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

This week on Humans On The Loop I welcome Andrew McLuhan , author, teacher, and Director of The McLuhan Institute , a generational ark for media theory in a world that desperately needs more help understanding the relationships between our tools, our minds, and our society. Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify Please consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible m...

Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Stross’ Accelerando , we tune in to the members of an interstellar first contact mission as they pass the time debating whether the Technological Singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert: all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a consensus VR environment as various post-human avatars, riding inside a computer the size of a grain of r...

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way). About This Episode This week we speak with “strategic futurist and pattern navigator” Adah Parris, a London-based wizard and weirdo with whom I immediately hit it of...

Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way). Our next members hangout will be Saturday Feb 15th at 3 pm Mountain Time and I would love to see you in the mix! Expect details on how to join the call by Friday. Ab...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that’s carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica to the Center for Media and Social Impact to The New America Foundation to The Association of Independe...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week we speak with K Allado-McDowell , artist, musician , and co-founder of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human-computer co-authorship with the book Pharmako-AI , as well as Air Age Blueprint , Amor Cringe , and the graphic novel Outside , plus works in opera and ritual. Their work reveals the...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound , one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and raises questions like: Where is the line between technology and magic? What is a computer, really, and do h...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp ( Website | LinkedIn ), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our limitations of perspective. Stephanie is the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen . If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io , an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communi...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts When technology gets byzantine, when the heady early years of cybernetic mysticism give way and our software engineers become the new priests of the Catholic institutions of Big Tech, maybe we can learn a thing or two from a Byzantine Catholic who’s made Responsible Technology their life. This week’s guest is just that person. Benjami...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts When, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Pro...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode “The best academic lecture/slam poetry/sermon/magical invocation/attunement and invitation to engage I’ve experienced in a long while.”– Daniel Lindenbarger Next week, after nearly nine years of development, this show grows up to become Humans On The Loop , a transdisciplinary exploration of agency in the age of...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube  • Spotify  • Apple Podcasts ✨  Support & Participate • Become a patron on  Substack  (my preference) or  Patreon (15% off annual memberships until 12/21 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop •  Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors•  Hire me  as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube  • Spotify  • Apple Podcasts This week I talk with Jamie Curcio  to ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power, and to whom do we give ours? Where does that power come from? To whom do we sell our stories? We explore the world behind the world, linking Jamie’s writing and game world-building in the domain he calls myth punk, and the equally Eldritch complex syst...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube  • Spotify  • Apple Podcasts This week on Future Fossils I welcome back Sara Phinn Huntley ( help her fight cancer !), a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher who has spent the last two decades exploring the intersection of psychedelics, technology, and philosophy. An intrepid psychonaut and cartographer of hyperspace, her current focus invol...

This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I’m stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has...

This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft . Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast ( his edit here ) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation. Enjoy! ✨  Support This Work • Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on  YouTube  •  Spotify  •  Apple Podcasts ✨  About This Episode How can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation? How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly dominated by anxiety and technological determinism? This week on Future Fossils (as a teaser for th...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on  YouTube  •  Spotify  •  Apple Podcasts ✨  About This Episode If you’re wondering why this episode came later than I promised, well…look no further than the text and subtext of this very rich discussion: it ain’t easy being a scholar when your kids keep banging down the door. This week I speak with professional organizer, single mother, and badass independent public i...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on  YouTube  •  Spotify  •  Apple Podcasts ✨  About This Episode This week on Future Fossils we speak with Helané Wahbeh ( LinkedIn ), Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences , adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University, and author of over ninety  peer-reviewed publications  as well as...

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube  • Spotify  • Apple Podcasts ✨  About This Episode The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as...

Now also on YouTube! In this episode we’re joined by Andrés Goméz Emilsson , President and Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), with whom we go deep on their computational approach to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the psychedelic experience — and thereby, perhaps, make the world a substantially happier place. Join us for an adventurous dialogue at the intersectio...

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in...

This week I riff with Austin Wade Smith (they/them) — an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York and the Executive Director of Regen Foundation , a US-based non-profit working with distributed ledgers and AI to design sovereign regenerative economics. Austin’s work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster...

This week marks the beginning of Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I. , a six-week online course led by writer and teacher Joshua Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast .  This course is, in large part, inspired by an episode he wrote last year called “So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in The Age of Mythic Powers” — exploring the mythic dimensions of tech innovation and calling for a reclamation of initiati...