MAKE HUMAN

You are bored for a reason! Your contradictions were never a problem to solve! Maria shares a quick programming note — Make Human is taking July off and returning in August — and reads you two original meditations.  Waypoints [00:00:00] — A summer pause, and two pieces to sit with [00:01:00] — Begging you to be weirder [00:02:30] — A genre of one [00:04:00] — Resist the flattening CTA YOUR SECRET...

This episode is about the tension between the daily “job” of making vs. the need for a big transcendent “why”. Maria's producer Carin Huebner came to the conversation with a live wire. She'd finally gotten into the darkroom after weeks of circling it, and she made, in her own assessment, zero successful work. What happens next? In this episode Why the question "what is this for?"...

You already know what burnout looks like on the outside. But Amelia Hruby describes something subtler and more insidious: still doing all the tasks, still checking boxes, still showing up, and feeling absolutely nothing.  If you’ve ever found yourself completing everything on the list and wondering where the desire went, you’ll love this episode on creative burnout, seasonal rhythms, and the hidde...

What do you do when your work has nowhere to go? When the credentials keep accumulating and you still don't feel like enough? When the scroll takes you under and you don't know why you went in? In this first Listener Questions episode, Maria is joined by her producer, Carin, to answer real questions from real people who are trying to make things, live honestly, and not lose themselves in t...

Where do you belong? What does it mean to belong? This is a big question for creatives. I'm talking to Sebene Selassie: writer, teacher, and speaker who explores the paradoxes and possibilities of belonging through meditation, creativity, and nature-based practices. Her book You Belong is one of those rare texts that holds the spiritual and the social together without flattening either. We tal...

Are you allowed to feel joy? Also, do you HAVE TO “choose joy”? That question sits at the center of this conversation with my sister Kate Bowler, NYT bestselling author and professor at Duke Divinity School, whose latest book Joyful Anyway is about as far from a "good vibes" manifesto as you can get. Kate has spent years — many of them marked by stage four cancer, medical trauma, and the...

You want to make something big. Yet here you are with every practice and routine and productivity tool that signals you're trying, and somehow still not at the real thing. What is that? Carin Huebner is a visual artist, former spiritual director, and the producer behind Make Human. She's also a person who has, in tears at a creative salon she was hosting , said: I just want to make. I just...

The Make Human Podcast is for creatives and culture makers who don't simply want to make more things. They want to be more alive and make the world more alive in turn. There's a version of creativity that's been reduced to output: something to optimize, measure, improve. Then there's creativity as a way of being: a spiritual and social path that includes how you meet your everyday...