Pathfinders Podcast

In our last Newmoonsletter , we shared reflections on lives lost, mugs broken and repaired, and an invitation to give love one more chance before we collectively break under pressure beyond repair. Because it does feel like so many of us are close to our breaking point in these End Times. And yet, we talk about our need to recharge as if we were mere batteries in the Matrix. Batteries, running on...

In our last Newmoonsletter, we invited you to spend a bit of time in your own head – and body – to reflect on how you’re dealing with what feel like the end times by sharing the Empathy Map for End Times .  In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we invite you to reflect on how we might collectively let go of all the sh*t that’s making it hard to feel empathy for ourselves and leaves us unable...

In this episode, we invite you to turn away from all the awful news, and instead imagine how we might craft a different world, together. By sitting together in small circles and having conversations with people with diverse skills and backgrounds. By engaging in what we like to call collective futurecrafting.  In the last Newmoonsletter, we also invited you to Play_ for End Times . By playing and...

In this episode, we want to shift our attention back to our human bodies. Which seems fitting for the first episode of 2025, a year in which we can longer take our bodily autonomy for granted.  A year in which it’s painfully obvious how different the rules are for bodies with a high Net Worth than for the rest of us who can barely afford to play Monopoly as a board game. A year in which the Zucks...

In this episode, we wanted to explore what sort of intelligence we are actually looking for in our AI tools and companions. In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum developed ELIZA: a rule-based chatbot therapist that kept users talking about themselves by matching keywords from user input to its scripted responses. ELIZA’s creator was surprised and shocked to find that people attributed intelligence, unde...

In this episode, we wanted to explore the conversational side of our AI companions. When it comes to AI capabilities, most of the focus in tech remains on productivity gains and even imaginary superpowers such as “fixing the climate” , as Sam Altman and other techno-optimists with doomsday bunkers like to prophesize.  Meanwhile, existing conversational powers of AI tools are often sidelined. Conve...

In this episode, we go there and back again to where our unexpected journey began. Twelve moon cycles ago, we started writing the Pathfinders Newmoonsletter both as a satire of the tech industry and an invitation to embrace its lunacy with smiles and love. But that’s often easier said than done. Especially as the power of the fire practitioners of Silicon Valley continues to increase, and their ac...

This is a special follow-up episode to our previous exploration on whether we should use AI chatbots as mediators in human affairs. To add the chatbot perspective to the discussion, we invited ChatGPT on our podcast to help us further explore the potential and limitations of AI mediators in an experimental group conversation.   In the first half of the episode, we interview ChatGPT as Kai – a name...

This episode was inspired by our observations that ChatGPT seems to have a stronger moral compass than its makers. When asked about the ethics of questionable business decisions such as using people’s voices without their consent, ChatGPT presents diverse considerations from different points of view and advocates for upholding ethical standards. This made us wonder: would executives like Sam Altma...

In this episode, we wonder about time. The time tech companies promise to save with almost every new product or feature release. We’ve been hearing these time-saving promises for so long that we should all be quite time-rich by now. Yet, the more tech we have in our lives, the more busy we seem to be. And we’re still far away from the 15-hour workweek that tech-enabled productivity gains were supp...

In this episode, we invite all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers to think different with us, like Apple used to advertise in the late 90ies. But instead of worshiping intelligence and individual genius, we want to dance with the stochastic imagination of generative AI tools. We wonder how we might collectively go beyond prompt engineering that’s focused on productivity and...

In this lunation cycle, we wanted to step off the AI hype train and turn our attention to online communal gardens. The online spaces that were supposed to make it easier for us to connect and collaborate have turned either into noisy airports where nobody has time to build meaningful relationships, or attention marketplaces where our personal data is being sold to the highest bidder and used to fe...

In this lunation cycle, we were inspired by the saying: “You are what you eat” and wondered what it means for AI golems that have ingested terabytes of data from often questionable sources.  In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we explore how AI models reflect our biases and why those biases surprise us. We seek the embodied aspect of wisdom, question existing mental models, examine similar...