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 stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as “the way things are.”

Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!

✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Become a member to support the show and score myriad perks, like our book club: our next call is on Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words this Sunday, Feb 15th!

✨ Become a founding member for access to my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant

Referenced & Related

• The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)

• Bits and Bobs (Alex’s long-running archive of weekly notes)• Common Ground (Alex’s dialogues w/ Aishwarya Khanduja of The Analogue Group)

• The Iterative Adjacent Possible (Alex on Medium)

• The Runaway Engine of Society (Alex on Medium)

• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice (podcast w/ Lenny Rachitsky)

• Media and Machines by Anu Atluru at Working Theorys

• Accelerando & Glasshouse & Halting State (three books) by Charles Stross

• The Transparent Society by David Brin

• The evolution of Covert Signaling by Paul Smaldino

• Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul by Stefani Crabtree et al.

• The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov

• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

• Blindsight & Echopraxia (two books) by Peter Watts

• The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor

• Silicon Valley’s quest to remove friction from our lives by Rohit Krishnan

• The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon

• Bernhard Seefeld

• Situated Software by Clay Shirky

• Das Rad (animated short)

• Geoffrey West

• Mark Pesce

• Fred Turner

• Robert David Steele

Explore hundreds of related podcast episodes in the archives!

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 naturalism, archaic futurism, embodied spirituality & the “integration-surplus model of religion and spirituality” for a post-postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises.

In this conversation we cover a lot of ground in a very short time, including: the nature of futurity and how humankind’s relationship to the future is changing; how to surf intense peculiarity'; the abiding sociocultural role of “shamanoid” personalities and other useful weirdos; “wartime” mobilization for The Big Us; and other deep and delightful subjects. It’s my honor to finally decant this year-old recording, now more pertinent than ever…

✨ If you enjoy this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider to help this work (and you!) find new allies: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Our next Humans On The Loop book club discussion is for Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words on Sunday February 15th! Become a member to participate in these calls, exclusive Discord members channels, and our monthly hangouts.

✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.

More links

• Explore the archives for nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Browse (nearly!) all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org•Dig into the Humans On The Loop pitch deck• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere• Contact me if you have burning questions!

Cited pieces by Layman

• The Soul of AI w/ Lee Chazen (YouTube)• The MetaModern Business Bureau (MMBB) (Substack)• Apocalyptarians (Substack)• The Society of Partial Deterritorialization (Substack)• The Two-Handed Demons (Substack)

Cited pieces by others

• Wendell Berry - Standing by Words• Hakim Bey - Temporary Autonomous Zone• Steven Johnson - The Revenge of the Humanities• Carol Dweck - Mindset• William James - On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake

Mentioned people with dialogues on my show

• Jim Rutt (181)• William Irwin Thompson (42, 43)• Erik Davis (99, 132, 140)• Timothy Morton (223)

Mentioned people without dialogues on my show

• Terence McKenna (although I’ve interviewed Terence’s brilliant close friends Ken Adams and Bruce Damer multiple times; check the archives for episodes 4, 109, 209)• Alexander Bard• Andrew Huberman• Harry S. Truman• Jacques Lacan• H.P. Lovecraft• Doug Irwin• Nassim Taleb• Friedrich Nietzsche

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 course at Weirdosphere• Contact me if you have burning questions

✨ Mentions

Max CooperHunter S. ThompsonDoug Rushkoff Friedrich NietzscheAndrew GallimoreJohn VervaekeK. Allado-McDowellDale PendellJoël de RosnayJoshua DiCaglioCharles EisensteinFred TurnerMark ZuckerbergMichael DouglasRichard BartlettGordon White

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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 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 intention. She sits on the board of trustees at Headlands Center for the Arts and on the SECA Council Board at SFMOMA, and is also an advisor to Stanford’s Women in Design Program.

Her most recent focus is in co-intelligence: integrating human, machine, and planetary intelligence to build future-facing organizations.

