This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of...
Aug 07, 2018•1 hr 10 min
Former NASA-JPL Mission Architect and founder of the Exploration Institute, Armin Ellis helps people think big and execute visionary projects for a living. He’s also now the Mission Architect for the Arch Mission Project, a group committed to getting long-lasting civilizational archives carried into deep space by other missions. Armin is exactly the guy to talk to if you want to think the future’s somewhere you would like to live… Watch the entire uncut video on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/...
Jul 30, 2018•1 hr 1 min
One third of American adolescents are on medication – half of that number, on psychoactive prescriptions. We have an educational system that not only can’t prepare young people for the rapidly evolving future world we’re creating for them to inhabit – it traumatizes people by attempting to squeeze every kind of human through the same twelve-plus-year sentence of indoctrination and obedience training. Are damaged and addicted mind control slaves really who we hope we’re shaping? Obviously not! Th...
Jul 23, 2018•1 hr 9 min
Lydia Violet Harutoonian is a badass Armenian-American violinist and folktronica artist who has played with some of today’s juiciest crossover acts, including Rising Appalachia and The Polish Ambassador, in addition to launching her own solo project this year. She also works with the supremely wise Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects, and leads singing workshops in which she applies her lifetime of music and work with Macy to teach music as a form of collective healin...
Jul 13, 2018•1 hr 11 min
This episode’s guest is Arthur Brock, currency design expert and lead visionary behind the Holochain project – which just might be the basis for the truly free, encrypted, peer-to-peer, surveillance-resistant, voluntary, non-exploitative Web we’ve all been dreaming about since the 1990s. Described by many as a “blockchain killer,” Holochain offers users an endlessly scalable and secure decentralized platform for our lives online, inspired by the fractal branching flows and emergent order we obse...
Jul 07, 2018•1 hr 7 min
This week’s guest is George Dvorsky, futurist, science journalist, and long-time contributing editor at legendary sci/fi blog io9 at http://gizmodo.com . http://twitter.com/dvorsky http://kinja.com/georgedvorsky http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/ https://io9.gizmodo.com/20-crucial-terms-every-21st-century-futurist-should-kno-1545499202 We Discuss: • Today’s explosive evolution of AI personal assistants, and where it’s heading… • Will children today, immersed in a world of AI dolls and smarthom...
Jun 27, 2018•59 min
This week’s guest is James Eggleston, research and business development at Power Ledger, a blockchain software company helping the world build a resilient decentralized electrical utilities networks that’s more resistant to the turbulence of our century – and lets all of us participate in and earn from distributed power production. Power Ledger: https://powerledger.io/ https://twitter.com/powerledger_io?lang=en James: https://twitter.com/jamesbychance?lang=en We Discuss: • The history of demater...
Jun 19, 2018•1 hr 9 min
Visionary artist Archan Nair joins Future Fossils this week for an infectiously fun conversation about the new creative opportunities of the digital age. http://www.archann.net/ • How learning to use new tools is a little like dying; • Archan’s history of using computers for art; • The feedback loop between evolving tools and evolving artists; • How to stay clear-eyed and full-hearted about the always-on awesomeness of the world, and not let the daily BS drag you down; • The role of the nondual ...
Jun 13, 2018•1 hr 23 min
“The best anti-virus is common sense.” This episode’s guest is Dylan Curran, a cybersecurity specialist who recently went viral after his exposé tweets about the personal information Google and Facebook collected about him were shared by Edward Snowden. Strap in for an uncomfortable close look at just how little privacy we have online – it’s even worse than you already knew – but also, some straight, practical advice for how to navigate the “glass house” we all live in now, with safety, dignity,...
Jun 05, 2018•1 hr 11 min
Self-aware machines, organs on a chip, brain-entangled meta-human military units, smart-sensor-gridded coral reefs, drone flocks, DNA-based computing, robots having baby robots…the line between the “made” and “born” is getting blurrier and blurrier each day. What does it mean to be alive in a time when we already treat the corporation as a legal person, fall in love with chat bots, and “possess” telepresence robots in virtual reality for work? This talk is a three-part argument: 1 - The Internet...
Jun 01, 2018•50 min
This episode’s guest is David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute – the world’s pre-eminent research center for complexity science. We discuss SFI’s new Interplanetary Project and how they are weaving scientists, engineers, science fiction authors, concept artists, and musicians together into a new collaborative storytelling and visioning project about how we can sustainably scale human civilization beyond Earth – and help spark a renaissance of Big Picture thinking and Big Problem sol...
May 29, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Terry Patten is a lifelong practitioner of both contemplative spirituality and real-world activism whose new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide To Inner Work for Holistic Change, gives us lucid instructions for how we can start to ask the hardest questions and engage the toughest problems in our age of global transformation. https://www.terrypatten.com/a-new-republic-of-the-heart/ I met Terry in 2005 when he was teaching how to recognize and integrate the psy...
May 24, 2018•1 hr 16 min
Patricia Gray is an animal music researcher, working with all kinds of creatures (humans, whales, songbirds, bonobos, even coral reefs) to understand what functions pitch and rhythm have in animal communication, how the sound of our living planet is actually a symphony of hidden meaning, and how to improve our lives by embracing the innate musicality of our human brains. https://research.uncg.edu/patricia-gray/ We Discuss: • How she went from being a concert pianist to the chamber music director...
May 18, 2018•1 hr 37 min
Biological Time Travel: Organ Regeneration & Brain Reanimation – Turning back time in cells and tissues with the new medical techniques of bio-logics, simulating “t = 1” in the human body... This week’s guest is Ira Pastor, CEO of the revolutionary biomedical firm BioQuark in Philadelphia. I had no idea who these people were until Ira messaged me about appearing on the show…and I’m so glad he did, because otherwise I don’t k now when I would have learned about their work with new techniques ...
May 12, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart Radio Join our Facebook Discussion Group This week’s episode features returning guest JF Martel, film-maker, culture critic, and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. In his first appearance on Future Fossils, we discussed art as an opening to the transcendent and his awesome three-part essay on the philosophy of Netflix’s Stranger Things, “Reality Is Analog”…so it only made sense to have him back to weigh in on Stranger Things...
May 04, 2018•1 hr 9 min
“Ah, eventually you DO plan to TALK ABOUT dinosaurs on this dinosaur podcast, right? Hello? Yes?” - Ian Malcolm about this episode. This week’s guest is professional dinosaur hunter Steve Brusatte, paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World . https://twitter.com/stevebrusatte Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart Radio Join our Facebook Discussion Group Beyond being a totally awesome – ...
Apr 27, 2018•1 hr 17 min
Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ co...
Apr 20, 2018•1 hr 7 min
This week we go deep in part two of my epic four-hour conversation with documentarian and gonzo journalist Charles Shaw – one of this show’s most requested return guests. In part one, Charles laid out the map of the problem: a world in crisis, an age of epidemic trauma and addiction. In this episode, we get into his self-experimentation with sleep deprivation to understand the hallucinatory reality of America’s homeless, his journey of healing and recovery working with entheogens and military ve...
Apr 11, 2018•2 hr 34 min
This week’s guest is media theorist, culture critic, author, graphic novelist, documentarian, and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff! Chances are you’re a “digital native” banking on “social currency” and consuming “viral media” – which means that you are living in the world Doug prophesied for all of us back in the 1990s. I watched his debut documentary on social marketing, Merchants of Cool , in my college Introduction to Film class (which is how you know my teacher was, in fact, cool). His book Prese...
Apr 04, 2018•59 min
This week we chat with the philosopher and sociologist John Danaher about the book Robot Sex: Social & Ethical Implications , a fascinating collection of academic articles on our sexbot future he just co-edited with Neil McArthur. (John also runs the blog Philosophical Disquisitions, which has been an awesome resource for deep thinking online for over a decade.) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/robot-sex http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com http://thefutureofsex.net Chances are good ...
Mar 27, 2018•1 hr 17 min
This week’s guest is independent culture critic John David Ebert – mythologist, philosopher, art historian, author of twenty-six books, and co-founder (with John Lobell) of http://cultural-discourse.com . We talk about the rich mythological references of Blade Runner 2049 in light of the larger – and very urgent – matter of mechanizing human reproduction and the (actually rather ancient) male quest to appropriate the mysteries of the goddess… Here’s John’s Blade Runner 2049 essay: http://cinemad...
