Today’s guest is William Morgan, the co-founder of Restless Egg, a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of “artist-founders” whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design.

His thesis: The tech sector’s obsession with optimization can’t help us discover the genuinely novel forms of human experience that this intelligent substrate makes possible. If we want something truly better, we need to cultivate the taste and discernment to know which futures are worth living in — and radically expand our imagination regarding what human-machine relationships can actually look like.

✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future

✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm

✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser: Taste & Sovereign Choice

02:46 Intro

06:41 Meet William Morgan

08:05 The Origins of The Avant-Garde

10:09 Taste and Abundance

12:12 Luxury Tech and Experience

15:57 Why Experiment?

20:21 Venture Models and Niches

25:20 The Sense Organs of Society

30:51 Rethinking Venture Incentives

38:54 Slop and Subculture Rebellion

47:13 Beyond “In” or “Out”

50:51 Founder Experiments Showcase

57:03 Scenius is Real Value

Mentioned

Restless Egg’s Half Dozen Newsletter

Art Is Everything You Don’t Have To Do by Cory Doctorow

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner

This collective is radically rethinking what it means to make art by Thom Waite at Dazed Digital

The Dimensions of Experience by Andrew P. Smith

Mount Analogue  by René Daumal

The Nerves of Government  by Karl Deutsch

Why Software is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen

Y Combinator’s Simple Agreement for Future Equity

Common As Airby Lewis Hyde

Standing by Wordsby Wendell Berry

Right Story, Wrong Storyby Tyson Yunkaporta

Fall by Neal Stephenson

The Politics of Visionby Lydia Nochlin

The Key to Science Fictionby Damien Walter

Flora Weil

Antithykera

CCRU

Luciana Parisi

George Bataille

Matthew David Segall

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