🌏 Mapping The Big Picture(s) 🐙 New Paintings 🫂 Next Members Hangout

Stray bits of creative ephemera discovered en route to the next big revelation.

Sep 30, 2025

“If one’s message is that things are complicated, uncertain, and messy…there are rather fewer ways to get the message across.”
– Richard Lewontin, evolutionary biologist

Here are few small things treats in between essays, episodes, book editing sessions, a new AI Alignment project, and doing what I can to help develop the early efforts to bring human-led exploration back to digital environments (short manifesto here).

Something for everyone, whether you’re left-brained, right-brained, or heart-centered:

⏳ How To Live In The Future’s Interactive Corpus

As part of my commitment to making complexity more legible and easier to navigate, I just fed all of the lectures and discussions from How To Live In The Future—the course I taught this summer at Weirdosphere—into NotebookLM. For a free public utility, it did a remarkable job of organizing a dizzying diversity of ideas into something legible at a glance. And now you can talk to what is effectively a storehouse of my scientific and philosophical learning, for a deeper understanding of the forces driving our world’s major transformations and how they draw an image of where we’re headed next. Check it out here.

(And you can access all of the recordings, transcripts, and readings—as well as access to future courses and study groups—by becoming a founding member.)

Above is a cool screenshot of the first three layers of the mind map it generated from over twenty hours of class. It goes deeper…here’s just one branch:

And of course probing the whole corpus with your own questions is very cool. This kind of user-led inquiry is the future of education, branding, currency design, architecture…everything. But it’s taking a long time for industrial modernity to die.

NotebookLM’s mind map is definitely something I’d use as the basis for a more structured syllabus the next time I teach this course, but when it comes to grokking big ideas, I think it’s important to see both the kind of “family tree” graph depicted above and a “food web” or network of how the ideas are all semantically related (like what you see on askfuturefossils.com). My one complaint with NotebookLM is that it doesn’t afford this kind of rotation through high-dimensional concept space…plural representation is a key feature of the new world emerging through advanced technology right now and if we are going to forage effectively we need at least two points of view (which is why the sciences and humanities are persistent basic modes, even as they recombine into new forms).

🎨 New Paintings and Mural Work Underway

Those of you who have followed me for a while know I used to make art full time, illustrated over 400 herpetological species descriptions, and rather abruptly pivoted into science communication and philosophy writing as my bread and butter…but the need to paint and make music persists as a way of entering a very specific flow. As part of a commitment to balancing my brain hemispheres and ways of being, and as a way of connecting with community by making art in public, I may never be able to give this up entirely. So in addition to the podcast, etc. here are some recent works:

“Untitled (Sea Dragon)”
24”x36” — acrylic pens — painted at Sqwerv @ Tumbleroot and Liquid Bloom @ The Mystic

Don’t ask me why…maybe because I’ve been responsible for a lot of childcare lately, or maybe because I vibe with the sea dragon’s kelp mimicry, but these exceedingly weird fish really do it for me. My online store is no longer functional, but there are 11”x17” card stock prints available for $30 + s/h if you want one — just hit me up.

“Nine Brains”
24”x36” — acrylic pens — painted at Thievery Corporation/Blockhead and the annual Team Everything party, both at The Bridge at Santa Fe Brewing Company

Unfinished, updates soon. Somehow in over 400 live works I never went for one of my favorite animals. My friends Layman Pascal and Octopusyarn recently wrote a fine piece on the octopus as a “dominant archetype of the coming age” that helps explain my decision to finally take on this unusually challenging subject:

Each tentacle has a different perspective on the world. We need to become as multi-perspectival as an octopus. In a post-truth world that is complexifying and fragmenting, this could be the most fundamental teaching of the Octopus.

Painting an octopus at a local dance party turns out to also be an excellent prompt for people to show you, like, a gazillion octopus tattoos. There’s definitely something here.

I’m also working on the biggest painting project of my life so far: a four-panel mural of iconic Magic: The Gathering characters for my local game store, WZKD Games.

Below are some shots of the mural in progress, which will ultimately feature about two dozen detailed re-imagined cards. It’s giving me a ton of time to absorb the wonderful CBC Radio series How To Think About Science, among other things…highly recommended, especially the episodes with Wendell Berry and Arthur Zajonc.

👯‍♂️ Next Members Hangout

Lastly! We are finally back from our summer break for our next monthly hangout, show-and-tell, stitch-and-bitch, art party, and world-insanity-support-group this Saturday, October 4th, at 11 am MDT. Meet kindred spirits, share project updates, solicit support, probe the Zeitgeist, discuss recent episodes…whatever suits you.

I’ll send an update to members with the link for our video call this Friday.

Next up on the queue for Humans On The Loop are conversations with Sam Arbesman of Lux Capital and Rimma Boshernitsan of DIALOGUE. Both deep, provocative, speculative, weird wonderful people and great discussions!

In the meantime, in case you missed it, my chat with Larry Muhlstein on his philosophy and design framework for technological love: