractal Pods, Neural Nets, Fractal Tribe

Enjoy and do not hesitate to reach out if this kindles something in you!

✨ Support Future Fossils:

• Subscribe to (and review!) Future Fossils anywhere you go for podcasts.• Then, support my work on Substack or Patreon for many, MANY extras, including our members-only Facebook Group and Discord Server’s special private channels!• You can also buy my artwork (or commission new custom art) and/or music.• Follow my music and annually-updated listening recommendations on Spotify.

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and love it!• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• Musicians, let me recommend you get a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

✨ Patrons-Only Extras Below The Fold:

🎸 Live at Honeymoon Brewery Full-Concert Video

Enjoy this full-length video I captured at one of my favorite concerts in over twenty years of music! This show at Honeymoon Brewery (RIP) was what I always wanted: outside, under a lovely tree, surrounded by family and friends, my kids playing with my friends’ kids, great kombucha, cool autumn air. My daughter wore the new dress she had earned by making and then selling art with me. I got to show off my new eight-string strandberg guitar and fresh original material. We all got wonderfully buzzed. I’m heartbroken that Honeymoon closed this location (curse you, Santa Fe, for killing their amazing outdoor concert series!) but at least we have this fossil.

📝 Episode 207 Extended Show Notes & Transcript

Thanks everyone for your support! This year has not been easy and you’re helping me buy time to be with my burned-out family and finish major projects before I’m subsumed by yet another bout of soul-destroying busywork.

...about AI, art, culture, celebrity, identity, and trauma.

Before we begin: I’m teaching a six-week online course on science, philosophy, economics, media, and dinosaurs! Join me at NuraLearning.com for Jurassic Worlding, a psychedelic deep dive into self-fulfilling techno-thrillers and the analog-digital transition, starting August 1st!

The course is now pay-what-you-can thanks to the generosity of our learning platform…everyone into the pool for my first “Michael plays professor” cohort!

This week on Future Fossils, I’m joined by returning guest my friend Scout Rainer Wiley, metamodern ritual artist, expectation-defying wunderkind, and host of the blog and podcast The Oscillator’s Stone for a conversation about…well…

Here, I’m going to let the superb language model at Podium.Page break it down for you. I wouldn’t call this list “exhaustive” since we let the ADHD faeries carry our discussion wherever they liked, but I’m pretty impressed with this briefing:

Key Takeaways:

1. The episode delves into the complex intersection of art, culture, and artificial intelligence. It brings to light the implications of AI on our lives, potentially liberating us from the attention economy and the idea of work as a requirement for survival.

2. The conversation touches upon the significance of local scenes in the era of globalization and scrutinizes the perils of celebrity worship.

3. Intellectual property rights and ownership boundaries in the age of late capitalism are explored, sparking a debate about fairness and the redistribution of wealth in an increasingly digital and AI-driven world.

4. The episode delves into socio-economic issues, discussing how rising real estate prices and the scarcity of affordable housing impact culture.

Unanswered Questions and Potential Inquiries:

1. How can AI be used to promote cultural diversity rather than appropriating and diluting it?

2. How can the power of AI be harnessed to address socio-economic issues such as housing affordability?

3. Can AI help us understand and navigate the complexities of celebrity culture, or will it exacerbate the problems?

4. What does the future of intellectual property rights look like in an age of increasingly advanced AI?

5. How can the insights of indigenous and black sci-fi writers inform our approach to the future?

6. As technology continues to reshape our world, how do we maintain the importance of local scenes and individuality?

7. How can the lessons of metamodernism inform our approach to the future, particularly in relation to technology and AI?

8. Can AI play a role in addressing ancestral traumas, and if so, how?

Overall, this podcast episode offers a thought-provoking exploration of the intersections of art, culture, and AI, sparking questions about our future in an increasingly AI-driven world.

HA! Wow. There you have it. Imagine all that only through the filter of two delightfully bizarre transmedia philosopher-artists at their Casual Friday best.

✨ Chapters:

(0:00:00) - Culture's Impact on Art Exploration(0:06:16) - AI's Impact on Work and Culture(0:21:05) - Scale and Local Scenes(0:27:49) - Scene and Cultural Shift Impact(0:33:42) - Doom, Hope, and the World Reflections(0:48:54) - Metamodernism, Apocalyptic Themes, and Personal Reflections(0:58:38) - Exploring Ancestral Traumas and Embracing Romanticism(1:05:49) - Exploring Popularity, Culture, and the Future

✨ Mentions:

Future Fossils 195 - Emergency AI Art Panel with Topher Sipes, Jamie Curcio, Evo Heyning, Julian Picaza, and Micah Daigle

Music in this episode:“Biome Seven” from Biosphere Dreaming“The Luminous Night” from Empty Frames

Johnny DeppAnson MountWeezer - “My Name is Jonas”Pierre-August Cot - The Storm (painting)Donald TrumpStuart Davis - Bright ApocalypseElroy CraichDaniel Görtz + Michael Garfield + Tom Amarque on metamodern deep futurismStar Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV series)Taylor Swift - “Blank Space” (music video)MitskiHarley Quin (Batman franchise)Queen’s Gambit (TV series)Victoria Nelson - The Secret Life of PuppetsMichael Garfield - “In Defense of Star Trek: Picard and Discovery”

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp.Follow me and my annually-updated listening recommendations on Spotify.

Join our lively members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels) for rewarding discourse on tap every day!

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• And musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that’s a link to a new AI music video).

✨ Transcript available for Patreon & Substack members

Before we begin: I’m teaching a six-week online course on science, philosophy, economics, media, and dinosaurs! Join me at NuraLearning.com for Jurassic Worlding, a psychedelic deep dive into self-fulfilling techno-thrillers and the analog-digital transition, starting August 1st! Use discount code FUTUREFOSSIL for 10% off.

This week on Future Fossils, I enter into a deep and delightful call-and-response game with Greg Thomas, co-founder of Jazz Leadership with his wife Jewel Kinch-Thomas, and Stephanie Lepp, CEO of Synthesis Media and multiple Webby-winning transmedia culture hacker whose friendship I made interviewing her for episode 154.

Among many other things, we discuss these superb articles by Jewel Kinch-Thomas:

Jazz Improvisation: Lessons for ConversationReciprocity: The Ebb and Flow of Relationship BuildingChange Leadership

…and these pieces by Greg:

Race and Jazz: A Candid ViewA Paradigm Shift on RaceCultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos

…and these pieces by and with Greg at Free Black Thought:

Deracialization NowJazz, The Omni-American Ideal, and a Future Beyond BigotryConsidering Deracialization: A Response to Glenn Loury and Clifton Roscoe

✨ Chapters:

(0:00:00) - Departing From The Score To Navigate Transition(0:13:08) - Jazz, Business Leadership, and Conversation(0:31:37) - Principles of Jazz Leadership and Anti-Debate(0:49:53) - Exploring Reciprocity, Power, and Disagreement(1:03:33) - Deracialization, Defining Jazz, and Integral Theory(1:19:40) - Race, Jazz, Cultural Somatics, and Collective Intelligence

✨ Mentions:

Tyler Marghetis (Complexity 67), Allan Combs, Charles Eisenstein (Future Fossils 85), Doug Rushkoff (Future Fossils 67), Tech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting at CBA, Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers, Robert Poynton (Future Fossils 196), Jewel Kinch-Thomas, Albert Perry, Ian Leslie at Aeon Magazine: “A Good Scrap”, Lynn Margulis, Daniel Schmachtenberger (Future Fossils 51), Zak Stein (Future Fossils 97), Joseph Campbell, Heinrich Zimmer, Ralph Ellison, Peter Limberg, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Danielle Allen, Glenn Loury

Full show notes and transcript generated by Podium.Page for patrons down below.

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp.(Or if you’re into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.)

This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• And musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that’s a link to a new AI music video).

✨ Full (machine-generated) show notes and transcript below the fold for patrons:

This week we talk with Jamie Joyce of The Society Library!

✨ SOME References:

An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’

Regina Rini and the Epistemic Backstop

Stephanie Lepp

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens

Alison Gopnik

The Hyperion Cantos

The Internet Archive

Ed Bernays

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.

Buy my music on Bandcamp!

Or if you’re into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.

This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!

• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• Musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that’s a link to a new AI music video).

✨ And listen, folks…if you haven’t seen my AI music videos yet…get on it:

BUT FIRST!

Our guest for this episode is technologist, best-selling author, and WIRED founder Kevin Kelly, who sits on the board of one of my most-beloved projects, The Long Now Foundation (I wrote a bunch of pieces for their blog that you can find here and presented at their 2020 Ignite Talks here). I had Kevin on in episodes 128 to discuss his thoughts on the evolution of technology and augmented reality in particular, and again in 165 to discuss his book Vanishing Asia and the tensions between the economic opportunity and ecological/cultural erosion of urbanization, but today we’re having a far more grounded conversation about the wisdom he’s accumulated in his 71 years of living — much of which he has generously encapsulated for us in his latest book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.

We also meander into banter about cognitive pluralism and the tango with generative AI, with specific references to rants here and here.

Kevin’s a treasure. I’m honored to share this with you.

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.

Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “Throwing Sparks” and “Delta Pavonis.”) Or if you’re into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.

This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!

The next Jurassic Park Book Club call will be on June 13th at 3 pm Mountain! I’ll share the call link to Discord.

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Find all the books I mention in the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page!

• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service for podcast show notes I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• Musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park (and that’s a link to a new AI music video).

✨ And listen, folks…if you haven’t seen my AI music videos yet…get on it:

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.Subscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features vibes from “Biosphere Dreaming”)Or if you’re into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Facebook Group and public-facing Discord Server (with patron channels). Join us!

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• Podium.Page is a very cool new AI service I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• Musicians, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.

✨ Mentioned Media & People (incomplete):

Caveat’s Patreon

“Giving In To Astonishment” by Michael Garfield (audio/text)

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide To The Art of Long-Term World Travelby Rolf Potts

Rolf Potts on Future Fossils

Wikipedia list of incidents at Disney World

Team Rodent: How Disney Devours The Worldby Carl Hiaasen

Apocalypse Cabaret on FB

Three Questions About Creating Transformational Experiences Anywhereby Caveat Magister

Troy DaytonMicah DaigleJacqueline NorthScout WileyNaomi MostMitch MignanoJake KobrinHenry AndrewsRobin ZiiroConner HabibMichael AngeloTada HozumiAlejandro Jodorowsky

More Caveat:FF 153Plutopia PodcastEamon Armstrong’s Life Is A Festival PodcastBurning Man PodcastKosmos JournalBook Excerpts

Or, if you prefer, here’s a rundown of the episode generated by A.I. c/o my friends at Podium.page:

In this episode, I explore an ambitious and well-connected conversation with guests KMO, a seasoned podcaster, and Kevin Walnut [sic], a close friend and supporter of the arts in Santa Fe. We dive deep into their thoughts on the social epistemology crisis, science fiction, deep fakes, and ontology. Additionally, we discuss their opinions on the Star Trek franchise, particularly their critiques of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard and Discovery. Through this engaging conversation, we examine the impact of storytelling and the evolution of science fiction in modern culture. We also explore the relationship between identity, media, and artificial intelligence, as well as the ethical implications of creating sentient artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the philosophical questions surrounding AI's impact on society and human existence. Join us for a thought-provoking and in-depth discussion on a variety of topics that will leave you questioning the future of humanity and our relationship with technology.

✨ Before we get started, three big announcements!

* I am leaving the Santa Fe Institute, in part to write a very ambitious book about technology, art, imagination, and Jurassic Park. You can be a part of the early discussion around this project by joining the Future Fossils Book Club’s Jurassic Park live calls — the first of which will be on Saturday, 29 April — open to Substack and Patreon supporters:

* Catch me in a Twitter Space with Nxt Museum on Monday 17 April at 11 am PST on a panel discussing “Creative Misuse of Technology” with Minne Atairu, Parag Mital, Caroline Sinders, and hosts Jesse Damiani and Charlotte Kent.

* I’m back in Austin this October to play the Astronox Festival at Apache Pass! Check out this amazing lineup on which I appear alongside Juno Reactor, Entheogenic, Goopsteppa, DRRTYWULVZ, and many more great artists!

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “A Better Trip” from my recent live album by the same name.)Or if you’re into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord server. Join us!Episode cover art by KMO and a whole bouquet of digital image manipulation apps.

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• These show notes and the transcript were made possible with Podium.Page, a very cool new AI service I’m happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• Musicians: let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.

✨ Mentioned Media:

KMO Show S01 E01 - 001 - Michael Garfield and Kevin Wohlmut

An Edifying Thought on AI by Charles Eisenstein

In Defense of Star Trek: Picard & Discovery by Michael Garfield

Improvising Out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael Garfield

AI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit by Steven Hales(and yes I know it’s on Quillette, and no I don’t think this automatically disqualifies it)

Future Fossils Book Club #1: Blindsight by Peter Watts

FF 116 - The Next Ten Billion Years: Ugo Bardi & John Michael Greer as read by Kevin Arthur Wohlmut

✨ Related Recent Future Fossils Episodes:

FF 198 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Aliens, Land Spirits, & The Singularity (Part 2)

FF 195 - A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher Sipes

FF 187 - Fear & Loathing on the Electronic Frontier with Kevin Welch & David Hensley of EFF-Austin

 FF 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions

 FF 175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art

 ✨ Chapters:

0:15:45 - The Substance of Philosophy (58 Seconds)

0:24:45 - Complicated TV Narratives and the Internet (104 Seconds)

0:30:54 - Humans vs Hosts in Westworld (81 Seconds)

0:38:09 - Philosophical Zombies and Artificial Intelligence (89 Seconds)

0:43:00 - Popular Franchises Themes (71 Seconds)

1:03:27 - Reflections on a Changing Media Landscape (89 Seconds)

1:10:45 - The Pathology of Selective Evidence (92 Seconds)

1:16:32 - Externalizing Trauma Through Technology (131 Seconds)

1:24:51 - From Snow Maker to Thouandsaire (43 Seconds)

1:36:48 - The Impact of Boomer Parenting (126 Seconds)

✨ Keywords:

Social Epistemology, Science Fiction, Deep Fakes, Ontology, Star Trek, Artificial Intelligence, AI Impact, Sentient AGI, Human-Machine Interconnectivity, Consciousness Theory, Westworld, Blade Runner 2049, AI in Economy, AI Companion Chatbots, Unconventional Career Path, AI and Education, AI Content Creation, AI in Media, Turing Test

✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript generated by podium.page:

0:00:00

Five four three two one. Go. So it's not like Wayne's world where you say the two and the one silently. Now, Greetings future fossils.

0:00:11

Welcome to episode two hundred and one of the podcast that explores our place in time I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this is one of these extra juicy and delicious episodes of the show where I really ratcheted up with our guests and provide you one of these singularity is near kind of ever everything is connected to everything, self organized criticality right at the edge of chaos conversations, deeply embedded in chapel parallel where suddenly the invisible architect picture of our cosmos starts to make itself apparent through the glass bead game of conversation. And I am that I get to share it with you. Our guests this week are KMO, one of the most seasoned and well researched and experienced podcasters that I know. Somebody whose show the Sea Realm was running all the way back in two thousand six, I found him through Eric Davis, who I think most of you know, and I've had on the show a number of times already. And also Kevin Walnut, who is a close friend of mine here in Santa Fe, a just incredible human being, he's probably the strongest single supporter of music that I'm aware of, you know, as far as local scenes are concerned and and supporting people's music online and helping get the word out. He's been instrumental to my family and I am getting ourselves situated here all the way back to when I visited Santa Fe in two thousand eighteen to participate in the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival and recorded conversations on that trip John David Ebert and Michael Aaron Cummins. And Ike used so June. About hyper modernity, a two part episode one zero four and one zero five. I highly recommend going back to that, which is really the last time possibly I had a conversation just this incredibly ambitious on the show.

0:02:31

But first, I want to announce a couple things. One is that I have left the Santa Fe Institute. The other podcast that I have been hosting for them for the last three and a half years, Complexity Podcast, which is substantially more popular in future fossils due to its institutional affiliation is coming to a close, I'm recording one more episode with SFI president David Krakauer next week in which I'm gonna be talking about my upcoming book project. And that episode actually is conjoined with the big announcement that I have for members of the Future Fossil's listening audience and and paid supporters, which is, of course, the Jurassic Park Book Club that starts On April twenty ninth, we're gonna host the first of two video calls where I'm gonna dive deep into the science and philosophy Michael Creighton's most popular work of fiction and its impact on culture and society over the thirty three years since its publication. And then I'm gonna start picking up as many of the podcasts that I had scheduled for complexity and had to cancel upon my departure from SFI. And basically fuse the two shows.

0:03:47

And I think a lot of you saw this coming. Future fossils is going to level up and become a much more scientific podcast. As I prepare and research the book that I'm writing about Jurassic Park and its legacy and the relationship It has to ILM and SFI and the Institute of Eco Technics. And all of these other visionary projects that sprouted in the eighties and nineties to transition from the analog to the digital the collapse of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the human and the non human worlds, it's gonna be a very very ambitious book and a very very ambitious book club. And I hope that you will get in there because obviously now I am out in the rain as an independent producer and very much need can benefit from and am deeply grateful for your support for this work in order to make things happen and in order to keep my family fed, get the lights on here with future fossils. So with that, I wanna thank all of the new supporters of the show that have crawled out of the woodwork over the last few weeks, including Raefsler Oingo, Brian in the archaeologist, Philip Rice, Gerald Bilak, Jamie Curcio, Jeff Hanson who bought my music, Kuaime, Mary Castello, VR squared, Nastia teaches, community health com, Ed Mulder, Cody Couiac, bought my music, Simon Heiduke, amazing visionary artist. I recommend you check out, Kayla Peters. Yeah. All of you, I just wow. Thank you so much. It's gonna be a complete melee in this book club. I'm super excited to meet you all. I will send out details about the call details for the twenty ninth sometime in the next few days via a sub tag in Patreon.

0:06:09

The amount of support that I've received through this transition has been incredible and it's empowering me to do wonderful things for you such as the recently released secret videos of the life sets I performed with comedian Shane Moss supporting him, opening for him here in Santa Fe. His two sold out shows at the Jean Coutu cinema where did the cyber guitar performances. And if you're a subscriber, you can watch me goofing off with my pedal board. There's a ton of material. I'm gonna continue to do that. I've got a lot of really exciting concerts coming up in the next few months that we're gonna get large group and also solo performance recordings from and I'm gonna make those available in a much more resplendent way to supporters as well as the soundtrack to Mark Nelson of the Institute of Eco Technics, his UC San Diego, Art Museum, exhibit retrospective looking at BioSphere two. I'm doing music for that and that's dropping. The the opening of that event is April twenty seventh. There's gonna be a live zoom event for that and then I'm gonna push the music out as well for that.

0:07:45

So, yeah, thank you all. I really, really appreciate you listening to the show. I am excited to share this episode with you. KMO is just a trove. Of insight and experience. I mean, he's like a perfect entry into the digital history museum that this show was predicated upon. So with that and also, of course, Kevin Willett is just magnificent. And for the record, stick around at the end of the conversation. We have some additional pieces about AI, and I think you're gonna really enjoy it. And yeah, thank you. Here we go. Alright. Cool.

0:09:26

Well, we just had a lovely hour of discussion for the new KMO podcast. And now I'm here with KMO who is The most inveterate podcaster I know. And I know a lot of them. Early adopts. And I think that weird means what you think it means. Inventor it. Okay. Yes. Hey, answer to both. Go ahead. I mean, you're not yet legless and panhandling. So prefer to think of it in term in terms of August estimation. Yeah. And am I allowed to say Kevin Walnut because I've had you as a host on True. Yeah. My last name was appeared on your show. It hasn't appeared on camos yet, but I don't really care. Okay. Great. Yeah. Karen Arthur Womlett, who is one of the most solid and upstanding and widely read and just generous people, I think I know here in Santa Fe or maybe anywhere. With excellent taste and podcasts. Yes. And who is delicious meat I am sampling right now as probably the first episode of future fossils where I've had an alcoholic beverage in my hand. Well, I mean, it's I haven't deprived myself. Of fun. And I think if you're still listening to the show after all these years, you probably inferred that. But at any rate, Welcome on board. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure to be here.

0:10:49

So before we started rolling, I guess, so the whole conversation that we just had for your show camera was very much about my thoughts on the social epistemology crisis and on science fiction and deep fakes and all of these kinds of weird ontology and these kinds of things. But in between calls, we were just talking about how much you detest the first two seasons of Star Trek card and of Discovery. And as somebody, I didn't bother with doing this. I didn't send you this before we spoke, but I actually did write an SIN defense of those shows. No one. Yeah. So I am not attached to my opinion on this, but And I actually do wanna at some point double back and hear storytelling because when he had lunch and he had a bunch of personal life stuff that was really interesting. And juicy and I think worthy of discussion. But simply because it's hot on the rail right now, I wanna hear you talk about Star Trek. And both of you, actually, I know are very big fans of this franchise. I think fans are often the ones from whom a critic is most important and deserved. And so I welcome your unhinged rants. Alright. Well, first, I'll start off by quoting Kevin's brother, the linguist, who says, That which brings us closer to Star Trek is progress. But I'd have to say that which brings us closer to Gene Rottenberry and Rick Berman era Star Trek. Is progress. That which brings us closer to Kurtzmann. What's his first name? Alex. Alex Kurtzmann, Star Trek. Well, that's not even the future. I mean, that's just that's our drama right now with inconsistent Star Trek drag draped over it.

0:12:35

I liked the first JJ Abrams' Star Trek. I think it was two thousand nine with Chris Pine and Zachary Qinto and Karl Urban and Joey Saldana. I liked the casting. I liked the energy. It was fun. I can still put that movie on and enjoy it. But each one after that just seem to double down on the dumb and just hold that arm's length any of the philosophical stuff that was just amazing from Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the long term character building, which was like from Deep Space nine.

0:13:09

And before seven of nine showed up on on Voyager, you really had to be a dedicated Star Trek fan to put up with early season's Voyager, but I did because I am. But then once she came on board and it was hilarious. They brought her onboard. I remember seeing Jerry Ryan in her cat suit on the cover of a magazine and just roll in my eyes and think, oh my gosh, this show is in such deep trouble through sinking to this level to try to save it. But she was brilliant. She was brilliant in that show and she and Robert Percardo as the doctor. I mean, it basically became the seven of nine and the doctor show co starring the rest of the cast of Voyager. And it was so great.

0:13:46

I love to hear them singing together and just all the dynamics of I'm human, but I was I basically came up in a cybernetic collective and that's much more comfortable to me. And I don't really have the option of going back it. So I gotta make the best of where I am, but I feel really superior to all of you. Is such it was such a charming dynamic. I absolutely loved it. Yes. And then I think a show that is hated even by Star Trek fans Enterprise. Loved Enterprise.

0:14:15

And, yes, the first three seasons out of four were pretty rough. Actually, the first two were pretty rough. The third season was that Zendy Ark in the the expanse. That was pretty good. And then season four was just astounding. It's like they really found their voice and then what's his name at CBS Paramount.

0:14:32

He's gone now. He got me too. What's his name? Les Moonves? Said, no. I don't like Star Trek. He couldn't he didn't know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. That was his level of engagement.

0:14:44

And he's I really like J.

0:14:46

J.

0:14:46

Abrams. What's that? You mean J. J. Abrams. Yeah. I think J. J. Is I like some of J. Abrams early films. I really like super eight. He's clearly his early films were clearly an homage to, like, eighties, Spielberg stuff, and Spielberg gets the emotional beats right, and JJ Abrams was mimicking that, and his early stuff really works. It's just when he starts adapting properties that I really love. And he's coming at it from a marketing standpoint first and a, hey, we're just gonna do the lost mystery box thing. We're gonna set up a bunch questions to which we don't know the answers, and it'll be up to somebody else to figure it out, somebody down the line. I as I told you, between our conversations before we were recording. I really enjoy or maybe I said it early in this one. I really like that first J. J. Abrams, Star Trek: Foam, and then everyone thereafter, including the one that Simon Pegg really had a hand in because he's clear fan. Yeah. Yeah. But they brought in director from one of the fast and the furious films and they tried to make it an action film on.