I’m glad to have such an excellent partner in conversation to, as the Taoists say, “Feel our way across the river stone by stone” in a discussion about all of this and more: the re-emergence of nomadic populations and intentional communities, fumbling toward an idea of planetary culture, the role of intuition in leadership and biophilia in the design of our work spaces...it’s a marvelously nondisciplinary co-exploration.

There are well over a dozen episodes in the editing queue and founding members can access the entire trove of unedited conversations before they’re released:

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere

✨ Mentioned Media & People

In Threads’ dwindling engagement, social media’s flawed hypothesis is laid bare

In a Time of Stress, Neuroaesthetic Spaces and Places Create a Path to Healing and Hope

The Triad of Intelligences: Harnessing Machine, Planetary, and Human Intuition in The Age of AI

DIALOGUE Interviews: Ivy Ross

DIALOGUE Interviews: Susan Magsamen

DIALOGUE Interviews: Kevin Kelly

More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science

Nikki SilvaBruce LiptonEd BernaysKen Wilber

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✨ 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 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 Technocene (00:32:12)• Navigating simplicity and complexity (00:38:44)• Acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices to the incomprehensibility of our technologies (00:45:02)• The squishy overlap between tech and biology (00:54:03)• The co-domestication of software bugs and people (01:03:22)• And the emerging age of ephemerality (01:15:55)

It was, as it always is with Sam, a joy. I hope you get as much out of it as we did.

This Saturday at 10 am PDT is the return of our monthly members hangouts. Join us!

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere

✨ Mentioned Reading & People

Steven Johnson - Everything Bad Is Good For YouWilliam Alonso - “Predicting Best with Imperfect Data”Danny Hillis - “The Enlightenment Is Dead, Long Live The Entanglement”Moses Maimonides - The Guide To The PerplexedRichard Brautigan - “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”Stewart Brand - The Clock of The Long Now

Lawrence Lundy-BryanClive ThompsonKevin KellyJose Luis BorgesLionel Snell (Ramsey Dukes)Nadia AsparouhovaUrsula K LeGuinWilliam GibsonDavid KrakauerMichael LevinChris LangtonJim LovelockLynn MargulisAlan MooreJessica FlackMonica AndersonJeremy UtleyAlan PerlisSteve Jobs

✨ Mentioned Episodes

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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 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 philosophical orientation” and “trunk of theoretical structure” as he lays them out in his Technological Love knowledge garden, asking how technologies for reality, perspectives, and karma can help us grow a world in love. What is just enough abstraction? When is autonomy desirable and when is it a false god? What do property and selfhood look like in a future where the ground truths of our interbeing shape design and governance?

It’s a long, deep conversation on fundamentals we need to reckon with if we are to live in futures we actually want. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Our next dialogue is with Sam Arbesman, resident researcher at Lux Capital and author of The Magic of Code. We’ll interrogate the distinctions between software and spellcraft, explore the unique blessings and challenges of a world defined by advanced computing, and probe the good, bad, and ugly of futures that move at the speed of thought…

✨ Show Links

• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts

✨ Additional Resources

“Growing A World In Love” — Larry Muhlstein at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

“The Future Is Both True & False” — Michael Garfield on Medium

“Sacred Data” — Michael Garfield at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

“The Right To Destroy” — Lior Strahilevitz at Chicago Unbound

“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul” — Puja Ohlhaver, E. Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin at SSRN

✨ Mentions

Karl Schroeder’s “Degrees of Freedom”Joshua DiCaglio’s Scale TheoryGeoffrey West’s ScaleHannah ArendtKen WilberDoug Rushkoff’s Survival of the RichestManda Scott’s Any Human Power Torey HaydenChaim Gingold’s Building SimCityJames P. Carse’s Finite & Infinite GamesJohn C. Wright’s The Golden OecumeneEckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now

✨ Related Episodes

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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 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, spoken and consulted all over the world, operated as an angel investor, and survived breast cancer. In other words, she’s just the person to teach you how to hang ten instead of duck diving under the next pounder. Let’s drop in and grab the rail. Thanks for listening!

