The Passing Through Podcast

Hello and welcome to 2026!

Join me for a quick current events update at the start, followed by a deep dive into some of the environmental, socio-cultural and cognitive impacts of artificial intelligence and social media and how these things have been passing through my existence recently.

Here's a quote from Vanessa Andreotti that I share near the end of the episode:

"Algorithmic modernity doesn't just control resources or power structures—it shapes attention itself. Algorithms are designed to harvest and monetize our focus, manipulating our neurobiology to seek rewards through the release of dopamine and oxytocin, the brain chemicals associated with pleasure and social bonding. This system feeds on our desire for validation, creating a feedback loop where our attention becomes a commodity, bought and sold in the marketplace of data. The result is not just an individual impact but a reshaping of collective realities and societal values.”

This episode brought to you by the Dodge Fugitive.

Further Reading

AI Research

Meta's Recent EU Breach

This week we're passing through the winter solstice; perhaps our most ancient human holiday.

What is the winter solstice? What is nature doing in the winter time? What is it asking of us? What can it tell us? What does letting go of your leaves look like?

Step into the darkest day of the year with me for a festive ramble where I ruminate on questions like these, tell stories about feral pigs and my friendship with a wood stove, explore humanity's relationship with fire, the sun, fractal cycles and the wider cosmos we're all a part of.

No boar were harmed during the recording of this podcast.

My dance partner today is the lovely and soulful Sara McFarland.

Sara is a storyteller, ritual performance artist, an improvisational singer, a soul initiation guide, a wild mind mentor, and a death doula for The Great Dying.

Sara’s views are rooted in an animist understanding of the world where story and myth and music and poetry are held dear and near to the heart.

Sara helps people initiate into soul, serving as a sort of midwife not just bringing a more beautiful world into being, but helping to dismantle destructive and limiting colonialist patterns of domination, control and disconnection — a vital and important role in these times of collapse, uncertainty and volatility.

We talk about composting and shedding. We talk about passing through this life, the nature of the soul, how we can think about soul, we talk about soul initiation and the role of death and dissolution, old Orpheus and Eurydice, humanity's collective soul initiation in the face of the polycrisis, practical ways for you to root down and feel what you’re feeling, and a bunch more.

If you’d like to learn more about Sara, check out the links below:

www.saramcfarland.com

www.starterculture.net

www.animas.org

Some people dedicate their lives not just to imagining different futures, but to deliberately, courageously crafting and inhabiting them — long before the mainstream catches up. This week on The Passing Through Podcast, I’m very excited to introduce Anna Kovasna.

Anna is a systems thinker, creative convener, and passionate weaver of local resilience and kinship with all life. She works with communities worldwide to nurture regenerative practice and systems change grounded in animist and relational worldviews.

She’s is cofounder of Kincentric Leadership, nurturing ways of leading and living rooted in kinship with a living, intelligent Earth. With deep roots in the ecovillage movement, she also serves as Strategic Lead for Community Resilience at the Global Ecovillage Network, exploring community-led ways of navigating the polycrisis. She is co-chair of Transition Network International, a trustee of Gaia Education, and cofounder of the Living Systems Alliance — a cross-movement initiative advancing place-based more-than-human governance and living systems design. After decades of ecovillage living, Anna now lives with her more-than-human kin on a small permaculture homestead in the Pyrenees.

We talk about relationality and kin-centrism — which is the understanding that all of the beings around us (the plants and animals and fungi and rocks and rivers) are our relatives, to whom we are inextricably linked. We talk about how to be good kin to our brothers and sisters on this planet, we talk about indigenous life-ways, Anna’s experience in the Peruvian Amazon with the Matses, reciprocity, how to show good etiquette to human and non-human persons, how animist/kin-centric worldviews can shift the way we organize our communities, relationships and governance systems; principles such as sacredness, animacy and interdependence, equity and justice — not just for humans, but also for non-humans — belonging and place, imagination, and lots more.

