Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Taryn Southern.
Taryn Southern is an award-winning storyteller and creative technologist exploring the intersection of emerging tech and human potential. Her groundbreaking creative experiments blend innovation and art, offering insights into how we can all engage technology to lead more creative, joyful, healthy and productive lives.
A digital media pioneer, Taryn’s career began at the forefront of the online content revolution. In 2007, she hosted and produced a TV series documenting her travels to meet MySpace friends and uploaded her first viral video to YouTube. Over the next decade, she created over 1500 videos garnering more than 1 billion views.
In 2017, Taryn began experimenting with emerging technologies to push the boundaries of her creative work. She composed the world’s first AI album, which landed on the Top 100 US Radio Charts and received widespread media attention. She then combined VR, blockchain, AI and spatial computing to create an award-winning Google VR series, earning her the AT&T Film Award. Her directorial debut, I AM HUMAN, a documentary on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, won numerous awards, and is now available on Apple and Amazon.
Since 2021, Taryn has served as Chief Storyteller at a leading implantable neurotechnology company, where she launched the world’s first BCI museum and oversaw communications strategy for two successful funding rounds totaling over $230M. An advocate of women in science and tech, she has also angel invested in future-forward companies such as Oura, Etched, Extend Fertility, Vessel Health, and Forever Labs.
Prior to her work in emerging tech, Taryn’s creative work spanned both traditional and new media. She sold a musical comedy pilot to MTV when she was 23 years old, co-hosted Discovery Channel’s #1 late night show, guest-starred on primetime network TV shows, and created digital series for Conde Naste, Airbnb, The Today Show, Snapchat, and Maker Studios. She was an early advisor to YouTube, Google VR and Snapchat product teams, and consulted for companies like Conde Nast and Marriott on digital content strategy and narrative design.
I shared Taryn’s long bio for this intro because, well, it really gives you a sense of what you’re in for. This is someone who has followed her curiosity and intuition, and ended up in extremely cool, weird, niche places as a result.
Two big tentpoles of our conversation were neurotechnology and AI—two realms of tech that hold incredible import for the future. I was especially keen to get Taryn’s thoughts on brain-computer interfaces, a subset of neurotech which can be controlled directly by the brain. BCI is still pretty nascent, though you may have seen some buzzy viral videos from the Elon Musk-founded Neuralink over the past few years. Not all of these are implantable—which is to say, under the skin—some are external devices. But there’s a ton of innovation happening behind the scenes, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if we see a big hype cycle kick off around BCI this decade.
I’ve touched on neurotech in a few other episodes on the channel, notably with Nita Farahany and Brittan Heller, and I was excited to add another angle to the discourse by bringing in Taryn’s direct experience working at one of the pre-eminent BCI companies while also weaving in her perspective as an artist, musician, storyteller, and filmmaker. Of course, like her bio, we got into all sorts of other stuff, from our shared experiences in the early VR/AR community, the necessity of civil debate, psychedelics research, and much more.
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more. Here is another recent episode with polymath artist-intellectual Nora Bateson:
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