Agency, attention, and AI at the edge.
Humans On The Loop treats exponential technology as a problem of attention, ethics, and imagination. Michael Garfield hosts long-form conversations where AI, psychedelics, institutional trust, cognition, and planetary culture meet without being flattened into easy optimism or panic.
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Humans On The Loop is a long-form conversation series about agency, attention, and responsibility under accelerating technological change. Michael Garfield hosts from the borderlands of AI ethics, futurism, cognition, psychedelics, institutional trust, and planetary imagination. The show has a restless intellectual range. One episode may examine trustworthy organizations through cognition and social license to operate, while another treats DMT experience as a challenge to ordinary models of mind. AI is a recurring subject, but rarely as a narrow product category. It appears as a translator between minds, a privacy problem, a tool for difficult conversations, a threat to sense-making, and a strange new partner in thought. The show is comfortable with uncertainty. It keeps returning to the question of how people can stay fully engaged when information environments feel less reliable, more synthetic, and harder to trust. That gives the series a distinctive tension. It is wary of hype, wary of despair, and drawn to the difficult middle where humility and experimentation still matter. Conversations can be dense, metaphor-rich, and speculative. They also stay connected to recognizable stakes: robot impersonation scams, institutional reputation, AI systems that nudge behavior, privacy built into infrastructure, and the culture forming around complex technologies. Psychedelic experience is treated not as spectacle, but as another route into questions about world-building, perception, and the limits of representation. The showโs guests often speak in systems terms, moving from the brain to organizations to planetary culture without treating those scales as separate. Garfieldโs editorial frame emphasizes attention and imagination as resources that need care. The result is a show for listeners who can tolerate bewilderment as part of understanding. It suits people who want more than tech news and less than certainty. Humans On The Loop asks what better tools are for, what better institutions require, and what kinds of humans might survive their own inventions.
Made for: For listeners who want rigorous, speculative conversations about AI, cognition, trust, psychedelics, and social change. It especially suits people comfortable with philosophy, systems thinking, and long arcs of uncertainty.
What sets it apart: The show connects technical AI questions to altered states, institutional trust, privacy, planetary culture, and everyday sense-making. Its signature is the refusal to separate tools from the minds, organizations, and worlds that use them.
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.cโฆ
Based on 6 episodes we listened to ยท September 2026
Michael Garfield connects AI, computing, cognition, and ethics through searching conversations about living responsibly with complex technologies.
Humans On The Loop treats technology as a question of human judgment, shared institutions, and the limits of understanding. Michael Garfield leads guest conversations that connect AI and computing with cognition, ethics, culture, and responsibility.
Michael Garfield goes from analog computers to AI's limits; bring a larger notebook.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at DMT, dreams, and a consciousness-first theory that is strongest when it stays close to neuroscience.
Andrew Gallimore is given room to make a big claim: psychedelics, especially DMT, may widen the cortex's representational reach beyond ordinary waking life. The episode also keeps circling a harder idea, that consciousness could come first and the physical world follow from it.
A clear, thoughtful map of how personal vulnerability becomes institutional trust.
Trust is treated here as something institutions have to earn in practice, not just as a principle they can invoke. Nathan Kinch frames it as relational vulnerability: one party accepts exposure to another's actions because it expects something positive in return.
A reflective discussion of AI, agency, and how people stay self-directed while using tools that shape thought.
This episode treats AI less like a product pitch and more like a messy habit of mind. It stays close to the speaker's own tendency to get stuck in loops with AI, then widens into questions about choice, planetary consciousness, and the way people respond when technology spillsโฆ
A clear, wary talk about technology, humility, and the cost of pretending systems stay fully legible.
The episode keeps circling a simple idea: when technology grows too complex to fully master, humility serves better than fear or awe. It treats limits on human understanding not as a stop sign, but as a reason to keep questioning with more care.
A measured look at technology's early promise and the harder question of what its builders may be changing.
The episode treats early technology with a clear, useful ambivalence. Its promise is allowed to feel real, even attractive, while the harder consequences stay in view.
A conversation about computing history that keeps returning to graphics, labor, and the slow overlap between analog and digital systems.
This episode ties Vannevar Bush, engineering culture, and the history of computing into a broader argument about graphics, material practice, and the shift from concrete analog devices toward symbolic abstraction.
A conversation about collective truth, planetary culture, and the limits of technology.
The episode follows Rufus Pollack's argument that individuality is often taken for granted and that people may need to recover collective value, collective truth, and collective beauty to coordinate at larger scales.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
A discussion on building cultural capacity for a psychedelic renaissance, emphasizing the uneven distribution of collapse and the need for responsive communities.
Jessica Clark discusses how understanding storytelling and code empowers media literacy and awareness of manipulation in new media.
A conversation with Scout Rainer Wiley about romanticizing experiences, the return of culture, and the intersection of AI, art, and martial arts in the Bright Apocalypse.
A discussion on the importance of interdependent community versus autonomous convenience, using examples from bowling leagues to war platoons, and reflecting on the post-COVID social disruption.
Neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore discusses how DMT expands the cortex's representational capacity, allowing access to high-dimensional structures and suggesting consciousness may be fundamental.
Humans on the Loop host Michael Garfield interviews AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch, exploring how institutions made of well-meaning people drift out of alignment with their own stated values.
On Humans On The Loop, Alex Komoroske argues that AI needs a new technical fabric built around privacy rather than isolated app origins.
Michael Garfield and Layman Pascal discuss the challenge of maintaining engagement and benign attitudes in an era of rapidly degrading information trust, exploring the need for 'prodigies of uncertainty' to navigate a world of deepfakes and misinformation.
Carl Hayden Smith discusses using technology to undo its own damage and explores hyperhuman potential through experiences like holotropic breathwork.
Rimma Boshernitsan discusses co-intelligence with AI, agency, and planetary perspectives in a metamorphic age.
In episode 26 of Humans on the Loop, host Michael Garfield talks with scientist and author Sam Arbesman about his book The Magic of Code, exploring the analogy between computer programming and magic.
Host Michael Garfield opens episode 24 of Humans on the Loop with a personal memory of learning to read ocean waves off Costa Rica in 2010, using it as a metaphor for navigating accelerating technological change.
Michael Garfield's Humans on the Loop episode 23 talks with Chaim Gingold, the Spore creator and author of MIT Press's Building SimCity, about simulation as a way of thinking.
Humans on the Loop host Michael Garfield interviews Rufus Pollock, economist, Open Knowledge Foundation founder, and co-founder of the Life Itself collective, about the wisdom gap between humanity's technological power and its collective maturity.