This was hands down one of my favorite conversations of the year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

If you’re interested in connecting with Anna you can find her on her website at https://www.kincentricleadership.org.

Or on LinkedIn at https://fr.linkedin.com/in/anna-kovasna.

This week, in this special 100th episode, I’m passing through Laski, Poland with a bunch of ancestors; living and dead.

Join me (and a few special guests) for an episode dedicated to giving thanks and honoring those who’ve come before us as we explore gratitude and reciprocity as possible doorways through which we can unchain ourselves from modernity’s shackles of violence, isolation, alienation, disconnection and meaninglessness.

No turkeys were harmed in the recording of this episode.

We live in a world consumed by code, and advanced by algorithms. For all of our technological prowess and alleged progress, we’re still haunted by the oldest questions; about love, meaning, loss, suffering, and what it means to be human creatures in times of precarity and collapse.

My guest today — returning to The Passing Through Podcast to contemplate these questions — is our friend Douglas Rushkoff. Longtime listeners will remember him, but for those of you just joining us, MIT named him one of the world’s 10 most influential intellectuals. Doug is an educator, author of many important books like Media Virus or Survival of the Richest, he’s media theorist, podcaster, gifted orator, and whole-hearted human interested in doing the hard work of composting our collective shit.

If you’re a new listener and would like to blast back to the past, he first appeared on this show last year, in episode 42. It’s still one of my favorite conversations, so please give it a listen.

It’s always a treat to talk to Doug, so I was thrilled to snag a bit of his time on Halloween in between meetings and menacing hordes of trick or treaters.

This time around we talk about AI and animism, about the strange overlap between silicon intelligence and the ancient sentience of the Earth. We talk about music, about the rhythms that hold us together when modernity’s mitigation strategies fall short, sorrow, love and the unrelenting pain, injustice and suffering seated in the center of the swirl.

If you haven’t already, go read one of Doug’s many books, or listen to his incredible podcast: Team Human. It’s one of my own personal favorite podcasts and well worth your time.

You can find Doug at https://rushkoff.com or on his podcast, Team Human:

https://www.youtube.com/@douglasrushkoff

https://open.spotify.com/show/5NJh9lWYPeJyu1ebGCnaxf

Beneath the noise of harrowing headlines and persistent propaganda, I suspect there’s a deeper movement growing: people remembering their collective power, refusing erasure, refusing silence and, choosing instead to tell their stories.

My guest today is Rolla Selbak — a Palestinian-American filmmaker and storyteller whose work is rooted in resistance, solidarity, and the imagination of freedom.

After her previous award-winning films like Choke and Three Veils, Rolla now leads the initiative Safina Filmmaker Project — born of the idea that storytelling is a shared voyage: “safina” in Arabic means “ship” or “boat,” reminding us that we are travelling together, literally passing through seas of shifting narrative.

In our conversation we talk about the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and what it means to make art inside the machinery of empire. We talk about labor unions, the power of collective strikes, and how solidarity itself becomes a form of storytelling.

We explore the links between the surveillance of Palestinians and the illegal detainments and deportations of people at home on U.S. soil — and the quiet, terrifying role that tech companies like Palantir play in both.

We talk about the No Kings Protest, Chris Smalls, The Disarm Genocide Rally and whether we can successfully organize and withhold our labor before AI finds a way to replace us. I really enjoyed this talk and think you will too.

You can find Rolla and information about her films on her website at https://www.rollaselbak.com or https://www.safinafilmmakerproject.com/

You can find her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/rollaselbak

There’s also her exciting upcoming social thriller called The Visitor.

It’s set in Jerusalem where a demon begins erasing the memories of the communities and families and friends in the town around a young Palestinian man. Described as the Palestinian Get Out, the film depicts dark satirical horror through fantastical Palestinian folklore.

Please check out thevisitormovie.com to learn more or support the film.

This week we’re passing through with the lovely Grace Rachmany where we’ll take a look at the relational, emotional, and ecological connective tissue that binds us to every living thing on this planet.