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.

Show Links

• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consulting

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: The Promise and Perils of Technology 01:07 Welcome to Humans On the Loop 05:57 Taryn's Early Fascination with Technology 08:55 Living with Constraints and The Spirit of Exploration 31:06 AI in Personal Growth and Communication 38:52 AI as a New Religion and Therapy Tool 42:04 The Ethical Dilemmas of AI and Big Tech 47:58 The Future of AI in Governance and Society 57:42 Empowering Individuals with AI and Community Involvement

Mentions

Moon RibasRolf Potts’ VagabondingDamien Walter’s “Modernity is Done”Jim O’ShaughnessySolo: A Star Wars StoryMichael Davis on Exploring the Intersection of AI & RomanceThe Evolution of SurveillanceCory Doctorow’s “enshittification”Howard Rheingold

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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 (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 reveal, oppress and empower us. In this dialogue we explore the the tensions between games and play, the analog and digital, abstraction and tactility, and mysticism and colonialism in simulation-induced experiences. We investigate the rise and fall of Sim City game developer MAXIS, weave threads through the history of computing and software development, systems science, and the philosophy of technology, and ask:

What makes some abstractions better than others?

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.

Show Links

• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consulting

Mentions

Will WrightJohn Conway’s Game of LifeVannevar BushAlan Kay & Xerox PARCEd Catmull - Creativity, Inc.James Clerk MaxwellEthan MollickBrian Sutton-SmithGottfried LiebnizLarry OwensJay ForresterLauren F. KleinEdgar MitchellRusty SchweickertJulian of NorwichChris LangtonKen ForbisMark ZuckerbergElon MuskSam AltmanSam Arbesman - The Magic of CodeTimothy MortonDonna HarawayNick BostromJoshua DiCaglio - Scale TheoryStanislaw Lem - The CyberiadKevin Kelly - Out of ControlStewart Brand & The Whole Earth CatalogFred Turner - From Counterculture to CybercultureDe Kai - Raising AI

And in case you missed it:

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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 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 religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate (however necessary) as we face our crises of collective action. It’s an earnest, soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching extra-long conversation and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did.

If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.

Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.

Show Links

• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consulting

Discussed

Four Types of Problem

Second Renaissance Whitepaper & Theory of Change

Technology as God

Getting over our Allergy to Religion

The Primacy of Being

David Sloan Wilson - Darwin’s Cathedral

William Irwin Thompson - Imaginary Landscape, The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur

Federico Campagna - Prophetic Culture

Alex Shakar - Luminarium

Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other Days

Joe Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the World

Jessica Flack - Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation Mechanism

Mentioned

Bayo AkomolafeSylvie BarbierLiam KavanaughBret Easton EllisJohn StewartCarl JungDoug RushloffKarl MarxGoetheJamie WhealSteven KotlerKen WilberRobert KeganSuzanne Cook-GreuterPaul LevyGeorge W. BushUrsula K. LeGuinIain McGilchristJim O’ShaughnessyNaval RavikantThich Nhat HanhW. Brian ArthurHazel HendersonJim RuttChristopher AlexanderJamie CurcioJordan PetersonW. B. Yeats

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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, 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 archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes

Discussed

Extensive context and background summary provided by George here

Radio evolve #568 - Collective Wisdom and ChatGPT with George Pór

Prelude to the Rise of the Compassionate AI - George Pór

AI and Wisdom - George Pór

A Future of our Interactions with AI - George Pór

Nobel Prize in economics awarded to trio for explaining why some nations are rich and others poor (CNN)

Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA - Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, and Christopher P. Kempes

AI Attending Human Attending AI

Relationality - David Jay

Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott

Mentioned People & Episodes

Layman PascalFrederic LalouxTimothy MortonAri KushnerStephanie LeppDavid SauvageRoss DawsonStephen ReidTurquoise SoundKate RaworthMatt SegallFrancisco Varela