Mar 21, 2018•1 hr 2 min
This week: Science Fiction Übermenschen & A Critique of Space Colonization with film scholar Barry Vacker, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. We talk about the critique of contemporary science fiction cinema in his new book, Specter of the Monolith – pointing past the spiritual shortcomings of our relationship to space, and toward a future human being that has both grown in both technology and wisdom. Barry's Essays: http://medium.com/@barryvacker Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • S...
Mar 13, 2018•1 hr 5 min
This week’s guest is David Bronner, grandson of Dr. Emanuel Bronner and the heir to and CEO (“Cosmic Engagement Officer”) of Dr. Bronner’s Soap Company. He’s also an outspoken advocate for psychedelic medicines and visionary culture, and has used his wealth and influence in awesome ways to support the collective healing of American society. In this episode we discuss his advocacy and activism, and the life-changing experiences that brought him to his current understanding and role in helping bri...
Mar 03, 2018•1 hr 11 min
[NOTE: We had a publishing error last week and most subscribers missed Episode 61 with Jamaica Stevens on Crisis, Rebirth, and Transformation! Definitely worth going back to listen to this awesome chat.] David Krantz is a personal nutrition and genetics coach, sound therapy technician, and electronic music producer based in Asheville, NC. http://david-krantz.com Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify Join our Facebook Discussion Group This week we chat about genetics – speci...
Feb 26, 2018•1 hr 7 min
This week’s guest is the inspirational badass Jamaica Stevens, key organizer for the Reinhabiting the Village project and Lucid University, and this show’s first pregnant guest (at the time of recording). We dive immediately into the deep end of our half-finished collective birthing process and how to navigate the difficult transition we’re all going through… http://www.jamaicastevens.com/ http://reinhabitingthevillage.com/jamaica-stevens/ https://www.facebook.com/LucidUniversity/ We Discuss: • ...
Feb 26, 2018•1 hr 23 min
Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the sharpest and most insightful people I know, and an globally-recognized expert and pioneer in the emerging meta-discipline of integral theory and practice. The former chair of John F. Kennedy University’s Integral Studies department, co-author (with Michael Zimmerman) of Integral Ecology, co-founder (with Mark Forman) of the international Integral Theory Conference, and now in his post-academic life, head of MetaIntegral a training and consulting company special...
Feb 10, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Radical documentarian, activist, and raconteur Charles Shaw joins Future Fossils Podcast this week for part one of an epic double (possibly triple) episode. https://vimeo.com/nomadcinema Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify Join our Facebook Discussion Group We Discuss: • The plight of the despised underclasses and the dark constellation of the Drug War, addiction, deportation, homelessness, and the prison industrial complex • The (largely broken) promise of visionary cult...
Feb 07, 2018•1 hr 41 min
This week’s guest is comedian Shane Mauss, whose psychedelic standup A Good Trip blew minds at over 100 tour stops last year, and whose documentary film Psychonautics takes us on Shane’s adventures in psychedelic therapies. He also hosts the Here We Are Podcast, where he interviews scientists of all stripes and mines their research for standup inspiration… Shane’s always been a rigorous thinker, a legitimate and respectable skeptic, which made his inquiries into the weird realms of psychedelia s...
Jan 31, 2018•1 hr 31 min
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion Group This week I’m lucky to sit with two extremely cool occultist philosophers: gay porn star Conner Habib & our mutual old friend, professional gambler turned journalist and record producer Mitch Mignano. We have a conversation about how life is observed and understood by occult philosophies - how organisms are perceived in, as, of, and beyond spacetime; the human and inhuman forms of evil in a discarnate taxonomy;...
Jan 23, 2018•1 hr 11 min
This week’s guest is Sophia Rokhlin, whom I met in Portugal at Boom Festival 2016, and who just finished her Master’s of Ecological Economics in Barcelona last fall. Sophia’s currently at work on a number of cool projects, including The Environmental Justice Atlas – a database of environmental conflicts happening around the world. She’s also helping Daniel Pinchbeck write a book on ayahuasca and has worked at Kosmicare, a European psychedelic harm reduction project. http://ejatlas.org http://twi...
Jan 16, 2018•1 hr 30 min
