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Humans On The Loop

Humans On The Loop

By: 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 Art Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • 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 hr and 22 mins
  • Fostering "Prodigies of Uncertainty" with Layman Pascal

    Fostering "Prodigies of Uncertainty" with Layman Pascal
    Jan 27 2026
    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 EarthquakeMentioned 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 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 hr and 29 mins
  • Becoming Hyperhuman with Carl Hayden Smith

    Becoming Hyperhuman with Carl Hayden Smith
    Jan 13 2026

    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



    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
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 18 mins
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