This week I talk to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen ( objectionable.net | @add_hawk ) of the University of Utah, author of Games: Agency as Art and many fascinating papers on social knowledge and the psychology of games, transparency in society, and the philosophy of science — the very philosophical concerns with which I’m obsessed and to which I have devoted much of this show. I met him at Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute this July and immediately knew I had to have him on for what turned out t...
Oct 13, 2021•1 hr 28 min
This week we're joined by robotics engineer, electronic music producer, and Future Fossils co-founder Evan “Skytree” Snyder — who has recently been asked to help design the sounds made by the next wave of Amazon warehouse robots. In this first part of our discussion, we explore the evolutionary and psychological considerations for designing human-compatible robot sounds, talk brilliant birds and their mimicry of people and machines, and riff on the manipulative utility of cuteness for both good ...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 10 min
This week I commune with psychedelic integration counselor Daniel ‘Sitaram Das’ Shankin, founder of Tam Integration and The Psilocybin Summit, in a soulful conversation on grace versus good works, taking multiple perspectives, being the kindest version of yourself (rather than the smartest), belief systems as spirit possessions, his journey from yoga teacher to psychedelic integration counselor, personality types as insurance strategies, the good, bad, and ugly of memes, and how to live with the...
Sep 07, 2021•1 hr 27 min
This week’s guest is one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, and someone I’m honored and delighted to know. I can hardly express how strange and exciting it was when I reached out to Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk and Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University , and found out he was already a fan of my podcasting…so this episode is a seriously chummy session of mutual discovery by two people perhaps already a little bit TOO familiar with one another’s work. Tyson inhabits a...
Aug 18, 2021•1 hr 45 min
This week we welcome back anthropologist and science writer Eric Wargo , for a conversation about his book Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self — as well as: how tautology (not paradox) rules a time travel universe, what it means to become a time-faring species, the future of precognitive technologies, the concern of a quantum computing financial singularity, why lying to yourself about your own future-sight might be of evolutionary benefit, why retrocausalists don’t believe in randomness, h...
Jul 28, 2021•1 hr 47 min
This week’s episode is a true return to form, in which my old friend Michael Jacobs (aka The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo , aka Void Denizen) and I talk about pretty much everything — including plenty of things I honestly can’t believe I spoke about so freely. Every once in a rare while I have a discussion on Future Fossils that truly exemplifies the spirit in which this show was born — the truly omnivorous amateur enthusiasm that pervaded it before I started worrying about defining these investig...
Jul 09, 2021•2 hr 2 min
This week we talk to Leidy Klotz about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less . Leidy Klotz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Business. His wide-ranging, prolific, and highly-awarded research is filling in unexplored overlaps between design and behavioral science. Nationally recognized as one of 40-under-40 professors who inspire, Leidy has taught thousands of students, including 21 Ph.D. advisees, whose designing a...
Jun 29, 2021•1 hr 17 min
If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts ! Patrons gain access to a secret feed of biweekly episodes, unreleased music, our monthly book club, and many other wondrous things. And join us in the Discord ! This week I talk with Mikey Lion, music producer and co-founder of Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 41 min
This week we talk with Robert C. Jacobson, entrepreneur and space industry enabler, advocate, and investor. Jacobson is the founder of Space Advisors, a strategic and financial consulting firm for space startups and organizations looking to establish a space strategy. He also works at the Arch Mission Foundation , which is dedicated to creating civilizational backup libraries, and Space Angels, the world’s first space-focused angel investment group. His new book is Space Is Open for Business: Th...
May 28, 2021•1 hr 28 min
This week we’re joined by Anna Riedl , a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum and organizer at Effective Altruism Austria, currently studying Cognitive Science at Universität Wien. We discuss behavioral economics, bounded rationality, computational rationality, and other formal ways of thinking about how to do the most good, given great uncertainty about most things. We ask whether “cognitive biases” are really fairly understood as biases when they’re the result of a rational learning proce...
May 13, 2021•1 hr 3 min
“The most expensive part of making this book was time. I spent my time, which is my scarcest resource. For every one of the nearly 9,000 images in this book, I was standing directly behind the camera. I had to get there. It’s not just a long way from the US to Asia, it was usually a long way from the airport to the local town in the countryside. And then it took time to reach the right village. And then it took time to find the ceremony. And then I would have to wait. Then wait some more. More t...
