A co-learning journey with The Emerald Podcast’s Josh Schrei
+ Special Guests Michael Garfield, Andrew Dunn, Elena Lake Polozova, Turquoise Sound, Mara Zepeda, Sara Jolena Wolcott, Evan Sharp
✨ TL;DR
Inspired by The Emerald Podcast’s episode on AI, magic, and responsibility, this course is for anyone interested in the relationship between myth, ritual, ethics, business and technology.
People from all walks of life — engineers, innovators, educators, business leaders, artists, coaches, counselors, and ritualists — will learn valuable new perspectives and practices.
Over five weeks of talks, co-learning sessions, and online discourse, you will:
- Study what diverse societies through history can teach us in the modern era about power, technology, responsibility, and living in right relation with non/human intelligences
- Make connections and engage in stimulating discourse with dozens of kindred spirits
- Work both alone and together to apply new insights to your life, organization, and projects
- Develop a more grounded, curious, and proactive stance toward technological innovation
- Exercise better solo and group sense-making for our era of exponential change
🪄 Context & Intention
ℹ️ Logistics
Course offerings are all optional. Recordings will be shared after each session. Asynchronous chat and office hours form a substantial part of this co-learning group’s process and opportunities to build meaningful new relationships with each other.
- 5 Live Virtual Sessions
- Thursdays 12:00 - 2:00 pm PT (April 18, April 25, May 2, May 9, May 16)
- 90-minute presentations followed by Q&A and small-group discussions
- Pre-recorded guest lectures with experts and role models (more info below)
- Weekly Office Hours (Mondays 12:00 - 1:00 pm PT) with Andrew and Elena
- A Private Forum for 24/7 engagement with other participants
- Additional inquiries and practices for you to explore on your own time
- Ongoing access to all course materials in perpetuity
✅ Enrollment
We offer a sliding scale payment model in accordance with various levels of financial ability as follows:
- Executive Rate: $900 for those of greater financial means (including access to corporate budget) who understand the amount of work that goes into creating a course like this and want to support the long-term vision
- Professional Rate: $600 for professionals and those able to contribute a little more to the vision
- Student Rate: $300 for students and practitioners with little expendable income
- Scholarships Available for the technologically unemployed. Tell us your story!
📚 Embodied Ethics Curriculum
Toggle each heading for more details:
Part 1: The Mythic Implications of AI
With the rise of AI we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real. Are human beings prepared to handle such powers?
In this first part of our course, we’ll explore the rise of AI through the mythic framework and look at the deeper drives underpinning AI development.
Part 2: Individual Initiation in the Age of AI
What does it mean to be personally prepared to be working with powerful technology? In traditional cultures and knowledge systems there was an initiatory process through which potentially world-altering knowledge was embodied slowly over time. Individuals who were entrusted to wield such power were expected to go through a process of initiation, tempering, and slow, gradual learning to ensure that they could handle such power. This went far beyond what is now covered in a modern-day tech ethics course and involved a deep process of building relationality and dismantling egoic drives.
This portion of the course will explore what a process of individual initiation and tempering might look like in the modern world.
Part 3: Ecologies of Accountability
How can embodied accountability be instituted on a company-wide and society-wide scale? What does it mean to communally embody ethics? In many traditional systems, individual achievement is less important than relationality and the ecology of the whole has precedent over the wants of the individual. Therefore, many traditional cultures see the world not in terms of what we are permitted to do but what we are required to do — not in terms of freedom but in terms of responsibility.
This segment explores what an ecology of responsibility looks like, and how we might structure our companies and tech environments to foster accountability, relationality, and sustainability over time.
Part 4: Re-prioritizing Slow Growth
When confronted with the suggestion that AI developers might consider slowing down a bit in their rush to get new technologies to market, the response is often — ‘that’s impossible — market forces and international competition won’t allow for it.’ And yet a consistent voice that encourages individual and societal slowdown is deeply important. A culture that unleashes new unproven technologies with no planning beyond next quarter is not only flirting with potentially catastrophic consequences but is also ensuring that their innovations won’t last. Slowdown is how we guarantee longevity. But what does slowing down actually mean? It’s not always as dramatic as we think.
