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 Present Shock: When Everything Happens Nowwas one of the core inspirations for this podcast and its examinations of time in the digital age remain some of my most frequently-recommended writing.   More recently his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus launched a vital conversation about how to make sure that the “superabundance” of digital society actually MAKES IT TO THE PEOPLE. And his podcast Team Human offers new insightful conversations every week about how we can sculpt a future for the 100%-ers – a world that welcomes everybody, that lets everyone in, that finds something meaningful for all of us to do and be. Doug’s written shelves on our new media environment and how the digital surround retrieves our magical antiquity. He’s issued potent cautions to us, that we must Program Or Be Programmed. He’s spent his entire life helping us find the bottom-up to complement the top-down that we’re stuck with…to help everyone be literate enough to make it in this modern world. And in this episode, he looks back on his life’s work, and forward to the great responsibility we bear to help imagine systems, cultures, and relationships for a more humane and equitable future… Doug’s podcast: http://teamhuman.fm Doug’s website: http://www.rushkoff.com/ This week we’re also joined by guest co-host Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops, our sister podcast, 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 – and who has appeared on Future Fossils to talk about Westworld in Episode 14 and the Blockchain in Episode 52 . We Discuss: • the ethical necessity of finding planet-scale solutions that work for ALL of us, not just a certain economic class;  • the externalized ecological costs of Bitcoin;  • how sigils and other ancient magical practices have been modernized for info warfare in the modern age;  • how the culture of our global information economy retrieves the gods of antiquity;  • the conflict of interests between our present and future selves;  • the problem with futurists as propagandists and how we use “the future” as a ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLexH7XWPBg

We’re switching it up this week to present my recent talk on psychedelic futurism at the first weekly meeting of the Australian Psychedelic Society (Fitzroy Beer Garden, Melbourne, Victoria). The Chinese have a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” The Irish have a toast: “May you be alive at the end of the world” I’m more Irish than Chinese, and I know this because even though we’re living through total chaos these days, that means unprecedented opportunity for wonder, creativity, discovery, and growth. - How to enjoy life in an age of mass extinction and the imminent transformation of the human species through genetic engineering - CRISPR and evolution “in real time,” within the lifespan of “individual” organisms - The self as a multitude of distinct neural “motifs” and how each of us is a village (or a bouquet) - Living through “a trans-technological, trans-nature” renaissance - The sharing economy, nonmonogamy, global citizenship, access vs. ownership as symptoms of a global transition to more freely exchanged modular selfhood - How each of us is basically the sexually mature larval form of our ancestors and how staying “childlike” has empowered us with special powers as a species - The future of work as a world in which there are as many different kinds of work as there are people - The spiritual and philosophical implications of “teledildonics” - What replaces “privacy” in an age of universal coveillance and mutual accountability - Why we shouldn’t judge the world and lives of our software based digital human descendants - Tim Leary’s “Just Say Know” as a better approach to technologies (since all technologies are psychoactive, and so tech and drugs should merit similar approaches)   Memorable Quotes: “To the extent that we recognize that who we believe ourselves to be is a story our brain is creating instinctively and automatically, we can be more conscious about that, and we can inhabit different self-concepts as it suits us.” “What we’re learning about the origins of life is that it wasn’t like suddenly the cell occurred, with a membrane already on it, and credit card debt, and alimony payments.  This happened in stages.  And the first stage, what we believe the first life form to be…was a soup of self-reproducing molecules that didn’t really have clear self-other division.  And even now, bacteria are very promiscuous and free about the exchange of their own genetic information with one another.” “When everyone has a 3D printer at home, you’re not going to go to a dealer.  You’re going to print your own drugs.” “Each of us is the still point at the intersection of colliding infinities.” “It’s not so much that we’re coming to ‘T ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pylI9HKKUW0