My guest today is Michael Garfield, a writer, musician, artist, poet-philosopher, paleontologist-futurist who's setting the seeds for a planetary renaissance. With incisive eloquence, he takes the threads of technology, science, and the wonders of the natural world to weave together a cosmic story of Life, one that needs to be shared more wildly. In his words, restoring soul to futurism.
He's the host of the Sante Fe Institute's Complexity podcast and his own show Future Fossils. Both of them are brilliant and have done a lot to inform my own thinking. He's also recently joined the Long Now foundation , a long-term cultural institution formed to foster long-term thinking and responsibility for the next 10,000 years and beyond, as community manager.
If you're unfamiliar with his work and way of thinking, there's plenty of places to start, but two entry ways I'd recommend would either be episode 145 of Future Fossils, Weaving A New Prehistory to Rewild The Future, or his essays from his book How to Live in the Future, both of which I'll link in the show notes.
Speaking of show-notes, I don't think I've ever had to find links to so many things mentioned in a podcast. Michael's erudition, breadth of interests, and is palpable hard to keep up with. How one finds the time to do as much as he seems to do is a question, now that I think about it, I really should have asked him in this episode.
In our conversation we cover:
Blockchain technology has potential to transform society. It’s described as ‘the trust machine’ – an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.
This episode explores the possible collapse of insect species around the world and what the implications such an event would have.
What are the universal scaling laws of life and what do they mean for how our societies today function and their survival in the future?
How do we beat one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced? What sort of thinking should we employ to act boldly and swiftly in times of uncertainty?
What's the relationship between the chaos, order, and ethics? How can we represent value without sacrificing accuracy? This and more in this episode.
How can looking at the contexts we are embedded within change how we relate and act within the world? This and more in this episode.
A conversation with a poet-philosopher, paleontologist-futurist who's weaving together a cosmic story of Life.