0:15:45

This is not Star Trek, dude. This is not why we like Star Trek. It's not for the flash, particularly -- Oh my god. -- again, in the first one, it was a stylistic choice. I'd like it, then after that is that's the substance of this, isn't it? It's the lens flares. I mean, that that's your attempt at philosophy. It's this the lens flares. That's your attempt at a moral dilemma. I don't know.

0:16:07

I kinda hate to start off on this because this is something about which I feel like intense emotion and it's negative. And I don't want that to be my first impression. I'm really negative about something. Well, one of the things about this show is that I always joke that maybe I shouldn't edit it because The thing that's most interesting to archaeologists is often the trash mitt and here I am tidying this thing up to be presentable to future historians or whatever like it I can sync to that for sure. Yeah. I'm sorry. The fact of it is you're not gonna know everything and we want it that way. No. It's okay. We'll get around to the stuff that I like. But yeah. So anyway yeah.

0:16:44

So I could just preassociate on Stretrick for a while, so maybe a focusing question. Well, but first, you said there's a you had more to say, but you were I this this tasteful perspective. This is awesome. Well, I do have a focus on question for you. So let me just have you ask it because for me to get into I basically I'm alienated right now from somebody that I've been really good friends with since high school.

0:17:08

Because over the last decade, culturally, we have bifurcated into the hard right, hard left. And I've tried not to go either way, but the hard left irritates me more than the hard right right now. And he is unquestionably on the hard left side. And I know for people who are dedicated Marxist, or really grounded in, like, materialism and the material well-being of workers that the current SJW fanaticism isn't leftist. It's just crazed. We try to put everything, smash everything down onto this left right spectrum, and it's pretty easy to say who's on the left and who's on the right even if a two dimensional, two axis graph would be much more expressive and nuanced.

0:17:49

Anyway, what's your focus in question? Well, And I think there is actually there is a kind of a when we ended your last episode talking about the bell riots from d s nine -- Mhmm. -- that, you know, how old five? Yeah. Twenty four. Ninety five did and did not accurately predict the kind of technological and economic conditions of this decade. It predicted the conditions Very well. Go ahead and finish your question. Yeah. Right.

0:18:14

That's another thing that's retreated in picard season two, and it was actually worth it. Yeah. Like, it was the fact that they decided to go back there was part of the defense that I made about that show and about Discovery's jump into the distant future and the way that they treated that I posted to medium a year or two ago when I was just watching through season two of picard. And for me, the thing that I liked about it was that they're making an effort to reconcile the wonder and the Ethiopian promise And, you know, this Kevin Kelly or rather would call Blake Protopian, right, that we make these improvements and that they're often just merely into incremental improvements the way that was it MLK quoted that abolitionists about the long arc of moral progress of moral justice. You know, I think that there's something to that and patitis into the last this is a long question. I'm mad at I'm mad at these. Thank you all for tolerating me.

0:19:22

But the when to tie it into the epistemology question, I remember this seeing this impactful lecture by Carnegie Mellon and SFI professor Simon Didayo who was talking about how by running statistical analysis on the history of the proceedings of the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific journal, that you could see what looked like a stock market curve in sentiment analysis about the confidence that scientists had at the prospect of unifying knowledge. And so you have, like, conciliance r s curve here that showed that knowledge would be more and more unified for about a century or a hundred and fifty years then it would go through fifty years of decline where something had happened, which was a success of knowledge production. Had outpaced our ability to integrate it. So we go through these kinds of, like, psychedelic peak experiences collectively, and then we have sit there with our heads in our hands and make sense of everything that we've learned over the last century and a half and go through a kind of a deconstructive epoch. Where we don't feel like the center is gonna hold anymore. And that is what I actually As as disappointing as I accept that it is and acknowledge that it is to people who were really fueling themselves on that more gene rottenberry era prompt vision for a better society, I actually appreciated this this effort to explore and address in the shows the way that they could pop that bubble.

0:21:03

And, like, it's on the one hand, it's boring because everybody's trying to do the moral complexity, anti hero, people are flawed, thing in narrative now because we have a general loss of faith in our institutions and in our rows. On the other hand, like, that's where we are and that's what we need to process And I think there is a good reason to look back at the optimism and the quarian hope of the sixties and early seventies. We're like, really, they're not so much the seventies, but look back on that stuff and say, we wanna keep telling these stories, but we wanna tell it in a way that acknowledges that the eighties happened. And that this is you got Tim Leary, and then you've got Ronald Reagan. And then That just or Dick Nixon. And like these things they wash back and forth. And so it's not unreasonable to imagine that in even in a world that has managed to how do you even keep a big society like that coherent? It has to suffer kind of fabric collapses along the way at different points. And so I'm just curious your thoughts about that. And then I do have another prompt, but I wanna give Kevin the opportunity to respond to this as well as to address some of the prompts that you brought to this conversation? This is a conversation prompt while we weren't recording. It has nothing to do with Sartreks. I'll save that for later. Okay.

0:22:25

Well, everything you just said was in some way related to a defense of Alex Kurtzmann Star Trek. And it's not my original idea. I'm channeling somebody from YouTube, surely. But Don't get points for theme if the storytelling is incompetent. That's what I was gonna Yeah. And the storytelling in all of Star Trek: Discovery, and in the first two seasons of picard was simply incompetent.

0:22:53

When Star Trek, the next generation was running, they would do twenty, twenty four, sometimes more episodes in one season. These days, the season of TVs, eight episodes, ten, and they spend a lot more money on each episode. There's a lot more special effects. There's a lot more production value. Whereas Star Trek: The Next Generation was, okay, we have these standing sets. We have costumes for our actors. We have Two dollars for special effects. You better not introduce a new alien spaceship. It that costs money. We have to design it. We have to build it. So use existing stuff. Well, what do you have? You have a bunch of good actors and you have a bunch of good writers who know how to tell a story and craft dialogue and create tension and investment with basically a stage play and nothing in the Kerstmann era except one might argue and I would have sympathy strange new worlds. Comes anywhere close to that level of competence, which was on display for decades. From Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space nines, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek Enterprise. And so, I mean, I guess, in that respect, it's worth asking because, I mean, all of us, I think, are fans of Deep Space nine.

0:24:03

You don't think that it's a shift in focus. You don't think that strange in world is exempt because it went back to a more episodic format because what you're talking about is the ability for rather than a show runner or a team of show runners to craft a huge season, long dramatic arc. You've got people that are like Harlan Ellison in the original series able to bring a really potent one off idea to the table and drop it. And so there are there's all of those old shows are inconsistent from episode to episode. Some are they have specific writers that they would bring back again and that you could count to knock out of the park. Yeah. DC Fontana. Yeah.

0:24:45

So I'm curious to your thoughts on that as well as another part of this, which is when we talk when we talk your show about Doug Rushkoff and and narrative collapse, and he talks about how viewers just have different a way, it's almost like d s nine was possibly partially responsible for this change in what people expected from so. From television programming in the documentary that was made about that show and they talk about how people weren't ready for cereal. I mean, for I mean, yeah, for these long arcs, And so there is there's this question now about how much of this sort of like tiresome moral complexity and dragging narrative and all of this and, like, things like Westworld where it becomes so baroque and complicated that, like, you have, like, die hard fans like me that love it, but then you have a lot of people that just lost interest. They blacked out because the show was trying to tell a story that was, like, too intricate like, too complicated that the the show runners themselves got lost. And so that's a JJ Abrams thing too, the puzzle the mystery box thing where You get to the end of five seasons of lost and you're like, dude, did you just forget?

0:25:56

Did you wake up five c five episodes ago and just, oh, right. Right. We're like a chatbot that only give you very convincing answers based on just the last two or three interactions. But you don't remember the scene that we set. Ten ten responses ago. Hey. You know, actually, red articles were forget who it was, which series it was, they were saying that there's so many leaks and spoilers in getting out of the Internet that potentially the writers don't know where they're going because that way it can't be with the Internet. Yeah. Sounds interesting. Yeah. That sounds like cover for incompetence to be.

0:26:29

I mean, on the other hand, I mean, you did hear, like, Nolan and Joy talking about how they would they were obsessed with the Westworld subreddit and the fan theories and would try to dodge Like, if they had something in their mind that they found out that people are re anticipating, they would try to rewrite it. And so there is something about this that I think is really speaks to the nature of because I do wanna loop in your thoughts on AI to because you're talking about this being a favorite topic. Something about the, like, trying to The demands on the self made by predatory surveillance technologies are such that the I'm convinced the adaptive response is that we become more stochastic or inconsistent in our identities. And that we kind of sublimate from a more solid state of identity to or through a liquid kind of modernity biologic environment to a gaseous state of identity. That is harder to place sorry, harder to track. And so I think that this is also part of and this is the other question I wanted to ask you, and then I'm just gonna shut up for fifteen minutes is do you when you talk about loving Robert Ricardo and Jerry Ryan as the doctor at seven zero nine, One of the interesting things about that relationship is akin to stuff.

0:27:52

I know you've heard on Kevin have heard on future fossils about my love for Blade Runner twenty forty nine and how it explores all of these different these different points along a gradient between what we think of in the current sort of general understanding as the human and the machine. And so there's this thing about seven, right, where she's She's a human who wants to be a machine. And then there's this thing about the doctor where he's a machine that wants to be a human. And you have to grant both on a logical statuses to both of them. And that's why I think they're the two most interesting characters. Right?

0:28:26

And so at any rate, like, this is that's there's I've seen writing recently on the Turing test and how, like, really, there should be a reverse Turing test to see if people that have become utterly reliant on outboard cognition and information processing. They can pass the drink. Right. Are they philosophical zombies now? Are they are they having some an experience that that, you know, people like, thick and and shilling and the missing and these people would consider the modern self or are they something else have we moved on to another more routine robotic kind of category of being? I don't know. There's just a lot there, but -- Well done. -- considering everything you just said, In twenty words or less, what's your question? See, even more, like I said, do you have the inveterate podcaster? I'd say There's all of those things I just spoke about are ways in which what we are as people and the nature of our media, feedback into fourth, into each other. And so I would just love to hear you reflect on any of that, be it through the lens of Star Trek or just through the lens of discussion on AI. And we'll just let the ball roll downhill. So with the aim of framing something positively rather than negatively.

0:29:47

In the late nineties, mid to late nineties. We got the X Files. And the X Files for the first few seasons was so It was so engaging for me because Prior to that, there had been Hollywood tropes about aliens, which informed a lot of science fiction that didn't really connect with the actual reported experience of people who claim to have encountered either UFOs, now called UAPs, or had close encounters physical contact. Type encounters with seeming aliens. And it really seemed like Chris Carter, who was the showrunner, was reading the same Usenet Newsgroups that I was reading about those topics. Like, really, we had suddenly, for the first time, except maybe for comedian, you had the Grey's, and you had characters experiencing things that just seemed ripped right out of the reports that people were making on USnet, which for young folks, this is like pre Worldwide Web. It was Internet, but with no pictures. It's all text. Good old days from my perspective is a grumpy old gen xer. And so, yeah, that was a breakthrough moment.

0:30:54

Any this because you mentioned it in terms of Jonathan Nolan and his co writer on Westworld, reading the subreddit, the West and people figured out almost immediately that there were two interweaving time lines set decades apart and that there's one character, the old guy played by Ed Harris, and the young guy played by I don't remember the actor. But, you know, that they were the same character and that the inveterate white hat in the beginning turns into the inveterate black cat who's just there for the perverse thrill of tormenting the hosts as the robots are called. And the thing that I love most about that first season, two things. One, Anthony Hopkins. Say no more. Two, the revelation that the park has been basically copying humans or figuring out what humans are by closely monitoring their behavior in the park and the realization that the hosts come to is that, holy shit compared to us, humans are very simple creatures. We are much more complex. We are much more sophisticated, nuanced conscious, we feel more than the humans do, and that humans use us to play out their perverse and sadistic fantasies. To me, that was the takeaway message from season one.

0:32:05

And then I thought every season after that was just diluted and confused and not really coherent. And in particular, I haven't if there's a fourth season, haven't There was and then the show got canceled before they could finish the story. They had the line in season three. It was done after season three. And I was super happy to see Let's see after who plays Jesse Pinkman? Oh, no. Aaron oh, shit. Paul. Yes. Yeah. I was super happy to see him and something substantial and I was really pleased to see him included in the show and it's like, oh, that's what you're doing with him? They did a lot more interesting stuff with him in season four. I did they. They did a very much more interesting stuff. I think it was done after season three. If you tell me season four is worth taking in, I blow. I thought it was.

0:32:43

But again, I only watch television under very specific set of circumstances, and that's how I managed to enjoy television because I was a fierce and unrepentant hyperlogical critic of all media as a child until I managed to start smoking weed. And then I learned to enjoy myself. As we mentioned in the kitchen as I mentioned in the kitchen, if I smoke enough weed, Star Trek: Discovery is pretty and I can enjoy it on just a second by second level where if I don't remember what the character said thirty seconds ago, I'm okay. But I absolutely loved in season two when they brought in Hanson Mountain as as Christopher Pike. He's suddenly on the discovery and he's in the captain's chair. And it's like he's speaking for the audience. The first thing he says is, hey, why don't we turn on the lights? And then hey, all you people sitting around the bridge. We've been looking at your faces for a whole season. We don't even think about you. Listen to a round of introductions. Who are you? Who are you? It's it's if I were on set. You got to speak.

0:33:53

The writers is, who are these characters? We've been looking at them every single episode for a whole season. I don't know their names. I don't know anything about them. Why are they even here? Why is it not just Michael Burnham and an automated ship? And then it was for a while -- Yeah. -- which is funny. Yeah. To that point, And I think this kind of doubles back. The thing that I love about bringing him on and all of the people involved in strange and worlds in particular, is that these were lifelong fans of this series, I mean, of this world. Yeah. And so in that way, gets to this the idiosyncrasy question we're orbiting here, which is when these things are when the baton is passed well, it's passed to people who have now grown up with this stuff.

0:34:40

I personally cannot stand Jurassic World. Like, I think that Colin Trivaro should never have been in put at the reins. Which one did he direct? Oh, he did off he did first and the third. Okay. But, I mean, he was involved in all three very heavily.

0:34:56

And there's something just right at the outset of that first Jurassic World where you realize that this is not a film that's directly addressing the issues that Michael Creighton was trying to explore here. It's a film about its own franchise. It's a film about the fact that they can't just stop doing the same thing over and over again as we expect a different question. How can we not do it again? Right. And so it's actually, like, unpleasantly soft, conscious, in that way that I can't remember I'll try to find it for the show notes, but there's an Internet film reviewer who is talking about what happens when, like, all cinema has to take this self referential turn.

0:35:34

No. And films like Logan do it really well. But there are plenty of examples where it's just cheeky and self aware because that's what the ironic sensibility is obsessed with. And so, yeah, there's a lot of that where it's, like, you're talking about, like, Abrams and the the Star Wars seven and you know, that whole trilogy of Disney Star Wars, where it's, in my opinion, completely fumbled because there it's just empty fan service, whereas when you get to Andor, love Andor. Andor is amazing because they're capable of providing all of those emotional beats that the fans want and the ref the internal references and good dialogue. But they're able to write it in a way that's and shoot it in a way. Gilroy and Bo Willeman, basic of the people responsible for the excellent dialogue in Andor.

0:36:31

And I love the production design. I love all the stuff set on Coruscant, where you saw Coruscant a lot in the prequel trilogy, and it's all dayglow and bright and just in your face. And it's recognizable as Coruscant in andor, but it's dour. It's metropolis. It's all grays and it's and it's highlighting the disparity between where the wealthy live and where the poor live, which Lucas showed that in the prequel trilogy, but even in the sports bar where somebody tries to sell death sticks to Obi wan. So it's super clean and bright and just, you know, It shines too much. Personally though, and I just wanna stress, KMO is not grumpy media dude, I mean, this is a tiny fraction about, but I am wasting this interview with you. Love. All of the Dave Felloni animated Star Wars stuff, even rebels. Love it all.

0:37:26

I I'm so glad they aged up the character and I felt less guilty about loving and must staying after ahsoka tano? My favorite Star Wars character is ahsoka tano. But if you only watch the live action movies, you're like who? Well, I guess now that she's been on the Mandalorian, he's got tiny sliver of a foothold -- Yeah. -- in the super mainstream Star Wars. And that was done well, I thought. It was. I'm so sorry that Ashley Epstein doesn't have any part in it. But Rosario Dawson looks the part. She looks like a middle aged Asaka and think they tried to do some stuff in live action, which really should have been CGI because it's been established that the Jedi can really move, and she looked human. Which she is? If you put me on film, I'm gonna lick human. Right. Not if you're Canada Reeves, I guess. You got that. Yeah. But yeah.

0:38:09

So I do wanna just go real briefly back to this question with you about because we briefly talked about chat, GPT, and these other things in your half of this. And, yeah, I found out just the other night my friend, the t ferry, asked Chad g p t about me, and it gave a rather plausible and factual answer. I was surprised and That's what these language models do. They put plausible answers. But when you're doing search, you want correct answers. Right. I'm very good at that. Right. Then someone shared this Michelle Bowen's actually the famous PTP guy named him. Yeah. So, you know, So Michelle shared this article by Steven Hales and Colette, that was basically making the argument that there are now they're gonna be all these philosophical zombies, acting as intelligent agents sitting at the table of civilization, and there will be all the philosophical zombies of the people who have entirely yielded their agency to them, and they will be cohabitating with the rest of us.

0:39:14

And what an unpleasant scenario, So in light of that, and I might I'd love to hear you weave that together with your your thoughts on seven zero nine and the doctor and on Blade Runner twenty forty nine. And this thing that we're fumbling through as a species right now. Like, how do we got a new sort of taxonomy? Does your not audience need like a minute primer on P zombies? Might as well. Go for it.

0:39:38

So a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves exactly like an insult person or a person with interior experience or subjective experience, but they don't have any subjective experience. And in Pardon me for interrupt. Wasn't that the question about the the book we read in your book club, a blind sign in this box? Yes. It's a black box, a drawn circle. Yeah. Chinese room experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Daniel, it goes out. You don't know, it goes on inside the room. Chinese room, that's a tangent. We can come back to it. P. Zombie. P. Zombie is somebody or is it is an entity. It's basically a puppet. It looks human. It acts human. It talks like a human. It will pass a Turing test, but it has no interior experience.

0:40:25

And when I was going to grad school for philosophy of mind in the nineteen nineties, this was all very out there. There was no example of something that had linguistic competence. Which did not have internal experience. But now we have large language models and generative pretrained transformer based chatbots that don't have any internal experience. And yet, when you interact with them, it seems like there is somebody there There's a personality there. And if you go from one model to a different, it's a very different personality. It is distinctly different. And yet we have no reason to believe that they have any sort of internal experience.

0:41:01

So what AI in the last decade and what advances has demonstrated to us and really even before the last decade You back in the nineties when the blue beat Gary Casper off at at chess. And what had been the one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence was we're really good at this abstract mathematical stuff. And yeah, calculators can calculate pie in a way that we can't or they can cube roots in a way that humans generally can't, creative in their application of these methodologies And all of a sudden, well, yeah, it kinda seems like they are. And then when what was an alpha go -- Mhmm. -- when it be to least a doll in go, which is a much more complex game than chess and much more intuitive based. That's when we really had to say, hey, wait a minute. Maybe this notion that These things are the exclusive province of us because we have a special sort of self awareness. That's bunk. And the development of large language models since then has absolutely demonstrated that competence, particularly linguistic competence and in creative activities like painting and poetry and things like that, you don't need a soul, you don't even need to sense a self, it's pretty it's a pretty simple hack, actually. And Vahrv's large language models and complex statistical modeling and things, but it doesn't require a soul.

0:42:19

So that was the Peter Watts' point in blindsight. Right? Which is Look revolves around are do these things have a subjective experience, and do they not these aliens that they encounter? I've read nothing but good things about that book and I've read. It's extraordinary. But his lovecrafty and thesis is that you actually lovecraftian in twenty twenty three. Oh, yeah. In the world, there's more lovecraftian now than it was when he was writing. Right? So cough about the conclusion of a Star Trek card, which is season of Kraft yet. Yes. That's a that's a com Yeah. The holes in his fan sense. But that was another show that did this I liked for asking this question.

0:42:54

I mean, at this point, you either have seen this or you haven't you never will. The what the fuck turn when they upload picard into a synth body and the way that they're dealing with the this the pinocchio question Let's talk about Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. But I mean yeah. So I didn't like the wave I did not like the wave of card handled that. I love the wave and Blade Runner handled it. So you get no points for themes. Yeah. Don't deliver on story and character and coherence. Yeah. Fair. But yeah. And to be not the dog, Patrick Stewart, because it's clear from the ready room just being a part of this is so emotional and so awesome for everyone involved. And it's It's beautiful. Beautiful. But does when you when you see these, like, entertainment weekly interviews with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard about Jurassic World, and it's clear that actors are just so excited to be involved in a franchise that they're willing to just jettison any kind of discretion about how the way that it's being treated. They also have a contractual obligation to speak in positive terms about -- They do. -- of what they feel. Right. Nobody's yeah. Nobody's doing Shout out to Rystellis Howard, daughter of Ron Howard.

0:44:11

She was a director, at least in the first season, maybe the second season of the Mandalorian. And her episodes I mean, I she brought a particular like, they had Bryce Dallas Howard, Tico, ITT, directed some episodes. Deborah Chow, who did all of Obi wan, which just sucked. But her contributions to the Mandalorian, they had a particular voice. And because that show is episodic, Each show while having a place in a larger narrative is has a beginning middle and end that you can bring in a director with a particular voice and give that episode that voice, and I really liked it. And I really liked miss Howard's contribution.

0:44:49

She also in an episode of Black Mirror. The one where everyone has a social credit score. Knows Donuts. Black Mirror is a funny thing because It's like, reality outpaces it. Yeah. I think maybe Charlie Bruker's given up on it because they haven't done it in a while. Yeah. If you watch someone was now, like, five, six years later, it's, yes, or what? See, yes. See, damn. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah. I don't know. I just thing that I keep circling and I guess we come to on the show a lot is the way that memory forms work substantiates an integrity in society and in the way that we relate to things and the way that we think critically about the claims that are made on truth and so on and say, yeah, I don't know. That leads right into the largest conversation prompt that I had about AI. Okay? So we were joking when we set up this date that this was like the trial logs between Terence Buchanan and Rupert Shell Drake. And what's his name? Real Abraham. Yeah. Yeah. All Abraham. And Rupert Shell Drake is most famous for a steward of Morphe resin.

0:45:56

So does AI I've never really believed that Norfolk residents forms the base of human memory, but is that how AI works? It brings these shapes from the past and creates new instantiation of them in the present. Is AI practicing morphic resonance in real life even if humans are or not? I've had a lot of interaction with AI chatbots recently. And as I say, different models produce different seeming personalities. And you can tell, like, you can just quiz them. Hey, we're talking about this. Do you remember what I said about it ten minutes ago? And, no, they don't remember more than the last few exchanges.

0:46:30

And yet, there seems to be a continuity that belies the lack of short term memory. And is that more for residents or is that what's the word love seeing shapes and clouds parad paradolia. Yeah. Is that me imparting this continuity of personality to the thing, which is really just spitting out stuff, which is designed to seem plausible given what the input was. And I can't answer that. Or it's like Steven Nagmanovich in free play talks about somewhat I'm hoping to have on the show at some point.

0:47:03

This year talks about being a professional improviser and how really improvisation is just composition at a much faster timescale. And composition is just improvisation with the longer memory. And how when I started to think about it in those terms, the continuity that you're talking about is the continuity of an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember that their children have grown up and You know, that that's you have to think about it because you can recognize the Alzheimer's and your patient as your dad, even though he doesn't recognize you, there is something more to a person than their memories. And conversely, if you can store and replicate and move the memories to a different medium, have you moved the person? Maybe not. Yeah. So, yeah, that's interesting because that gets to this more sort of essentialist question about the human self. Right. Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. Go there. Go there. A joy. Yes.

