We’re living through a mass extinction – which is also one of the most awesome opportunities for creativity the Earth has ever seen. In this talk that I gave at Burning Man 2017’s Palenque Norte Speaker Series, I give a short tour of Great Catastrophes of Natural History and show how each of them was also equally the advent of new life, intelligence, diversity, and richness. Studying how crisis is the mother of invention, it’s my hope that this talk will inspire you to see our turbulent, chaotic...
Jan 09, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion Group Support this show and get cool stuff This week’s guest is futurist and mythographer Maya Zuckerman, member of IEEE and author of the young adult science fiction series Em’s Theory. https://www.mayazuckerman.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayazuckerman/ We Discuss: • What it’s like to be a woman futurist in the Bay Area; • Futurism as a pastime of privilege; • Marginalized (third-world) futures and sc...
Jan 04, 2018•1 hr 16 min
Merry X-(is for Xenomorph)-mas, everyone! This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the r...
Dec 25, 2017•1 hr 46 min
In a special episode so timely that I couldn’t wait a week to publish, I sit down with Jennifer Sodini ( EvolveAndAscend.com ) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology. Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you –...
Dec 16, 2017•1 hr 5 min
This week’s guest is Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Neurohacker Collective – one smart dude! Must be the nootropics. We have an awesome conversation about what it will take for us to thrive through our Age of Transition and into the emergent world that works for all, not just a few of us. His company: http://neurohacker.com His blog: http://civilizationemerging.com Some Topics We Discuss: • How he got started in complex systems thinking while working in (and watching the failures of) wildlife co...
Dec 12, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Ayana Young didn’t even go camping until she was 25. Now she lives in a cabin she built herself in the redwoods of Northern California and manages a 477-acre native species nursery wilderness rehabilitation project (as well as an amazing podcast). This week’s episode is a candid, personal discussion about how awakening to our participation in nature is the key to both our survival and our spiritual salvation… https://forthewild.world/ https://www.instagram.com/for.the.wild/ For The Wild is curre...
Dec 06, 2017•1 hr 34 min
This week’s guest is visionary artist Jake Kobrin, whose digital paintings explore a gorgeous, dark, evocative terrain of non-ordinary human experience and twist religious iconography into a metamorphic form well-suited to our psychedelic modern era. We discuss his painting “Black Madonna” and the return and healing of the repressed feminine – not just women, but the body, the psychological shadow, marginalized peoples, death, and transformation… We talk about Jake’s artistic intuition, nontradi...
Nov 24, 2017•59 min
Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group Support Future Fossils on Patreon This week’s guest is my friend Lindsay Loftin, a professional mermaid who uses her performances to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. She also boasts 60 pushups in two minutes and the ability to transform phone-addicted schoolchildren into avid gardeners. https://www.facebook.com/mermaidsforcleanwater/ We Discuss: • How mermaid perform...
Nov 18, 2017•1 hr 25 min
In one of the most QUOTABLE episodes of Future Fossils yet, this week’s guest is Eliot Peper – a “novelist and strategist” writing fiction and consulting businesses about the social implications of disruptive technologies. In addition to writing a steady stream of sci-fi inflected techno-thrillers like True Blue and Cumulus, he’s an editor at Scout.AI (one of the cooler speculative fiction websites I’ve seen out there). http://www.eliotpeper.com/ http://scout.ai/ We Discuss: • The power of scien...
Nov 06, 2017•1 hr 7 min
This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network. Bloom Network: http://bloomnetwork.org Magenta’s Personal Website: http://www.imaginationhealer.com/ We discuss: - The adoption of regenerative culture practices; - Cultivating planetwide resiliency in an age of thousands of years of unprocessed grief and trauma; - Web native permaculture psychedelic anarchy; - Communicating across HUGE political gaps (esp. with family); - Cool Bloo...
Oct 25, 2017•1 hr 4 min
This week’s guest is philosopher Kerri Welch, whose doctoral thesis from CIIS (and current book-in-progress) explore a fractal model of time. If you have ever wondered about time, this episode is for you. Instant classic. Kerri’s Academic Papers & Talks: https://ciis.academia.edu/KerriWelch Kerri’s Blog: https://textureoftime.wordpress.com We take a wild tour through the layers of the human brain and mind, examining the correlations between different brain waves and their correspondent state...
