Weather Management
Influencing weather patterns at a local scale. This field applies human intervention to enhance or alter natural weather conditions for beneficial purposes like increasing rainfall or mitigating adverse weather effects.
Virtual Cells
Building virtual cells capable of predicting the behavior of healthy and diseased cells to improve our ability to treat many different diseases and optimize biological performance.
Plant Recursive Agriculture
Self-reinforcing systems where direct plant and soil signals create feedback loops that inform more preventative and predictive interventions, optimizing crop and ecosystem health.
Planetary-scale Stewardship
Creating decentralized AI and sensor networks that monitor and regulate planetary health metrics, such as biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and atmospheric carbon levels. These systems would report autonomously but with human oversight and intervention to support ecological balance.
New Organisms
New lifeforms, created through diverse manipulations of living organisms, from creating new environments for emergent cell behavior to genetic design and editing or even advanced breeding.
Neurological Sensing and Augmentation
Technologies and methods that enhance or expand human neurological capabilities through sensing, monitoring, and augmentation of brain and nervous system functions.
Energy Abundance
Developing and scaling technologies that increase the production, storage, and distribution of renewable and highly dense energy sources.
Climate Management
Technologies and systems designed to regulate environmental temperatures at various scales—from local to global—through methods such as solar radiation management, carbon removal, and other climate intervention techniques, including cooling, heating, and atmospheric moisture control, where appropriate.
Ecological Agency Value Integration
System for monitoring and evaluating how outputs from ecological systems influence and cascade through social and financial domains, integrating environmental metrics with human activity to support more sustainable decision-making.
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Commons Based Development Networks
Knowledge systems that represent assets (infrastructure, technology, commodities), environmental data, and financial flows for serving and protecting the commons.
Citizen Governance
Diverse models of governance processes that foster cultural adaptability, unity, and resilience in communities by strengthening their ability to preserve and upgrade traditions and values while adapting to new challenges. This approach emphasizes developing flexibility in value systems, increasing cultural memory, and expanding the range of meaningful and novel choices available to community members. Many of these use machines to sense and aggregate large amounts of data for community value discovery, so policy design and public action better integrate diverse values.
Biomanufacturing
The use of biological systems and living organisms to produce materials, chemicals, or fuels at industrial scales. This field combines biotechnology, engineering, and manufacturing processes to create sustainable alternatives to traditional production methods.
Animal Communication
Technologies and methods aimed at establishing meaningful communication with animal species, typically using artificial intelligence to interpret animal vocalizations and behaviors. This field includes initiatives working to decode and translate animal communication including whales, birds, and other species.
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Originals
by The Divinity School
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
3 days free + $40 Monthly
- 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.
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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.
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