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PODCAST

The Observing I Podcast

Award winning podcast about philosophy, psychology, and the human experience. New episode every Tuesday. theobservingi.com

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

46:40

The Vanishing of Vernon Pale

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/12/16

This episode is a little different. It’s a work of fiction. A Christmas ghost story for philosophers. A Dickensian horror wrapped in VHS static and existential dread.In 1983, a philosophy professor named Vernon Pale went on public access television to deliver a Christmas lecture. He argued that every gift we give is violence. That obligation is the real present we’re exchanging. That Christmas is capitalism’s most honest ritual, because it makes that transaction explicit.For forty three minutes he

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42:53

The Secret Lives of Objects

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/12/09

What if everything around you has a secret life you’ll never access?Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology makes a radical claim: objects aren’t just props in the human drama. The hammer in your toolbox, the coffee cup on your desk, the chair holding your weight. They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you. They exist in depths you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you grip them or how much you think you understand them.This episode explores Harman’s philosophy of

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43:46

Chronophobia: Why Modern Life Makes Us Afraid of Time...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/12/02

You wake up and the first thing you think is how many hours you wasted sleeping. How many emails piled up. How many opportunities slipped past while you were unconscious. This is chronophobia. The gnawing animal panic that time isn’t just passing. It’s hunting you.This episode is your descent into the fear you’ve been scheduling around. The dread you’ve been color-coding and optimizing and productivity-hacking into submission. You think if you pack your calendar tight enough the terror will

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52:20

Ethics for the End of Everything

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/11/25

The universe is falling apart. That is not a metaphor. That is physics. That is the second law of thermodynamics. That is entropy winning every single time you take a breath, think a thought, care about anything at all.Drew M. Dalton and speculative realism refuse to ignore this. No transcendent meaning. No cosmic purpose. No metaphysical safety net catching you when you dissolve back into the substrate you temporarily organised yourself out of. Philosophy has spent thousands of years building

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41:53

How Imagination Becomes Reality: Grant Morrison and...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/11/16

Grant Morrison had a nervous breakdown in 1988 while writing about insanity. He was channeling madness, writing madness, becoming madness. And then one day the character he created walked into his living room in Glasgow and sat down across from him. King Mob. The bald anarchist revolutionary. They had a conversation. Morrison couldn’t remember who spoke first.That is when he understood. Fiction is not inert. Imagination is not passive. When you imagine something hard enough, with enough detail, with

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42:09

Hyperobjects and Other Nightmares: Timothy Morton and...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/11/02

You think you understand climate change. You don’t. You think it’s a problem you can solve with better recycling habits and electric cars. It’s not. It’s a hyperobject. Something so massively distributed in time and space that you never see all of it at once. You only see pieces. Symptoms. The hurricane. The wildfire. The flood. But those aren’t the thing. Those are just the thing touching you before it moves on.Timothy Morton wants you to stop pretending you’re outside looking in. You’re inside

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49:43

The Cartography of Pain: Paul Auster's City of Glass...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/10/26

A writer named Daniel Quinn answers the wrong phone number at three in the morning and becomes a detective who never existed. He follows a father who locked his son in darkness for nine years trying to recover the language of God. He maps routes through Manhattan that spell TOWER OF BABEL. He fills a red notebook with observations that become unreadable. He watches until he forgets he’s watching. He dissolves into the architecture of surveillance until there’s no one left doing the surveilling.This

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51:05

Four Thousand Weeks: A Love Letter to Your Mortality

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/10/19

You have approximately four thousand weeks to live. If you’re lucky. If you’ve already lived thirty years, you’ve spent about fifteen hundred of them. They’re gone. You’re not getting them back.This week we dive into Oliver Burkeman’s book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” and ask a question that productivity culture desperately wants you to avoid: What if trying to “get everything done” is fundamentally broken?The productivity industrial complex promises that if you just get

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41:51

Peter Putnam's Cosmos: The Functionalist Demolition...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/10/12

This week on The Observing I, prepare for the total demolition of your most cherished comfort: the belief in your soul. We drag the ghost out of the machine and dissect the brutal, cold logic of philosopher Peter Putnam’s Functionalism. If you cling to the idea that you are a unique, precious snowflake, this episode is a necessary betrayal. We cut through the pathetic noise of both priests and boring materialists to ask the ultimate question: What if your mind isn’t defined by the soft meat it’s

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44:49

The Philosopher’s Cage: Why Every Age Builds Its Own...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/09/28

Philosophy sells itself as the search for truth. Eternal wisdom. Universal principles. But strip away the polish and what you find isn’t purity, it’s propaganda. From Athens to Silicon Valley, philosophy has always been a mirror, warped and cracked, reflecting whoever happens to be holding power.This episode drags you through the centuries to show how thought has been chained, caged, and weaponised. Socrates exposing Athens until they killed him. Plato drafting a utopia that doubles as a