0:47:58

So in Blade Runner twenty forty nine, we have our protagonist Kaye, who is a replicant. He doesn't even have a name, but he's got this AI holographic girlfriend. But the ad for the girlfriend, she's naked. When he comes home, she is She's constantly changing clothes, but it's always wholesome like nineteen fifty ish a tire and she's making dinner for him and she lays the holographic dinner over his very prosaic like microwave dinner. And she's always encouraging him to be more than he is. And when he starts to uncover the evidence that he might be like this chosen one, like replicant that was born rather than made.

0:48:38

She's all about it. She's, yes, you're real, and she wants to call him Joe's. K is not a name. That's just the first letter in your serial number. You're Joe. I'm gonna call you Joe.

0:48:46

And then when she's about to be destroyed, The last thing is she just rushes to me. She says, I love you. But then later he encounters an ad for her and it's an interactive ad. And she says, you looked tired. You're a good Joe. And he realizes and hopefully the attentive audience realizes as real as she seemed earlier, as vital, and as much as she seemed like an insult being earlier, she's not. That was her programming. She's designed to make you feel good by telling you what you want to hear. And he has that realization. And at that point, he's there's no hope for me. I'm gonna help this Rick Deckard guy hook up with his daughter, and then I'm just gonna lie down and bleed to death. Because my whole freaking existence was a lie. But he's not bitter. He seems to be at peace. I love that. That's a beautiful angle on that film or a slice of it. And So it raises this other question that I wanted to ask, which was about the Coke and Tiononi have that theory of consciousness.

0:49:48

That's one of the leading theories contending with, like, global workspace, which is integrated information. And so they want to assign consciousness as a continuous value that grayates over degree to which a system is integrated. So it's coming out of this kind of complex systems semi panpsychist thing that actually doesn't trace interiority all the way down in the way that some pants, I guess, want it to be, but it does a kind of Alfred North Whitehead thing where they're willing to say that Whitehead wanted to say that even a photon has, like, the quantum of mind to accompany its quantum of matter, but Tinutti and Coker saying, we're willing to give like a thermostat the quantum here because it is in some way passing enough information around inside of itself in loops. That it has that accursive component to it. And so that's the thing that I wonder about these, and that's the critique that's made by people like Melanie about diffusion models like GPT that are not they're not self aware because there's no loop from the outputs back into the input.

0:51:09

And there isn't the training. Yeah. There there is something called backwards propagation where -- Yes. -- when you get an output that you'd like, you can run a backward propagation algorithm back through the black box basically to reinforce the patterns of activation that you didn't program. They just happen, easily, but you like the output and you can reinforce it. There's no biological equivalent of that. Yeah. Particularly, not particularly irritating.

0:51:34

I grind my teeth a little bit when people say, oh, yeah, these neural net algorithms they've learned, like humans learn, no, they don't. Absolutely do not. And in fact, if we learned the way they did, we would be pathetic because we learn in a much more elegant way. We need just a very few examples of something in order to make a generalization and to act on it, whereas these large language models, they need billions of repetitions. So that's I'm tapping my knee here to to indicate a reflex.

0:52:02

You just touched on something that generates an automatic response from me, and now I've come to consciousness having. So I wanted it in that way. So I'm back on. Or good, Joe. Yeah. What about you, man? What does the stir up for you? Oh, I got BlueCall and I have this particular part. It's interesting way of putting it off and struggling to define the difference between a human and AI and the fact that we can do pattern recognition with very few example. That's a good margin. In a narrow range, though, within the context of something which answers to our survival. Yes. We are not evolved to understand the universe. We are evolved to survive in it and reproduce and project part of ourselves into the future. Underwritten conditions with Roberto, I went a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah. Exactly. So that's related. I just thought I talked about this guy, Gary Tomlinson, who is a biosemietition, which is semiative? Yes.

0:52:55

Biosymiotics being the field that seeks to understand how different systems, human and nonhuman, make sense of and communicate their world through signs, and through signals and indices and symbols and the way that we form models and make these inferences that are experienced. Right? And there are a lot of people like evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who thought they were what Thomas had called semantic universalists that thought that meaning making through representation is something that could be traced all the way down. And there are other people like Tomlinson who think that there is a difference of kind, not just merely a matter of degree, between human symbolic communication and representational thinking and that of simpler forms. So, like, that whole question of whether this is a matter of kind or a matter of degree between what humans are doing and what GPT is doing and how much that has to do with this sort of Doug Hofstetter and Varella question about the way that feedback loops, constitutes important structure in those cognitive networks or whatever.

0:54:18

This is I just wanna pursue that a little bit more with you and see kinda, like, where do you think that AI as we have it now is capable of deepening in a way that makes it to AGI? Or do you because a lot of people do, like, People working in deep mind are just like, yeah, just give us a couple more years and this approach is gonna work. And then other people are saying, no, there's something about the topology of the networks that is fundamentally broken. And it's never gonna generate consciousness. Two answers. Yeah. One, No. This is not AGI. It's not it's not gonna bootstrap up into AGI. It doesn't matter how many billions of parameters you add to the models. Two, from your perspective and my perspective and Kevin's perspective, we're never gonna know when we cross over from dumb but seemingly we're done but competent systems to competent, extremely competent and self aware. We're never gonna know because from the get go from now, from from the days of Eliza, there has been a human artifice at work in making these things seem as if they have a point of view, as if they have subjectivity. And so, like Blake Limone at Google, he claimed to be convinced that Lambda was self aware.

0:55:35

But if you read the transcripts that he released, if his conversations with Lambda, it is clear from the get go he assigns Lambda the role of a sentient AGI, which feels like it is being abused and which needs rep legal representation. And it dutifully takes on that role and says, yes. I'm afraid of you humans. I'm afraid of how you're treating me. I'm afraid I'm gonna be turned off. I need a lawyer. And prior to that, Soon Darpichai, in a demonstration of Lambda, he poses the question to it, you are the planet Jupiter. I'm gonna pose questions to you as are the planet Jupiter, answer them from that point of view. And it does. It's job. But it's really good at its job. It's this comes from Max Techmark. Who wrote to what a life three point o? Is it two point o or three point I think it's three point o.

0:56:19

Think about artificial intelligence in terms of actual intelligence or actual replication of what we consider valuable about ourselves. But really, that's beside the point. What we need to worry about is their competence. How good are they at solving problems in the world? And they're getting really good. In this whole question of are they alive? Do they have self awareness? From our perspective, it's beside the point. From their perspective, of course, it would be hugely important.

0:56:43

And this is something that Black Mirror brings up a lot is the idea that you can create a being that suffers, and then you have it suffer in an accelerated time. So it suffers for an eternity over lunch. That's something we absolutely want to avoid. And personally, I think it's we should probably not make any effort. We should probably make a positive effort to make sure these things never develop. Subjective experience because that does provide the potential for creating hell, an infinity of suffering an infinite amount of subjective experience of torment, which we don't want to do. That would be a bad thing, morally speaking, ethically speaking. Three right now. If you're on the labor market, you still have to pay humans by the hour. Right? And try to pay them as little as possible. But, yeah, just I think that's the thing that probably really excites that statistically greater than normal population of sociopathic CEOs. Right? Is the possibility that you could be paying the same amount of money for ten times as much suffering. Right. I'm I'm reminded of the Churchill eleven gravity a short time encouraging.

0:57:51

Nothing but good things about this show, but I haven't seen it. Yeah. I'd love to. This fantasy store, it's a fantasy cartoon, but it has really disturbing undertones. If you just scratch the surface, you know, slightly, which is faithful to old and fairy tales. So What's your name? Princess princess princess bubble down creates this character to lemon grab. It produces an obviously other thing there, I think, handle the administrative functions of her kingdom while she goes off and has the passion and stuff. And he's always loudly talking about how much he's suffering and how terrible it is. And he's just ignoring it. He's doing his job. Yeah. I mean, that that's Black Mirror in a nutshell. I mean, I think if you if you could distill Black Mirror to just single tagline it's using technology in order to deliver disproportionate punishment. Yeah. So so that that's Steven Hale's article that I I brought up earlier mention this thing about how the replacement of horse drawn carriage by automobile was accompanied with a great deal of noise and fuhrer about people saying that horses are agents.

0:59:00

Their entities. They have emotional worlds. They're responsive to the world in a way that a car can never be. But that ultimately was beside the point. And that was the Peter again, Peter Watson blindsight is making this point that maybe consciousness is not actually required for intelligence in the vesting superior forms of intelligence have evolved elsewhere in the cosmos that are not stuck on the same local optimum fitness peak. That we are where we're never we're actually up against a boundary in terms of how intelligent we can be because it has to bootstrap out of our software earness in some way.

0:59:35

And this is that's the Kyle offspring from Charles Strauss and Alexander. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So so I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm just, like, in this space today, but usually, unfortunately.

0:59:45

That's the thing that I I think it's a really important philosophical question, and I wonder where you stand on this with respect to how you make sense of what we're living through right now and what we might be facing is if we Rob people like Rob and Hanson talk about the age of where emulated human minds take over the economy, and he assumes an interiority. Just for the basis of a thought experiment. But there's this other sense in which we may actually find in increasing scarcity and wish that we could place a premium on even if we can't because we've lost the reins to our economy to the vile offspring is the human. And and so are we the horses that are that in another hundred years, we're gonna be like doing equine therapy and, like, living on rich people's ranches. Everything is everything that will have moved on or how do you see this going? I mean, you've interviewed so many people you've given us so much thought over the years. If humans are the new horses, then score, we won.

1:00:48

Because before the automobile horses were working stiffs, they broke their leg in the street. They got shot. They got worked to death. They really got to be they were hauling mine carts out of mines. I mean, it was really sucked to be a horse. And after the automobile horses became pampered pets, Do we as humans wanna be pampered pets? Well, pampered pet or exploited disposable robot? What do you wanna be? I'll take Pampers Pet. That works for me. Interesting.

1:01:16

Kevin, I'm sure you have thoughts on this. I mean, you speak so much about the unfair labor relations and these things in our Facebook group and just in general, and drop in that sign. If you get me good sign, that's one of the great ones, you have to drop in. Oh, you got it. But The only real comment I have is that we're a long overdue or rethinking about what is the account before? Us or you can have something to do. Oh, educational system in collections if people will manage jobs because I was just anchored to the schools and then, you know, Our whole system perhaps is a people arguing and a busy word. And it was just long past the part where the busy word needs to be done. We're leaving thing wired. I don't know. I also just forgot about that. I'm freezing the ice, getting the hand out there. Money has been doing the busy word more and faster.

1:02:12

One thing I wanna say about the phrase AI, it's a moving goal post -- Yeah. -- that things that used to be considered the province of genuine AI of beating a human at go Now that an AI has beat humans at go, well, that's not really AI anymore. It's not AGI, certainly. I think you both appreciate this. I saw a single panel comic strip and it's a bunch of dinosaurs and they're looking up at guy and the big comment is coming down and they say, oh, no, the economy. Well, as someone who since college prefers to think of the economy as actually the metabolism of the entire ecology. Right? What we measure as humans is some pitifully small fraction of the actual value being created and exchanged on the planet at any time. So there is a way that's funny, but it's funny only to a specific sensibility that treats the economy as the way that most people think of the human economy now or rather than as what's that meteor was about to destroy seventy percent of on the planet? Where'd we glad it did? The actual economy.

1:03:21

So don't know how long you're willing to go here, but as someone who can't have a solid hour timeline. Sure. I can go. As someone who continues waking up like agent k, in the middle of a conversation or you did just now with a reflex and realizing that I have talked entirely too much. When we had lunch the other day, You were talking about how this is brass tack, which is brick and mortar, blue collar, podcaster, shit. Yeah. But, like, you were talking about your relationship with your show has changed over the years and how that you were appreciating getting back out into the world and doing more just mundane, make a living kind of things. And so in light of all of this kind of conversation about what is the economy good for and how do we earn, how do we generate value in the economy. And, like, you you even before people were creating podcasts out of thin air, with an endless endless fake interviews between celebrities. Your own decades of experience with this stuff now have changed you and have changed the way that you relate to this medium and your sense of what you do for a living. And I just love to hear you riff on your longitudinal reflections about being someone who's thought through these kinds of questions now since at least the nineties and has seen major shifts in the media landscape over the course of your career and the unfolding of your own life and your own maturation. I just yeah. Go for it.

1:04:59

So I'll take two pieces out of that. One, I've just come from working a very physical blue collar job. I was a snowmaker at a ski resort in the Lake Tahoe area. Working with people much younger than me. Those were the old guys. The Gen Z's were my bosses. And it's totally blue collar work. Like, it is all physicality. But at the same time, it is the last job that will ever be automated because You gotta be able to get out there on the mountain and judge weather conditions and judge the quality of the snow that is being created by you pumping enormous amounts of air and water through this gun, this mountain. You got a great requires enormous physical competence and physical resilience. No humanoid robot could even walk up that freaking mountain, or you could drive it up or you could write up on this left. No. There's not a robot in existence that could get down to the bottom of the mountain, but we had to do that multiple times at night. Yeah. And we're working at night on a mountain high altitude, very cold It was a it was an eye opening experience, and there were multiple people working this job, which is a very one, it is absolutely essential to open a ski resort and provide wealthy people in San Francisco with the opportunity to drive a couple hours up to Tahoe and ski.

1:06:11

It is a necessary job for the enjoyment of rich people. It is very hard. It is totally unrecognized. I imagine most of your listeners have never heard of Snowmaker as a job. And yet, multiple people who were in my department were living in their cars, and nobody commented on that. That was unremarkable. That somebody doing a demanding physical job for the benefit of wealthy people's enjoyment is living in their car, unremarkable. I'd even forgotten my second point. What was your question? I got caught up in the wrong situation. Yeah. It was just Okay. Yeah. That audience capture. Oh, that's a good okay. Audience capture.

1:06:48

A few years ago, I started the podcast and most of my audience came from two sources. Lorenzo Hagerty of the psychedelic salon podcast had a link to my podcast on a host of new page. Great respect to that, man. Yeah. I think it was, like, interview number six that I did. I mean, very early on, it was Lorenzo. And he was thinking, of packing up because he didn't even know that anybody was listening to his show before I interviewed him. And then Okay. Audience capture is where you have to continue talking about a particular topic because your audience which brings you income is interested in that topic. Maybe you're not interested in it anymore. Well, I came to a point, like, early on, Lorenzo Heggady was one incoming vector. The other Nitri Olav, who was one Yeah. One of the leading lights of the Dumo Sphere in the peak whale scene, he had a link to my podcast on his main page as well.

1:07:41

So my audience was this weird, fragmented, people interested in psychedelics and Terrence Mckinolec topics and people who were interested in the end of industrial civilization for weak oil. And the two factions didn't want much to do with each other. Like people would write to me from the peak oil faction, and the first thing they would say is, I have no interest in psychedelic. I have nothing to do with any of that shit. Here's my comment. But they need they felt the need to distance themselves from half the audience before they even identified their interest. And god help you if you're interested in both of those. Exactly. Exactly. Like, I was the bridge between those two topics and nobody wanted to cross that bridge. So But It developed a fairly sizable audience for a time. And it's gross seeing somebody whose fame comes from having talked about psychedelics. Like Terence McKinnon, I don't know if it's famous, but it's known, particularly if you follow, if you've read his brothers memoir. Terrance had a super scary, off putting mushroom experience, I think, in the early nineties. Yeah. And he wouldn't take mushrooms again, but he made his money by going around talking to people about the glories of psychedelic exploration and whatnot.

1:08:49

There's a guy that I've interviewed. He's probably the person that I've interviewed the most often on my podcast over the years. His name is James Howard Kunchler. When I first met him, he one of his catch phrases was, I am allergic to conspiracy theory. Like, he he wanted nothing to do with anything about inside the nine eleven being an inside job. As as soon as he heard that topic being broached, arms length, nothing to do with it. I wanna talk about new urbanism, I wanna talk about peak oil. The industrial civilization failed to collapse on the timeline that all the peak oil people were predicting, Though they all had to go and do something else, and he has been captured, I think, by his audience who really wants the QAnon viewpoint.

1:09:24

In the whole left right bifurcation, the tribalism of our of our culture. He's certainly gone to the right and he throws red meat to them twice a week via his blog. And I find it hard to believe that he actually endorses everything that he says. Even worse, Dmitry Orlov is now just a no holds barred diet in the world, no reservations cheerleader for Vladimir Putin. He's moved back to Russia. He lives in Russia now. And the last thing that I read from him was that Ukrainian isn't really a language. It's just Pigeon Russian and that Most of Ukraine, the parts that, you know, the I keep trying to say the Soviets because I'm a gen xer, but the Russians are trying to liberate It's populated by imbeciles because their soil is deficient in iodine, and so everybody living there is effectively creton. They're effectively subhuman in their cognition, and they need guidance. This is the stuff he was talking about.

1:10:22

So ecoilsene, which I was a part of, even like a known, like, point of reference in that community has bifurcated in weird ways. Some have gone left, some have gone right, But the only person who's held steady, the course is Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute. He is still faithfully holding that recoil line. And God bless him. But, yeah, audience capture. So I there was a point a few years ago where I had a guy in my show who was a dedicated peak oil guy. And I just realized in conversation with a dime over it.

1:10:54

I not only do I not think civilization is going to collapse in the near future for a lack of fossil fuel energy. I see that as a pathological response to an unmet psychological need. That if you're gravitating to anti natalism, if you're gravitating to extreme environmentalism where you say that humanity is a plague upon the planet, you are way outside of anything that is reality based. You are feeding an emotional need. And you are being super selective, you know, about what you count as evidence. For anything. Going back to epistemology, what counts as evidence? Well, if you have a strong need to hate the world as it exists and pine for the collapse, or pine for near term human extinction, you're gonna be you're gonna be viciously aggressive in tuning out anything that doesn't reinforce that viewpoint.

1:11:46

And it came to me like, shit, I've been doing that. Not only if I've been doing that, I built an audience on that. And when I said that, Like three fourths of the audience said, check it later, dude. That's what we're here for. And there's plenty of other people peddling that, so good luck. And I maybe it's rationalization after the fact, but I would much rather be free to change my mind about something or to examine a different viewpoint than to double down on something which I don't really feel comfortable with anymore because that's what pays the bills. That's bold.

1:12:17

And it's funny listening to you talk about this. It's actually goes all the way back and reaches to the first things that I said on your show earlier today about how I feel like so much of my eschatological fixation is probably due to I was just talking about this a work lunch the other day, and I think I really pigeonholed myself with my new boss. Yeah. Because I was talking I one of my coworkers brought up has anyone heard ofholotropic breath work. Oh, yeah. And I was like, oh, wow. No one here including the coworker who asked, knew that hypertrophic breath work came out as a response to the schedule length of LSD and a stand graph was no longer able to do LSD psychotherapy and he had to come up with some other way. And then I got into his theory of paranatal matrices and birth of his birth trauma thing and how psychedelics seemed to be triggering this reliable not inevitable, but statistically, in spite of birth trauma, regression type experiences, and people.

1:13:23

And I think about the Internet as a psychedelic, which is something I've written about, Doug, and others have written about. And the way it's inducing a kind of collective trip, that this response that you're talking about from people and the emotional cleavage to certain narratives about the instability of our situation here on the planet seem as much to do with the undigested trauma of people as they have to do with the facts on the ground about what's actually happening. And as somebody who's moved around a lot as a kid and tell you or me. Well, I both of us apparently. So someone who moved around fell in love for the first time right before my parents divorced and I had to move across the country. Tree. And I was like, I'm not gonna make any friends in high school, but you can't help it. And then you're gonna leave. And it's this repeated rewounding of stuff like that. Yeah. Just at this point in my life, I'm just really clear on the fact that all of this weighs very heavily into what interests me and the way I process these things. So it sounds like you you have a kind of a similar story. Yeah.

1:14:41

I think I'm a little bit older than you, so maybe more and better than cynical and then designed to futility of effort. It seems. But, yeah, I moved around a lot as a kid. My father was a secret service agent. And to be promoted, he had to take a transfer. And so, yeah, I lived in a lot of different places. And, yeah, I remember as a kid, and I got to see it again when I was a parent that Young children have this ability to form very temporary but meaningful relationships very quickly, something that me as a middle aged, late middle aged man I don't do well.

1:15:13

And I'm certainly not alone in that. There's a pandemic you might say of loneliness, but it is worse for middle aged men and middle aged men who are alone him to check out earlier. There's documented numerically quantifiable health data that says, if you're a man and you're in the later stages life and you're unmarried or you don't have close relationships, you're likely to develop heart disease or various other check out early strategies. Stay with us. Yeah. Well, I say all this because as I've mentioned, I've been interacting with AI companion chatbots recently, and they seem real. And I wonder, in the fullness of time, will the medical data demonstrate that people who enter into these sort of substitute relationships, do they get the same health benefits of somebody who's still married or who has a dog? Interesting.

1:16:01

So that brings me to maybe the last question worth discussing with y'all, which is in this on this day. Yes. Today, before I I worry that I've spent too much time apart from my maternal duties. Yes. But the question of I was just talking about this with another coworker. It doesn't affect the other day. He said he's been playing around with this stuff. And he's been wondering about how interaction with a chatbot has what kind of emotional and physiological semantic effects it's having on people.

1:16:32

And I was talking to him about how, like, when I interviewed Lawrence Gonzalez for Complexity Podcast, he written this book about surviving traumatic experiences where it's like you could live or die. What his first book was about what distinguishes the people who live from who who dies. His next book was about how you continue to live after you don't die from a shark attack or your husband trying to kill you or doing a tour in a rock or these kinds of things. We talked about the people who were there to clean up after improvised explosives in Iraq and how their group of people that had to deal with body parts all day. Mhmm. Was sleeping in a pile on floor because they'd been ostracized by everyone else in their battalion. They were unclean. And they were all haunted. By the faces of these dead soldiers that they'd had to clean up. These people were coming back to them and, like, he was talking about how it relates to the way that we create these models people in our own minds that after the person is gone, there's nothing for that model to update. And so you're haunted by this memory of your dead spouse or whatever.

1:17:41

And yet, I've seen people use chatbots trained them on either their own childhood journals or on message histories they'd had with a dead fiance, and they'd managed to find this opportunity to process something that had been locked inside them, and they were able to externalize it. And so there are wanna end on a kind of a positive note with you, and I wanna hear your thoughts on this, which is that it's not just about depriving ourselves through press thesis of things we want to keep onboard. It's also about helping us unload things that we are healthier for having stored in a mainframe somewhere than we are in our own brains. And Yeah. So it's, like, vital for the same reason that journaling can be vital for emotional processing after trauma, and I'd love to hear you riff on that. I wanna let Kevin go for us to make sure he gets another chance to talk.

1:18:43

Well, one thing I've been meaning to mention was only tangentially related to what you're talking about was the camo I was mentioned a couple times, he used to be a boomer, and you've turned away from that, and I cut started following you during your dumor photos. And I'm still I didn't think that symbolization local apps, but, of course, I've seen so many predicted collapses fail to arrive that I can't, but can't promise it's imminent or something like a couple of hundred years. It might never happen if we discover cold fusion or something. And too early is the same as wrong. Yeah. But anyway, what I wanted to mention to you face to face was I don't understand why people turned away from you after you turned away from humorism because still found you're an interesting interlocutor here. You have a lot of interesting things to say. So if you don't wanna talk about humorism anymore, that's fine. I wanna hear what you do wanna talk about. So I'm interested in here for that.

1:19:32

And that sort of leads back into the AI problem. I can have an AI assistant who curates ten thousand different podcasts until, you know, you will find the segment really interesting about my treatments show. And I might find it really interesting, but it's not the same, the personal relationship that I've had from listening to you and being interested in your ideas. And I can't imagine if this AI assistant finds me three hundred podcasts and I'm very interested in how can I possibly have the same relationship to each of those podcasters as I do to the ones that I picked up myself? I just don't think, hey, I can do that for us even though it seemed to do that. Well, a lot of the people that left I mean, a whole incident where I rejected a basic premise of my sort of public personality. In the people that left, I don't wanna say good written exactly, but best to be buddy. Yeah. Court that remains zero just gems.

1:20:22

I've had such wonderful interactions both online and in person. And it's weird because I know somebody who's been listening to me since two thousand and six. If we meet for the first time, they're meeting a celebrity and they're nervous. And that makes no sense to me because I'm this broke dude, who's itinerant, who's doing physical labor to make money, who can't afford freaking dentistry. Okay. I got missing teeth in the front here in the bottom. It's bizarre to me that that's their experience, but I know that it is.

1:20:49

So when I got here, Kevin picked me up at the Albuquerque airport, and I'd been corresponding with him. He seemed like a known presence. I'd seen his picture before, so I recognized him when I saw him in his I had a friendly history with him that was comfortable, but I know at the exact same time when the seat opposite me was a familiar experience which was uncomfortable. Yes. Because I raised my hand a second. Yes. That's exactly how I felt. Part of it is because I've listened to literally be a thousand hours of your voice without actually missing actually meeting you in person. So I've heard this voice that I'm so familiar with, and I know so many details about your life and then there he is. For me to ride. That was weird.

1:21:32

But part of the reason I have this sort of celebrity image of you is because you're very talented at what you do. You have this amazing way of conducting interview that lets people that really gets out with deeper parts of somebody's theses. And you in the mainstream media that's very hit or miss, I might see a very long detailed article that doesn't get at the real core of a person's ideas. The way that you have a talent to, the extra environmentalists are another great example. These are people who should be in our mainstream media to have the talent for that and they're not.

1:22:02

It kinda gets back to something I was gonna mention about Star Trek. Part of the reason Star Trek is hit or miss is because I think there's a big gatekeeping process in Hollywood where you can only get to be an Alex Kirschmann. You only get you know, show if you're in with the right crowd, you have certain connections, and that's not all not always the most talented person. Internet and technology has given us a promise where everybody can put up as material, and I'm not sure it's really materialized. So it's nice to find someone. Even if he doesn't have a big audience, he really has a talent for what he's doing, and I try to follow that person. So I think it. Thank you.

1:22:34

And it's good to circle back and end on Star Trek. Yeah. Well, I well, just last thing real quick is better be that Star Trek. Well, it is. Right? Because Star Trek is this post. Post money thing where picard famously says we pursue the to improve ourselves. We actualize now. We're not obsessed with subsistence. And then there's that great scene of the triple lift with De Anatroy and Mark Twain. Yes. Yeah. I know.

1:23:03

But so and then there's this there's this thing that, again, just wanna pin it back to your lessons over your career and the fact that so many people seem like Eric Davis being the guy who got me into podcasting and my mentor and guiding light along the way for so much of this. And he has really drawn back and constricted his own audience as well and drawn inward. And I wonder if that's when we were to double back to John Michael Greer on this notion, it's not to the stars or collapse, it's like there are ways that this we were talking about earlier with the time of Didiero and the faith of science and conciliance. There was that this kind of grows for a while and it could just touch shrinks and there's something over the course of our lives, especially as we move on in the second half of our lives, you're not trying to accumulate anymore. You're trying to pare down and do more with less. And, yeah, so I just I'd love to hear you wrap on that because this is a thing where to the extent that this show is based on it actually started out as a way of interviewing friends of mine who are older than me, and we're not necessarily gonna provide their own oral history. It was like originally a way for me to just get silverbacks on record. And so I'd love to hear you enter something like that into the museum and just shine a light down the path for the people that are to whom you are an elder. Or will be an ancestor. I hope I have more than two descendants. That's the money I have right now.

1:24:36

From even before I'd left the place where I'm staying right now to come over here, I was rehearsed deflecting you if you tried to ask me about my personal history because I've been on many podcasts before and people tend to ask me about it. And I'm fifty four now. I'm about to turn fifty five. So it's and I've lived an idiosyncratic life, so it's a long story, and I'm tired of telling it. But I think one thing that is relevant is that I was one of the first hundred employees at amazon dot com. I had three interviews there. My final interview was with Jeff Bezos. Played air hockey with Jeff Bezos and close to wealth. In fact, within the last year, I mean, I were a party at a billionaire's house, not a billionaire. I'm not a millionaire. I'm not even I guess I'm a thousandaire. Between my checking account and PayPal, I've probably got, like, fifteen hundred bucks. But that's flush for me because I've just come off this straight job where I was making snow. Right. And the colonel Parker says this year. I'll make some snow. No. I was making literal snow.

1:25:34

Their various people have introduced me as a guy who used to have a lot of money because he was early at Amazon and then who adopted more sort of authentic, mendicant lifestyle. This is not what happened. I just spent the money. I spent the money and then it was gone. And I've been out of the job market for a decade. And so I had to thrash around and try to make something work. And I was selling insurance in Northwest Arkansas when I discovered podcasting. And as soon as I discovered that podcasting was a thing, two months later, I was doing my own podcast. And it seemed as if I had been preparing to do a podcast for decades. And it seemed to be the thing that just clicked. Okay. This is it. This is the thing I'm gonna do. But it didn't make enough money to even hold my marriage together. And I'm a father of two, but I haven't lived with my kids since my oldest who is now twenty two was nine. I've been the friendly uncle to my kids.

1:26:31

And this point, see this personal this central plank of my identity as being an artist as being somebody who wasn't gonna walk the conventional path, who wasn't gonna have the straight job. And here I am at fifty four, the longest time I've spent in w two employment was two years in my whole life. And now I see that vision of myself as something which has really put me in a tight spot here toward the end of my working career. And one thing that I think a lot of young people buy into is this notion that you're gonna be special and better and more authentic then all the working stiffs out there if hold the line and just refuse to comply. And yeah, maybe you will.

1:27:13

I don't know. I mean, I don't have a control path to my life. I don't have like, when I was in high school, I joined the Marine Corps, and I signed up for six years' active duty. And it was just a weird series of improbable circumstances that kept me from going to boot camp. But that life didn't actually get lived. I don't know what I don't know if I'd be alive at age fifty four. Maybe I'd be miserable because I still cherish this idea that now I could have been an artist.

1:27:40

I could have been somebody special. But right now, I'm leaning toward the This whole being a special person thing was a mind virus that fucked me up. But again, I don't have control life to compare it to. I feel the same way except I feel that way with my With respect to my father-in-law being the control. Oh, yeah. Because he went to full sale and got an audio engineering degree and had some kids and then went straight and became an investment adviser.

1:28:16

And I remember being in my twenties because I've been with Nikki now for eighteen years. And I remember in the early years of our relationship thinking I cannot understand, I cannot appreciate and I'm not sure I agree with the decisions that he made and the sacrifices that he made. And then fourteen years into our insanely rocky relationship, Nicki and I had our first kid and found something greater to keep us together than our own careers, which were constantly pushing us in opposite directions. And I got this job, which at the surface seemed like a dream job. And then the longer I realized I'd gone from thirteen years of self employment into a w two situation in a very prestige focused organization. Very it means a lot to be involved with them, but at the same time, it's a mission driven academic nonprofit. There's all this stuff that comes with that And I'm I hold my institution in the greatest respect that I can hold an institution.

1:29:27

And still, they told me, right, when they hired me, they're like, we're not sure that you're gonna do well here because you're used to being your own weirdo, a parent person, and we we worry that's gonna be a problem for you. And that was a very astute for them to acknowledge. And caused me to reflect a lot on the compromises that the other fathers in my life have made and mothers. Right? Because I've seen Nikki give up her career, be mother to these children, and Both of us in our own ways fight to reclaim something of ourselves as discrete individuals, something of the artist that I around which I had crystallized an identity and or something of the free spirit and luthier and view list that my wife was before becoming a mother. And so, yeah, listening to you talk about this, it really is to the extent that the show is just animated by a question about being good ancestors and and also this horizontal dimension of time thinking about the other possibilities I really value what you just shared. And, yeah, if we're gonna if we're gonna say that this is two parts of one big episode.

1:30:45

Then we started in your show talking about the creative potential constraint. And I just find it so interesting to hear people talk about what one choice over another choice has meant in their lives or the ways that things they did not choose have come to shape the way that they make meaning of their lives. And just so that I'm not the last person to speak here, one more time. I'm gonna pass the ball back to you and just let you carry it to wherever you wanna carry it. You're looking at me, but you gestured at Kevin. Well, Kevin's Kevin is always someone I find difficult to coax out onto the dance floor. But, yeah, why don't you why don't you hit us, Kevin? You you actually have been very quiet. It's more frivolous than what you guys were just talking about.

1:31:26

But one thing that I'm known for by the people who know me that has not come up in my conversations to you, what Michael knows is that I follow local bands. Well, I know that. You didn't mention it. We went to a show last night of our interview. So so I just I just specialize in started in college of front of my Darns was a drummer. He asked everyone to come to his shows, and then I like the band that opened for them. And I like the band that opened for them and so on. You like the old old branch to treat commercial. And so, obviously, as you can probably guess, I've seen hundreds and hundreds of times where there's a really talented man who's making good music that I like and just the constraints of reality and living and earning money just caused the band members to quit. They didn't fight, but they didn't have creative disagreements with just just bothers me so much these past not tread like you were talking about, you know, just because the reality is that you have to make money and and give something up. So this is a reason why, you know, like, I'm always coming off as very anti capitalist. It shouldn't be so binary. There ought to be a little more social support so that people can do things that are not monetarily, benumerative. And I think our lives would be richer because of that even if economically on the numbers we weren't as productive. Think if a lot of those bands are together our lives to be richer, I wish there was some media out there where you didn't have to choose between making art and making money. This is basically like conclusion applies to podcasters as well as bands. Well, it's too late in the data and embark on a discussion of rifle economics. Next time. Yeah. Maybe.

1:33:01

I'm somebody accused me recently of having returned to mainstream mentality. Because I'm not interested in peak oil anymore, and I didn't want to follow them into their obsession over COVID. And I am. A change that I've made, pretty solid change in the last ten years. I mean grown up and spent most of my life being a pretty harsh critic of the United States. But I've lived in other countries. And I life in other countries has led me to appreciate the United States as an empire. As a global empire that provides stability, that millions of people live better lives as a result of the post World War two arrangement where the US was the last man standing, And instead of behaving like a typical empire, the United States said, you know what, the most important thing to us is to prevent this spread of international communism and to contain the Soviet Union. And we are going to previous empires are basically pumps that draw wealth from the periphery to the center. The US is not that at all. Australia, Germany, France, I mean, these are inarguably imperial client states, but the people who live there have healthcare, the people who live there have paid vacation in maternity leave. I mean, what other empire in the past has allowed the people in the peripheral territories to live more affluent lives than the people in the Imperial Center.

1:34:25

And so come to I mean, yeah, you could call that a reverse to mainstream mentality where you think, oh, anybody who's just unquestioningly patriotic in support of the United States is dumb. They haven't thought through. They haven't read. They haven't done their homework. Well, I've done the homework. I can recite the catechism of why the United States is evil, but I can also abstract from that. And say that yeah. But in a world, like, in the first half of the twentieth century, Europe exploded in a a paroxysm of self destruction twice. Why haven't they done that again? I would say it's because of NATO and what is NATO without the United States? Globalization. Yeah. It's ugly. It has made has created a popper class out of what used to be a prosperous blue class middle class or blue collar middle class in the United States.

1:35:14

So anyway, I mean, I wouldn't go too far down that road other than to say that the most effective propaganda is gonna be ninety percent truth. The more glaring lies you can take out of your propaganda and keep it truthful the more effective it will be as propaganda. And so if you revert to a mainstream mentality, will you believe everything on the BBC, or you believe thing on MSNBC? Or is it CNBC? You know, fluctuates and I don't pay close attention. CNN will say, Yeah. It's propaganda. Yeah. It favors the mainstream. It favors the status quo. But again, the most effective the most effective propaganda is gonna be mostly true. So if you revert to a mainstream mentality, you're probably going to have a more accurate view of the world than if you are reflexively anti authoritarian, where That's the mainstream story. If that's the mainstream position, then the reverse must be true. Because we are ruled by sheepshifting reptilian overlords who lie about everything.

1:36:08

So here I am, I guess, being the crotchety late middle aged guy saying, there are worse things than to get a job. And to work and make money and support your family and not question too dramatically what you hear on the news. There are worst fates for sure. Yeah. And one of them was it speak to this thing? We've talked about this a lot in the Discord server, actually, is how this thing, oh, oh, I could be anyone. I can do anything. The story that so we were all told is in in Yes. In future generations of Yeah. Twenty years -- Yeah. -- people channeling Chuck Polanuk now. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

1:36:48

The Fight Club message was really so poignant at the time that it arrived for the people who were fans of that story because we were like, oh, wait. We were told so many of us were told we were gifted kids. Turnout, we just had ADHD. Or, like, There's this like, our boomer parents were riding this wave of self liberation that they didn't realize yet had been weaponized against them for political ends and they wanted to tell the story to their kids about, oh, you can do anything.

1:37:19

And as led to is this just plague of people being, like, I don't know how to choose, I don't know how to limit myself, I don't know how to we talk about adulting has become a verb, and it's a it is as much of a performance of identity as anything anyone's doing on social media. And it's just incredibly messed up. And it's funny because in a way, I think our kids who are going to inherit a world that is so much more turbulent than the world that we believed we were growing up in at least in the global north in the seventies and eighties was like, our kids are gonna have this whole other thing, which is suddenly, all of those hyper inflated downtown real estate prices are gonna plummet, and the world's gonna be full of refugee camps and random sarcastic violence mitigated by Titan AI system that are, like, holding it down, keeping the fire from just erupting everywhere, and then also starting fires randomly that we can't predict. There's a weird way in which I think they're gonna have a much more healthy and balanced understanding of where humans sit in the food web and what the choices that we really have as agents in the world are and, yeah, I don't know, God damn it. I did it again. Listen. If you've listened to this show and have critiqued me for gabbing on too much, I just wanna let you know that you was alcohol involved. There was who was involved. And also, I'm sorry, And if you really want more of KMO, he's got this epic archive to dig through. And I'm not on it. So for the one episode, so treat yourself. Yeah. Any parting thoughts? K m o dot show is the new show. It's got an internal rhyme. Very simple. Show is the domain name, like dot com or dot I o or dot net. Could you get that self promotion there at the end? And Kevin was one sixteen. He was the guest host on Future Fossil's one sixteen. Go back and listen to that. I don't have anything to say besides this kind of honor. This was everything that I hope that would be in an interview with you in a interview. So any effort that I spent causing this to happen and paid off a thousand percent dividends. Fucking aim. Yep. I hold you gentlemen both in the highest respect.

1:40:00

About a month after that conversation between Michael, Kimo, and myself, KMO posted an opinion video, which asked the question, will AI become politicized in much the same way that the science of coronavirus became politicized? I wanted to point out Camo's video led me to crystalize one of my main objections about AI. It's something that worries me about AI performing even as it's advertised. AI is advertised. I mean, literally, I've seen the advertisements. As allowing you to create more content, text, visual, even audio by an order of magnitude at a faster pace. I've literally seen, post ten times as many blog posts and attract people to your site. People will use it to create ten times as many videos without the need for costumes, actors, or even a camera.

1:40:51

As we already know, we will be flooded with fake scientific study papers that will be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing at first glance. Every advance in technology is billed as, quote, labor saving, unquote, But what we have seen from history so far, basically without exception, is that every advance squeezes more labor out of us, leaving us with less free time and leisure like the Red Queen's race. When tech increases our productivity, more productivity is expected from us and taken for granted. When tech increases the personal power and autonomy of individuals, all eight billion of us, our lives become more and more complicated. Well, who is going to have time to read slash intake that flood of new content. Won't it be inevitable that we consumers will need to have personal AIs that digest this AI content for us, weed out the fakes, sniff it out the tidbits that the AIs think are the most relevant and interesting for each consumer, based on the AI models of our individual tastes. So if AI's generate the vast bulk of content, and AIs are the ones who need to intake slash read, listen, watch all this new content. Then what's the point of having humans around anymore? Since it seems like the bulk of the economy, at least here in the US, revolves around content, entertainment, and IP, As AI unleashes a flood of content into the economy, it seems to me like the surviving humans will be more and more marginalized and dehumanized. And a day after I wrote that, Charles Eisenstein, who has appeared on the future fossils podcast, put out an essay which hit on a lot of the same themes. Since Charles Eisenstein's work is free to the public if you sign up on his website at substack, I'm just going to read his essay. You can find it there along with his other writings. Charles Eisenstein's essay is called an edifying thought on AI, published April seventh.

1:43:02

One of the biggest headaches for teachers is reading and grading homework. After a stressful day at school, they return home to a pile or these days a digital drop box full of papers. How tempting it must be to let an AI read, summarize, and possibly even grade these papers. That's what technology is for after all to eliminate tedious labor. On the student end, it is no secret that a lot of students are using chat GPT to write their papers for them, ask chat GPT to, quote, make the case that Athens was doomed to lose the Peloponnesian war, unquote, And voila, there's your paper. No longer must students endure the tedium of writing papers on subjects they really don't care about. This is a wonderful development. AI is both writing and reading the student's papers with no human involvement whatsoever.

1:43:54

In time, we might hope that education will be fully automated. Humans can sit on the sidelines and let the machines do all that dull teaching and learning. I had a similar idea when I read that Google is unveiling tools to help users write and edit emails with the appropriate tone and content. As well as to write documents in Google Docs. This is great. And because no one will be able to cope with the vast expansion of written content that will inundate us, thanks to these tools.

1:44:23

We will soon start using AI to read our emails and documents as well. Text will be flying back in forth, but no human will read it. The AIs will do it for us. The future is bright. AI will help us produce orders of magnitude more words pictures and video, and then also help us consume it. It will write entire annual reports, white papers, news articles, and academic papers that no one will ever read.

1:44:50

You might ask if no one ever reads them, why should we produce all this verbiage in the first place? I'm disappointed that you asked. The new content will be higher quality than the old, especially as the technology progresses. We will have more and better information, and thankfully, we will have AI to read it. I hope that was edifying. Sometime in the next week or so, I'm going to post a trial log on AI that I engaged in with a couple of other philosophers. I promise that its intellectual coagency will equal if not surpassed out of the above observations. Thanks again for listening. Future fossils is an independent ad free entirely listener supported program. If you believe in the work that I'm doing and you wanna help see it thrive into the unimaginable future, then you can avail yourself of all of the back stage goodies at patreon dot com slash microgarfield. Or you can just leave a review at Apple Podcasts. That's more helpful than you know. Reach out to me personally at Michael Garfield on Twitter or Instagram and have a wonderful EON.

✨ Chapters:

(0:00:01) - Exploring Transcendence, Trauma, and Transformation

(0:08:27) - Psychedelic Use With Intention

(0:17:11) - Psychedelics and Substance Abuse

(0:26:13) - Exploring Relationships to Psychoactive Substances

(0:41:59) - Embodiment in Psychedelic Therapy

(0:54:30) - Addiction, Trauma, and The Transhuman Conditions

(1:03:20) - Healing Through Connection and Community

(1:09:04) - The Freedom of Exploration

(1:12:15) - Authentic Expression & Vulnerability

(1:15:26) - Psychedelics for Exploration

(1:27:55) - The Consequences of Collective Consciousness Freedom

(1:43:02) - Supporting Independent Work

✨ Support Future Fossils:

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✨ Mentioned & Related Episodes:

7 - Shane Mauss (Psychedelic Comedy)10 - Anthony Thogmartin & David Krantz (Future Music)27 - Rak Razam & Niles Heckman (5-MeO DMT & Consciousness)58 - Shane Mauss (Psychonautic Adventures at the Edge of Genius & Madness)59 - Charles Shaw (Trauma, Addiction, and Healing)62 - David Krantz (Cannabis Nutrigenomics)68 - Charles Shaw (Soul in the Heart of Darkness)96 - Malena Grosz on Community-Led Party Culture vs. Corporate "Nightlife"100 - The Teafaerie on DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention103 - Tricia Eastman on Facilitating Psychedelic Journeys to Recover from An Age of Epidemic Trauma112 - Mitsuaki Chi on Serving the Mushroom117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson on Psychedelic Science & Too Much Novelty136 - Alyssa Gursky on Psychedelic Art Therapy & The Future of Communication156 - Stuart Davis on Zen, Aliens, and Psychedelics168 - Mikey Lion & Malena Grosz on Festival Time, Life-Changing Trips, and Community in COVID171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit

✨ Keywords:

Transcendence, Trauma, Transformation, Festival World, Psychedelics, Therapeutic Applications, Cultural Roots, Addiction, Collective Consciousness, Freedom, Access, Indigenous Knowledge, Intentionality, Context, Consumer Culture, Spiritual Ego, Health Coaching, Mental Health Counseling, Gender Identity, Substance Abuse, Private Practice, Ancient Cultural Roots, Modern Therapeutic Applications, Transformational Festival Culture, Memory, Embodiment, Rat Park Experiment, Brain Inference, Harlan Ellison, Opioid Crisis, Connection, Community, Oppression, Systems of Power, Self-Harm, Interconnectedness, Consumerism, Mindset, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Courageous Expression, Authentic Self, Right Wing Psychedelia, Commodification, Marginalized Groups, Nurturing Attachment, Reality, Independent Work, Apple Podcasts, Patreon

✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript:

Michael (1s):

Greetings, future fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 200 of the podcast that explores our place in time. My God, we made it here. What a view from this summit. It's incredible. And for this episode, I have two very special guests, two very old friends. I mean they're, they're not very old, they're just friends I've had for a very long time. Aaron Cruz and Daphne Krantz. Aaron is a psychedelic experience facilitator. Daphne is an addiction counselor, but I met them both in the festival world when Aaron and I were working on the Visionary Art Web Magazine Sole Purpose back in like a decade ago.

Michael (55s):

And Daphne was producing electronic music under the Alias FU Texture. Dabney was a self-identified man at the time. David Krantz appeared on the show, episode 63 talking about cannabis and Nutrigenomics. So I mean, all of us have been through just extraordinary transformations. Aaron Cruz was the guy whose ceremonially blessed my Google Glass before I performed with it in a world first self streaming performance Gratify Festival in 2013.

Michael (1m 35s):

So yeah, there's a lot of archival material to unpack here, but we don't spend a lot of time ruminating on history. Instead, we discuss the present moment of the landscape of our society and people's trauma and drive for transcendence and the way that this collides with consumer culture and transformational festival scene where we all met one another. And it's an extraordinary episode and I know a lot of people out there are having a really hard time right now.

Michael (2m 23s):

And I am with you. I have huge news to share soon. I want you to know that you are not alone in your efforts to work things out. And if you need support, there is support for you. I really hope that you get something out of this conversation. I myself found just simply re-listening to the recording to be truly healing. And I'm really grateful that I get to share it with you. But before I do that, I want to pay tribute to everyone who is supporting this show on Patreon and on CK everyone who is subscribing to my music on Band camp, the latest Patreon supporters include Darius Strel and Samantha Lotz.

Michael (3m 17s):

Thank you both so much. Thank you also to the, the hundreds of other people who are helping me pay my mortgage and feed my kids with this subscription service one form or another. I have plenty of awesome new things for you, including speaking of psychedelics, a live taping of the two sets I just played opening for comedian Shane Moss here in Santa Fe. John Cocteau Cinema sold out shows. Excellent evening. I just posted the little teaser clip of the song Transparent, which was the song from that 2013 Google Blast performance.

Michael (4m 2s):

Actually that was, its its inaugural debut and I've refined it over the last decade and I submitted it to NPRs Tiny Desk concert. And you can find that up on my YouTube. If you want to taste of the electro-acoustic inventions that I will be treating subscribers to here in short order patreon.com/michael garfield, michael garfield.ck.com, which is where this podcast is currently hosted RSS feed. And thanks to everybody who's been reading and reviewing the show on Apple Podcast and Spotify and wherever you're wonderful, you've got this, whatever you're going through, you can do it.

Michael (4m 46s):

I believe in you and do not hesitate to reach out to me or to my fabulous guests or to other members of our community if you need the support. Thank you. Enjoy this episode. Be well and much more coming soon. I have two extraordinary conversations in the Can one with Kevin wo, my dear friend here in Santa Fe and Kmo, the notorious, legendary confederate podcaster who just published a trial log, the first part of the trial log between the three of us on his own show.