This portion of the course will cast a new light on how slowing down — both individually and collectively — is how systems that actually stand the test of time are built.
Part 5: Towards Embodied Intelligence
Tech companies have put forward the proposition that intelligence, once fully realized, will solve everything. Yet intelligence as it is defined in the tech world — computational capability — does not solve anything meaningful in and of itself. Intelligence with no anchor to practice, to relationality, or to living systems remains an abstraction, and there are tangible consequences to constructing our lives and our educational systems around abstracted intelligence. What would it mean to redefine intelligence? What would it look like to build relationality and accountability into the technologies themselves?
This final portion of the course explores how the tech itself can come to embody ethics, and how rethinking the way we approach and interface with tech will determine how it can be integrated into our lives harmoniously rather than disruptively.
🧑💻 Meet Your Course Leaders
Joshua Michael Schrei (Teacher) is the founder and host of The Emerald podcast, which draws from a deep well of poetry, lore, and mythos to challenge conventional narratives on politics and public discourse, meditation and mindfulness, art, science, literature, and more. A writer, teacher, and a lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — in particular, the Indian subcontinent — Josh has sought to navigate the living, animate space of the imagination and advocate for a world that prioritizes imaginative vision. Josh has taught intensive courses in cosmology, mythology, and somatic disciplines for nearly 20 years.
Michael Gregory Garfield (Host) is the host of Future Fossils Podcast, a transdisciplinary discussion series exploring the edges of the known and knowable. Trained in paleontology before touring the world as an artist and musician, Michael joined The Santa Fe Institute in 2018 to host their flagship systems science podcast Complexity. He left academia for the second time in 2023 to work for a non-profit AI startup and write two books about the past and future of human-technology co-evolution. In his spare time he has released over 100 hours of original music for film, yoga, deep listening, and journeywork.
Elena Lake Polozova (TA) is a former machine learning engineer at Meta, turned private-practice bodyworker and student of the mythosomatic. She also has 6 years of experience in math, computer science, and physics academia, as well as deep inquiries into nature connection, emotional spaceholding, and dance. She’ll bring her interdisciplinary backgrounds across embodiment and technology to help answer your questions at the office hours.
Andrew Murray Dunn (Producer) is a student at the intersection of human development and innovation, currently focused on co-activating Wise Innovation Project. He works as a trans-disciplinary visionary and pollinator, helping people bring ideas to life in ways that are more awesome for all involved. Before serving as Innovation Lead at Center for Humane Technology, Andrew spent over 10 years in early stage startup operations experience, most notably with the pioneering Public Benefit Corporation Siempo while they developed an award-winning open source humane smartphone interface.
🎙️Special Guest Speakers
🙋🏼♀️ FAQ
Who is this for?
- Not only for those who work in AI. It’s for tech, business, and social change leaders in critical junctures of their development. Founders and executives, investors and philanthropists, rising leaders with a sense that something needs to change. Asking deeper questions, growing psycho-spiritual orientation, feeling obligated and/or motivated to take next steps on their journey towards greater alignment. Those want to bridge personal somatic work with their leadership in the world.
- Those who support these professionals: coaches, therapists, healers, service providers
- Those highly interested in this topic
I can’t make these dates / times. Will you offer the course again?
All lectures will be recorded and shared with students and enrolling grants you access to 24/7 asynchronous discussion in a private forum. When we’ll host the course again is TBD.
Subscribe to Wise Innovation Projects’s newsletter to be informed of upcoming offerings.
Are there any volunteer opportunities?
We would love your help — especially if you can help us design social media content or various other forms of art from our talks and other course materials. Please get in touch!
Is there a refund policy?
Yes. If you decide within the first week of enrollment, that Embodied Ethics is not a fit for you, just let us know and we'll refund your full payment, no questions asked.
How can I get in touch?
Email us at help@wiseinnovation.school
This course is the first major offering from Wise Innovation Project, an emerging non-profit initiative with a mission to re-imagine innovation education.