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45:36

Heidegger and the Horror of Existence

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/09/14

Martin Heidegger doesn’t waste time with the easy questions. He doesn’t ask what truth is, or what justice means, or whether God exists. He asks the question everyone avoids, the one buried under chatter and distraction: what does it mean to be? Once you hear it, you can’t shake it. Heidegger drags you through the foundations of your existence, showing you that you were thrown here without consent, that you hide inside the routines of everydayness, that your anxiety is the sound of your own Being

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48:57

The Pendulum of Suffering: Schopenhauer’s Dark...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/09/07

Life isn’t a journey. It isn’t progress. It isn’t destiny unfolding like some golden road. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, life is a pendulum. One side is pain. The other is boredom. Back and forth, forever.This week on The Observing I, we dive headfirst into the black hole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The world, he says, isn’t made of matter, or reason, or God. It’s made of Will. Blind, endless hunger that never stops gnawing. Every desire you chase, every victory you clutch, every kiss, every

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44:59

121 In the Province of the Mind: The work of John C....

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/08/31

Step into a black coffin filled with warm saltwater. Float until your body disappears. Wait until your thoughts collapse. What’s left? Just awareness. Just the raw hum of consciousness.That’s where John C. Lilly began. He wasn’t a mystic, not at first. He was a physician, a neuroscientist, a man in a white lab coat at the National Institutes of Health. He mapped the brain with electrodes, charted nerves like a cartographer drawing borders. But beneath the sterile experiments was a restless hunger

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52:20

120 Attention is the Last Frontier: Bernard Stiegler...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/08/24

Bernard Stiegler’s life reads like something out of a parable. A young man with no future robs banks in 1970s France, spends years behind bars, and in that captivity rebuilds himself with philosophy. He walks out of prison not as a criminal, but as a thinker possessed, convinced that the real theft in our time is not money, but attention.In this episode of The Observing I, we explore Stiegler’s haunting philosophy of technology. For him, every tool humanity creates is a pharmakon, a drug that is

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48:17

119 Laughing at the End of the World: The Philosophy...

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/08/17

Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher who shouldn’t exist. Dishevelled, incoherent, constantly coughing and stumbling, he looks less like a thinker and more like a man who accidentally wandered onto a stage. And yet, out of this chaos comes one of the sharpest diagnoses of our world: why we laugh at ideology, why we fantasize about the end of the world, why capitalism feels eternal even as it devours us.In this episode of The Observing I, we dive deep into the contradictions that make Žižek both clown and

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48:00

118 The Middle Path of the Mind

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/08/10

After a month away in Indonesia, the temples, incense, and heavy heat of Bali still linger in my mind. The summer break has ended, and The Observing I returns with something both spiritual and deeply psychological. This episode asks a simple but unsettling question: what happens when ancient Buddhist philosophy meets modern psychology?It begins with a moment in Ubud, sitting cross-legged in a temple courtyard as a monk tells me, “Everything is impermanent.” A week later, back home, my therapist

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50:07

117 Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/07/06

Antonin Artaud didn’t want to entertain you. He wanted to infect you. He wanted to burn down the theatre, then climb into the ashes and scream until the gods woke up. His Theatre of Cruelty was never a metaphor. It was a ritual, a possession, a violent reminder that behind every mask of civilization there is a jaw, and behind every jaw, a scream waiting to be released.In this episode of The Observing I, we do not study Artaud. We survive him. We walk with him through the electric corridors of his

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40:36

116 Georges Bataille, The Philosopher of Holy Filth

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/06/29

This episode is not clean.It doesn’t try to sanitize the grotesque or turn philosophy into polite conversation. It doesn’t quote thinkers to make you sound smarter at dinner parties. This episode crawls through the blood, the filth, and the sacred excess of Georges Bataille. A man who tried to turn his life into a ritual and his suffering into something divine.In this journey, we don’t just talk about Bataille’s ideas. We enter them. We sit inside the madness. From his shattered childhood and

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47:24

115 The Death of Deep Time

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/06/22

You know that nagging feeling, right? That relentless pressure of the "now"? The constant urge to scroll, to react, to optimize for the immediate? We're all in it. Chasing the next hit, the next notification, the next fleeting distraction. Our attention spans are shattered, our patience non-existent. We're living in a world that's forgotten how to truly see beyond the blink of an eye.This isn't just about being "busy." This is a profound, dangerous amnesia. We’ve forgotten Deep Time. We’ve severed

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51:11

114 Hannah Arendt: Totalitarianism, Evil, and Action

The Observing I Podcast ·

2025/06/15

Project Mayhem, prepare yourselves. This week on The Observing I, we’re tearing into the mind of Hannah Arendt, the radical thinker who redefined our understanding of evil, freedom, and human existence.Arendt, a survivor of 20th-century totalitarianism, didn't offer comforting answers. Instead, she delivered unsettling truths: that the greatest evils can be "terrifyingly normal," committed by those who simply fail to think. We'll brutally dissect her seminal works, exploring how insidious systems

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161 results

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