ontological playlists
Every year I rebuild my playlists on Spotify. Below are descriptions to playlists from 2020-2025. Each one is based on a mood or behavior. music has always been how i map emotion to time. each playlist is a small world, a setting for a state of mind. they move between moods, memories, and motion.
bubble — french and tropical house that feels like sunlight on water.
cloud — organic house that drifts between stillness and lift.
cozy — warm folk harmonies for nights that need softness.
contemplate — cinematic calm for thinking, working, or feeling deeply.
drum — afro house rhythm for movement and grounded energy.
fall — love in full color, cinematic, tender, for the start of something special.
flow — instrumental grooves for mornings and creative momentum.
float — ambient beauty for rest, bathing, or quiet renewal.
go — steady build and drive for full-body movement.
grow — progressive sound that evolves and opens space.
groove — vintage rhythm with soul and swagger.
innovate — steady pulse for working and making together.
learn — meditative soundscapes with voices of wisdom.
lime cars — music for long drives and open-hearted love.
nightcap — late-night jazz for dim lights and slow hours.
nostalgia — songs that shaped a youth and still hum with memory.
operate — global electronica for focus and forward motion.
play — playful melodic house for light and laughter.
quest — cinematic themes for journeys and imagined worlds.
repair — quiet lyrical music for mending hearts.
reverse — timeless sound from another era, easy and true.
rhyme — hip hop storytelling with rhythm and grit.
rock — 80s anthems that still hit like lightning.
run — music built to match the pace of your stride.
send — deep electronic textures for night drives and motion.
shidō — ambient space for reflection and emotional stillness.
sip — gentle japanese-inspired sound for tea, rest, and breath.
swim — fluid instrumentals that move like water and wind.
touch — slow, sensual sound for connection and intimacy.
traverse — desert blues and deep rhythm for long horizons.
vida — lively spanish energy for movement and celebration.
vybe — soft background for conversation and connection.
wander — bright acoustic sound for open trails and long walks.
books that changed me
Mastery
by George Leonard: Nonfiction / Self-Growth & Practice
My favorite book of my life. It was wrote by my mentor’s mentor, and resides in the quiet zone of growth: learning that the point isn’t just hitting some milestone but living the path of becoming.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
by E. O. Wilson: Nonfiction / Science & Philosophy
In my top 3 - this book threw open the doors between science, humanities and culture and made me feel knowledge is not compartmentalized but woven. It nudged me to trust that systems of meaning aren’t separate.
Recapture the Rapture
by Jamie Wheal: Nonfiction / Consciousness & Culture
Written by a mentor and friend, this book reframed how I see awe, meaning, and human potential. It’s part science, part sermon, and entirely alive with questions about where we are and where we are going.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
by Buckminster Fuller: Non-fiction / Systems Thinking & Sustainability
Bucky is probably my biggest hero. This book made me aware that stewardship isn’t optional, it’s the job.
The Future is Faster Than You Think
by Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler: Technology / Future Studies
A field guide to exponential change. It left me both charged and uneasy about what’s coming.
Stealing Fire
by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal: Science / Performance / Flow
About chasing altered states and collective flow. It helped me frame creativity as a spiritual practice in disguise.
Zero to One
by Peter Thiel: Business / Innovation
Sharp, contrarian thinking about creating the future. Useful in remembering that true originality is lonely work.
The Tao of Pooh
by Benjamin Hoff: Philosophy / Eastern Wisdom
About the art of doing less and being more. It made me question the rush and remember calm matters.
The Tiny Book of Essential Wisdom
by my dear friend, Forrest Landry: Philosophy / Aphorisms
A dense pocket-philosophy in bite-size aphorisms. This one sharpened my lens on meaning and choice.
Originals
by Adam Grant: Psychology / Creativity
Explores the art of being contrarian with grace. It nudged me to trust my odd ideas more fully and act on them.
Start with Why
by Simon Sinek: Leadership / Business
A reminder that purpose precedes momentum. Straightforward but grounding especially early in my career.
Be More Pirate
by Sam Conniff Allende: Culture / Entrepreneurship
One of my absolute favorites. A radical playbook for breaking rules with integrity. It’s rebellion, but organized.
You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future
by Jonathon Keats: Biography / Design Thinking
Fuller’s mind was a galaxy. This book is an homage to his life and reminded me that systems thinking can be art.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari: Future Studies / Science / Philosophy
Harari stretches time forward, tracing obsession with godlike control. It’s both inspiring and quietly terrifying.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari: Contemporary Culture / Philosophy
Less about history, more about surviving now. It helped me sharpen how I think about truth, tech, and agency.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari: Nonfiction / History / Philosophy
A sweeping look at how we became who we are. It made me think about civilization like a fragile evolving story.
The Denial of Death
by Ernest Becker: Psychology / Philosophy
Unflinching, but it changed how I see human motivation and our lives as a runaway train agains entropy.
Finite and Infinite Games
by James Carse: Philosophy / Systems Thinking
A simple idea that some games are about winning, others about continuing the play with omni-win mentalities.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell: Mythology / Psychology
The original blueprint for all life journeys. It helped me see that transformation comes through loss.
The Mastery of Love
by Don Miguel Ruiz: Spirituality / Relationships
A kind, piercing take on love without attachment. It helped me stop confusing drama or passion for depth.
The Four Agreements
by Don Miguel Ruiz: Spirituality / Self-Growth
Four simple principles that somehow touch everything. This is required reading for life and in my top 3.
Experiments in Truth
by Ram Dass: Spiritualilty / Growth
This is Ram Dass at his most human and humorous. He turns enlightenment into something reachable.
Be Here Now
by Ram Dass: Spirituality / Mindfulness
A psychedelic field guide for waking up. Every time I revisit it, it lands differently. I’ve opened it over 100 times.
Conversations with God
by Neale Donald Walsch: Spiritual / Metaphysical
A sincere dialogue with the divine. The tattoo on my left arm is directly from a talk I had with Neale in 2014.
The Magdalene Manuscript
by Tom Kenyon & Judi Sion: Esoteric / Spiritual History
Mystical and sensual, it reframed love and creation as sacred technology. Not light reading, but potent.
Island
by Aldous Huxley: Fiction / Utopian Philosophy
A gentle island society trying to live awake. It’s a quiet nod to community, governance, and culture.
The Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell: Sociology / Ideas
A field guide about how small shifts spark big waves. It made me appreciate timing as much as talent.
Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell: Psychology / Intuition
A deep dive into the snap judgments that often know more than we do.
Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline: Sci-Fi / Adventure
A nostalgic fever dream for anyone raised on screens. It made me rethink escapism as both refuge and trap.
1984
by George Orwell: Fiction / Dystopian
Still uncomfortably relevant. A warning disguised as a novel — and a study in how fear distorts truth.
Dune
by Frank Herbert: Science Fiction / Philosophy
Modern scripture about power. It made me think about how leadership always carries both shadow and sacrifice.
Foundation
by Isaac Asimov: Science Fiction / Systems Thinking
I read it as a meditation on inevitability and on how even the smartest plan still bends to human emotion.
Harry Potter
by J. K. Rowling: Fantasy / Coming-of-Age
These books taught me about friendship, loyalty, and the strange cost of being chosen to fight darkness.
Hatchet
by Gary Paulsen: Young Adult / Survival
My favorite book as a kid. It taught me resilience before I even had words for it.
Holes
by Louis Sachar: Young Adult / Mystery
A story that loops luck, destiny, and justice together. Stranger and wiser than it first appears.
Where the Wild Things Are
by Maurice Sendak: Children’s Fiction
A map of childhood rage and imagination. It’s still teaching me how to come home to myself.
Oh, The Thinks You Can Think!
by Dr. Seuss: Children’s / Imagination
Playful proof that thought itself is creative. It planted the idea that wonder is a discipline.
The Giving Tree
by Shel Silverstein: Children’s / Philosophy
A bittersweet and painfully true metaphor about love without boundaries and sacrifice without resentment.
The Bible
by a bunch of people we are uncertain even existed: Religion, Sacred
Beyond religion, it’s a compendium of archetypes, poetry, and paradox and was my foundational teaching as a kid. It fundamentally shaped how I read everything else.
trimtab quotes
It all begins with an idea.
Over the years I’ve collected sentences like artifacts. These are pieces of insight that caught me mid-breath and never let go. Some are from the people who I was inspired by or have been my heroes. Some are from mentors and friends I’ve held in the flesh. A few might even be from me, though I’ll let you guess which.
Each one is a compass needle in motion, pointing somewhere between wonder and responsibility.
“Love is that which enables choice.” Forrest Landry
“Life is not about always being in integrity. It’s about how quickly we can get back in integrity when we fall out. This is the practice of center.” Domo
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
“The consciousness that created the problem is not the same consciousness that will solve it.” Albert Einstein
“Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change changes you.” Adrienne Marie Brown
“Sometimes a dream is all you have, the only truth that lives in you, like the memory of a great king.” Rafiki
“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” Martin Luther King Jr.