Grace is a field representative dedicating her energy toward addressing the metacrisis. She’s a pioneering thinker, writer, consultant and coder whose work bridges decentralized technology, digital democracy, governance, and new forms of economy.

But her work extends beyond the world of code and contracts and asks deep questions about what it means to be human amidst a collapsing civilization. I first met Grace earlier this year, in Hungary, during the Global Eco-village Network Gathering where she spoke about bioregionalism. I loved her spirit and sense of humor and I was really excited to sit down with her again and have some time to talk.

Grace is passionate about promoting the vision of a world where everyone has a say in the decisions that affect their lives. She’s also the founder of Voice of Humanity:

“Voice of Humanity creates systems of collaboration, governance and currency design, and reconstruction of human economic systems with the goal of creating a world in which humans live in harmony with one another and with the natural systems of planet earth.”

So as you might imagine, Grace is a great guest for the types of things this podcast is interested in investigating.

In our discussion we talk about grief, the hard work of composting, bioregionalism, the components of our human infrastructure, governance and membership systems, right speech and the nature of truth, the archetype of the joker, the No Kings protests, harm reduction, working with your neighbors, bridging differences, and a bunch of other good stuff.

I loved this conversation with Grace, and found it hard to stop speaking with her even after we stopped recording. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

You can find Grace and learn more about her and the many different branches of her work on her website at https://gracerachmany.com.

You can learn more about her other work here:

https://www.voiceofhumanity.one

https://sideways.earth

https://www.daoleadership.com

https://github.com/GraceRachmany

https://ganglysister.com

This week I'm passing through Berlin, Germany!

Back in September my partner and I attended a 5-day training in Portugal, on Peace Building. Since then I've been meaning to record an episode about the experience and discuss the topics we explored.

As you might imagine, distilling five days of training down to less than 60-minutes means I won't be able to cover everything we learned about, but I will talk a bit about peace, conflict, and a tool called Non-Violent Communication.

So sit down, get comfortable, and soak the peace of this episode in through all of your chakras, especially your root chakra.

If you want to read more about Non-Violent Communication you can check out the Wikipedia page here, or read Marshall Rosenberg's book Non-Violent Communication.

If you'd like to learn more about The Waking Life festival or some of the partner organizations responsible for the training, you can visit their websites below:

Waking Life

Youth Peace Ambassadors Network

Co-Wonders

This week, Josh Schrei is Passing Through!

Josh is the creator and host of The Emerald Podcast — one of my own personal favorite podcasts. Josh isn’t just an educator, storyteller, music-maker, writer and pioneer in the field: in terms of podcasting he’s one of the best to ever do it.

If you’re curious about spirituality, Buddhism, the collision of Western consciousness with eastern animist cosmologies, practical practices for orienting your mind with the land, loving kindness (Metta) as an animist force strong enough to halt charging elephants, bardic visions of the storyteller, rhythms as living entities, the sonic nature of the universe, Little Richard, ODB, festival culture and Burning Man, or creating a collective field where group alchemy can take place...then this episode is for you.

This was a watermelon of an episode and I hope you find it as juicy as I did!

Where to find Josh:

Consider taking one of Josh's courses:

https://www.themythicbody.com/courses/

You can find Josh's podcast, The Emerald, here:

https://open.spotify.com/show/1OwFblqZ7FIkLSW4rvbJEF

Support Josh via Patreon here:

https://patreon.com/theemeraldpodcast

References from this episode:

The Shamanic Bones of Zen by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

(Why Mindfulness Isn't Enough) - The Emerald

https://open.spotify.com/episode/64iID6pjaiESrb7ENob2y3

When Bread is no Longer Bread - The Emerald

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0spYA01c9BJiHTyWchk65q

Animism is Normative Consciousness - The Emerald

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5OpoIw1W9VuLddeum7v8l2

One of my personal favorites from the Emerald:

I Wish It Could Have Been Another Way

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1mKNMZwQN10PCenkAARClI