Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts 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 o...
Jan 08, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts 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...
Dec 25, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts 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...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 40 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ 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 — philosophica...
Dec 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ 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 Te...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 33 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts 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 21s...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts 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 appro...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 22 min
This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I’m stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has gone swimming into the deep end of The Weird for long enough to develop an appreciation for its par...
Oct 11, 2024•1 hr 52 min
This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft . Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast ( his edit here ) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation. 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 • B...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 30 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ 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 Stockhol...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ 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...
Aug 23, 2024•1 hr 45 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ 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 enti...
Aug 06, 2024•59 min
Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ 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 motivat...
Jul 12, 2024•2 hr 16 min
Now also on YouTube! 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 neurobi...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 40 min
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a ...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 26 min
This week I riff with Austin Wade Smith (they/them) — an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York and the Executive Director of Regen Foundation , a US-based non-profit working with distributed ledgers and AI to design sovereign regenerative economics. Austin’s work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster greater interdependence between individuals and our living world. They teach design and engineering...
May 08, 2024•1 hr 20 min
This week marks the beginning of Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I. , a six-week online course led by writer and teacher Joshua Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast . This course is, in large part, inspired by an episode he wrote last year called “So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in The Age of Mythic Powers” — exploring the mythic dimensions of tech innovation and calling for a reclamation of initiatic mystery schools in order to provide us with the requisite self-mastery to wield tools like generati...
Apr 15, 2024•1 hr 30 min
I’m honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise , professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity . ✨ Mentioned & Related Links: Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI Complexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and ...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 27 min
If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you! 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 PB...
Mar 06, 2024•1 hr 36 min
This week I speak with Jingmai O’Connor ( Staff Page | Instagram ), Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles (a.k.a. Priestess of Dead Dino-Birds) at The Field Museum in Chicago, about the magnificent strangeness of Mesozoic flying reptiles, the perverse anthropology of paleontologists, and much else. Contrary to expectations for a show with “fossils” in its title, I don’t ordinarily interview people who actually dig up prehistoric creatures, but as I make perhaps too obvious in this enthusiastic ge...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr 34 min
This week I speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams ( Twitter , LinkedIn ) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence — new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges. And the time for this work is definitely NOW. As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological sys...
Jan 22, 2024•1 hr 40 min
✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify . Unborn archaeologists thank you! 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 transc...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 20 min
✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify . Unborn archaeologists thank you! 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 fabu...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 11 min
Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Or wherever! 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 ...
Nov 06, 2023•1 hr 12 min
Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify . Or wherever! 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. Amo...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 15 min
Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify . Or wherever! 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...
Oct 02, 2023•1 hr 25 min
This week I have the joy of sharing a long-overdue discussion with legendary psychedelic media pioneer Ken Adams ( Vimeo | LinkedIn ), one of the first people I ever interviewed on record years before Future Fossils and whose influence on my own creative life cannot be overstated. Two of Ken’s main claims to fame are the films he created in collaboration with Terence McKenna, namely Alien Dreamtime ( mediocre fan upload , archived references to ) and Imaginatrix ( rental page ). This June was th...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 33 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com 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 int...
Aug 25, 2023•1 hr 29 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com 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...
Aug 10, 2023•1 hr 16 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com ...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 l...
Jul 27, 2023•1 hr 22 min