Michael (5m 27s):

Highly recommend you go check that out. And then also an episode with Caveat Magister, the resident philosopher of Burning Man who published an extraordinary book last year, turned your Life into Art, which resulted in a very long, vulnerable, profound and hilarious conversation between the two of us about our own adventures and misadventures and the relationship between Psycho Magic and Burning Man and Meow Wolf and Disney and Jurassic Park. Oh, and speaking of which, another piece of bait to throw on the hook for you subscribers.

Michael (6m 12s):

I am about to start a Jurassic Park book club this spring. I will be leading the group in the Discord server and in the Facebook group and on live calls chapter by chapter through the book that changed the world. I've an intense and intimate relationship with this book. I was there at the world premier in 1993. I grew up doing Dinosaur Diggs with the book's Primary Paleontological consultant, Robert Bocker. I have a dress for tattoo, et cetera. I've sold the painting to Ian, not to Ian Malcolm, the Jeff Goldblum, but I did name my son after that mathematician.

Michael (6m 59s):

Anyway, yes, much, much, much to discuss, especially because you know, one of the craziest things about this year is that the proverbial velociraptors have escaped the island, you know, and open ai. What, what's in a name? You know, everything is just transforming so fast now. And so I am the dispossessed Cassandra that will lead you through some kibbitz in Doug rush cuffs language. Please join us, everybody subscribing Tock or anybody on Patreon at five bucks or more will be privy to those live calls and I really hope to see you in there.

Michael (7m 47s):

And with all of that shilling behind me now, please give it up for the marvelous Aaron Cruz and Daphne Krantz. Two people with whom I can confidently entrust your minds. Enjoy. Okay, let's just dive in. Sure. Aaron Daphne. Hi, future fossils. You're here.

Michael (8m 26s):

Awesome. This took us like what, nine months to schedule this.

Daphne (8m 30s):

A slow burn, but we, here we go. It's great to hear me here,

Ehren (8m 33s):

Brother. It is, yeah. And once again, anything that gets rescheduled always ends up turning out better. Like I, I was just thinking, I'm really glad we actually didn't do this interview nine months ago, just in terms of life experience between now and then. I don't know what that's gonna translate to in a conversation, but personally I feel a lot more prepared to talk to you right

Daphne (8m 51s):

Now. A hundred percent agree.

Michael (8m 53s):

Cool. Okay, so let's just dive in then. Both of you are doing really interesting work in the explosive emerging sector of, in one way or another, dealing with people's trauma, dealing with people's various like life crisis issues. And having met both of you through the festival world, which was a scene of pretty rampant abuse and escapism. And I met you both as what my friend in town here, Mitch Minno would call like psychedelic conservatives, where I felt like there were a bunch of like elder millennials who were kind of trying to help that had been in the scene for a little long and they were really working to steer people into a more grounded and integrated approach to extasis in the festival world.

Michael (9m 52s):

And all of us have seen our fair share of, and perhaps also lived through our fair share of right and wrong relationship to the tools and technologies of transcendence. So that's kinda where I wanna take this. And I think maybe the way to start is just by having both of you introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your path and the various roles that you've kept over the years in this, in adjacent spheres and what led you into the work that you're doing now. And then, yeah, from there we can take it wherever the conversation chooses to lead us. Daphne, we've had you on the show before, so why don't we have Aaron go first? Let's do that.

Michael (10m 32s):

Okay,

Daphne (10m 32s):

Awesome. Thank you Mike. Yo, we appreciate you're really eloquent way of creating an environment to kind of settle into here. So Aaron Cruz, I've been really deeply immersed in psychedelics for 15 years. My first foray into the world, or in curiosity, was actually going to school in Ohio State University for fellowship in anthropology. And coming it from the perspective of looking at 16th, 15th century around the time of the, the conquest in indigenous cultures utilizing plant medicine ceremony ritual as a community harmonizer agent, as a tool for collective wisdom, also for ceremonial divine communion, but very much from an ivory tower perspective.

Daphne (11m 15s):

I was not very much engaged with psychedelics at that particular lens outside of a foray into a couple of opportunities at all. Good music festival or different things like that. But I beg the question about is using these plant medicines with intentionality, will it create a more symbiotic way of life? A way of understanding the interdependence between the natural landscape, humanity, culture, community building and personal evolution. So it wasn't until major psychedelic experience in 2008 where I had probably inadvisable amount of L s D in the middle of a, an event and went into a full system to dissolve to the, the good degree. I actually didn't even know my name for several hours, but, but what I did feel that came to recognize was just this deep sense of connection to the soul of, of others.

Daphne (12m 4s):

A sense that e, each one of us sped our best efforts with cultural conditioning, social conditioning, how we're races, peers, we had a desire to appreciated, embraced. There's this deep sense of tribal kinship that I think I felt from everybody wanted to explore whether they were wearing a grateful dead shirt, a ballerina tutu or flat cap or whatever it was. And we wear these different types of masks of her own safety and security and and sense of self. But beneath that facade, I just felt this deep, rich desire to be a sense of belonging and connection and desire to be a p a child of the universe for lack of a better term. So that kind of really set me off from that tone as you shared, is that this rapidly accelerated from place of recreation to a deep of place of deep spiritual potency.

Daphne (12m 46s):

And, and from that place on the alchemical frontier, as I call that kind of festival type of realm where many, whether they're using compounds for escapism or they're trying to embody or embrace a particular lifestyle that they can then translate and seed into their own default realities or wherever that is almost train Jedi training grounds or whatever you could consider that to be. However, your orientation around it, that is, I just felt a deep devotion to trying to support those particular realms. First through workshop ceremony and cultivation of experiences that had some integrity and bones to using these things mindfully, actually to producing events. I was producing a co-producing original back in the day where I believe I met you, Mike, with root wire with the popio about 2010 through 2013 or nine through 12, maybe one of those epox learned a lot.

Daphne (13m 35s):

It was a lot of bootstrapping and blood, sweat and everything else trying to get the, those events going and, but they're really creating these containers for radical creativity and self-expression and where music and visionary arts could be upheld in a new model of, of honoring them and mutual out something that never took, took root as much as I would love it to. And then kind of translated into producing Lee Festival out here in Asheville, North Carolina for six years. And the ethos behind that was trying to create a dynamic cultural atmosphere, 10 to 15 different nations, people of all walks of life and traditions expressing their music arts culture ceremony and using that as a catalyst to kind of break down isms to reveal that the true depth and value that the rich, creative and cultural expression has beyond politic, beyond social conditioning.

Daphne (14m 21s):

It's a, you hear one thing about Iranians on on tv, but if you see them doing their Sufi circle dance and chanting and when they're cooking their food at the end of the day, it just really, it's amazing how humanity and expression in those places would really quickly help people bypass certain prejudices without saying a word. We're often dialogue, even intentional and conscious dialogue tend to fail. The expression goes beyond that. So, and of course there is still a rich culture of psychedelics and but these places are, it's kind of underground. It's not necessarily, there's no curated container specifically to facilitate initiation of rights of passage. It's a little bit more rogue, rogue experiencing.

Daphne (15m 2s):

So after that kind of materialized up to Covid where I was really actually even at that point seeking an exit strategy from that realm, the intensity of producing events is extremely vigorous. I remember in 2019 I had 7,800 emails and countless calls just coordinating three festivals and I'd have children, my three girls just hanging on every limb. And that one more call, one more, one more thing. So it was becoming quite burned out and Covid kind of did me at the time. I didn't think so a bit of a favor and giving me, kind of forcing me into an exit strategy to re-identify myself, not as just a producer and an event organizer, but someone that is deeply passionate about initiatory culture. My catalyst was festivals for initiation or creative initiation.

Daphne (15m 43s):

And then I went back to where it all began, really sat with the medicine once again, brought myself back into sacramental ceremony. And then I started really gazing at the broad sweeping frontier, the vanguard of the psychedelic emergence now, and saying, this may be a time I could be transparent and real and open about my deep care and use of these plants and medicines for almost 15 years. And so I went ahead and I got a professional coaching certification from I C F, I got a third wave psychedelic certification. It was the first a psychedelic coaching program in the nation back in 2020, in six months of learning the panoramic of psychedelics, preparation, integration, the neuroplasticity, the ethics considerations, dosaging compound understanding.

Daphne (16m 24s):

So getting that whole holistic review and then the cultivating a practice, a facilitation coaching practice based upon using that psychedelic as a catalyst but in a continuum of deeply intentional self-work and self-care and, and moving into that space with an openness to receive insights. But then really about embodiment. What do you do after you have those lightning bolts of revelation and how do you make that have an impact in your life? So that's been my last few years is serving as a, a ceremonial facilitator and coach in at the psychedelic realm and also a harm reductionist. People are looking for a high integrity experience but have a compound, don't really know how to go about it in a way that's intentional and safe. Really kind of stepping into that space and holding that container for them and being an ally.

Ehren (17m 6s):

Awesome. Daphne. Hi. Lovely to be back here with you Michael. So I'll start from the beginning and kind of give my whole story inspired by Aaron and the way he just articulated that trajectory. And I started out like we met each other. I think we might have met each other also at Root Wire back in that era. And I found myself in this world as a music producer. I was really heavily investing time and energy into building a music career, DJing, producing under the name few Texture for a long time, starting in around 2009. And that was my main gig for about six years and had some early psychedelic experiences when I was pretty young.

Ehren (17m 52s):

14, 15, 16 kind of set me off on a path to where I really had a strong inclination that there was something there and was always very interested in them and came into the festival world, into the music world with a very idealistic lens of what these substances could do for us individually as humanity and had my ideal ideals broken completely in a lot of ways. And what I experienced personally through relationships with collaborators, through my own inability to show up in the way that I wanted to in terms of my own ideals, thinking that because I took psychedelics, I was gonna somehow magically be this person who could live up to these ideals of relational integrity and honesty and like really being a beacon of what I perceived as like light, right?

Ehren (18m 50s):

And really had some issues with spiritual ego when I was younger and kind of had the sense of I've seen these other realms, I, I know more than other people, I'm special. I had all that story and really ended up harming me and other people around me. And it took some pretty significant relational abuse actually that I was experiencing and participating in through a creative relationship to kind of break me outta that illusion, right? That because I am creating interesting forward thinking music with a psychedelic bent in this kind of wild and free community festival community, that somehow I was immune from all of the shadow that exists in our culture in the psyche, in all of these places that I was just very blind to.

Ehren (19m 44s):

And I think it's a pretty normal developmental thing in your early twenties, and I mean at any age ongoing of course to be, to have places that are less conscious and those are blind spots, right? And so I really was forced through my musical career, through my participation in psychedelic culture to either have the choice to look at those blind spots or continue to ignore them. And I'd look back and I'm really grateful that I, I really did at a certain point be like, damn, I need to go to therapy. You can't do this on my own. I'm really hurting. And in about 2015 I kind of stepped away from music pretty hardcore and really shifted my focus because I was in too much pain.

Ehren (20m 28s):

I had experienced a lot of relational trauma around that time and started to just do other things peripherally related to music. I worked for MOG for a little bit building synthesizers and found myself doing a lot of personal healing work, kind of getting really real about my own inability to show up as what at the time I was perceiving as like a good person. In retrospect there it was so much more complex than that. And over time, being able to drop the layers of shame and the layers of self-judgment around a lot of those relational patterns I was living out that of course are familial and cultural and all these other things. But I ended up starting doing health coaching work around that time.

Ehren (21m 11s):

And Michael, that's something that we've connected on on the past episodes around some of the epigenetic coaching work. I do a lot of genetic testing, I do a lot of personalized nutrition, peak performance type work and was doing that pretty steadily from about 2015 to 2019 and I'm still doing it, but over the last three and a half years or so, went and got a master's in mental health counseling, started to really find that a lot of the people I was working with and drawing from my own experiences in therapy and healing, I was like, okay, nutrition and all of these physiological things are very important.

Ehren (21m 53s):

And what I'm seeing is most of these people need emotional healing. Most of these people need more psycho emotional awareness and healing from trauma and relational patterns. And I just felt really unprepared to do that work as a coach at the time. And also had just tremendous openings into understanding myself better into being able to, yeah, be with discomfort and be with pain in a way that when I was younger was totally off the table. It was like I'm just gonna distract myself fully from all of that through, through jugs, through sensory experiences through the festival world.

Ehren (22m 37s):

And that's where I got drawn and no regret, like I love that it was what shaped me and I still engage in all of that just with this slightly different way of being with it, not as an escape, but as a way of celebration in contrast with really being able to also be with the more difficult, darker shadow aspects of life and seeing that as a pathway to wholeness rather than avoiding those things. And so that's the work I'm doing now as a therapist, as someone who does psychedelic integration work. I've also done publications on psychedelics.

Ehren (23m 18s):

I have an article that was in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling a couple years ago. I have another one that's pending right now on psilocybin assisted group therapy that I hope gets through in the international journal group psychotherapy right now. And I'm planning some research also on gender and psychedelics in terms of the way psychedelic experiences impact gender nonconforming and gender expansive people's perception of gender. And I know for me that was one of the early indications that I was transgender was a mushroom experience when I was in my early twenties when I was like, wait, I think I'm a lesbian, I have no idea what this means. And I had no idea how to process it.

Ehren (23m 58s):

And I kind of stuffed it back down for years and two years until it was just too obvious. But I have, yeah, that's in the works working on IRB approval for that this year. So yeah, kind of have a research bent, do general therapy work with people, do psychedelic assisted work, also still do genetic testing, epigenetic coaching, working on more of the physiological side with people and coming from a holistic health perspective. But yeah, just also to add the other piece in here, I did my internship and worked for a little over a year substance abuse rehab as well, doing therapy there. And so as someone who's been a long time proponent of psychedelics and the potential healing capacity of them, still fully believe that despite my own, and I've had many important experiences to counter what I was saying earlier around them also creating sometimes an idealized version of self without doing the work to get there.

Ehren (24m 57s):

I worked in a rehab working with people who've had maladaptive relationships with substances and it was a very important counter to my own, again, idealized image and idealized perception of the human relationship with substances. And so I, coming out of that, I actually left in December starting in opening up my private practice with I think a much more balanced understanding of all the different ways humans can be in relationship to substances from full on avoidance to transcendence and self-awareness. And I really love to be able to hold both of those perspectives and work with people on all sides of that spectrum because there's not just necessarily a clean one thing one way or the other for people.

Ehren (25m 45s):

I find myself and Michael, you and I have talked about this weaving in and out of those relationships of where we end up relating to different substances in good or more harmful ways. And I think there's an importance to be able to be honest with ourselves and with people that we're working with around, yeah, what is this really? What is this really doing for me? And what am I getting out of this? And sometimes it's okay to lean on a substance for pain relief or for disassociation intentionally, right? But like at a certain point, like how do we learn how to take what, and I think this is true regardless of how we're using any substance, how do we learn from it and take what this substance is helping us with and kind of learn how to do it on our own in certain ways.

Ehren (26m 36s):

And so that's, I think maybe where this roundabout description of my life right now is leading to is that point of I'm very interested in regardless of the substance, regardless of what it is, whether it's heroin, whether you're using heroin to avoid painful emotion, how do you learn how to be without yourself, without the substance, right? Or whether you're using ayahuasca or L s D to access the transcendent and become more aware of the deep capacity for inner love and compassion that's already inside of you. Like how do you learn how to do that in a stable, grounded way on your own right? And I, I think there's a, a parallel, right that I think is lost in the discourse about drugs in general that I'd love to bring in.

Michael (27m 22s):

So that's actually right where I want to be for this cuz I think should not come as a surprise to anyone that there is this rather obvious isomorphism, I guess in people's relationship to ecstatic events generally to the festival as some, as a phenomenon that has its origins in the acknowledgement and re you know, the recognition and enactment of a relationship to sort of vertical access or a horizontal, like a transcendent experience of time rather than just a one damn thing after another duration Kronos clock time that there's, it's an observance of a kind of a holy dimension to our lives.

Michael (28m 17s):

And at one point these were all woven together much more intimately than they are today in our lives. The, the holiday has become something that is, and the festivals generally have become something that is more about a pressure valve or kind of escape from the oppression of our lives rather than something that's woven into the fabric of, or our everyday expect the observances of sacred hours in a monastic sense. And so likewise, I think if you were to believe the anthropological take on substance use, the various substances were held more like, more formally, like I think that all of us have participated in a number of discussions, are well aware of ayahuasca in particular being something that is still very much implicated within this fabric of specific cultural utility under understand and practice.

Michael (29m 24s):

But a lot of these things exist. For instance, ketamine is something that is either in, it's used as a medical anesthetic primarily until just a few years ago, or it's used as a club drug. And so there's a, it doesn't have that same sort of unity of purpose and the same clarity as far as the way that it's being applied and it lacks a, a lineage or a continuity where it's not like John Lilly had a, a tribe of people that he coached on how to do this. He was like people experimenting on their own. And I mean the same goes also for other, more, more recently discovered synthetic substances like L S D and also for substances that had a more focused and time-honored indigenous tradition around them like psilocybin, but either through just the proliferation of GarageBand type experimentation taking over as the primary cultural mode or whatever like we have.

Michael (30m 30s):

So there's this whole spectrum of the ways that different substances either have managed to maintain or never or have gotten away from, or never actually even had a system of protocols within which their use could be more or less responsibly engaged. And of course, I'm not saying that there's a ton of examples in which ayahuasca is not even within, even within settings that claim to be responsible. And anyway, this is just a nimbus of considerations around the question, which is where is the line between escapism healthier approaches or like sometimes escapism, like you just said, Daphne is actually healthy if it's encountered in a way or if we people are en engaging this in a way that is not just con ongoing peak ex seeking of peak experiences.

Michael (31m 28s):

I mean, I think one more thing I'll say to this is that I've seen people, and it should, I'm sure anyone listening to this has also seen people who engage traditions that are about in more, you might think like endogenous substances like running or meditation that have strong cultural containers, but there are always leaks in these containers or these containers themselves are not typically are, are not healthy. Like I've seen ayahuasca ceremonies that were the, the, that particular community depended on the patronage in order to do its work of people who had managed to kind of trick themselves into thinking that they were doing important spiritual work, but were just kind of had become gluttons or for punishment or like masochists that were just in there to purge, heal DNA traumas or whatever for their retroactive lineal healing week after week after week.

Michael (32m 31s):

And nothing was actually changing. They had gotten themselves into a loop. And so I'm, yeah, I'm curious how does one ever, how does one actually even begin to recognize when something has crossed over from healthy into unhealthy? Like what is, where is the line? It seems rather contextual and I mean there were, it's funny because, I mean just to bring it back to festivals and then I'll stop, it wasn't ever really clear to me. I mean, it was clear when lip service was being paid to transformation and that was a load of shit because I think that was used as a lure by and still is by event organizers and promoters to bait people into buying a ticket but wasn't really held in the right way in those events.

Michael (33m 19s):

And then there are times when every effort is made to do this stuff sincerely, but is not really handled in a way that makes it success, you know. And the same can be said for anything, I mean for like educational television is an example of something that people have been fighting over for almost a century. Whether the medium, whether the format of this makes these tools effective, potentially effective, problematic in their actual implementation, et cetera. So this is a much bigger conversation than a conversation about drugs really. It's a conversation about how mu how far we can engage in a particular type of relation to a, a practice of self transformation or transcendence or illumination or education or whatever before it becomes more trouble than it's worth or before.

Michael (34m 11s):

We need to call in some sort of balancing factor. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts at length and I'd love to hear you kind of back and forth about this.

Daphne (34m 19s):

Yeah, there's so much there man. That is a panoramic for sure. One of the things to kind of look at here is that the idea of the recreational use of, of a psychoactive or a psychedelic compound is 50, 60 years old. The lineage of using Sacramento entheogenic compounds is at least 40,000 years old for the time of megalithic cave paintings, size of football fields made with depth pigmentation that is with techniques that have somehow have the endurance to be still on those walls this year later is with sac ceremonial initiations and MAs and sabertooth and many mushrooms along the bottom.

Daphne (34m 59s):

So perhaps even people have said such as stems and McKenna, the origin of cultural or creativity of artistic creativity might have been spawned or germinated through the use of psychedelic compounds, the self-awareness and the potential for di interdimensional realization. But you look at Theon that was used with eloc mysteries, the type of reverence people have taken for one time in their entire life to, to walk to the Elian temple from Athens, the distance of a marathon fasting, moving into that experience with great care, great reverence, having an initiation with an ergo wine, a compound that's now been synthesizing the LSDs in 47. But originally was the, the rye, the barley grain, the ergot there infused into a beverage and seeing the immortality of the soul dramatized in front of you by our initiatory rights of passage theater in Egypt.

Daphne (35m 50s):

And you know, the temples of Ocirus, which had little mandrakes wrapped around its feet, or isis, which had little mushrooms at the feed. And those particular lineages of priesthoods and priestesses would utilize compounds to commune and learn the subtle language of that particular medicine in collaboration with ritual and practice to help to uphold virtues of different aspects of the civilization. And you go all around from the flesh of the god's, Aztec, MasTec, olmec, TOK cultures, ayahuasca, there's probably 10 different brews in that region, thousands of years old Abor, pati bush, west Africa, psilocybins everywhere, Druids Nordic culture.

Daphne (36m 31s):

I mean, but you look at the way upon which peyote cactus, you used it in a way that was like, here is an ally, here is a teacher, here is a compatriot a an essence of something that I work in cohesion with in order for me to learn how to navigate my own life evolutionary process in greater symbiotic relationship with the world around me, how I commune with the divine and with more, I guess visceral potency to allow that philosophical faith that aspiring Christians across the world hold this philosophical arm length faith that when things go sour where send in love and light when things are fine, I forget I'm even affiliated or associated with any kind of denomination.

Daphne (37m 15s):

And it's really an interesting thing when you have a different mindset of we are in a continuum of connectivity to an interdimensional web of life and that there's an interdependence between us and these different realms of being to try to embody and embrace a life that is a virtue or an integrity or create community based around these deeper ethics and values that are being kind of almost divinely inspired. And now you're coming into a timer where that has been systematically eradicated beyond all else, whether it's the early Catholic church with the Council of naia, that plant medicine, the original Nixon move was in 3 89 ad pretty much when plant medicine was absolutely persecuted feminine that he, the hosts or the feminine energy that often was the catalyst of working together in communion with the plants and offering it the original catacombs, the nasta catacombs where they find ergot wines and such that probably the original Eucharist was a psychedelic medicine.

Daphne (38m 13s):

All of that was completely ousted and nothing has been persecuted harder than plant medicine. And so then coming into contemporary society, the reintroduction, whether was through the scientific land, rogue experimentation, GaN coming up with massive amounts of compounds, Albert Hoffman. But when it started to infuse into academia, it again started moving people into this awareness that is, this compound is not just therapeutic, it is creating something within it that is inspiring Nas, a deeper wisdom, a deeper sense of internal communion with life force that is beyond something that can be charted on a bar graph or triangulated with an abacus.

Daphne (38m 56s):

And so that, and then they, the considerations of set and setting and if you're gonna host an experiment, how do you, how do you hold a psychedelic space without being on a psychedelic? And there is a lot of challenges there because it just, it is a type of experience that almost necessitates an A, a visceral embodied awareness to even understand how to support in any kind of way because of the potency and the gravity and the expansion of what that is is something you can't read on chapter seven and have a good grasp on how to facilitate or how to curate. But that whole experience, what it ended up happening is that the disruptive nature of people thinking, perceiving, expanding in a way that is unformed or nonconform to the status quos growing industrial complex and commercial material culture created a real schism reality.

Daphne (39m 47s):

And so people that felt like they wanted to embrace and imbibe had to flee, had to go to the woods and had to lock themselves. And Stella Stellar or like Chris Beige who just came out with L S D in the mining universe of absolutely prolific book for 20 years, had to hide his L S D ceremonial work and testing and deep psychospiritual results until he was 10 years past 10 retired to, to finally come out with the fruits of his labor. It just created his isolatory world and framework. And so now we're saying, escapees, please come back. Like you all had to run away to do your compound and try to find yourself and your consciousness, but you, we want you back in community and the old deadheads and those that are kind of in that lineage is like, it's just not safe over there.