Oct 13, 2017•1 hr 56 min
This week’s guest is tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan, who regards his practice as a sacred act and tattoo as a kind of binding of time in the body. https://www.mountaintempletattoo.com/ We talk about: • how he became a tattoo artist and came into “transformational tattooing” as a way of communicating with and programming the subconscious mind; • other ways we bind time into matter with earthworks art and pre-Columbian mounds; • the difference between choosing your own tattoos and the more trad...
Oct 06, 2017•1 hr 11 min
This week we continue the special two-part conversation with historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson. Author of dozens of sweeping works of synthetic insight, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community: The Lindisfarne Association , a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its f...
Sep 29, 2017•59 min
This week’s guest is one of my greatest inspirations: the historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson. Author of sweeping works of synthetic insight like At The Edge of History (a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972), The American Replacement of Nature , and Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness , Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community: The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for ...
Sep 25, 2017•1 hr 7 min
This week’s guest is the visionary painter Hannah Faith Yata , whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once. We talk about her new show “Dancing in Delirium,” the role and life of wilderness in the Anthropocene – weather control and fear porn (eerily prescient, given recent events; this talk was recorded in July) – the feeling of living through a time of ma...
Sep 15, 2017•1 hr 11 min
This week’s guest is Andrew J. O’Keefe II – documentarian, archivist for Singularity University, devoted recordist of the emergent planetary culture, and a dear old friend I met back in the Dawn of Time when he was working as the personal assistant to Android Jones. http://www.andrewjokeefe.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andrewjokeefe https://twitter.com/andrewjokeefe?lang=en https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjokeefe/ https://medium.com/@andrewjokeefe We talk about the motivations for preserving ...
Sep 11, 2017•1 hr 25 min
This week’s guest is Hunter Maats, host of the Mixed Mental Arts Podcast and co-author of The Straight-A Conspiracy. We talk about the future of education and human collaboration – moving past a world of routine factory-worker indoctrination and the “insane cargo cult” of the academic system, and into a new model for the transmission of knowledge that suits a truly planetary culture. https://twitter.com/huntermaats https://medium.com/@huntermaats The value of myth, ritual, and other deeply-ingra...
Aug 28, 2017•1 hr 24 min
This week’s guest is singer-songwriter and music therapist Marya Stark, whom I met at the Global Sound Conference in Los Angeles in 2008. We discuss the future of the feminine, relationships, and reproduction – and laugh a lot. • Links http://marya-stark.com https://maryastark.bandcamp.com https://soundcloud.com/marya-stark https://www.facebook.com/maryastarkmusic • Topics - Long Distance Relationships in the Internet Age - The Pre-Trans Fallacy & Getting Back to The Land - The Future of Sex...
Aug 14, 2017•1 hr 47 min
“You were a paleontologist, originally. I’ve always considered myself a ‘paisley-ontologist.’ A paleontologist will excavate the soil in search of fossils and a paisley-ontologist will excavate the present for fossilized perceptions. So I’m always looking for these kind of nuggets, linguistic impressions or etymological traces that lead us from the present into this sort of timelessness, or this subconscious of words and symbols. I look at the world as a sort of Rorschach Worship Workshop…” This...
Aug 08, 2017•1 hr 8 min
Support Future Fossils on Patreon Review Future Fossils on iTunes Review Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week is part 2 of our conversation with biohacking polyamorous geneticist and aspiring Australian politician Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry. Get ready for a chat so crazy you’ll think it’s 1999…we spend about 20 minutes arguing about modern art, 20 minutes arguing about the Singularity, and 20 minutes arguing about what’s...
Aug 01, 2017•1 hr 3 min
Review Future Fossils on iTunes Review Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week’s guest is Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry whom I met at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Innovation Lab in February. Meow is a modern trickster-wizard par excellence, entirely too smart for his own good, and he loves to argue – this is one of the most wide-ranging talks on Future Fossils yet! Enjoy part 1 of a special double feature that continue...
