Originals
Ep Release: February 23rd, 2025
Marc Andreessen
Power, AI, & The Future of America
This pilot differs from our future episodes of original content. Instead, to kick things off, we're hosting a members-only watch party featuring selected clips from Lex Fridman's recent podcast interview with Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America. We'll examine key moments from the episode to explore several themes: Marc's perspective on elites and their societal responsibilities, his notably authentic demeanor in this interview compared to previous ones, his personal evolution from mathematics enthusiast to well-rounded thinker, his recent turn toward religious inquiry, and how to go meta and stay grounded on intense conversations like this one and many others that are in the zeitgeist.
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Ep Release: March 23rd, 2025
Bayo Akomolafe
Religious Imagination
In this episode Bayo shares stories of the Yoruba trickster-god, Esu, and Bonnie shares stories of Coyote, the trickster in Native American allegories. What is the role of the trickster, and why is trickster energy relevant today? What cautionary tales does the trickster hold for us? What does it mean when a culture ignores the trickster, or worse, thinks it can get rid of the trickster by exerting more and more control over nature? Can a deeper understanding and appreciation of trickster within us and among us, help us revitalize our relationship with the forces of nature, and by doing so, re-wild ourselves?
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Ep Release: April 20th, 2025
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
Linguistic Bodies and Sensorimotor Agency
In this Originals episode, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo joins Bonnitta Roy to explore the deep entanglement of life, mind, and language through the lens of embodied cognitive science. What does it mean to live as autonomous, precarious beings shaped by the constant interplay between our organic, sensory-motor, and intersubjective bodies? How does language transform our relationship with ourselves and with others, not as a tool of representation but as a living, participatory process? Together, they examine the tensions and breakthroughs that arise when shared norms break down, revealing the ways in which our bodies, habits, and histories are co-created with the world around us. Could a more holistic understanding of these dimensions help us move beyond reductionist narratives and deepen our connection with the full spectrum of human and non-human life?
Ep Release: May 18th, 2025
John Robb
At War with Ourselves
In this Originals episode, military strategist John Robb joins Bonnitta Roy to explore the dual dangers and opportunities of decentralization. They examine how society's previous decade of obsession with self-optimization has come at the cost of outer exploration and collective innovation. They cover AI dominance and the emerging AI producer-consumer economy, questioning whether Mars colonization represents genuine pioneering ambitions or serves as a cover for space mining and industrial expansion. John and Bonnitta explore the critical changes we must anticipate over the next 5–10 years, examining both opportunities and challenges ahead. How can we best prepare ourselves to navigate these transformative times with wisdom, resilience, and foresight?
Get updates about the Divinity School Leadership Program application periods, short courses, interviews and other conversations released to our list, as well as personal and global insights to support your ability to create more living, sacred worlds. This newsletter is the place where we publish real-world achievements from our students so that you can stay appraised of the edges of innovation in nature-integrated collective intelligence. We also publish opportunities to contribute to projects and join organizations aligned with this vision.
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Originals
Shaping Futures that Affirm Life
The digital age has challenged how we make sense of the world, questioned our values, and transformed how we pursue meaningful lives. The pre-digital world is now gone, and society has been reshaped by a wave that is technological by design. In the 20th century, we witnessed the death of a dream—a mathematical, scientific, and technological future built on perfectly knowable reality, guaranteed rules, and flawless prediction. Though we now understand this is impossible, most scientific fields have yet to catch up and today's capital-intensive "advanced technology" industries still operate on these outdated ideals. This has all led to a default future of centralized control and widespread alienation and fragmentation. As this technocratic society becomes our "new normal," it grows increasingly difficult to imagine other futures. Yet this is not our fate.
Cutting Through the Noise
Originals features cutting-edge scientists, technologists, policymakers, and cultural innovators whose work is relevant to creating systems aligned with biological intelligence and the values of the living world. Each episode prioritizes the context and long-term consequences of each guest’s work, the edges of their thinking, and the skills that enable them to keep working in the unknown, the ambiguous, and the new.