Apr 27, 2021•51 min
This week we talk to artist, musician, and community organizer Violet Luxton , who works and lives at the intersection of Indigenous wisdom traditions and Indigenous rights movements, #LandBack and #BlackLivesMatter, afro-futurism, yoga, and visionary biotechnological speculation. In a conversation far shorter than the subject matter deserves, we explore some of the themes in and related to her profound academic paper, "Transtemporality and The Technology of Indigenous Kinship: The Science of Re...
Apr 08, 2021•57 min
This week we’re joined by evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers and Bitcoin entrepreneur Brandon Quittem for an interdisciplinary trialogue on the analogy between digital currencies and the so-called Wood Wide Web. Toby studies fungal economies in the lab, and her research challenges the commonly-held assumption that mycorrhizal networks are socialist utopia hippie love-fests. Brandon evangelizes “The Internet of Money” as an exemplary instance of biomimicry and argues that Bitcoin is doing for huma...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 24 min
This week, I embark on a new experiment and respond to three "advice column" questions from the Future Fossils listening audience: • How do I know if aliens would like my music? • How do I talk to my five-year-old about death? • How do I be creative without training or experience? This was a lot of fun and I'll definitely do this again. Enjoy, and thanks for listening! Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts ! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive...
Feb 23, 2021•56 min
This week I talk play, innovation, noise, disruption, cryptocurrency, and trickster creativity with Michael Phillip , host of sister podcast Third Eye Drops, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102 , 88 , 58 , 44 with Doug Rushkoff , 38 with Niles Heckman , 28 with Bruce Damer , 21 with Erik Davis , 9 with Shane Mauss , 4 with Erik Davis , and this special mashup episode . This one was originally recorded as Third Eye Drops Episode 239 , but I went ahead and painstakingly edited out over ten minutes o...
Feb 06, 2021•1 hr 19 min
It’s time for humankind to grow up — but it might also be more important than ever that we reconnect with our inner children and play like our lives depend on it (because they do). And so, given the in-progress BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s masterful fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials , it feels like a great time to talk about this coming-of-age story and its cosmological questions. This week on Future Fossils, we link up with my friends Stephen Hershey and Kynthia Brunette, whose persp...
Jan 21, 2021•1 hr 36 min
2021 comes in hot with Michael Dowd , ecumenical Christian preacher turned climate grief advocate, whose Post Doom Conversations are a well of wisdom for anyone prepared to stop fighting the inevitable* and start celebrating what actually can be done in these weird, scary, precious years to come. We discuss his time as an evolutionary biology evangelist and his friction with techno-optimists, what it means to live sustainably within a mature religion of place, urban scaling and collective action...
Jan 06, 2021•1 hr 36 min
This week I’m delighted to bring The Teafaerie ( ep. 100 ) and Ramin Nazer ( ep. 120 ) back to Future Fossils Podcast ! These are two of the funniest, weirdest amateur futurists I know, and I hope you agree this discussion was worth the wait while I spent hours making it sound like we didn’t just talk over each other like overexcited dorks for two-plus-hours. In this episode, we discuss the virtualization of live events as relates to the science fiction of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi , th...
Dec 13, 2020•1 hr 48 min
This week I’m honored to speak with musicologist Phil Ford , co-host of Weird Studies , on a voyage that takes us from elevator muzak to aquarian cults to Disneyland to the future of magical warfare. We discuss what it means to be (or want to be) “primitives of an unknown culture,” the staging of nature, what happens when your aesthetic commitments become your reality commitments, ontological anarchy, and The Super Mario Bros Movie ’s influence on the 2016 presidential election. Keep your ears p...
Nov 20, 2020•1 hr 30 min
“There’s a Mormon Tabernacle Choir inside of everyone. It’s just better to include and embrace all these facets of identity.” I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain Stuart Davis. He’s been a guiding star for me and presumably many other irrepressibly nondisciplinary artists for over a decade, one of the founding figures of my adult psyche in its pluriform contortionism. Musician, painter, poet, talk show host, stand-up comic, film-maker, and depth psychologist, the man knows no bound...
