Listen to the full episode here https://www.patreon.com/posts/24822439/ This week’s guest is Epiphany Jordan of Austin, Texas – a nurturing touch professional whose therapy sessions help triage the crisis of loneliness and touch-hunger facing billions of tech-immersed but intimacy-stranded people. In her new book, Somebody Hold Me: The Single Person’s Guide to Nurturing Human Touch, Epiphany explains how to get your basic touch needs met – consensually – outside of romantic relationship. In our conversation we talk about why this is such a widespread issue, how people are fumbling their attempts to connect with one another, and what to do about it. Her Website: nurturinghumantouch.com Printed Book: amazon.com/gp/product/1732879206?pf_rd_p=c2945051-950f-485c-b4df-15aac5223b10&pf_rd_r=VGPWK0WEF50A2TD8YA3T   E-Book: amazon.com/Somebody-Hold-Me-Persons-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B07MM6FFBD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=somebody+hold+me&qid=1550610978&s=gateway&sr=8-2 Support Future Fossils on Patreon and get access to secret episodes, our sci fi book club, and more: https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Join the (lively, interesting) Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils Subscribeon any platform you desire: https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils We Discuss: The internet has not replaced human intimacy; it has only convinced many of us that it can. “Because our culture identifies sex with touch, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, you’re not getting your touch needs met.” “Nonconsensual touch is like a starving person stealing a loaf of bread, or something.” When hugging someone is their worst nightmare. Is not wanting to be touched something that should or should not be seen through the lens of trauma-induced disorder? The future of getting touch needs met by nonpersons: heavy blankets, hugging machines, womb simulators, intimacy robots… Eliza Schlesinger’s Elder Millennialstandup special and how women in their 30s start displacing mother impulses onto their pets. Why don’t we extend the same rights we give people to other nonhuman beings? (e.g., nonconsensual touch of animals…) Is professional cuddling a symptom of a tragic dehumanizing trend in the evolution of civilization? “Paleo-cuddling” Tips for effective, safe, consensual, non-sexual cuddling. The tribal joy of the pseudo-anonymity of cuddle puddles. The double-edged sword of oxytocin. Teaching touch to teenagers. Touch deprived, or touch illiterate? Multicultural societies and trouble navigating overlapping rules about intimacy. “Part of what I’m trying to do is have people write another story about what it m ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5OJgm7RzM

This lecture is the basis for my new book of the same name – learn more, reserve your copy, and get front row seats to my creative process at http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield …in which I talk about Jurassic Park, Terminator, Pokémon, cat videos, Radiolab, Google, DARPA, Charles Stross, the Singularity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martine Rothblatt, Genesis P Orridge, neo-advaita nondual philosophy, and angels. (“Do you guys believe in angels?”) Recorded at Boom Festival's Liminal Village, 16 August 2016. EXCERPTS: The future is an idea that is constructed socially, just as insanity is constructed socially. If we don’t know where we came from, we don’t know where we’re going. Most people spend most of their time thinking about what the world we’re moving into is going to look like, and very little time thinking about what it’s going to FEEL like. Who we are going to be, once all this transformative change has settled into a newly-constituted world age. It’s very telling that so much of the conversation around artificial intelligence is this notion that there’s some kind of demon emerging through the machine for us to encounter and to reckon with. That there is something we have to confront…something that may destroy us even as it transforms us. And I think that the problem here is that this is a half-chewed sandwich. We’re right there on the precipice of recognizing that we too are implicated in this global conspiracy, that we too are participating in the evolutionary process, and it falls upon us all to heal this alienation from the natural world – especially as it appears in non-human living systems and as it appears in non-human machine intelligences. And to recognize, first of all, that we are a function, we are an action, of Earth’s geology. It’s by failing to identify our own transcendental nature – our own identity beyond the opposites of subject and object, self and other, nature and culture, the made and the born – that renders the transcendental as something against which the limited identity of the egoic self has to be defended. And so we experience what could be regarded as the emergence of a planetary Christ child – as the internet swallows us and we awaken together into this planetary identity, we experience this as the intrusion of a Borg mind or Terminator: Rise of the Machines. We are capable in our understandably anxious paranoid delusion of seeing only the demonic manifestation, because it’s so much easier to reject this kind of radical transformation than it is to embrace it and to steer it. And I’m hoping that by the end of this talk you all feel slightly more empowered to participate in this future, and to participate in the growing number of people worldwide that ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExnn6zLl3Y