Originals Community
Our goal is to identify the skills that empower originality and highlight how to practice and expand your mastery of them. This community values serious learning, focusing on developing character, vision, action, and commitment—not just accumulating knowledge.
Originals is a community dedicated to cultivating overlooked yet more powerful futures—futures led by people attuned to life's vitality and skilled in nurturing it. Our members—engineers, artists, scientists, policymakers, counselors, students, farmers, and others—are transforming their fields from reductive to creative practices, recognizing the shared principles that underlie this shift across disciplines. The Originals community is building worlds where our sciences and technologies foster greater opportunity, novelty, belonging, and more life.
Your Host
Bonnitta Roy
Originals is guided by Bonnitta Roy, a philosopher, futurist, horse whisperer, and insight guide. After graduating from Colby College with a BA in Biology and Philosophy, she pursued doctoral studies in neurophysics at UC Berkeley. She then built a successful landscape design firm in New England, where she also raised horses and led transformative horse energy workshops—teaching participants to recognize their unconscious communication patterns through simple gestures. Following this chapter, Roy returned to academia and teaching. She has published over 20 articles in academic journals spanning philosophy of mind, metaphysics, organizational design, and leadership studies. She designed and directed the MA in Consciousness Studies at the Graduate Institute (2014–2022) and launched a thriving Substack reaching over ten thousand subscribers across 164 countries. Her work now culminates in Originals and The Divinity School, which offers a certificate course and an upcoming MA in Leadership.
Deep Learning
Before each Originals episode's public release, Bonnitta Roy hosts an interactive watch party exclusively for Originals Community members. These sessions offer an opportunity to experience the conversations in a new light, as Bonnitta provides moment-by-moment commentary that reveals the deeper layers and nuances within each dialogue.
In the Episodes, Bonnitta focuses primarily on featured guests’ insights—in Watch Parties, she draws out why they are the kind of people that generate original insights and reveals the higher, sacred purpose they serve.
Prior to recording each interview, we organize study groups inspired by our featured guests' bodies of work. Together, we examine relevant books, videos, essays, and research, connecting these materials to the Originals community's vision and your personal goals. Community members who are passionately connecting a featured guest’s work to their own may be invited to lead these study groups.
Originals Membership
Join a Community That Values Serious Learning, Focusing on Developing Character, Vision, Action, and Commitment
Monthly Subscription
- Engage in Deep Learning – Join live watch parties with Bonnie and study groups that explore the ideas and perspectives of featured guests in greater depth.
- Connect with a Diverse Community – Be part of a network of individuals from various fields innovating toward more life-affirming and creative approaches in their work.
- Develop Practical Skills – Focus on building the capacities needed to navigate complexity and contribute meaningfully to new futures.
- Participate in Collaborative Efforts – Take part in discussions and initiatives that aim to explore and implement new ideas across different disciplines.
The Divinity School
In addition to hosting Originals, Bonnitta is the Academic Director of The Divinity School, a year long Certificate in Leadership (working towards M.A. accreditation). In Originals, Bonnitta platforms the kinds of visionary scholars who make up The Divinity School’s faculty.
The Divinity School is designed to forge leaders who can align humanity with the natural intelligence of the universe—be it through physicalist (fundamental laws), religious (divine will), or naturalistic (entelechy of the life force) perspectives. The year long curriculum focuses on four pillars of great leaders: clarity in perception, visionary scholarship, wisdom skills, and effective agency.
Endemic
Originals and The Divinity School are projects of Endemic and hosted in Endemic’s platform. Endemic is an community development and innovation ecosystem working to rejuvenate society by training people and communities in crucial skills to unlock and accelerate pathways toward richer, more vibrant, and more alive worlds and to support the healthy coordination of movements to achieve those futures.
As an Originals Member you get access to the Endemic forum where you will meet your new best friends ; ) Together, you will contribute to practical, action-oriented conversations moving forward high-leverage fields advancing more living futures, establish or join structured coalitions taking responsibility for accomplishing concrete interventions, and participate in additional educational pathways with leaders not included in Originals and The Divinity School.