Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Discord | FB Group
It’s 2025. You’ve likely noticed that a death cult is in charge, thanks to a fundamentally misaligned structure that elevates the psychopaths, prioritizing the dark triad of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism over pro-social behavior.
Do not despair! There are three kinds of hope: pre-apocalyptic (naïve) hope, doomer hope, and post-apocalyptic hope. Today we’re going to lean into third option, the one where you stare into the abyss but you keep going. You keep cultivating the love in your heart and your commitment to the living world. It’s going to take a wider perspective, one that embraces both the mapped and unmapped regions of reality. But that’ll be easy, because my partner in dialogue today is the amazing Manda Scott (website | Wikipedia), self-described as a “thrutopian novelist, podcaster, smallholder, and conscious (r)evolutionary.” Once a veterinary surgeon, now “wholeheartedly endeavouring to craft a future we’d be proud to leave behind,” her novel Any Human Power is one of the most potent reads I’ve picked up in a long time. And (likely in no small part because she is also an inveterate podcaster on her show with Faith Tilleray, Accidental Gods) this conversation is as soulful as it gets.
We talk about the importance of ritual in “modern” times, trust-building, new models for governance where leaders really listen, squaring the circle of our high-tech society and the more-than-human (and more-than-living) reality that exists always-already in excess of our language and mortal concerns…it’s a truly capacious exchange. Enjoy!
Information for our next Humans On The Loop members hangout, this Saturday December 13th at 11:30 am Mountain Time, is below the paywall 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
Richard Bartlett
Shirley Weber
W. Brian Arthur
Audrey Tang
Jenny Laus
Tanya Luhrmann
Francis Weller
Erin Martin
Indy Johar
Jonathan Haidt
E.O. Wilson