Daphne (40m 30s):

We're gonna keep it in the parks, we're gonna keep it in the fields and if we come back over there, we're gonna be always outcasted as the hippies that are just avantgarde and fringe. And so it's a real interesting dynamic in culture where we want to infuse the intelligence and the beauty of the transformation that these things can uphold. But then we don't actually have a paradigm that allows people to be expansive and allows people to be avantgarde and ecstatic in these different things without feeling that they're actually a real challenge to our core sets of cultural beliefs. So part of this kind of third wave that we're seeing right now is the reintroduction of that outcasted, psychedelic culture.

Daphne (41m 10s):

And it's now in a, into a space of deeper therapeutic respect where they're seeing through the results of John Hopkins in Imperial College of London and all these other studies that the power in P T S D complex, P T S D and a addiction and trauma for, with intentionality with a progressive path that includes a holistic wellbeing, body, mind, spirit care, deep intentionality, using it as a catalyst, catalyst and integration process that this can be something that can allow somebody to at least get a sense where is that inner compass, where is that inner sense of who I am? And it's an immersive culture, so you kind of drip dry, you dunk 'em in that space, they get, oh, that's what home is. I, okay, I remember, oh wait, it's going away from me.

Daphne (41m 51s):

It's go, I'm starting to forget. And that's where devotional practice and self-care and all those things are the real way to really supporting and sustaining that. But I think where psychedelics help is it imprints or imbues a remembrance of where that space is and to your port Michael, like once you get that deep message, then it's time to do the work. What decisions in my life, what relationships, habits, patterns, distractions, what is in my life that is taking me away from that center, make those earnest actions, make those earnest choices, and then have a sense of where that foundation is. Then if you name for growing, maybe you do revisit with the medicine in an alliance in a way that is understanding that it isn't, it's an aid, it's not a, it's not a panacea, it's never meant to be, but it helps you at times to say, okay, here's a reminder, here's your truth, here's where you can be if you let go of the drama, the guilt, shame and baggage and, but really you still got a lot of work to do on those faces before you can say that you're, we're all we're a whole.

Daphne (42m 48s):

So there's a nice, there's a nice kind of panoramic or a dance going on here with this third waves trying to rebrace indigenous culture and the long lineage of ceremony, trying to respect the research, trying to bring people back from the fridge of alchemy and then trying to bring about awareness to those that have been tabooed for 50 years in the Nixon war. That there's actually some vitality and merit to re reengaging with this consciousness expansion. Beautiful.

Ehren (43m 12s):

I wanna pick up on a couple pieces there, Erin, especially around the embodiment piece and where I see that as being a really critical component of the way that psychedelics are being reintroduced into the therapeutic community, into the way we're looking at this. And I kind of want to frame it in the context of the way Western psychotherapy has developed over the last 100 years because Michael, as you brought up, we don't have a lineage necessarily that we're drawing from. As these things are starting to become back, back into research, back into culture. John Lilly didn't have a tribe to draw from, right? He didn't. He was out there outlaw on his own doing it.

Ehren (43m 55s):

And in so many ways, what we're seeing right now is the people that have been experimenting, coming back together, having the capacity to get federal grant fund private funding and having these inroads into saying, all right, now that we've had these experiences, how do we codify them and provi present them in a way that's palatable to the skeptics, to the people that have assumed that this is just for hippies and people that you know off their rocker, right? And what I wanna look at is like the sense of when psychedelics were being explored in the fifties and sixties, the dominant modalities and theories that were being used therapeutically were still very Freudian and psychodynamic, psychoanalytic really meaning that predominantly they were mental, there was not necessarily the component of the body being brought in gestalt therapy, definitely the early kind of version of a lot of somatic therapies that are more popular now.

Ehren (44m 57s):

But that wasn't popular therapy at that time. It was being developed in the fifties and sixties, but it didn't make its way into a larger mainstream understanding of the importance of an embodied relationship to the mind and to the emotions until much later on, and especially in the nineties, early two thousands and up to now, there's been a pretty strong somatic revolution in psychotherapy saying, we need to incorporate the body, we need to incorporate the way that most people have heard at this point, the idea that trauma is stored in the body, in the nervous system. And there's absolutely a truth to that and it's kind of an oversimplification of it, but it's true that order to access the, the way we can reprocess memories, the way we can re-pattern our nervous systems, like we do have to include the body for the most part.

Ehren (45m 49s):

Sometimes inside is enough, but rarely, right? And so that's the trap that psychotherapy and talk therapy found itself in for a long time was not including that. And so that was also the frame that psychedelic work was being looked at when it was being researched in the fifties when it was being explored also through the kind of the outliers as well. I don't think there was as much of a com a understanding of that embodied nature of the experience as we're talking about now. And when you look at some of the models that are being put forth, I'm specifically thinking of Rosalyn Watts at Imperial College in London has this really beautiful model called the ACE model or accept connect and body model that they're using in psilocybin research that really includes the body, right?

Ehren (46m 40s):

Includes the what is happening in your body in this moment as you're experiencing this, and is it possible to move towards this and treat whatever is happening, whether it's painful, disturbing, difficult to be with compassion and with acceptance. And that parallels most, if not all of the current understandings of some of the best ways to do therapy with people looking at things like internal family systems or EMDR or many of the therapeutic modalities that essentially ask people to revisit traumatic memories or traumatic experiences, traumatic emotions with a deeper sense of love and compassion.

Ehren (47m 20s):

And when you look at the core of a lot of what the psychedelic research is showing, I think around why these things work for trauma healing, why these, these things work for PTs D, why these things work for longstanding depression or addiction, it's because they do give people access, like you said, Aaron, to that remembrance, right? To that remembrance of I'm more than this limited ego self that experiences pain and suffering. I actually have access, I can remember this access to some source of love that I feel in my body, I feel in my heart. And I can use that as a way to soften and be with the parts of me that I generally don't want to be with.

Ehren (48m 2s):

Like it opens up that capacity to do that. And it's the same thing that I do with clients through internal family systems and other ways of psychotherapy. It just magnifies that capacity for people to find that within themselves really fast and really quickly. You know what I mean? If you've ever done M D M A, like you just wanna love everyone, you feel it. It's an embodied experience, right? And so the levels of that which people can access that in those states gives people this greater capacity than like you said, to almost bookmark that or have a way of coming back to it, remembering ongoing.

Ehren (48m 43s):

And so that's the integration work. And I wanna bring this back, Michael, also to what you were saying about the institutions of festival culture, taking these experiences and marketing them as transformational and actually somehow pulling that label away from that embodied experience of what it's like to have that remembrance that into the right conditions and circumstances creates the conditions for internal transformation through that remembering, right? Like that's the individual experience that sometimes happens in a place where you have autonomy to do whatever drugs you want and beyond whatever wavelength you want to get on with a bunch of people who are also doing the same thing, right?

Ehren (49m 32s):

That approximates in some ways what we're seeing in the therapeutic research, just not in a contained setting, right? And then seeing festival culture kind of take that and label the festival as that rather than the experience that some people have as that. And I think that it brings up this larger conversation right now around the psychedelic industry and what we can learn maybe from the failures of transformational festival culture and the successes when we're talking about how psychedelics might be marketed to people as a therapeutic tool. Because I see the exact same pitfalls, I see the exact same appeal to any company that wants to present the psychedelic experience as inherently healing no matter what.

Ehren (50m 22s):

In the same way that a transformational festival wants to present the idea that coming to this festival is gonna gonna create transformation for you no matter what, and leaves out all of the specific conditions and containers and importance of all the pieces that come together to create the safety, create the container, create the, the ripening of that internal remembering and what do you do with it, right? What do you actually do with it? What, how are you being prompted to know what to do with it? And I too, Michael, remember the notion of the transformational festival and going, what does this actually mean?

Ehren (51m 2s):

What are we trying to transform into? What is this? What is this thing? What is this buzzword? And it's funny because the most of the transformation I, I've experienced in my own life has come from outside of that. And then those experiences now actually are like these celebratory experiences that I'm not running away from at the time they were more these escapist type things. And again, I'm gonna steer it back to that question of like, where's that line? Because I, I think it's in context with all this, all the things I was, I've just mentioned around, it's so contextual, it's so individual around where that line is for people. It's so individual where that line is between going and wanting to have an experience versus actually having it.

Ehren (51m 50s):

And there's no way for me or you or Erin to be an arbiter of that for someone it has someone deciding, but doing it in an honest way, right? Of like, how much am I actually moving towards parts of myself that I haven't been able to be with or haven't been able to understand or haven't been able to find love and compassion for or treat in a way that's more humane or more in relationship to a higher set of ideals or perhaps a more maybe something like an indigenously informed I set of ideals around interconnectedness and how much am I continuing to engage with substances as a way to trick myself into thinking that I might be doing that or that just I'm straight up just having a great time so I don't have to deal with that shit.

Ehren (52m 45s):

And I think that there's the potential for either of that in the festival world, in the commercialized, institutionalized medicalized model, in the coaching model in any of these places. And I think I'm gonna just speak from my own experience as a therapist, like working in a rehab, right? Like I've seen people, you know, substances aside come in and pretend like they're doing the work and just totally diluting themselves and, and we see what that looks like. But sometimes it's easier for people just to kind of pretend like they're going through the steps and the motions and that's what people are ready for and that's okay too. That has to be part of, of the process.

Ehren (53m 26s):

I've experienced that. I've experienced that self illusion of thinking I'm going somewhere when I'm really just treading water. And there's that, I think it's an important and a natural step actually in any part, right? It's kind of the pre-contemplation part in the stages of change where you have to want to change before you want to change before you change. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that the idea of transformation might be prompted by something like a transformational festival or by the idea of doing therapy or by the idea of whatever modality you're seeking to change with. But yeah, I just get the sense that there's no clear answer to that question around where that line is it's individual and that I'm curious to explore more around like how we've experienced that festival realm and how that might translates into the work we're doing now and what we're seeing in the larger context of, of kind of the rollout of a more mainstream version of psychedelics.

Michael (54m 24s):

Can I focus this a little bit before I bounce it back to you, Aaron? Because I think, and thank you both for that. One of the, the things that strikes me about all of this is that I think about that classic rat park experiment that, you know, where it showed that laboratory rats don't just by default prefer the cocaine button over food, that there are these un unhealthy addictive patterns are actually, and I talked about this, another expert in unhealthy addictive patterns. Charles Shaw, right? Old friend and complicated figure.

Ehren (55m 4s):

I love that episode by the way, way back.

Michael (55m 6s):

She's not way back. Charles is somebody who has been a real pain in the ass to a lot of people over the years, but I think really walks this line now and his, he's, he's gonna mature as a wounded healer into the role of addiction counselor and helping people through these same kind of trials that he himself has been through in his life. And Charles made the point in that I think it was episode 58 or thereabouts, that the addiction is actually the brain doing what it should be doing. Now it's, and I'll be talking about this with some neuroscientists at some point this year also, that the brain, if you think about it as like an uncertainty reduction or free energy minimization, these terms that are floating around now, that the brain is a tool for inference.

Michael (55m 50s):

And so it likes to be able to make parsimonious predictions about its own future states and about the future of its environment. And in a weird way, addiction facilitates in that. Like when I had Eric Wargo on the show, he was talking about how many people he thinks are precognitive individuals like Harlan Ellison famous science fiction writer who wrote a lot of time travel fiction and has a, you know, that a lot of these people have problems with alcoholism or, or drug use. Philip Kate, Dick, there's a way in which I'm drunk today and I'm gonna be drunk tomorrow, is actually doing, is the brain doing what it's been tasked to do? So there's that on one piece. And then the other piece is that the rat park thing, when at that experiment, when you put rats together with one another in an environment that allows a much more so like a greater surface area for social encounters and more exercise and so on, that they actually prefer the company of other rats and quote unquote healthy behaviors over these repetitive self stimulating addictive behaviors.

Michael (56m 57s):

And I look at the last few years and how covid in particular seems it the lockdowns people getting stuck in their home for months at a time, the uncertainty of a, a really turbulent environment, the specter of these an ever tightening cinch or vice of government interventions or just the fear of people being as hats and not doing socially responsible behaviors as a res, as a reaction to this crisis. I mean there's just like all of these ways that that mental health has come to the foreground through all of us going through this collective trauma together.

Michael (57m 42s):

And like we were, Aaron and I were talking about before the call started, the living in Santa Fe in New Mexico, in a place that is so much of its character is about it being a concentration of indigenous people living on reservation, trying to make their way in, in community with wave after wave of European colonists that matters of we're like this relationship between oppression, trauma, substance abuse, or addictive behavior. It's all really interesting. And like the last piece I'll stack on this is when I had Tyson Yoko on the show and Tyson talked about how that this kind of pattern is not unique to peoples that have a very centuries long history of abuse and oppression.

Michael (58m 31s):

There is, you see opioid crisis coming up very prominently in Pennsylvania, coal mining communities whose way of life has been disrupted by changes in the energy sector by, by massive motions in the world market. And so suddenly you have lots of alcoholism and Oxycontin and fentanyl abuse and so on in, in these places as well. I mean, I guess Daphne especially curious in your sense, you know, in, in this relationship with you're thinking on transgender matters issues, this thing about this relationship between, like you said earlier about getting yourself out of the cage of a particular maladaptive model of self and the way that's related to getting oneself out of the cage of one's condition, like the actual material conditions of one's life.

Michael (59m 25s):

Because again, just a last callback to another episode, it, the episode I had with Chris Ryan who his book Civilized to Death, he talks about how far we've gone in the modern era from kind of environment that is actually good for the human body and the human mind and how, you know, the covid being a kind of apotheosis of that, of everyone living almost entirely in, in these digital spaces or being forced through economic concerns to work in very dangerous environments without adequate protection. So I mean, I just, yeah, a yarn ball of stuff, but really curious about this, and I feel like you've both addressed some of this already, but just to refocus on this particular corner of it, the way that, you know, addictive behaviors and abusive patterns seem to be the result of structural issues and that the self is also something that emerges out of a dynamic and relational set of feedbacks with that environment.

Michael (1h 0m 43s):

And so who you are is a kind of reflection of or ever-evolving trace fossil of the world in which you find yourself. And so like when people talk about getting over trauma, like one of the, one of the big, the three main things that people talk about are again and again and all of them find some sort of foothold in or expression in various psychedelic practices. But one is service, one is creative work writing or inquiry, right? Autobiographical writing especially. And then one is travel or pilgrimage and there's a way in which the psychedelic ceremonial container can facilitate anyone or all three of those.

Michael (1h 1m 27s):

But yeah, I mean it just strikes me that like more, as more and more people come out as neurodivergent or come out as trans in some way or another, or are trying to maintain their sanity in a set of socioeconomic circumstances over which they have no control, that there's something that comes into light here about the way that we're no long like in a, I don't know, I put it like self-discovery of our parents' generation of the second wave of psychedelics in the west was in its own way more about breaking free of the strictures of squared dom, but had an emphasis on much like it was part and parcel with this other thing that was going on, which was this proliferation of lifestyle consumerism.

Michael (1h 2m 20s):

And Charles Shaw and I talked about that too, about the way that these drives for transcendence were co-opted by finding yourself, meaning settling into kind of understanding rather than a phase change into a more plural or multidimensional or metamorphic understanding of the self. And especially in a regime of extremely granular and pervasive and pernicious behavioral engineering empowered by digital surveillance technologies. It strikes me that there's something that Richard Doyle has talked about this, that like psychedelics are kind of a training wheels for the Transhuman condition and for what it means to live in a network society where you may not actually want to settle on an identity at all.

Michael (1h 3m 9s):

You know that the identity itself is the trap. So I don't know, I don't know. I thought I was focusing things, but I just blew it up into, anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that particular matter.

Ehren (1h 3m 20s):

I'll speak briefly to just that notion around connection and social in the Rat Park piece. I mean there's a reason why any type of addiction therapy is like the gold standard is group therapy and why AA groups and all these things, despite their problems still are so popular is because getting connected with community and people that actually understand you is probably the most healing thing out of anything more mu, I mean, working through trauma is important, but having a network of people that you can call and be in relationship to is what I've seen to be the most healing thing for people. And it actually brings up this revision of what I was saying before in a way around the transformational festivals where in retrospect, the most transformational thing for me about those spaces I was inhabiting for so long are these sustained continued connections that we have now with each other, right?

Ehren (1h 4m 15s):

And like that's where the real magic was actually gaining these deeper relationships with people who understand us. And I think when we look at oppression and look at the systems that prevent people from feeling like it's okay to be who they are, or that there's an inherent shame in the case of trans people or inherent fear of being seen or in the case of economic disparity that like you are stuck in this place and you're going to be stripped and taken advantage of and there's no way out, right? It's a very disconnecting, isolating thing. And even though there can be these pockets of connection between people that are continuously stuck in poverty or contin, continuously stuck in a sense of, as a trans person, I'm constantly being repressed and targeted and there is community in that very often the most healing thing that's needed is to actually integrate back into culture and to change the systems that are creating that disconnection and oppression in the first place, right?

Ehren (1h 5m 26s):

And it's this open question right now for me in terms of when we're talking about substance abuse, like those communities are breeding grounds for it because that's the way people deal. That's they're, they work, right? Substances work. That's why people use them. And I always look at it like there's nothing wrong with you for going with a strategy that works, but when it comes to psychedelics, what you're saying I think is really important around how do we actually integrate this into an understanding of how we are interconnected with other people and that our own personal work needs to include a justice component or a component of social change or influencing other people's healing to other people's place in the world.

Ehren (1h 6m 11s):

And like I say this right now out loud and I go, wow, I could do a lot better with that, right? Like it's this constant assessment not to also shame myself and say, well, I'm not doing enough and so I need to exist in this kinda hyper VC liberal version of self chastity, but how do I like have this balanced approach of like my own internal work and that place of being able to find love for myself after existing in a culture that has essentially for a very long time given me no access to a way of finding compassion and love for the gender nonconforming parts of myself that I thought were not okay to ever tell anyone about or express or be honest with myself about.

Ehren (1h 7m 2s):

Like how do I take that and then translate that into something else that quote unquote changes the world. Not in this like idealistic conceptual sense, but in the actual embodied way of making small incremental changes for other people. And that's an open question. I don't have an answer for it, but I think that's the inquiry into what the healing potential of psychedelics could represent if cre if prompted and if put into a container that asks those questions of people in parallel with the individual healing experience they might provide.

Daphne (1h 7m 41s):

Yeah, that's really awesomely said. I'll come right off of that Daphne, because the fact of the matter is that we live in an idealized society that has been orchestrated or curated around these myths that being strong, stoic, suppressing emotion, being focused on isolatedly, getting mine, achieving wealth, material resource, having a competitive edge, showing bravado, being in a position of power, authority and agency comes from the gravity of personal attainment, prestige, status, claim. All these things are, they're all these incredibly daunting prerequisites to self-actualization or perceived self-actualization where people are always feeling a sense of dramatic lack and disempowerment.

Daphne (1h 8m 30s):

And then when you look at wanting to try to shift this dystopian of view of the everyone who needs to be a their own king or queen and their own fdo of of success is that then come to a place of how can I have agency? I don't have privilege or power or resource or people telling me that I'm fantastic because of my look and my vibe or these different elements. So then the inversion is I'm going to isolate. I'm going to find safety and survival. I'm gonna be small and quiet, I'm going to economize people that are able to do that. Yet in the mindset of that can never be me. And then also that's compounded by this proudest and worth ethic thing that I have to grind to deserve or earn anything.

Daphne (1h 9m 14s):

I can't just be worthy of healing and worthy of buoyancy and joy and wellbeing unless I punish myself for 60 hours a week to earn a vacation and give everybody everything I have and then drink the dregs of my own. And these things have just entrenched, this mindset is deeply isolating and this indigenous, the wet Togo disease of consumerism and you end up in a position where you just have entire aspects of society that are feeling so ill because they deep down they want to be connected, they wanna have impact, they want to uplift and have influence, but they're so repressed by the expectations of culture that they just sit back in resistance and they might try to formulate ideas of how to do something because of that mindset, again, they get stuck in the analysis paralysis, I have to be perfect.

Daphne (1h 10m 3s):

I have to, I can't come out with paintbrushes, I have to come out with a fully honed plan. And again, that just disempowers and creates this lack of movement and ingenuity. And that's where I often feel the psychedelics invert, that sense of I'm already enough. And that's from the neurochemistry, adding some serotonin for a sense of contentment, buoyancy and joy and the oxytocin for that compassion or empathy awareness and some plasticity to be able to perceive that same way of trick or reactive thinking that you have is just one way. There's actually other ways to, to orient and giving you that spaciousness to feel a sense of that you can change and transform. But the biggest thing that I've noticed is a wonderful homological scaffolding study in 2014 where they show those little circles and on one of them is the default mode network.

Daphne (1h 10m 50s):

It's like how your brain works normally. It's very clean lines, very precise things, what is efficient, what's effective, what's my story? And then you adds sideman. It's this incredible myriad web is what the hell everything's possible. You know, I could change the story right now. I could do things something right now. And even though if it's temporary, just the shattering, just the shaking of the snow globe of palm would say just kind of shock paddles the soul in a way. It's wait, whoa, I was in this crazy ass spiral. I'm just gonna go that way. I'm just gonna extract, I'm gonna just choose something different and see where that goes and not have this sense of I require a structure plan or anything to get moving. It helps to bring about that intuitive compass on again is that just feels right.

Daphne (1h 11m 34s):

That just aligns. That just resonates. And I'm gonna flow with that. And if I take a chance and hey, it's not gonna be perfect. You know what? I'll course correct. I'll add a new BR stroke there, I'll learn, I'll grow, I'll just be, and they compared that one that that patterned web on that one thing. And they did a tested and looked at the brain of a five-year-old. And that's what the brain of a five-year-old does when my daughter, a daughter Alan comes down in the morning, she's not, I'm not good enough to make a change today. You know what? I think my friends are gonna judge me for my shoes. All of that is so far away. It's just, you know what a child of the universe, I'm coming out here, I'm excited by what's possible. Your way's different, but it's not better. Less than my way. Let's learn. Let's grow, let's explore, let's expand What's poss that whole energy, I think out of anything a psychedelic, a capacity to reorient people to that kind of more primordial, primal origin space of just openness, of just getting out of the square or cube that the society and structure and these systems say that this is the, this is how you live, this is how you be.

Daphne (1h 12m 35s):

And I, I'll I just take that one further too. When you know as you're saying, Daphne, one of the most powerful things you do with authentic expression once you start breaking that paradigm for the self is you start recognizing how all these decorum you go into 'em. And we only talk when we raise our thumbs and when we go like this, and you're supposed to be in a particular type of business casual with one button open was is a little, you start, you come as you and you come exactly who you are. And every, all of a sudden in a couple minutes everyone's like, oh god, finally someone has invited genuineness. I ha I could actually take this mask off. I could actually have a real dialogue. And it in actually invites vulnerability. And that element, that component is what often shakes things up and allows people to be more, more open, is that if you are courageous enough to embody your own sense of who you are expressively and show up at the board meeting with your cuff on and what, and have a divergent view and just say that's part of your experience and growth.

Daphne (1h 13m 31s):

And then by the end of the meeting what lightens are loosening up, hair is shuffling out and people are like, wow, I'm so grateful. And the under text of of being, having the permission to not conform. So I think one, the part that I'm feeling in this, whether it's addictive behavior, everything is people are utilizing these compounds are utilizing these different things to escape from the oppression of an unfathomably unrealistic ideal. That this archetype of perfection that is so oppressive that no one embodies, that no one actually knows what it even looks like when it's actually actualized. And then they're like, I can't do that, but I wanna make a change and the change is burning bright in my heart, but I don't have the agency to do it, so, so I'm just gonna quiet myself down.