“The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear, and bearing it.” Jordan Peterson
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen
“Plans are worthless. But planning is priceless.” Winston Churchill
“Before you awaken, you go towards water and you avoid fire. After you begin to awaken, you go towards fire.” Rumi
“Fear keeps us away from love.” Bell Hooks
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Gustave Flaubert
“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong.” Thich Nhat Hanh
“A setback is a moment to sit back and reinvent yourself for your comeback.” Margo Majdi
“Every conflict the world has ever known comes from a missed acknowledgement.” Dave Zaboski
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond by removing impossible obstacles.” Terence McKenna
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“If our sense-making is broken, then our peace-making will fail. What we call civilization is only as coherent as the quality of attention we bring to each other.” Daniel Schmachtenberger
“We cannot compete our way out of the problems that competition created.” Daniel Schmachtenberger
“When you touch the numinous, the ineffable, the thing that cannot be named, it reorganizes your priorities. The sacred is not a category of belief, it’s a mode of perception.” Erik Davis
“Technology is the literal externalization of the human imagination. We have become gods, yet we remain afraid of our own reflection.” Jason Silva
“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose. You must unlearn what you have learned.” Yoda
“The spiritual is not a retreat from the world, it’s a more exquisite way of paying attention to it.” Erik Davis
“We are the species that transforms myth into matter, dreams into data, and prayer into possibility.” Jason Silva
“Much of what is called enlightenment is simply the slow remembering of what has always been true.” Unknown
“We are meaning-making creatures in a universe that does not hand out meaning freely. Our task is not to find purpose but to weave it.” Erik Davis
“Ecstasy is not escape. It’s the moment we finally arrive where we’ve always been.” Jason Silva
“The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.” Toni Cade Bambara
“Our world has come to value only that which can be counted, ignoring what can only be felt.” Adam Robinson
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to experience.” Frank Herbert
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me that I am everything. Between these banks flows the river of my life.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Don’t mistake the selfie on the summit for the completed journey.” Jamie Wheal
“We tend to say we have a limited amount of time, but it might make more sense to say we are a limited amount of time.” Oliver Burkeman
“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different.” Oprah Winfrey
“Love doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest.” Love Hard
“To exist is to survive unfair choices.” The OA
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” Epictetus
“You only have to find yourself. Everything else you can Google.” Pavitra Maa
“Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.” Rumi
“We must live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.” Charles Bukowski
“The greater the gap between who we are and what we do, the more pain we feel.” Ted Klontz
“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” African Proverb
“Treat yourself like you are someone that you care about.” Jordan Peterson
“Be true to life by being true to this moment. The destination is secondary.” Eckhart Tolle
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, while imagination embraces the entire world.” Albert Einstein
“When one can see oneself with clarity and acceptance, one is likely to see others the same way.” Vicki Noble
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” James Baldwin
“When you want to be free, you begin to hear that suffering is the mind’s clinging, offered to you as a gift.” Ram Dass
“Every emotion fully felt is bliss.” Joseph Campbell
“People say we’re seeking a meaning for life, but we’re seeking an experience of being alive.” Joseph Campbell
“If you push something away, it’s still got you. You are busy not doing it.” Ram Dass
“There is only now. The now is all there ever was and all there will ever be.” Alan Watts
“Treat every expression in communication as sacred. Meaning is found in relationship.” Jordan Hall
“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected.” Alain de Botton
“When our collective power to destroy exceeds our wisdom to guide it, the only moral project left is to close that gap.” Daniel Schmachtenberger
“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” George Addair
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” Rumi
“When we act on behalf of all living beings rather than our own self-interest, we have the immune system of the cosmos on our side.” Lynne Twist
“Do or do not. There is no try.” Yoda
“Our most beautiful experiences are not when we reach the summit but when we dissolve into awe — when we realize we are not standing above nature but inside it.” Jason Silva
“The future is a story we tell ourselves about the present. What we believe about it determines how we act today.” Erik Davis
“We find ourselves in uncertain and unfair times. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections.” Margaret Wheatley
“No life is more important than another, and nothing has being without purpose. What if we are all part of a great pattern we may someday understand?” A Winter’s Tale
“Every thing that is, is only in relationship to everything else that is.” Forrest Landry
“The path of wisdom is the practice of clear discernment — of distinguishing what serves life from what does not.” Forrest Landry
“People become successful and get locked into the behaviors that led them there. Be good at letting go of what made you successful.” Bruce Springsteen
“Once the mind is stretched by a new idea, it will never return to its original position.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” William Gibson
“Our thoughts shape our spaces, and our spaces return the favor.” Steven Johnson
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” C.S. Lewis
“The artistic imagination allows us to have a visceral experience of possibility.” Tom Chi
“The medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan
“The beautiful and scary thing about the efficacy of capitalism is it scales up ability while scaling down responsibility.” Domo
“Peak performance is an infinite game. Motivation gets you in the game, learning keeps you playing, creativity steers, and flow takes you beyond reason.” Steven Kotler
“An emotion lasts ninety seconds if it is left uninterrupted.” Tara Brach
“We are fantastic creatures with an utterly mundane mission: to lodge our genes in the future. What makes us extraordinary is that we can give that mission meaning.” Brett Weinstein
“If you want to be original, do a lot of work. The most prolific people are also the most original.” Adam Grant
“Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.” Serbian Proverb
“Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask whether your next act will be of any use.” Mahatma Gandhi
“When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.” Buddha
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” Vincent van Gogh
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King Jr.
