The Observing I Podcast

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 produc...

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 su...

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 i...

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 bef...

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....

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 everythi...

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...

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 weaponis...

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...

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, endl...

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...

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 h...

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....

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 tem...

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 Obser...

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...

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 j...

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 tho...

Alright, Project Mayhem, this isn't another episode about chasing good vibes. This week, The Observing I rips apart the shiny façade of forced positivity and exposes the rotten core of the Tyranny of Happiness . We've been sold a lie: that constant happiness is the only acceptable emotional state, and if you're not perpetually beaming, you're broken. From the insidious conditioning of history to t...

You’re trapped. Not by physical walls, but by invisible ones. The constant, self-confirming loop of your feed, your tribe, your chosen narrative. Every voice is an echo of your own. Every thought, pre-approved. They've sold you certainty, but they've stolen your mind. In this episode of The Observing I, we rip the comfort blanket from your face and forces you to confront the intellectual padded ce...

They’ve gamified your existence, turning every breath into a metric, every action into a score. On this episode of The Observing I, we confront the uncomfortable reality of life as the ultimate rigged game. From the fleeting dopamine hit of a digital badge to the constant pressure of social media leaderboards, we dissect how the illusion of progress is designed to strip away your authentic self an...

What if the ground beneath your feet remembered more than you do? What if the stories you inherit, the ones whispered across centuries, aren’t just echoes, but living forces shaping who you are? In this episode of The Observing I , we journey into the brutal and beautiful world of memory - how it survives in land, in language, in blood. Through the lens of the Icelandic sagas and the raw tension b...

You were told this world was real. That flesh was truth. That gravity meant something. But what if none of it was supposed to happen? This is the dream. The broken one. Welcome to Sophia’s Dream - the story of a divine feminine being who reached too far, fell too hard, and accidentally gave birth to a blind god who built this world like a prison with beautiful wallpaper. His name is Yaldabaoth. He...

We cheer the hero. We hiss at the villain. But what if we've had it backwards all along? In this episode of The Observing I, we dig deep into the ethics of monsters, and uncover the uncomfortable truth: villains might be the only ones telling it like it is. From Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor to Killmonger, Tyler Durden, Joker, and Walter White, we peel back the polite layers of morality and ask “w...

What if everything you think you are is just a performance? A glitch. A mask. A beautifully rehearsed hallucination mistaken for truth. In this episode of The Observing I, we dive deep into the architecture of the ego - how it forms, why it lies, and what happens when it collapses. We begin with Narcissus, not as a symbol of vanity, but as a child starving for recognition. Then we break open Lacan...