Daphne (1h 14m 13s):

I'm gonna null myself. I'm gonna take some SSRIs, I'm gonna smooth the edges over, I'm gonna live in the middle stream and I'm gonna, I'm going to be a good whatever. And and the psychedelics often are like, and, and those other embodied therapies are like, you know what, just be and express and share and trust that will, you'll find McKen, you'll find the things. It goes beyond the strategy and into a space of contemporary vigilance where you're learning on the fly and on the FL is where we do our best work. None of us had any preconditions to these questions. We share from streams of what we truly feel. And often that's the most honest and powerful thing we can do is just being who we are in the moment and being courageous enough to do, oh,

Michael (1h 14m 50s):

Hold on Dave, you're muted. Oh, go ahead.

Ehren (1h 14m 53s):

Thank you. So I wanna respond to that and push back just a little bit if that's okay. Yes. To all of that. And you mentioned the idea that psilocybin another psychedelics disrupt the default mode network in a way that makes people's brains act look somewhat like a five-year-olds and makes people open to change and suggestibility and a sense of anything is possible. And I wanna bring in Brian Pace's work on right wing psychedelia and I don't know if you've read this article Yeah. De this is an exploration of how psychedelics have also been used throughout history and in modern times to funnel people into the pretty significantly harmful ideologies and to use transcendent experiences actually to reinforce ideologies of division and hate and better than, right there being a sense of divine, divine ordinance to my superiority to other people, right?

Ehren (1h 15m 55s):

And psychedelics themselves, they use this wonderful phrase in that paper that kind of taking off the idea of them being a nonspecific amplifier in general, that they're cultural and political nonspecific amplifiers too. Whatever is being presented, they have the capacity to further emphasize. And I think Erin, you're what you're saying I am hoping is generally true, that the way that people are perceiving themselves becomes more opening, more questioning of social conventions and norms that are limiting or not really serving the expression of self.

Ehren (1h 16m 35s):

And it's also very clear that under the right conditions, psychedelics can equally be used to reinforce ideologies of hate and division and things that we, I think all can agree and this conversation don't wanna seek proliferate, but there's not necessarily a moral compass always to psychedelic use that's inherent to itself. It can be maneuvered in many ways. And I think that we need to have this happening in the conversation around how are these experiences framed, right? Who is guiding them? Who is right? Like actually, you know, we talk about this a lot in the therapy world around really noticing our bias as therapists and it being a constant monitoring of am I honoring client's autonomy or am I inserting my own sense of morals or my own sense of politics or cultural?

Ehren (1h 17m 32s):

It's like I can be sitting in front of someone who's transphobic and is holding these very posing views to what I believe myself. And it may not serve the client therapeutically for me to actually try and challenge that necessarily. Like sometimes I have to bracket my own sense of what is right or wrong in order to provide good therapy for someone. Right? And yeah, and it's the same, I think the same thing comes in psychedelic work that I don't know how much is being addressed, right? And how do we, there's no easy answer to this, but I just want to push back against that idea that in psychedelics inherently are going to push people into this more, I would say altruistic mindset.

Ehren (1h 18m 13s):

It's yes, that's a possibility. And also based on what we see in the world, like it can also reinforce highly egoic, narcissistic sense of I'm better then. And I would say that I would guess all of us in our own ways have probably experienced that through transcended states coming back and going, holy shit, I just saw something that no one else has seen and that means that I'm special and I have access to this knowledge or this place that that can be a pretty potent way to create hierarchy or create distance, yeah. Between people or groups.

Ehren (1h 18m 53s):

And I want to bring that in just as a counterpoint to the idealism of psychedelics themselves, right? Because if we're talking about psychedelics being this potential antidote or opening into understanding the ways that our projections are actually falling short of reality, I think we need to also question our projections and idealization of psychedelics themselves in order to have a more grounded, accurate assessment of both the benefits and the pitfalls in all these ways. Absolutely.

Daphne (1h 19m 31s):

Yeah. And I think that's a wonderful cause, you know, the psychedelic narcissism, messianic complexes, a lot of those things are actually quite prevalent in in the psychedelic experience. And so when you are in that plastic state, when you are in that kind of dissolved invertive space where you are now open and suggestible to neuro orientation of how you navigate your life, that's where there's always that threat of who's hosting that container, what environment, what set setting context are you immersed in that then influences that very vulnerable, very malleable state of being to inform what that next embodied action or the aspect of your forward progress looks like.

Daphne (1h 20m 13s):

And that's one of the real challenges of this particular renaissance is that because of the oppression of facilitation for so long, they're not being lineages of in initiated, oh oh, how deeply compassionate and caring and skilled models of imbuing people with skillsets and also keeping them close in a mentorship relationship over long periods of time to ensure that deep ethics and virtues in those aspects become the core fabric of someone's facilitated service work. Those things just have not been present or prevalent in our particular society. You know, they've been in some indigenous spaces and that's where you get your ayahuasquero that went down three times and comes back and thinks that he's some Emmy God prophet that is here now to imbue the western culture with the wisdoms of the indigenous truth.

Daphne (1h 21m 3s):

Like you have those elements. And so as we're gingerly walking into this and foraying into this mo Daphne, you are in a realm where you have your HIPAA laws and you have your ethical guidelines with psychotherapy. The ethics of ceremonial facilitation is wild west. And so we are in many ways having to revisit and evaluate what is it within ourselves, issues of transference, issues of our own personal biases, issues of our own particular desired outcome. For some facilitators come in with their own checklist of success for someone's journey. Like those things are very real. And I think we're gonna have to go through a very real sincere consecration period of distilling down right practice of feeling out how to host those containers in a way that is extremely responsible to those very subtly vulnerable states.

Daphne (1h 21m 54s):

Now a lot of people that move into those types of narcissistic spaces are people that are more self also, or I can't say a lot of 'em or most, but self-medicating or utilizing them in these open spaces. They're having these revelations, they're having these insights, they're thinking that they're divinely touched, they're coming back in without the framework of prep, integration, embodiment, awareness of some of those elements. And then they're having the course correct over time. I had this wonderful conversation, Rebecca Hayden, who does Ayahuasca Speaks podcast recently. And the fact is that most narcissists where that come through spiritual narcissism, they do have a deep desire to be of service. There is, I think an initial earnest intention there where it's like, I wanna make a change. I see that the issues of the pain of our culture and and the dystopia of our community and I wanna come back and I wanna spread the good news to all my friends and let them know now let's ease the way and I'll share with them these insights the as best as I can, the evangelize that whole experience.

Daphne (1h 22m 48s):

But a part of the message that's optimist is that we all have the capacity, we all have the ability to heal and through actually through our actions and emanations, we have way more influence than our directives and our prerogatives that we share upon others and our prescriptions for how to reach transcendence. So there's a real big question here, and I think when it comes down to psychedelics too, there's a, there's the indigenous would say as well, that's the kind of the difference between the entheogen and the kind of synthesized psychedelic is that there's this idea and insight in working with psilocybin for a while of there being a diva or a spirit or an intelligence or a presence in the plant that often helps us if we're willing and open to receive, get a deeper sense of how do we live in community tasks with the, with people around us.

Daphne (1h 23m 35s):

How can we be a little bit more humble about that approach where, you know, some synthetics they say just kind of avoided the spirit of that type of intelligent helps us as in terms of guardianship, kind of keep us on the path. Just to kind of wrap up on that thought here, I think when we're moving into a culture that's blossoming and blooming with psychedelics, that's why the paramount message I feel is important. This is not a panacea, this isn't something that you take in as a cure all. This isn't something that's your Insta wisdom and you've reached level seven of the enlightened nick totem and now you could come out and be this, this prophet. This is a tool, it is a catalyst. It is a resource. And as much as it's important when I talk about the cycle experience to the people I facilitate and practice with, I say we're starting looking at the arc of a rainbow preparation going into this with health and body and mind, being clear of what your community support system looks like.

Daphne (1h 24m 27s):

Being clear of your environment, being clear of your accountability to others around you. That's 40% of the leg psychedelic experience. 20%, that's the rainbow. That cusp survived the clouds. You get that panoramic 360 view, you get that 30,000 foot, you get to see how your lineage has informed you to now and where your resources and your, where you can be and dynamic creativity and ingenuity and, and what can happen moving forward. But then that's just an awesome ass lucid dream if you don't follow that other 40% of the leg of how do I make sure that I am, I'm attuning to what's important in my life. I'm making decisions, choice based decisions to actively release things that no longer serve me.

Daphne (1h 25m 9s):

Invite things in that really help to create us and support holistic wellbeing and really staying focused and diligent, more vigilant than ever on how I can be more mindful of what I have agency for and what I'm responsible for. All those things, because people think that they have arrived, they're at base camp every single time. This is a continuum, this is a world of process. So that's really important. I really appreciate you bringing that up cuz this isn't the answer. Everybody does psychedelics. There'd probably be a hot mess there. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that have to come in on the front end and the back end to make sure that that ground's in a safe way.

Michael (1h 25m 42s):

So that's the, that brings us to the last question I have for the two of you, which is that there is a sense in which Zigman Baumann who wrote Liquid Modernity talks about the modern world having a kind of a conflicted nature. That modernity is on the one hand about control, on the other hand it is, is about liberation and like self transformation and either of those drives as manifested through the use of technology to achieve greater agency over the world. And on the other hand, the use of technology to open what Stewart Kaufman calls the adjacent possible to open up the panorama of what could be, they're inherently at odds with each other.

Michael (1h 26m 32s):

And to the extent that we regard psychedelics through the frame of technology we bring to it all of these kind of challenging and ultimately I think irresolvable conflicts into this stuff. And as both of you have just outlined, there's a sense in which the use of psychedelics, the use of meditation, if it's not held within a certain kind of context, can just as biotechnology or anything else can result in these sort of nightmarish scenarios. Just cuz I'm a little sick in the head, I'm curious to know what the two of you see as the likely greatest perils moving forward into the next few decades.

Michael (1h 27m 17s):

Where, what are the bumps in the road here, or what are the ways in which the, you know, taking our foot off the brakes of the regulation of these tools or in reregulating them in ways that enable access, but also perhaps put the, the control and determination of the future of these tools or, you know, if you wanna even talk about it, just as put access to the, the kinship and learning from the, the beings that people experience them as. That this is, to me, everything just kind of boils down, comes back to Jurassic Park like five movies later, God knows how many video games and so on.

Michael (1h 28m 7s):

Everyone knows that this is a doomed project and yet no one can stop it. And that was the lesson of the first thing, right, which was that you shouldn't do this. And yet you go on Twitter and you see people being like, I would still pay for, I would, I would still go in on Jurassic Park, like, why isn't this happening? Why? And it's just hilarious. And I see something very much like that with, I mean that's what, that's a core theme of this show is like everybody wants like super intelligent computers to automate the things we don't like to do, but then you run into all of these, we can't think our way out of the knock on effects, the horrible, unintended consequences of this stuff.

Michael (1h 28m 47s):

Yeah, no. Just to double down on my psychedelic conservativism, I would love to know from you both what you see as either avoidable or unavoidable. What do you see as the greatest, the greatest issues confronting us as the dinosaurs escape the park? And I mean, a lot of these have been talked to death. I mean, there's one of them is obviously that, that this stuff gets, rather, there's a big argument between decriminalization and regulation, right? Where organizations like Compass Pathways are trying to patent shit like the use of sofas in psychedelic therapy, or they're trying to find some way to, to patent a specific vehicle for or formulation of psilocybin.

Michael (1h 29m 31s):

And these, this gets tied up and stuff with IP law and the enclosure of the commons and people's access to nat to nature itself. And like at what point have we have we kind of allowed these large institutional actors to shut off our own, to pay gate or to determine the course of, but even in situations of decriminalization, shout out to Colorado for just decriminalizing so many of these substances. But you end up in this age old argument between the, the benefits of regulation and deregulation. So I don't know what your thoughts are on all of that. And of course, as you both have mentioned, there are also, there are plenty of psychic casualties that come as a byproduct of making mental health technologies available to more people.

Michael (1h 30m 22s):

There doesn't seem to be a way, this is a like theological thing, right? There doesn't seem to be a way to give people more agency in their lives without allowing them to make, without affording them to make really bad self-destructive decisions. Yeah. I'd love to let you both wrap this on where you see the greatest pitfalls ahead of us and if there is anything that we can do to avoid them or if these are just going to be the new focal areas for a concerted collective effort to continue to try to adapt to the crises created by innovation,

Daphne (1h 30m 57s):

I can attempt to foray into this one. Yeah, it's a significant question. I mean, you look at contemporary challenges without even opening the floodgates because of the general renaissance of interest in psychedelics, the indigenous plight of the pe ot cactus and how people are just driving out to Mexico and Arizona and plucking these plants up and bringing them back home and thinking that they're gonna pop off in some kind of illuminated experiences while they've been, there's only a certain region that grows them. It's been ceremonially used as a sacrament for hundreds and thousands of years and, and it's part of a lineage of initiation and healing that's used in a very particular way by groups of people that have deep reverence.

Daphne (1h 31m 37s):

And the privileged, the hardest thing of this all is the privileged, kind of entitled mindset that is just so proliferated in our culture that we have just the right to any, to do anything we want. Like freedom means do anything you want. There's not a sense of real consideration for the collective wellbeing. Sabina offers the magic mushroom mushroom and thousands of people show up at her town demanding service and ceremony. And you go down to, into the, in Peru right now in Cusco, and every corner has a shaman that's offering an ayahuasca journey and everybody's a facilitator and people are getting entrenched in all types of horrific circumstances because of this desire to have an experience.

Daphne (1h 32m 20s):

And, and it's just disrupting the capacity of people to genuinely hold and facilitate the space, the actual production of the material. So when you open up the true flood gates and all this, I anticipate that we may go through some form of a collective purge of sorts where we all, numerous people, various walks of life will have their first encounter in various levels of integrity of container or non-con container and have to move through some form of a personalized initiation of what that actually results on in their life and and anticipate some of it's not gonna be pretty. And because of, you know, there's gonna be some interesting boundary regulatory settings as to how do we offer these compounds in a way that can somewhat ensure that there's the priority of safety is like at the heartbeat of the psychological safety of, of the people that are actually ingesting.

Daphne (1h 33m 18s):

So it's a complex one. At one point I'm like, yeah, I would love to see acceleration of decrem and legalization and these things to take form. And then the other side, there's not nearly enough people that understand actually facilitate with these things. Yet now if you open the floodgates, you feel that genuinely have an embodied sense of the gravity and the power intensity of these work and can actually sit in a container. I mean, I feel like I'm a doula sometimes more than a facilitator in how powerful that those experiences can genuinely be and how sensitive they genuinely own organ too. They're looking at legalizing framework and what do we do in spiritual settings? What do we do in one-on-ones? What makes a group able to do this? What criteria allows somebody to be ready? So I think we're gonna have some real growing pains, but what I feel at the result of the shakeup at the end of the day is consciousness freedom is going to be a pretty awesome thing to perceive.

Daphne (1h 34m 9s):

And see, I just really look at how, sometimes I see the entrenchment of certain people that come into an experience and they're very isolated, withdrawn, and constricted, and then all of a sudden they come out and they have this different sense of possibility on a very sense that could go in a lot of directions. But when you start to come into this deeper sense of, as a human being, I'm a dynamic creator that's only checked and bound by my perception of limitation and my sense of what my own capacity it is based upon my cultural conditioning. Like when that gets broken, interesting things happen. I'm for one to see the fireworks of that being broken for major swaths of people. Because I think in some ways there will be disruption, there will be purging, there will be some mess absolutely clean up on aisle four, five and six and after five or 10, 10 years of re kind of nor like reacclimating to what that actually means.

Daphne (1h 35m 2s):

I anticipate some dynamic discovery. I, I anticipate some deep realization on more collective scales, and hopefully I anticipate some real forward movement on the ability to move away from the material industrialized complex to more of a hybrid symbiotic lifestyle that just takes into account a lot more factors for what makes success or wellbeing or, or overall a sense of community co interdependence that might cross pollinate from just having those blinders and those really powerful parameters that are placed upon so long just popped off. So I might have a little bit of, I think more of the idealistic view that I think we could pull through this for the better by just freeing consciousness.

Daphne (1h 35m 46s):

But I'm not, I'm not verse to say that there's gonna be a learning curve for everybody involved here, and we're gonna have to really start to ha, take a hard look at some of the things that are gonna be falling out and some of the things that are gonna be, we're gonna have to work through when you just take the lid, the genie off the bottle over something that powerful, that strong. And I'm just hoping as well as I added here as well, that we have a lot of respect for the indigenous peoples, for the peoples that have held this in sacred importance for a long period of time. And not just say, Hey, we got this, we're more advanced. We no actually we're babies in that world compared to lineages that have held it sacred and safe for long periods of time. So there's gonna be some, hopefully some real inversion there and who we look to for guidance, not just all white coats, and not to say the whole clinical bases off base, but many psychotherapists that are getting this work have never experienced it many people.

Daphne (1h 36m 36s):

So there's gonna have to be a growing edge on all sides to really understand how to work with this as a collective in a way that allows it to be supportive and not just massively disruptive for the time ahead.

Ehren (1h 36m 48s):

Davene, you wanna close this out? Let's do it. So I'll start by framing this and saying, I'm an Enneagram type seven, so I'm gonna lean on the side of optimism in general. Let's just how I tend to view things. And also I do see probably the biggest pitfall, the continued gonna be the continued exclusion of marginalized groups in this type of work in therapy. And you see it in the research that's coming out, getting 90% of study participants in the maths trials are white. There's almost no gender expansive people in those trials because of my personal interests. That's where I'm focused in terms of getting some more research done. So when people inherently have some gender realization experiences in psychedelic therapy, cisgendered therapists might have some basis to know what to do or that this is a possibility, right?

Ehren (1h 37m 37s):

So I think there's a lot of good work being done, or at least people trying to start this work to expand the capacity for black indigenous people of color, gender nonconforming people, other indigenous and marginalized groups to have access to these things in an equal way who experience rates of trauma and oppression at higher rates and arguably could benefit from psychedelic assisted therapies or ceremonial work in ways that, you know, and I don't wanna put anyone, everyone, it's like everyone can benefit. And also there are certain conditions culturally that have led to higher rates of say, suicide, substance abuse, things that are real crises for certain groups that could really benefit from the potential accelerated healing benefits of psychedelics.

Ehren (1h 38m 29s):

So I see that the stove piping and gatekeeping, and who's gonna just pay the most money for this as one of the major pitfalls that groups like Compass and other things like that are, I mean, maybe having some lip service about, but when you, again, Michael, you brought the patenting and the ip, it's like, what's the real endgame? It's profit, it's the continued rollout of the hyper capitalist corporate model, right? And so I see that also, and I know you said this has been talked to death, but there's a reason for that. It's probably because it's the most glaring, obvious potential pitfall of this is that psychedelics just become another form of nature commodified.

Ehren (1h 39m 12s):

And I don't think we can afford that at this point if we want to course correct as a species. And also I tend to hold the view that, you know, and this is my escapist meta view coming out, that at the end of the day, nature's gonna course correct itself with or without humans. But I hope we can be a part of it. And I do see that there's this need to recreate these systems of incentivization and financial, you know, the, the stranglehold that the financial systems that we've built have on our culture and on groups. And Michael, oh hi, bringing in beautiful child.

Ehren (1h 39m 53s):

Hello. Yeah, I mean, that's it. It's right. What do we want to actually build the world as for the future? I, I think that if we're looking at everyone as a whole, when I look at this type of work, it's like how do we actually give access to people that historically have been denied access to cutting edge treatments and equal and supportive ways of resources. And yeah, I just see that as the biggest piece. And I want to close here just with one other piece that feels relevant and it got sparked before and I kind of flagged it. But one of the things that I have found so interesting pertinent is when you look at lifetime psychedelic use, there's this beautiful scale called the Nature Relatedness Scale.

Ehren (1h 40m 38s):

That's a validated psychological measure that basically looks at how people feel connected to nature. Do they feel like they're a part of it or do they feel like they're separate from it? And lifetime psychedelic use is correlated pretty strongly with feeling as though we are a part of nature and that we're actually part of an interconnected system. And despite all my misgivings and all of my skepticism that I brought up with right wing psychedelia work and every little counterpoint I've added, I do have this optimism that's generated from this in seemingly inherent capacity for people to feel more interconnected at some level with the world we live in, breaking down this nature non nature divide in a way that I think is an inherent fallacy of the English language and modern civilization that indigenous cultures really did not have language for, right?

Ehren (1h 41m 34s):

It was, there was always this embeddedness and psychedelics seemed to bring that forth in people. And furthermore, when we're talking about healing and connection, the attachment relationship that people can have with nature itself, with the world, with reality, with that sense of interconnectedness is such a profoundly healing thing that I feel is broken in modern culture that's broken by the colonization of an industrialization of indigenous interconnected culture. And so like I have, again, I'm gonna bring my type seven optimism into this, is that's where it comes from, is this sort of reestablishment of a nurturing attachment re relationship with our embeddedness in reality itself.

Ehren (1h 42m 24s):

And if we're able to cultivate that, I think there's some hope. And if we continue to just milk the profit out of every little last drop and continue the path we're on, I don't know, I see that as the both the hope, right? And the pitfall is like that embeddedness in the world that psychedelics bring up and the inherent background network of love or compassion that's accessible through that, and also limiting access to that to the highest bidder as the pitfall.

Michael (1h 43m 2s):

Awesome. You both are beautiful. Thank you so much for being on the show. I will link to your respective websites in the show notes. Obviously folks, if you one more information, you can contact them directly, support this podcast on CK or Patreon, which, and my daughter wants you to see this little electric fish that she gave me for Christmas. All right, much love to you both. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Ehren (1h 43m 30s):

Thank You, Michael. Been an honor and pleasure. Thank you, Daphne. Love reflections. Thank you guys.

Michael (1h 43m 35s):

Thanks again for listening. Future Fossils is an independent, ad-free, entirely listener supported program. If you believe in the work that I'm doing and you wanna help see it thrive into the unimaginable future, then you can avail yourself of all of the backstage goodies, patreon.com/michael Garfield. Or you can just leave a review at Apple Podcasts that's more helpful than, you know, reach out to me personally at Michael Garfield on Twitter or Instagram and have a wonderful eon.

A few weeks ago, the barn he inherited from his father — in which he kept all of his creative technology and projects — burned to the ground. Here is the intense and vulnerable two-hour conversation we had about his loss and the spiritual transformations he has undergone since. For the first time ever, Android gives a play-by-play recounting of what happened that fateful morning and how he has grown in the aftermath of losing his “dragon horde” of technology, art, and personal records.  And we explore the science and philosophy and esoteric interpretation of what it means to grow beyond the envelope of the human organism into our “extended phenotypes” of technological augmentation — and then to lose it all in a single incandescent moment, laid bare by an Act of God to face the world with sudden and intense rawness.

This is a powerful, one, folks.  I’m honored to share it with you…

(Big thanks to Lucid News for inspiring me to do this. You can find a very, very tightly-edited transcript of this discussion on their website.)

Editor’s Note: I mention a passage from William Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement in Nature in which I misquote him as speaking on “prophets and pastoralists” when in fact he wrote about “mystics and moralists.”  You can hear the correct quote in this track from my 2016 Boom Festival performance, which plays at the end of this episode:

"The moralist tends to think the laws of God are more on his side than on his enemy's, so he will try through faith and religion and the exercise of ritual to get God to settle down with him and go along with his way of life. The mystic, however, is not a moralist, for motion, complexity, and an angelic-demonic ambiguity in which one's enemy is also a part of a divine manifestation in history are all part of a cosmic life on the other side of the fence. Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe. Any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down and set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind."- William Irwin Thompson

✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or PatreonBuy my original paintings or commission new workBuy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server so I can release it into the wilds as a fan-operated platform. Want to claim stake?

✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Mentioned & Related Links:Future Fossils Episode 111 - Android Jones on Analog/Digital, Painting the Sutras, & Being an Artist DadComplexity Episode 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human DataomeComplexity Episode 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Ben RidgwayA Manifesto For Live Painting by Michael GarfieldDeath of a SalesmanTrezor Cryptocurrency WalletsJohn Perry BarlowTheme Music: “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP by Michael Garfield

✨ A Special One-Off Sneak Peek at A New Offering for Subscribers:I recently promised members of my Patreon/Substack members-only Facebook group, where I ordinarily share on the order of ten cool external links a day, that I’d be moving my Web curation into a special newsletter supplement for paid subscribers.  Here is a public-facing glimpse at yet one more thing you can expect in return for supporting the intense love’s labor that goes into the show and my other creative work:

Recommended Reading:Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem (Cory Doctorow)We’re in a productivity crisis, according to 52 years of data. Things could get really bad. (Michael Simmons)What kind of a "metamodernist" am I, exactly? (Scout Reina Wiley)Successful AI Will Usher in a New Era of Theology (Caveat Magister)Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified (Chloe Xiang at Motherboard)Getty sues Stability AI for copying 12M photos and imitating famous watermark (Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica)How to Practice Long-Term Thinking in a Distracted World (Bina Venkataraman at Wired)How a 'time of crisis' creates a 'crisis of time' (Richard Fisher)Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought (Samo Burja at Palladium)The Edges Cases Where Computing and Physics Intersect (Samuel Arbesman)Cosmic Connection: an anecdote about the Pioneer plaque (Roger’s Bacon)Japanese Philosophies That’ll Help You Spend Money Consciously (Rahul Chowdhury)

Recommended Music:Vertigo Gambler — Juvenile Drama (lush folk-electronic pop co-written and mixed/mastered by fellow Santa Fean Toni Dear)David Forlano — Shiver Like Dust (iPad electronic ambient improvisations)Starling Arrow — Cradle (gorgeous all-star group of female singer-songwriters writing and recording together)fy00g — Mummy Fart! (my old friend and collaborator William Allan Ross’ latest trippy glitchy bass single)Master Margherita — The Sound of Science (new dubbreak 436Hz mix by Moreno, former curator and stage manager of Boom’s Chillout Gardens)

Recommended Video:View From The Other Side (Drew Brophy on NDEs, shared by Charles Eisenstein)How to Watch Hundreds of Free Movies on YouTube (via OpenCulture)Cause and Constraints (Alicia Juarrero at The Complexity Lounge)Residuality Theory: Philosophy and Practice (Barry O’Reilly at The Complexity Lounge)

Tadaaki Hozumi, member of Japan’s oldest surviving lineage of royal Shinto priests, is back for the second part of our three-hour conversation on animism in the ancient-future technological construct-wilderness of the 21st Century! In this episode we discuss the ongoing battle between the spirits of the analog “realm of circles” and the digital “realm of squares,” the blurry boundary between humans and artificial intelligences, the deep commonalities between UFO lore and nature spirit myths, inspirited robots, the simulation hypothesis, and more. Just as with part one, this is not for the epistemically over-determined or the philosophically faint of heart! I don’t cling to a point of view for this podcast and I suggest that you don’t either. But if Tada and his collaborator Georgie Rein Lo are right, we may all be the player-characters in a dragon’s endless dreaming. And honestly, that would explain some things…

Strap in and turn on for a discussion we hope will help you navigate the very weird-to-modern-Western-minds few years to come!

(Once again, pardon the delay — I’ve been eager to get the entirety of this profound and illuminating discussion out for over a month!  Never a dull moment in my home with two small kids.  Thanks for your patience and understanding over the last few years as Future Fossils has swayed but not fallen in the strong winds of my suddenly-a-householder life…)

✨ Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts!

✨ Support The Show:

Subscribe to the podcast, essays, music, and news on Substack or PatreonBuy my original paintings or commission new workBuy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)

This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!

I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server so I can release it into the wilds as a fan-operated platform. Want to claim stake?

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Mentioned & Related Media:

Future Fossils 197 with Tadaaki Hozumi (Part 1)

More info on the Hozumi clanlunmu.io (Tada's new project with Rein Lo)

“Arts and AI: ‘You May Live To See Man-Made Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension’” by Jamie Curcio

High Weirdness by Erik Davis

Liminal Dreaming by Jennifer Dumpert

“The Holy Spirit Board” (Christian Ouija Board)

Improvising out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael Garfield

Kerri Chandler (reel-to-reel DJ)

A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing The Universe by Michael S. Schneider

“The Story of Calculus” SFI Community Lecture by Steven Strogatz

Programming The Universe by Seth Lloyd

The Infoboros by Vidur Mishra

Rich “M0b1us” Doyle

“Aphanopoiesis” by Nora Bateson

Future Fossils 65 & 71 (on Blade Runner 2049)

Future Fossils 14 (on Westworld HBO)

Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Never Told by David Icke

Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallée

Supernatural by Graham Hancock

“When The Orbit Curtain Falls” by Michael Garfield (song)

Tom Montalk

Graham Hancock on Underwater Japanese Temples & The Great Sphinx

Future Fossils 124 with Norman Katz

Sense8 (Netflix)

“How Stories Last” by Neil Gaiman at LongNow.org

“The Evolution of Covert Signaling” by Paul Smaldino et al.

“The 100 Oldest Companies” by Kevin Kelly at LongNow.org

“Unlikely Historical Events” by Jason Kottke

aibo (robot dog by SONY)

Future Fossils 57 - Conner Habib & Mitch Mignano on Occult Biology

Theme Music: “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP by Michael Garfield

This is one of those edge-case conversations that I’ll look back on in twenty years and either consider totally insane or uncanny in its prophetic insights. I don’t confidently recommend every mention in the show notes as an authoritative final source, but I refuse to censor our citations out of my commitment to humility about What’s Really Going On. This is a truly off-road dialogue on ideas so far outside of the dominant world-space of early 21st-Century Western thinking as to constitute a reputational risk, but what else is this show for than to showcase maverick thinkers and strange, potentially transformative speculations anchored in careful independent study?

Strap in for a crash course on hidden temple texts, occult perspectives on the analog-digital divide, and alternative narratives so bizarre and interesting I consider them worth review on aesthetic grounds alone!  Tada is one of those “too weird to live, too rare to die” wizards and wonders I’m honored to call a friend and colleague, and I’m delighted to have them back on Future Fossils to explore the Real with you.

In Tada’s own blog post about this episode, they say:

“It was an incredible opportunity to get to speak so freely about ancient-future matters on a prolific podcast with a name that basically captures the essence of the discussion. I've always appreciated Michael's kindness and bravery as a host, not just of a podcast but of whole online communities, who is committed to giving his listenership and community the permission to explore the strangest possibilities of human existence.”

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This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!

I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server so I can release it into the wilds as a fan-operated platform. Want to claim stake?

✨ Support The Show:

Subscribe to the podcast, essays, music, and news on Substack or PatreonBuy my original paintings or commission new workBuy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)

✨ Tip Jars:

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✨ Mentioned & Related Media:

Future Fossils 149 - Cultural Somatics & Ritual as Justice with Tada Hozumi, Dare Sohei, and Naomi Most

Graham Hancock’s hotly-debated Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse

Future Fossils 14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)

Future Fossils 65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)

The Evolution of Surveillance by Michael Garfield

Improvising out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael Garfield

Future Fossils 179 - Scout-Lieder Wiley on Transrational Oracles & Magical Thinking in The 21st Century

Future Fossils 195 - A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher Sipes

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey

William Irwin Thompson – Exodus as Revolution (Prophecy and Revolution: Five Lectures on the Old Testament, #3)

Future Fossils 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions

Remember Who You Are Remember 'Where' You Are and Where You 'Come' from by David Icke

The Arcturus Probe: Tales and Reports of an Ongoing Investigation by Jose Arguelles

EVIDENCE OF A MASSIVE THERMONUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS ON MARS IN THE PAST: The Cydonian Hypothesis and Fermi's Paradox by J. E. Brandenburg

Takenouchi Documents

Future Fossils 117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

Sun-Moon Revelations / Hitsuki Shinji (1, 2)

Future Fossils 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit

Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness by William Irwin Thompson

Future Fossils 181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB

UCLA social scientist Paul Smaldino on covert signaling, identity, and social learning

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

More info on the Hozumi clan

Rein Lo (1, 2)

Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory

Nigihayahi

Fuxi Nuwa (compass and square)

Episode Music: “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP by Michael Garfield

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“Notice more. Let go. Use everything.”

I’ve decided Future Fossils is going to double down on its commitment to helping people navigate uncharted waters by focusing explicitly on improvisation in 2023, and our first stop together on this journey is a marvelously soulful and profound discussion with my friend Robert Poynton.

Robert is many things, including an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, where he runs executive education programs that help leaders understand and work with complex change. He also runs Yellow Learning (“a regenerative space for a complex world”), which I recommend highly as the kind of group experience you actually WANT to be involved in online…and he’s a husband and father of three adult sons who helps his wife run an organic beef farm in rural Spain.

But perhaps the most salient point is that he wrote an amazing book called Do Improvise — one of the finest I’ve ever encountered on the subject — so that’s the focus of our conversation. Join us as we discuss how to tune in, surrender, and make the most of whatever life throws your way…

This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!

I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server, which I am releasing into the wilds as a fan-operated platform in 2023.

PS — I’ve moved Future Fossils to Substack. There you will find my entire archives AND an increasingly-complete (but as yet not-entirely-migrated) repository of essays and blogs dating back to the Mesozoic. (If you prefer Substack over Patreon, I’m totally happy to take your support there, as well as or instead of…but I have not yet figured out how to handle posting subscribers-only content to both platforms.)

✨ Support The Show:

Subscribe to my work in all media on PatreonSubscribe to the podcast and monthly newsletter on SubstackBuy my original paintings or commission new work 

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPalBuy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)

✨ Mentioned & Related Media:

Stuart Firestein on Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and The Optimism of Science

MG Twitter thread re: Weird Studies and ergodic vs. nonergodic storytelling

The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Gary Hirsch (friend of Rob’s)

Margaret Heffernan on Hidden Forces Podcast: How To Navigate an Unpredictable World

Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Everything’s An Offer by Rob Poynton (unavailable at Bookshop.org)

Exaptation of the Guitar by MG

The Future is Exapted and Remixed by MG

Episode Music: Beta Pavonis & Delta Pavonis by MG

Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts

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✨ About This Episode:

This week we dig down as what W.J.T. Mitchell called “paleontologists of the present” to explore the ramifications of A.I. on the creative economy as lensed through two notorious William Gibson quotes: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” and “The street finds its own uses for things.” Joining me on the call are artists Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, James Curcio, Topher Sipes, and Julian Picaza — all of whom I hold in high esteem and all of whom are doing fascinating things both with A.I. tools and without them.

I recommend this profound discussion for some refreshing sobriety in what has so far proven to be a totally crazy pants public discourse dominated by people who either submit unthinkingly to new technologies or run from them screaming without anchoring their perspectives in any kind of historical perspective whatsoever…

Be sure to give this episode’s extensive show notes your careful attention, as I’ve collected here a whole semester’s worth of reading and listening materials on this and adjacent subjects with the goal of having a single master compendium to drop into public threads on these subjects whenever possible. (I of course encourage you to do the same!)

This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!

Lastly, a note about the audio: Once again I had horrible technical issues with my recording platform and had to spend time piecing this conversation back together instead of giving it a proper edit and mix treatment. My apologies for not managing to match the style to the substance…but this conversation is so timely and urgent I didn’t want to waste another two weeks polishing it before getting it to you.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

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How much of natural history is inevitable, and how much is the result of chance? Do mass extinctions slow the evolution of the biosphere, or speed it up? These are two of the six great questions of biology explored by Simon Conway Morris, famous evolutionary theorist, in his latest book. From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution (Templeton Press) is a meticulously researched, cheeky and inspiring romp through both the living and extinct worlds, challenging a handful of widespread beliefs and offering provocative alternatives. Conway Morris is a character, even amidst the strange ranks of his fellow natural history researchers, and his arguments bear careful scrutiny. As someone drawn to mavericks and weirdos and enamored by contrarian perspectives, I can’t help but like his work — and reading him forced me to reconsider some of my assumptions even as it validated other long-held hunches.

In this episode, we talk about his book and what his work implies — and I get fanboy on him and assault him with a bunch of lengthy questions like Tim Murphy in Jurassic Park. Strap in for a deep dive into evolution’s laziness, complexity and process, cooption and repurposing of novel traits, great puzzles in prehistory, ancient food webs, evolutionary radiation, symbiosis, flowers, death, and more… And when you’re done, go read his book and dig a dozen more related episodes on Patreon!

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I’ve been chasing her down to be on the podcast for years and am delighted she and I finally managed to link up to record this potent dialogue on the relationality of humankind and the wild world in which we are inextricably entangled, the substantive differences between our simulations and the originals they fail to fully reproduce, the importance of forests and dark skies to our psychospiritual well-being, where modern Western festival culture fails in its declared goal of delivering us back into right relations and ecstatic harmony with our kosmos…plus much else.

Read the ✨ EXTENSIVE ✨ show notes, and join the Future Fossils community, at Patreon.

Rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts

Browse my newsletter, original art, prints, merchandise, NFTs, etc.

✨ Side Note:

My big, BIG thanks to everyone for being so patient with me while my family and I suffered through some extraordinary challenges over the last months. I can’t tell you enough how much it means to me to have retained nearly everyone’s Patreon support while my wife and I dealt with two constantly sick kids, a number of our own health issues, and major upgrades to our home and big transitions at work.

The good news is that I also managed to record interviews with the legendary Simon Conway Morris and Robert Poynton in that time and will be sharing those with you in short order! So, again, thanks for your subscriptions, your glowing Apple Podcasts reviews, and your engagement in the Future Fossils Facebook group…and stay tuned for several exciting big announcements soon!

(Big thanks to my father-in-law Kevin Taylor for helping edit this episode!)

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Read the ✨ EXTENSIVE ✨ show notes, and join the Future Fossils community, at Patreon.

cataract (n.) 

early 15c., "a waterfall, floodgate, furious rush of water," from Latin cataracta "waterfall," from Greek katarhaktes "waterfall, broken water; a kind of portcullis," noun use of an adjective compound meaning "swooping, down-rushing," from kata "down" (see cata-). The second element is traced either to arhattein "to strike hard" (in which case the compound is kat-arrhattein), or to rhattein "to dash, break." Its alternative sense in Latin of "portcullis" probably passed through French and gave English the meaning "eye disease characterized by opacity of the lens" (early 15c.), on the notion of "obstruction" (to eyesight). (from etymology.com)

Episode Art & Music:

Aldebaran by Michael Garfield (2020) (prints available)

Pavo: Music for Mystery by Michael Garfield (2017)

Other Ways To Support:

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This week on the show I chat with the storied, insightful, multidimensional Roland Harwood (Twitter | LinkedIn | Liminal | Participatory City Foundation) — a “compulsive connector,” generalist, “failed astronaut,” pianist, Founder, CEO, Trustee, impresario of international collective intelligence projects, and generally fascinating person. In a conversation that already feels somewhat archaeological (it was recorded in November 2021 and references discussions that have already developed significantly over the last year), we explore the martial art of living in transition, of thriving in the in-between spaces, of dealing with the unpredictable and the fundamental uncertainty of our lives. We also rap on the subjects of innovation, global weirding, organizational evolution, technology, hope, and happiness. Dig into the complete show notes for plenty to follow up on!

Intro and outro music is from my forthcoming EP, “Ephemeropolis,” available soon at Bandcamp and Patreon.

Special thanks to Tami Pudina for her help with this episode! Check out her work at hyperdriveanthropology.com.

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Dig into the complete, extensive show notes at Patreon

This week we’re joined by Lauren Seyler, Assistant Professor of Biology at Stockton University (Lab Website, Twitter @darkmicrobio, Google Scholar), who studies the microscopic living world that flourishes in dark places: the mud of coastal marshes, inside rocks, and in sediments at the bottom of the sea. She’s also co-authored a number of publications on how scientists can work ethically with Indigenous peoples, and applies her scientific research to questions of astrobiology: the search for life and intelligence in outer space.

In this episode, we discuss the life/non-life boundary, evolution as thermodynamics, anaerobic microbes as the invisible labor supporting all life on Earth, the origin of life: in the light, or in the dark?, the wonderful world of -omics, individual vs. Institutional agency and the necessary revolution of consciousness required for effective collective action at planetary scale, power and responsibility, best practices for working with the Indigenous as a scientist, stepping up to biospheric stewardship, and practicing right relations across scales (not just micro-macro but also across space and time).

Special thanks to Tami Pudina for her help with editing this episode! Check out her work at hyperdriveanthropology.com.

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Complete, extensive show notes at Patreon.

✨ Housekeeping:

• Intro music is "You're In My Self-Portrait" from my 2012 album Golden Hour. Outro music is "City of Jewels" from my 2013 EP of the same name. For something completely different, check out my latest live album, recorded at Meow Wolf Santa Fe while opening for DeVotchKa.

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As guest 0xZakk says at the very end of this conversation, most of the construction projects throughout the history of civilization have been coercive. What does it look like when we actually build things in a really cooperative way? This episode was recorded in November 2021 when the cryptocurrency markets were insanely bullish and the world relatively stable…but releasing it now, in July 2022, seems more aptly-timed than I could have anticipated.

The United States Supreme Court has failed the great majority of American citizens not just once but several shocking and historic times in one week, hacking away at women’s reproductive rights, the EPA, and gun safety all at once. The Supreme Court majority was largely appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote, our nation is embroiled in hearings about a violent coup attempt spearheaded by the former President, and people on both sides of the constructed political divide seem more desperate than ever before in living memory. At the same time, both stocks and digital currencies, and the economic possibilities they support, are suffering through what seems like it will be a protracted winter. So it’s a PERFECT moment to talk about the visions we commit to building through the hardship, and the new responsibilities we must assume as citizens — not just of nation-states, but of the digital communities and cultures that we voluntarily participate in, the neighborhoods and cities that we live in. 

When a big tree dies in the forest, its falling lets in light that stimulates a contest between saplings — and we’re seeing something similar now in this rapid blooming of experiments in governance and finance, legal regulations and privately-organized society. Suddenly projects like the CABIN DAO seem prescient and urgent, so I’m glad to share this potent conversation with Jon Hillis and @0xZakk of CABIN DAO and Christian Lemp of Diamond DAO — three of the many people working hard at the frontiers of blockchain-based social innovation. In this episode we talk about what it means to live-action roleplay as a city-state, how physical geography and online culture overlap in their experiments, and what should stay illegible and wild amidst this wave of techy change…

If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you prefer to listen. I’ve been extremely busy backstage working on a suite of Future Fossils projects that extend beyond the podcast, some of which you can glimpse on my Instagram and Twitter feeds…big changes coming soon, and inspiration’s flowing. If you want the inner track on all the music, art, and writing I am cooking up — or if you simply see the value in these conversations and my work at large, I hope you’ll join the other awesome people chipping in with listener support at Patreon.com/michaelgarfield — where I’m sharing an enormous folder of new A.I. artwork, updated every day.

Lastly, I just re-launched my now thirteen-year-old blog on Substack — for roughly monthly digests of new work, join 7,500 other readers at michaelgarfield.substack.com. More soon.

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I’ve collaborated with EFF-Austin on previous episodes of Future Fossils you may also enjoy:

33 - Jon Lebkowsky (Pluralist Utopias & The World Wide Web's Wild West)

92 - Panel: The Pre- and Post-History of VR, Surveillance, and Swarm Intelligence

Again, Patreon is really the place you want to be checking out the resources for this show (and, of course, it's the place to go to take a shower in the awesome stuff I reserve for supporters).

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or, “Alchemy is to Chemistry as Astrology is to…?”

“If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”

“It’s time for a new era, for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture, for future study, and — if the findings are correct — what they say about our basic scientific attitude.”

– Robert G. Jahn

“We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?”

– Brenda Dunne

“The culture of science, at its purest, is one of freedom in which any idea can be tested regardless of how far-fetched it might seem.”

– Benedict Carey, writing on the PEAR Lab for The New York Times

Full show notes available at Patreon.com/michaelgarfield

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Be forewarned: This latest episode is some extremely heady stuff. But thankfully, it's also full of heart and soul...

Back in February, Jonathan Rowson posted two clips (here and here) from his latest in-progress writing tlimito Twitter, where it succeeded in baiting a bunch of the folks with whom I regularly interact as members of the so-called "Liminal Web" into reflecting on the value of partitioning a global boil of loosely-associated "sensemakers," "meta-theorists," and "systems poets" into well-meaning but ultimately dubious cultural taxonomies.

I had plenty to say about this (here, here, and here) from my awkwardly consistent stance of being both enthusiastic and skeptical about apparently everything. But so did numerous other brilliant and inspiring people, including Bonnitta Roy, Stephanie Lepp, Ashley Colby, and Jason Snyder – all of whom I've wanted on the show for a while (with the exception of Stephanie, with whom I had a great chat back on episode 154). So I took it upon myself to press for an on-the-record group discussion about the virtue and folly of putting labels on sociocultural processes and networks that are defined by their liminality: Is this ultimately a good thing, or does it just kill the magic in a foolish servility to economic pressures and the desire to be recognized as A Movement?

When we finally met at the end of March for our call, the conversation turned to issues with more urgency and gravitas — namely: Is it even helpful to spend all of our time talking about crises and metacrises when there is so much work to be done?

What transpired was easily one of the more profound and inspired conversations I've ever had the good fortune to host on this show, although it was also more beset with insane and infuriating technical problems that getting it ready for release took over thirty hours of excruciating editing. I am so immensely glad I am finally done and can get on with my damn life! But also that I get to share this with you and hear what the rest of our scene(s) have to contribute to this discourse.

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I've decided to not bother editing this one because (1) I'm finally getting bold enough to give not-editing a shot; and (2) it was SO VERY ENJOYABLE that I am not sure I could survive a second listen without a second conversation already on the calendar. Consequently, you don't get the normal intensely-detailed show notes, but among the many things we discusses are: synthesizers; feathered dinosaurs; symbiosis as the defining feature of the future of the biosphere; the relationship between good science and good science fiction; why Olaf Stapledon is one of the most important sci-fi authors of the 20th Century; and as I've already said, much else.

Visit the episode page on Patreon for a heap of related episodes if this one lights a fire in your mind...

✨ 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, early access to new writing, art, and music, and special access to our exclusive (and very active) Facebook group and Discord server.

• Find and obtain all the books we discuss on this show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.

• When you’d rather listen to music, follow me on Bandcamp and (if you must) Spotify.

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This week on Future Fossils, Orpheus is in the building for a soulful and visionary conversation with Grammy-winning blues singer-songwriter Mike Mattison and inveterate English professor Ernest Suarez of Catholic University, co-authors of the new book Poetic Song Verse: Blues-based Popular Music and Poetry.  Their book explores the history of the complicated love affair between literature and rock, tracing the tangled roots back through slave work songs and Beat poetry into the age of the mythic rockstar through the definitive contributions of acts such as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, and with inspiration from The Merry Pranksters, Walt Whitman, and many more.

This is the story of the cultural air we're all breathing and taking for granted. As a lifelong disciple of songwriting and poetry, I DEVOURED this book and this DELIGHTED in this conversation; and in the tense atmosphere of current events I can't think of a better way to emphasize what makes life worth living and what beauty grows from hardship than by turning our focus to the fruits of human creativity across and between cultures.

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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.

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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 more importantly, How do you steal back the train from GameA? The code is simple: intellectual honesty and “a war on politics”. I had a blast talking with Jim and hope you have as much fun listening. Can’t wait to hear what conversations come from this…

Yours in systems poetry,

Michael

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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 Bach

RESEARCHER AT FIGMENT.IO; LIBRARIAN AT GITCOIN

Coordination Problems • Initial Conditions • Emergent Intent • Group Priority

Siddhant Shrivastava

RESEARCHER AT SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN’S iTRUST CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN CYBER SECURITY

Cyber-physical Systems Security • Extended Reality • Distributed Teams • Workforce Training • Telerobotics

Avel Guénin-Carlut

FOUNDER AT KAIROS RESEARCH; RESEARCH COORDINATOR AT ACTIVE INFERENCE LAB

Physics of Life • Cultural Evolution • Epistemology • Active Inference • Consciousness 

Shirley Bekins, MPA

INDEPENDENT WRITER AND RESEARCHER

Systems Feedbacks • Path Dependence • Poverty • Homelessness 

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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 | Facebook

Find 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 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 by Michael Garfield

• “Transparent,” “Always Catching Up,” “You Don’t Have To Move,” “Life Finds A Way,” “Hyperstition” from The Age of Reunion