Future Fossils

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 prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.We can’t take a reasonable principled stanc

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 courses. He is also a founding member of several think tanks in the developmental psychology and spirituality space, senior editor of Emerge online & is allied to numerous institutes across the field. In addition to many journal and anthology articles, he is the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as an upcoming book about Nietzsche. Layman is known for his philosophical work on the metaphysics of adjacency, complex nonduality, coaxial developmental stage theories, sacred na

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 enrollment here.✨ Our next Humans On The Loop members hangout is this Sunday January 18th at 10:00 am Mountain Time! Calendar invite coming soon for subscribers.✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.✨ Show Links• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy cour

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Discord | FB GroupThis 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 management consulting at Deloitte, focusing on M&A and large-scale transformation, before moving into industry advising across healthcare, consumer business, and telecommunications. Later work in the art world taught her how cultural and political insights could drive innovation and transformation in business, leading her to found DIALOGUE in 2016.She now combines strategic foresight, human-centered innovation, and interdisciplinary thinking to help her clients reframe challenges, identify opportunities, and lead with intenti

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeThis 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 perfectly eye-to-eye about just where the analogy of code as magic works and where it falls apart, that tiny bit of friction makes for a fascinating joint exploration into the liminal zones where our categories fray and their distinctions are constantly rewritten.In this episode, we discuss:• Sam’s origin story as a code-lover (00:10:20)• Code as “algebra and fire” (00:14:17)• If code is magic, what is magic? (00:20:10)• Open-source development and open-ended innovation (00:25:48)• Rethinking the nature of “failure” in the so-called

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis 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 of philosophical orientation, a trunk of theoretical structure, and technological leaves and fruit that offer nourishment and support to all parts of our world. I believe that we can grow love through technologies of togetherness that help us to understand, respect, and care for each other. I am committed to supporting the responsible development of such technologies so that we can move through these trying times towards a world where we are all well together.”In this episode, Larry and I explore the “roots of philosophica

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsToday’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 album I Am AI, the first LP composed and produced with an LLM, she caught air at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 with the premier of her documentary I Am Human (co-directed with Elena Gaby), an intimate look at the lives of three people with implantable brain interfaces and the medical, ethical and societal implications.She’s also produced an award-winning musical VR series for Google using Tiltbrush and Blocks, worked as Chief Storyteller for Blackrock Neurotech, minted the first song token on the Ethereum blockchain,

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsWe 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 Sim City: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press) takes readers from the prehistory of modern computing through the post-war development of cybernetics and systems thinking and into the entangled relationship of video games, military info-tech, civil engineering, software-based education, and complexity science that forms today’s “invisible environment.” Sim City is more than a legendary video game. It is case study in how the digital revolution reshaped the ways we think, teach, design, and govern…and how what simulation as a mode of discourse can hide and rev

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis 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 organizations who, along with his wife Sylvie Barbier and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture — the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in a brave new world, the intertwingling of

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis 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, and the World Wildlife Foundation. George has played vital roles our emerging understanding of collective intelligence, knowledge gardening, and online community. In this episode we explore his latest iteration as a Metamodern AI Shaman — what that means, why he’s promoting this approach for the cultivation of hybrid human-machine wisdom, and his theory of change for a reimagined human being in an age of collaborative planet-scale intelligence.Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop arch

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis 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 across sectors to promote this radically different and more empirical approach to applied machine intelligence.After completing his PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, Evan led research at Protocol Labs, creating their research grants program, and led the special projects team that created Hypercerts, Funding the Commons, gov4git, and key parts of Discourse Graphs and the initial Open Agency Architecture proposal.In our conversation we talk about a wide swath of topics including regulatory scaling problems, specifying formal

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsWhat 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 prophecies of [EDIT: Guy Debord’s] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillard’s simulation], the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts a kind of reversal as the movement of the Tao that challenges the dreams and ideals of the Enlightenment…it is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it all…or is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game?Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news,

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 American, and the founder, writer, and researcher for The Advanced Apes at PBS Digital Studios.In this episode, we discuss self-actualization and self-transformation in our age of magical technologies — the domestication of the human being by AI and institutions, how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, navigating hybrid physical-virtual relationships, the importance of intergenerational learning, and how we can make a better argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value. In

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 to cultivate human agency at the frontiers where physical reality and the metaverse fold into one another and entangled human and machine intelligences unleash radical new possibilities for reflection and creativity. By the end of our discussion we start to trace the contours of a world in which everyone has a better chance to pursue their passions without having to worry about “product-market fit” — a future in culture stages a glorious insurrection against the dehumanizing division between passion and paid work.If this

“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 PoyntonThis 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 and hosting creative retreats in Spain.In Future Fossils Episode 196 Robert and I discussed how important it is to learn the principles of improvisation as a way of life. And as he notes in his latest book, most of us are already skilled improvisers because we spend our lives in conversation — not just with each other, but with our environments. How does trying on this frame transform the ways that we relate to them?In this episode we explore conversations as an art form and as a technology, technology as a conversation, and

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 it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside it all.And this has enormous implications: contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity but an existential necessity. In an age of exponential AI, our future hinges on whether we can learn to overcome the tendency to colonize other scales with our abstractions and cultivate the capacity to recognize interdependency with the unthinkably small and large. How does truly understanding this change the way we live? Bewilderment is a rich place to start. Let’s simme

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 origination and fulfillment of stock investment portfolios over a worldwide computer network.” (You heard right!)After decades of success in wealth management, he left his company in the care of his son Patrick and launched O’Shaughnessy Ventures — a firm that combines “Jim’s deeply rooted interest in all things art, science, investing and tech with his long-held desire to establish positive sum scenarios designed to help promising creators and their inspiring ideas succeed, regardless of age, location, job history or level of

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 Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents on April 26th, along with pre-game discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server’s members-only channels. This book is a masterpiece of thinking otherwise and just what we need to attend to as transition from one mode of worlding to another…I can’t wait to talk about it with you and hear everyone’s reflections! * I am finally publishing “The Big Machine”, my anthem for the Screen Age, and will drop my new single and music video on April 1st, so dive into the s

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 vital cultural activity without reducing the measure of our humanity to our economic productivity?* What if we’re looking for mind in AI in the wrong places, and instead treat both technology and human consciousness as unified within one unfolding process of cosmic self-discovery?We welcome your feedback and reflections — here, or in the Future Fossils Discord Server — and to join us in the inquiry about what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination we need to thrive there! I hope you enjoy this

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 • SpotifyPlease consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks.)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteriesChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:17 - Intro0:06:38 - Partial Agency & The Great Inversion0:11:53 - Three Generations of McLuhan Theorists0:21:51 - Poetry & Prose, Narratives & Networks0:34:43 - Artists Show Us The Way0:41:29 - The Persistence of Memory vs. The We