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PODCAST

Robert meets World Podcast

Aqua Flamingo Media

Some questions don't resolve and this podcast doesn't pretend otherwise.Ranging from existential philosophy to conversations about therapy, dating and cultural theory of religion, each episode is less about arriving at answers than about taking the questions seriously. Essays, interviews and occasional side quests from the edges of how we think about meaning, identity, consciousness and what it actually means to live well, by someone still genuinely figuring it out.Produced by Aqua Flamingo

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

3:47

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion (Side Quest 25)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/10/02

There is a simple way of looking at life. You feel joy, and call it joy. You see a sign and read the letters as they are written. There is a second way of viewing life which asks, what is this sentence hiding from itself. The second way is known by Ricoeur as The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

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5:57

Sidemen is a Good Place to Do Nothing (Side Quest 24)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/09/25

On the Eastern edge of Bali, a few hours from the bustling draw of Ubud is the small rural area of Sidemen.A population of 39,000 split across 10 villages, some people say that Sidemen reflects Bali from 20 years ago. A place before the influx of investment capital into hospitality to support the growing tourism surge on the island.A place of massive rice fields, subsistence farming and the classic Balinese gentleness that captures the heart of travellers.Comparing this to the developed Canggu,

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8:21

You Technically Need a Permit for That: Spirit of the...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/09/18

A quiet afternoon DJing in Golden Gate Park took an unexpected turn when a park ranger approached me—triggering a wave of immigration anxiety, panic over losing my visa, and an unexpected dive into legal philosophy.In this video essay, I share a personal narrative about playing music along JFK Drive in San Francisco and how a brief encounter sparked a deeper realization about the "spirit of the law," regulation, and why human discretion keeps what you might assume is a rigid legal code

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4:27

The Most Complex Yoga Asana (Side Quest 16)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/09/11

To do a plank..Correctly..Is a hard thing to do.The instructor announced as we listened on the veranda of a steamy Costa Rican morning in San Jose.Often, it looks easy to do from the outside...Because we do not see the effort required,From the inside.Immediately, a Tibetan singing bowl was struck in the background: an elongated ringing followed by a trailing silence circling off into eternity - we held planking on our big toes.

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3:55

Notice The "I" & The "Me" (Side Quest 14)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/09/04

The quiet voice in my head hummed along as I walked.Notice the “I” and the “Me”.Pay attention to the "Me"In a dream-like state, the sound of my footsteps down Fillmore street filled my ears with a predicable click and clack noise providing a background note for the inward process that was taking place. A process in which I found myself catching each and every thought that the mind attempted to race after, having sprung free like a jailbroken convict.

en-US

61:20

RXW12 - Kathryn Bakos: Climate Adaptation, Financial...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/09/04

CHAPTERS00:00:00 Introduction & What is Climate Adaptation? 00:03:15 The Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation 00:07:15 Insurance Trends as a Climate Risk Proxy00:15:30 How Flooding Impacts the Housing Market 00:21:07 Home-Level Flood Protection for $0, $250, $250+; Municipalities offering $3K+ in subsidies to prevent flood00:26:52 Extreme Weather Risks Across Canada 00:34:08 Corporate Risk & Financial Exposure 00:40:20 The real ROI for Adaptation: $2-10B / yr?00:46:02 Dawn River and Central

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9:45

Martial Arts without Spirituality is Just Violence...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/08/28

My heart felt just about ready to explode out of my chest.But, before I could catch my breath, Kru Top ran to the push sled.Standing on top of it and yelled out to me:TAXI !I pushed the 75kg fighter across the gym and back in genuine difficulty, as I gasped for air.But, Kru Top’s amusement from his taxi trip was short lived.Despite being one of the more brutal striking sports in martial arts, Muay Thai possesses a deeply transformative and spiritual dimension.If we can look beyond the fighting of

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4:28

Side Quest 15 - On Reasons to Write (RXW)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/08/21

What reason is there, really, to do all this writing you ask?Is it perhaps because on the empty pages one can, as Robert Johnson puts, in the domain of the psychological unconscious,“Clothe the invisible forces [unseen and] to make [them] visible.”Inner Work p. 21That is, one can make apparent the continuous inward monologue of the skull and enliven it to reality. But surely it is not only this. You see, in the white spaces of empty lines one can be the most truthful with oneself, and in this

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21:26

Side Quest 26 - Dress Rehearsal for Life; ambition,...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/08/14

I’m standing alone in a University Community Center basement classroom. Beige, brown and black tiled, dull, and lifeless walls enclose the space with a cast of around 18 empty chairs and tables.Overhead, a projector scatters light onto a white screen with a PowerPoint presentation reading “Expect The Unexpected” in black font to an orange background (apparently I failed the Intro to Perfect PowerPoint Presentations 101 class).It’s intensely quiet, only the sound of my inner monologue and what I have

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3:13

Side Quest 8: Who Are You When You Stop Becoming?