Jul 27, 2017•1 hr 17 min
Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group Support Future Fossils on Patreon This week we talk about what the oldest fossils in the world have to teach us about life’s origins and destiny with Tara Djokic of the University of New South Wales. Tara’s a geologist and astrobiologist whose team and work just appeared on the cover of Scientific American for changing our ideas about the beginning of our story… http://www.pangea....
Jul 21, 2017•1 hr 17 min
This week's episode is brought to you by Visionary Magnets , the refrigerator poetry magnets that turn your boring old kitchen appliances into the substrate for woke invocations, tantric pillow talk, and other occult goofery. Support their Kickstarter and "enlighten your fridge" today! Or tomorrow. Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week is part one of a special double-length episode with Jon Lebkowsky, founde...
Jul 13, 2017•2 hr 12 min
Support Future Fossils on Patreon Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group “I think we’re at a real crossroads. I’m an old guy, I may not live to see a whole lot more of the changes that are undoubtedly going to happen, but I would sure like to. I try to be an optimist. I’d like to hope that through education and science and clear thinking and good communication we come to sort of a passive understanding of the stuff we ...
Jul 06, 2017•1 hr 11 min
“I would love to see a world where 100% of the people on this planet, and all the other beings, believe their life is WAY worth living. Not just kinda okay, even, but WAY worth living.” This week’s guest is Mitch Altman, a hacker and electronics scientist whose life is the stuff of legend (here's his Wikipedia entry ). Founder of Cornfield Electronics (“We Make Useful Electronics for a Better World”), co-founder of Noisebridge (epic hackerspace in San Francisco), inventor of TV-B-Gone. This epis...
Jun 27, 2017•1 hr 20 min
New essays , music , talks, and writing coming soon for my Patreon supporters! Subscribe here and get everything I do for free if you haven’t already… This week our guest is Becca Tarnas, whom I caught up with at the 2017 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland. Becca’s Website https://beccatarnas.com/about/ Archai Journal: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology http://www.archai.org/ “Everything breathes together.” - Plotinus We discussed: The imminent shift into an archetypal paradigm, in ...
Jun 17, 2017•53 min
(New essays , music , talks, and writing coming soon for my Patreon supporters! Subscribe here and get everything I do for free if you haven’t already…) This week we chat with Sara Huntley – Dancer, Graphic Novelist, Tattoo Artist, Clown, and Psychedelic Futurist. Buckle Up! Sara’s Website: http://sarahuntley.weebly.com/ Sara on FB: https://www.facebook.com/huntley.sara A conversation on New Media & The Future of Storytelling, the Ethics of Digital Entities, and Treating Bots With Kindness. ...
Jun 07, 2017•1 hr 6 min
(New essays , music , coloring book pages, and recorded talks coming soon for my supporters! Sign up on Patreon if you haven't already...) “You cannot change the present system. This thing is dying, it’s structurally unsustainable. And so to try to somehow fix the present system is just a waste of time. Don’t waste your time on the present system. We have to start working on building the new world.” – John Petersen This week we welcome futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute into the d...
Jun 01, 2017•1 hr 9 min
This week I sit down with Rak Razam and Niles Heckman – psychonauts, journalists, provocateurs, and the film-makers responsible for Shamans of the Global Village . http://www.shamansoftheglobalvillage.com/ In a conversation too full of awesome neologisms, delightful turns of phrase, one-liners, and weird genius for me to convey it all, we talk about the role of creative media in helping usher in new modes of human consciousness – and what we’re learning those new modes might be. We finally get i...
May 24, 2017•1 hr 34 min
Help crowd-sponsor Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon and score subscriber-only perks and exclusive extra content! This week we chat with science journalist Jessa Gamble, author of The Siesta and The Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time , about time in the body, circadian rhythms, lunar cycles, and the science of sleep. – Topics We Discuss: • Cultural dimensions of human communities at different latitudes; • Organic human rhythms versus high-frequency trading algorithm digital rhythms; • ...
May 16, 2017•57 min
