Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies

Today’s guest is William Morgan , the co-founder of Restless Egg , a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of “artist-founders” whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design. His thesis: The tech sector’s obsession with optimization can’t help us discover the genuinely novel forms of human experience that this intelligent substrate mak...

✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future ✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org ✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm ✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence In the last episode, my...

✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future ✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org ✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned Subvert.fm ✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team on a mission to build sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence About T...

✨ Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry . Our next call is this weekend, May 2, at 2 pm MDT! This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka ( Website | LinkedIn...

In this episode we join pioneering psychedelic neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore ( Website | X | Instagram | Substack ) to probe the bewildering high-dimensional horizons of DMT research and their implications for our understanding of consciousness and the structure of reality. In his book Death by Astonishment , Gallimore argues DMT expands the brain’s “representational reach,” enabling perception...

Today’s very overdue conversation is with AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch of Trustworthy By Design ( Website | LinkedIn ), asking questions like: How do institutions made of decent, well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory “li...

This week go deep with Alex Komoroske , CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked. The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could...

The world is getting weirder every day… We need weirdness specialists. Maybe the best guy for the job is my friend, the brilliant “metashaman” ( and possible octopus ) Layman Pascal . In his own words, Layman “used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but he’s feeling much better now.” He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs , hosts The Integr...

This week we come at technology sideways with help from hyperspace explorer Carl Hayden Smith, Associate Professor of Media at the University of East London ( Talks & Papers ), Founder of The Museum of Consciousness at New College, University of Oxford , co-founder of the Cyberdelic Nexus , Director at Noonautics and head of Context Engineering at Eleusis . ✨ Carl is currently teaching a course o...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Discord | FB Group This week (actually, April) I speak with Rimma Boshernitsan ( Website | LinkedIn ), a speaker, interviewer, facilitator, and advisor who has partnered with senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies—including Google, Kaiser Permanente, Roche, TATA, and Aesop—guiding them through transformation and growth. Her writing...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode This week I talk to Sam Arbesman , scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital , Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation , and host of The Orthogonal Bet , weaving together and plucking at the ideas in his delightful new book, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our World…and Shapes Our Future...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts This week we hear from Larry Muhlstein , who worked on Responsible AI at Google and DeepMind before leaving to found the Holistic Technology Project . In Larry’s words: “Care is crafted from understanding, respect, and will. Once care is deep enough and in a generative reciprocal relationship, it gives rise to self-expanding love. My work...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Today’s guest Taryn Southern is someone I consider a master surfer of technological change: a fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high chop. She’s better than I am at finding the pocket, has made a name for herself for riding some serious bombs, and seems to know precisely...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts We live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes… This week’s guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold , wrote what I consider the best book available...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts This week I speak with Rufus Pollock ( Website | Twitter | Wikipedia ), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies , RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself , Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian , and Second Renaissance . Rufus is a key player in...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts This week we speak with George Pór , mentee of Doug Englebart, Founder of Future HOW , Enlivening Edge, and Campus Co-Evolve, independent scholar with past academic posts at the London School of Economics, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Integral Studies, and Université de Paris, wisdom-guided AI advisor at River , and consul...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts This week’s guest is my friend Evan Miyazono , CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that c...

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts What the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene trans...

This week’s guest is Cadell Last, the creator of Philosophy Portal, author of Global Brain Singularity and Real Speculations, and organizer of myriad conferences, anthologies, and collaborative volumes exploring biocultural evolution, the mind-matter relation, and speculative futures. Cadell has been the director of psychedelic research at Psirenity, a researcher at the Bertalanffy Center for the...

This week’s guest is the singular Michael Dean , who graduated from architecture school and played in a band before spending years in tech working on virtual reality, only to metamorphose into one of the best essayists I’ve ever read. With support from Humans On The Loop supporters O’Shaughnessy Ventures and Cosmos Institute, Dean is now decoding the structure of great essays and translating his f...

“When I have a rich, powerful, mind expanding, mind bending conversation like this, I'll need to go and lie down in darkened room afterwards.”– Robert Poynton This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration Robert Poynton , Founder of Yellow Learning , Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford , and author of three beautiful short books — Do Pause , Do Improvise , and Do Conversation —...

This week’s guest my friend Joshua DiCaglio , Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of the fabulous Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry . It’s a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it’s one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps and another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at...

This week Jim O’Shaughnessy ( Website | X ) joins Humans On The Loop to carry our first on-record conversation on Infinite Loops into bold new terrains! Jim is one of the most renowned investors and asset managers of all the time and the author of several hugely best-selling and influential books on investing, including What Works on Wall Street , Invest Like The Best , and Predicting The Markets...

Where do we need boundaries, and where do we need flows? And how can we ensure that we can redistribute them according to the changing needs of any given moment? These are the kinds of questions I would ask if I were trying to meta-solve a meta-crisis, and this is why I’m glad to share this conversation with you. Today’s guest Aishwarya Khanduja , is a fellow living inquiry, an incandescent interr...

This week I dialogue with Matthew David Segall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, and author of the Footnotes To Plato blog as well as numerous books on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling. In it, we wrangle with some very funda...