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/08/07

Who are you when you stop becoming?It is common in social groups to give a role to a given person.A role is a box. A safe, bounded, predictable box.The mind is a sophisticated categorizing, perimeter and box constructing machine.It draws divisions on the continuous to create order, logic and reason.Once a box is drawn around something or someone, the mind is set at ease.It no longer says: “What is this?”Instead it says: “I know”.

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4:47

Side Quest 20: The Culture That Could Only Count

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/07/31

Everything today seems to come with a number attached.Followers, likes, watch time, sentiment scores, even influence itself, quantified and ranked.What would happen if we took all of that away?This episode is an open inquiry into a world that has learned to measure almost everything, told through verse, and what the implications may be.

en-US

15:10

Side Quest 23 - Ain't No Economy Like The Attention...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/07/24

The story of a decade long, still unresolved fight to quit social media, from deleting Facebook in university to running Instagram ads for a DJ business years later. A honest look at notification loops, comparison, and what it actually costs to live inside the attention economy, even when you know exactly how it works.

en-US

7:24

Side Quest 18: What Would You Be Secretly Relieved...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/07/17

Several months ago I became a bit obsessed with understanding Human Design (HD), a neo-typology that has emerged in the last 40 years combining Jewish Kabbalah with the Chinese I Ching and Vedic Astrology. While I do wonder if it was an immaculate conception born of counter culture in the bohemian refuge of 1970s Ibiza (the founder “Ra Uru Hu” lived there during his “revelation”), it has stimulated me into trying to live in a more embodied way. That is, to make decisions with an additional body

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19:54

Side Quest 19: The Ministry of Self Improvement

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/07/10

Jung personified that place, the Shadow, which Robert Johnson playfully describes as: “[the] unconscious dumping ground for undesirable characteristics of a personality”As a collective, we’ve developed different sanctioned places for those parts of ourselves, and for me, that’s always been fitness and performance training. The gym has always been the place to find comfort in breaking myself down and vocalizing parts of myself that I don’t often express.From long distance running to Olympic

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13:25

Side Quest 10: The Beauty of Ugly Movement

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/07/03

I laid on the floor in a heavy state as a dark wave of depressive fatigue and heaviness washed over me.A massive pressure weighed on my head, and that characteristic optimism telling me there is always a way out, reframe or way to step back to see the bigger picture, seemed to be failing me. I didn’t see a way out of what was happening to me: the seeming hell of a mind viciously swirling in an anxious and disturbed spiral; the same hell that Vipassana meditations had so kindly reacquainted me to

en-US

17:34

Side Quest 22: The Selfish, The Selfless & An Old Man...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/06/26

In this side quest, Robert unpacks the chaotic, messy, and deeply human struggle at the intersection of ego, detachment, and higher minded ideals.Starting with a late-night standoff with a spider, Robert discusses internal conflict between three distinct modes of being that we all cycle through:The Personal Ego: Our defensive, flawed nature trying to get ahead.The Spiritual Ego ("The Yogic Doormat"): The exhausting pursuit of endless compliance that often leads to self-abandonment.The Zen

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10:04

Side Quest 13: Fear-Cold-Connection (RXW)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/06/19

We stood facing the water basins as faux candles let out a soft glimmer in the dark room. Like a 1500s secret Gregorian chanting chamber (or potential incognito cult initiation), four rows of partnered pairs stood above individual plunging pools as sweat dripped off our bodies from the prior sauna session. Inhaling and exhaling deeply into the diaphragm we stared directly into our apparent fate: ice water.

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4:37

Side Quest 6: The Validation Hole

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/06/16

Drawing on Sherry Turkle's observation that smartphone-raised kids "know how to be lonely, but not how to be alone," this episode explores what Jungian psychology calls the vas hermeticum, and it's antithesis the validation hole. The validation hole represents the impulse to reach for our devices the moment internal tension rises, bleeding pressure through likes, comments, and digital echo chambers before it can do its alchemical work. To illustrate the alternative, the episode turns

en-US

13:16

Side Quest 12 - Emotional Polyphony (RXW)

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/06/12

When we feel our emotions like a piece of music, rather than a still photograph, we allow them to move and layer, rather than being pinned down and lodged for inspection; in doing so we're practicing a form of emotional polyphony.Emotional polyphony is the capacity of both the human mind and masterful artwork to sustain multiple conflicting emotional registers in parallel without forcing resolution. The literary term "polyphony" originates from Mikhail Bakhtin's borrowing of

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14:24

RXW - Side Quest 7: To 'Say Everything' (On Creatives...

Robert meets World Podcast ·

2026/05/25

"'A genuine inspiration has visited me’, he wrote to his friend in October… Stavrogin is everything", Dostoevsky wrote in a note dated August 16, 1870.Once the true protagonist appeared, the materials of [Demons] began to compose themselves around him. The result: neither pamphlet nor poem but recasting of both, to a cost of another two years of work.What is it about the creative process that drives the feeling to "say everything?".

en-US

36 results

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