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Has anyone here watched Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, Rory Kennedy’s new documentary about the continuing crisis inside the Seattle-based aerospace giant? If you have, you’ll know it makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing. Freefall follows Kennedy’s 2022 documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which examined the two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft – Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 five months later – in which 346 people died.

Something in a Reutersstory yesterday caught my attention. It concerned a new AI venture called Accelerated Understanding, founded by husband-and-wife team Anima Anandkumar and Benedikt Jenik. Anandkumar is Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech and a former Senior Director of AI Research at Nvidia; Jenik has a background in building large-scale machine-learning systems.

(Photo by Jacek Smoter on Unsplash) For the better part of a decade, the argument over UAP disclosure has revolved around a surprisingly simple assumption: that whatever the US government is protecting, the secret must lie principally in the things themselves. Depending on where you stand in the debate, those things might be experimental aircraft, advanced foreign weapon systems, recovered vehicles of unknown origin or evidence of a non-human intelligence operating somewhere in our environment.

(Photo by Eutah Mizushima on Unsplash) This story begins, as another recently did, on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Readers may remember the Tyringham Initiative gathering hosted last month by entrepreneur Anton Bilton, where scientists, physicians, indigenous practitioners and consciousness researchers came together to explore a provocative question: the nature of non-human intelligences and their possible relationship to psychedelics, spirituality and consciousness.

When I started recording these audio follow-ups, I imagined they would simply expand on the essays. They’re already becoming something rather different. This conversation picks up where Dialogue 2: The Attention War left off. I talk about why attention has become such a central idea within AIM, share the story of an unexpected ‘download’ that changed the…

For most of my adult life, I never had to think about my attention. At university, I simply knuckled down to getting my degree, warding off the distractions of student life long enough to earn it. When I went looking for a job in journalism, I focused almost single-mindedly on getting my foot through the door, writing letter after letter until somebody finally noticed. The same was true when I sat down to write my first book. Never mind the odds stacked against me.

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular series of subscriber audio conversations. Rather than reading the essay aloud, these recordings explore where the discussion goes next. This one begins with your comments on Déjà Vu: Reality’s Reveal on the Island of Dreams and the unexpected directions they took me – from Karl Pribram’s holographic …

This story begins on a small island in the Mediterranean. For most people, Ibiza evokes images of beach clubs, electronic music and all-night parties. Yet beneath that surface lies another culture, one that has long attracted seekers, artists and experimenters drawn by the island’s reputation as a place of spiritual exploration. This confluence of currents has led to its informal name as ‘the island of dreams’.

How do individuals and societies remain coherent when their model of reality changes faster than their ability to adapt? That question has sat quietly beneath much of my recent work. It sits beneath The Outlier Series. It sits beneath the Adaptive Interface Model (AIM). And, intentionally or not, it also sits at the heart of a new paper released today from John Priestland and the team at uNHIdden titled Preparing for Disclosure: A Public Health Framework for Paradigm-Shifting Revelations.

In recent weeks, Pope Leo has emerged as one of the most unexpected voices in the global debate around artificial intelligence. His concern is not simply economic, though the economics are already beginning to look ominous. Nor is it merely ethical. It cuts far deeper than that. Again and again – in his first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (‘Magnificent Humanity’) Pope Leo XIV returns to a single underlying theme: that humanity risks externalising too much of itself into machines.