Humans On The Loop

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...

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...

“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 des...

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 differentia...

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 ...

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 ...

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 di...

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.

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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 ca...

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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 ...

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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 def...

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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...

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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 ecologi...

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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 abo...

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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 Produc...

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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 communicate legible impact metrics to stakeho...

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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. Benjamin Olsen is the Head of Windows Respo...

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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 Professor at Penn State Center for Huma...

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✨ 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 automation. For long-time listeners of F...