✨ 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 ) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and K...
Apr 27, 2026•1 hr 23 min•Season 2Ep. 34
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 of high-dimensional structures and apparent interaction with non-human “intelligent agents,” challen...
Mar 25, 2026•1 hr 35 min•Season 2Ep. 33
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 “living labs” for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working ...
Mar 11, 2026•1 hr 26 min•Season 2Ep. 32
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 have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and proso...
Feb 10, 2026•1 hr 22 min•Season 2Ep. 31
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 Integral Stage , Soulmakers+ , and (forthcoming) Untegral Stage podcasts, and provides unique online c...
Jan 27, 2026•1 hr 29 min
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 on Apocalyptic Hyperhumanism with Layman Pascal at Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal! More info and ...
Jan 13, 2026•1 hr 18 min
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 has appeared in Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Tech Crunch and Forbes. She began her career in managem...
Nov 10, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 27Ep. 2
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 . Sam is a brilliant scholar, a maverick mind, and a good friend—so even though we don’t see perfectl...
Oct 02, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 2Ep. 26
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 focuses on creating such systems of care by constructing a holistic sociotechnical tree with roots ...
Sep 22, 2025•2 hr 15 min•Season 2Ep. 25
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 when to bail. Starting as an actor, Internet famous for being an early YouTube influencer and her a...
Sep 10, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 2Ep. 24
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 on the history and sociality of simulations: Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MI...
Aug 20, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Season 2Ep. 23
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 the so-called “Liminal Web” and active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging changemaking organization...
Jul 10, 2025•1 hr 47 min•Season 2Ep. 22
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 consultant who has worked with clients including the UN Development Programme, HP, Greenpeace, Intel, Ford...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 21
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 constrains and formally specifies AI outputs, with reviewable intermediary results, collaborating acr...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 20
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 transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophe...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 19Ep. 2
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 Study of Systems Science, a science writer on primatology and paleoanthropology for Scientific Ameri...
May 23, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 2Ep. 18
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 framework into both a textbook and an AI-powered editing tool. In this conversation, we explore how t...
May 03, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 2Ep. 17
“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 — full of his insights from decades of designing and leading Executive Education leadership programs ...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Season 2Ep. 16
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 once. We can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos, but scale makes ...
Apr 05, 2025•1 hr 55 min
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 of Tomorrow . He also founded the first online investment advisor and holds the patent for “ the ori...
Mar 29, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Season 2Ep. 14
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 interrobang just like myself, the founder of The Analogue Group . Announcements: * We will book club Feder...
Mar 22, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Season 2Ep. 13
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 fundamental questions, such as: * What distinguishes the organismal and machinic? * How can we support vi...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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 monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop . (You’ll get all the same perks.) Project Lin...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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 rice on a craft the size of a soda can. To readers it seems like a satire: what, if not this, would i...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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 off over our shared interest in “cyborg shamanism” and an emphasis on being good ancestors. Forbes...
Feb 19, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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. About This Episode We live in a time defined by the agency of what author, critic, and teacher How...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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 Independents in Radio and beyond, and now she oversees a refuge for social innovators working at the inte...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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 human as inherently relational and ecological, technology as something nature’s doing, and t...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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 humans qualify?How wrong might we be about the future?How do stories shape reality, and what happe...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 Evolution and former Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. Her work has been ...
Jan 16, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 4