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain
“There is a crack between worlds where imagination and matter trade secrets. The task is to listen to both.” Erik Davis
“The human adventure is just beginning. The same energy that fuels the stars is the energy that fuels our curiosity.” Jason Silva
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Yoda
“Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.” Buckminster Fuller
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Everything you say and do should prove what you believe.” Simon Sinek
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Suffering is the compost in the growth cycle of awakening.” Thich Nhat Hanh
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” Ursula K. Le Guin
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Ernest Hemingway
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” Carl Jung
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Rumi
Many of these words came to me from people I’ve been lucky enough to know — mentors, peers, and quiet geniuses I’ve shared work or fires with. Others are from the long dead, still whispering through time. And a few, well… may have been written by me under names I haven’t used in a while.
They all carry the same thread: that the world is not finished, and neither are we.
the experience highway
It all begins with an idea.
We begin in British Columbia, tracing the spine of the Pacific down the West Coast of the United States through Oregon forests, California deserts, the Baja Peninsula, and into greater Mexico.
Further south, we wind through the jungles of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Crossing the Caribbean coast, looping the Gulf of Mexico, and skirting the Florida panhandle, we head north to upstate New York, over the Great Lakes into eastern Canada, and out to the Atlantic high seas.
From there, we reach Portugal and drift along the Spanish coasts. Through the Mediterranean and onto the banks of Tel Aviv. Then south, past the equator into the Balinese archipelago, halfway around the world from where we began. We rise high enough to see the pattern: a planetary thread of light and movement weaving across the Earth.
Everywhere along this route, nomadic and regenerative communities are assembling. A constellation of intentional living, creativity, and resilience. Cultures once gathered along rivers and trade routes. Today, the highways are invisible: fiber-optic, emotional, relational. Technology has expanded our sense of place, allowing us to stay connected and at home in more than one world at once.
The challenge and opportunity is how we connect these places to their people. How we build the housing that holds us, the transit that moves us, and the digital systems that tie it all together. The design of these connective tissues will define how we behave as communities, how we collaborate across distance, and how coherent we become as a species.
Because we are not building communities. Communities grow. They pulse. They gather and disperse like breath. Human connection is the living fabric beneath any thriving collective, and like any organic system, it depends on rhythm, on the repetition of gathering.
Each community awakens a different way of being and a different kind of impact. How we move between them, how we explore, adapt, and carry learnings from one to another, is still a mystery we’re learning to solve together.
Most communities still operate in silos. Their stories live on static websites or abandoned Facebook pages, while their real-time progress and shared wisdom remain hidden in private group chats and lost documents.
Where is the dashboard of our collective evolution? Where is the feedback loop that helps a community understand itself? Where do we go to find resonance, to see which places fit our values, and how those places talk to each other?
Surely, it’s not still Facebook.
This is where technology must evolve. Not to replace the human pulse, but to serve it. What we design will design us back. If we build tools that amplify trust, transparency, and shared purpose, our behaviors will follow. If we don’t, the attention economy will keep fracturing the social one.
Everything rests on shared experience: how we design it, and how each experience points toward the next. These experiences are the new synapses of society. They teach us how to behave, how to belong, how to become.
So we ask: what are these places becoming? And if you had a hand in shaping them, what would you have them do?
This is the living question behind The Canvas. How we grow together, and how we design experiences that lead to greater connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the natural world. Through immersive gatherings, new tools for collaboration, and shared land-based infrastructures, we are prototyping what comes after isolation: coordinated belonging.
We are a community of operators, producers, and visionaries. Seekers building systems for a more regenerative and playful world. We are here to redesign how people convene and collaborate, to create immersive playgrounds that test new behaviors for living and working together.
This is a rallying call for the stewards of Spaceship Earth, those willing to build, share, and evolve the places where culture regenerates itself. The Experience Highway is already under construction. It just doesn’t have road signs yet.
We are here to lay them down. To connect the dots. And to invite you to share the ride. We are building a system for operating locations and a platform that allows communities to share land, co-create solutions, and live around them.
We believe the leaders of tomorrow are community organizers, regenerative designers, and systems thinkers. Our goal is to equip them with the tools to bring coherence where it’s needed most.
Written by Seth Bunting, 2025
For those traveling the Experience Highway and building the road as they go.