Humans On The Loop Podcast Por Michael Garfield arte de portada

Humans On The Loop

Humans On The Loop

De: Michael Garfield
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Let's dream better! Join paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield for bold, far-ranging explorations into the nature of agency in the age of automation, wisdom and innovation, responsibility and power, and the care and feeding of the new superpowers conferred to us by magical technologies. Weekly dialogues at the edge of the knowable, learning to navigate Global Weirding and exponential AI with the curiosity and play required of us. Building on twenty years of independent research plus firsthand experience of the tech, arts, and science worlds, Humans On The Loop is a show to transform you and help us make better use of our greatest natural resource: our attention.

michaelgarfield.substack.comMichael Garfield Arte Ciencias Sociales Filosofía Historia y Crítica Literaria
Episodios
  • Neuroscience in Hyperspace with Andrew Gallimore

    Neuroscience in Hyperspace with Andrew Gallimore
    Mar 25 2026
    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,” challenging standard accounts that treat the experience as mere hallucination, dreams, or Jungian archetypes. What new shapes will we—and our sciences—take as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice “truly psychedelic” science? And what insights might we be able to bring “home” to the Flatland where we spend most of our waking lives?Andrew has talked about this work in many, many other venues (his conversations with Jesse Michels and Danny Jones were especially good), so I wanted to carry the conversation into fresh terrain. Consider this episode the “200 level course”, or at least my best attempt ask a brilliant and provocative researcher some very complicated questions.Over our two hours together we discussed neuroimaging findings that challenge the “dream” and “archetype” interpretations of DMT phenomenology, how criticality and noise in complex systems inform our understanding of the psychedelic experience, and the methodological problems inherent in studying ontologically shocking experiences while maintaining scientific rigor. We also probed the philosophical implications of DMT research—such as the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than matter—and the possible connections between DMT hyperspace and life in an era of advanced technology. Andrew also gave some context on the Noonautics research non-profit its partnership with the newly-launched Eleusis facility, a carefully-crafted venue for extended-state DMT work. But perhaps my favorite part of this conversation was spent in speculation, about how science and even language might evolve to meet the challenges presented by the ineffable high-dimensional reality that DMT reveals to us.✨ 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.✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations” & “City of Jewels”✨ Contact me to collaborate or hire me as a consultantChapters00:00:00 Intro00:08:15 Gallimore’s Origin Story00:13:00 DMT as a Technology00:20:01 “Entities” & Methodological Problems00:29:06 World Models and EEG Clues00:36:57 Why The Psychedelic State is Not a Dream00:44:11 Noise, Criticality, and New Order00:47:50 The Temperature-Noise Motif00:52:47 Metabolism & Dimensionality00:53:47 The Cortex & Representational Reach00:57:44 Do We Need New Language to Study The DMT Realm?01:00:45 Is There Only The Subject?01:09:31 Psychedelic Science As Altered Observation01:17:34 DMTx & Eleusis Plans01:21:55 The Future of Transdimensional Research01:31:44 A Call for HumilityCited WorksNeural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEGby Christopher Timmerman et al.The Overfitted Brainby Erik HoelThe evolution of syntactic communicationby Martin Nowak et al.The Transcension Hypothesisby John SmartMiguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Societyfor Complexity PodcastAncient Extinction Events, Apocalyptic Cults, and DMT Entitieswith Michael on The Danny Jones PodcastOther MentionsStephen SzáraNick SandDonald HoffmanKarl FristonJordi RibaDavid ChalmersWilliam BurroughsJohn LillyPhil DickTerence McKennaRobert Anton WilsonJohn D. BarrowMentioned & Related Podcast Episodes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 h y 35 m
  • (Re)Building Trustworthy Institutions with Nathan Kinch

    (Re)Building Trustworthy Institutions with Nathan Kinch
    Mar 11 2026
    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 together?“Certainly one of the world’s leading figures on ethics in practical applications.”— Fionn Delahunty, NLP Lab at University of GalwayAs we frequently observe on this show, we need to rework our ideas of agency and identity to adapt them to advances in our understanding of complex systems. Decisions emerge within a nexus of nested, multi-scale dynamics, and our species flourishes or fumbles in intricate symbiotic relationships with the collective intelligences embodied in cultural technologies like states, markets, corporations, and social clubs — beings that, by any reasonable account, live in worlds alien to our own lived experience and demonstrate their own goals and values. Getting them to behave in ways that nourish us requires a much more nuanced theory of change than that which created them in the first place, perhaps even a radically different vision of the links between biology, psychology, society, and environment. And given that AI is a beast of a similar order to these other “egregores” — the entities of collective computation that arise from our efforts to coordinate at scale and then impose their own top-down causal influence on our thoughts and actions — learning how to align individual and organizational purpose can give us profound insight into how to live well alongside (or in the proverbial guts of) newer, more obvious forms of non-human intelligence like LLMs that amplify our biases through lossy compression and feedback, and shape both our desires and view of adjacent possibility.In other words, the “intent-to-action” gap in corporate ethics and the “paperclip machine” problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can “tame” the secular gods of the modern industrial era , our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing.If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas — and who isn’t? — this will speak to you, and I’m excited to share it.✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.✨ Become a member for access to our study group and community calls, and for those recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.✨ Become a founding member for access 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.)This is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a member:✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultantReferenced & RelatedWhat’s trust got to do with it?Nathan KinchThree reasons why AI ethics is strugglingNathan KinchIf ‘Trust is a must’ for AI governance — here are 3 things regulators should doHilary SutcliffeBluesky and enshittificationCory DoctorowEnvironmentally Mediated Social DilemmasSylvie Estrela et al.FLD On Navigating Complexity in Education: A Conversation with Dave SnowdenTim LoganThe corporate cultivation of digital resignationNora Draper & Joseph TurowWilliam GibsonJohn VervaekeRajiv SethiMat MytkaNadia LeeBarronness Onora O’Neill This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 h y 26 m
  • AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske

    AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske
    Feb 10 2026
    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 consultantReferenced & 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 SteeleExplore hundreds of related podcast episodes in the archives! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 h y 22 m
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Future Fossils is bound to be the Joe Rogan Experience of the post -2020 world.

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