Nov 06, 2020•1 hr 56 min
This week I chat with film-maker Michael Morgenstern about his latest transmedia project, I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life , which takes young adults down a mind-bending and immersive narrative vortex about weaponized synthetic media to teach vital 21st Century literacies and the society-threatening implications of #deepfakes. While I’ve been speculating on the ominous (albeit numinous) social and psychological consequences of deepfakes since my 2017 sci-fi short “ An Oral History of The E...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 7 min
This week I chat with artist Stephanie Lepp, producer of Infinite Lunchbox , the Reckonings podcast, and — most excitingly, for me — Deep Reckonings , a stunning new project exploring the “pro-social” uses of AI-generated “deepfakes” and other synthetic media for education, therapy, and other beneficial outcomes. While I’ve been speculating on the ominous (albeit numinous) social and psychological consequences of deepfakes since my 2017 sci-fi short “ An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’ ”, i...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 26 min
This week we bring together Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister (the author of The Scene That Became Cities , from Penguin Random House) together with anarchist community organizer Naomi Most of Noisebridge and Playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano for a conversation about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality — and how holdouts worldwide persisted in “IRL” celebrations that preserved the face-to-face community and presence Burning Man cannot yet replic...
Sep 24, 2020•1 hr 28 min
“I know now that the rules of reality change by zip code.” In a conversation recorded nearly a year ago on September 27, 2019 (and now hilariously strange in light of months of pandemic quarantine), I speak with the ultra-talented, delightful, immediately relatable and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto — guitarist for the excellent band Circa Survive and solo project Psychic Babble , painter, writer, and podcaster — about what we’ve learned from our high-dose psychedelic experiences, from our ...
Sep 17, 2020•2 hr 15 min
For episode 151 we welcome Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter. Jon hit me up a couple months ago to participate in a documentary film he’s producing, interviewing artists about their creative visions, and our first conversation for his interview series was so solid and heartfelt I had to swap interviewer seats with him and have him on the show. In this episode we discuss his understanding of his role in life, his relationship to time and identity and ...
Sep 06, 2020•1 hr 5 min
For Episode 150 we welcome back Sean Esbjörn-Hargens , one of the most formidable and daring intellects I know, and the author of a new paper integrating over 650 books on UFOs and the paranormal, from over 150 disciplines, to trace the outline of a unifying meta-theory of the weird. In this episode, we discuss how Sean reconciles ten different hypotheses for the UFO phenomenon with his “mutual enactment hypothesis,” an updated ontology based on reconstructive post-modernism and Indigenous ways ...
Aug 16, 2020•1 hr 53 min
“A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having. If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming.” – Emma Goldman Strap in for what might be the best Future Fossils episode yet: a four-way with guests Tada Hozumi and Dare Sohei of the Ritual as Justice School and guest co-host Naomi Most , in which we discuss how trauma manifests in posture and social interactions, how cultures are bodies we participate in, how the individual does not exist as we were taught, how inter...
Aug 08, 2020•2 hr 10 min
This week we sit for a soulful chat with speaker, writer, and organizational development expert Sahana Chattopadhyay of Mumbai to discuss her essays “The Power of Communities in Uncertain Times” ( Part 1 , Part 2 ) and “ Befriending Uncertainty in a Post-COVID World .” Follow Sahana on Twitter & LinkedIn . If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon for over nearly twenty secret episodes, our book club calls and recordings, and much m...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr 25 min
This week is something different: author-read audio of the first four essays from my ongoing book-in-progress, How to Live in The Future . These essays are the first in my feature-length interrogation of the insufficient ways we think about the future…a poetic exploration of the fruitful interface between psychedelic mysticism, evolutionary theory, and critical futurism. For more along these lines, check out Future Fossils Episode 129 for the Boom Festival 2016 talk that started it all… You can ...
Jul 08, 2020•53 min
Where do I even start explaining this week's episode? Probably with a vignette: someone came up to me after I was on this all-star panel discussion featuring five living legends — psychedelic researchers Ralph Metzner and Dennis McKenna , author Allan Badiner , film-maker Gay Dillingham , and former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson — and asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I was the youngest person on stage by twenty years, and had done nothing with my life yet that put me in the same w...
Jun 25, 2020•57 min
