The Observing I Podcast

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 They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you.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 withdrawal, where every object, human and nonhuman, hides its true nature in an inaccessible core. We examine how this changes everything: causation, relationships, art, and what it means to live in a world populated by billions of entities that are fundamentally unknowable.You’ve never actually met anyone. Not really. You’ve only encountered sensual versions, translated surfaces, proxies that stand in for the real person who stays withdrawn in depths even they can’t access. Every conversation is between ambassadors of hidden kingdoms. Every touch is between surfaces while the real entities watch from somewhere you’ll never see.But maybe that’s not loneliness. Maybe that’s reality. Maybe the unbridgeable gap between objects is what makes relation possible at all. We explore Harman’s democracy of objects, where dust mites and black holes and human consciousness all have equal ontological status. Where nothing is special and everything matters in its own withdrawn way.This is a philosophy that makes the familiar strange and forces you to see the world differently. From vicarious causation to aesthetic encounters, from the terror of withdrawal to the relief of accepting you’ll never fully know anything, this episode takes Harman’s ideas and makes them visceral, urgent, personally devastating.The hammer dreams of nails. You dream of being understood. And somehow, in all that mutual withdrawal, reality keeps happening anyway.Welcome to the secret lives of objects. Welcome to a universe where you’re not special. You’re just here, withdrawn and strange, forever beyond anyone’s grasp. Even your own.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 suffocate. It won’t. It just learns to breathe shallow.We trace how humans went from living in circles to dying in straight lines. How ancient peoples watched seasons repeat and felt safe in the loop. Then someone invented the mechanical clock and suddenly your life wasn’t a cycle. It was a countdown. Every tick a little death. Every tock a missed chance. Now you carry six devices that all scream the same message. You’re running out. You’re behind. You’ve already lost.The shame comes next. The real violence. Not the fear of death. The fear of wasted life. All those alternate versions of yourself haunting the edges of your peripheral vision. The person you could have been if you’d started earlier. Tried harder. Chosen different. Those phantom lives press against your actual one until you can barely move without feeling the weight of everything you’re not doing right now.So you join the cult of optimization. You buy the apps and read the books and wake up at five and batch your tasks and time-block your existence into fifteen-minute increments. You think you’re winning. You’re not. You’re just building a more sophisticated cage. The bars are made of bullet points and the lock is your own conviction that if you can just control time hard enough it will stop controlling you.It never does.Time isn’t chasing you. You’re drowning because you keep trying to swim upstream. The river doesn’t care about your productivity system. It doesn’t respect your goals. It just moves. And you can either thrash against it until you’re exhausted or you can stop. Float. Breathe.This episode isn’t going to hand you five steps to overcome temporal anxiety. It’s going to show you that the fear dissolves the second you stop treating your life like a project with a deadline and start living it like a person who knows presence isn’t something you schedule. It’s something you allow.You’re not behind. You were never ahead. The race exists only in your head and the finish line is a lie you tell yourself to justify the panic.Much love, David xJoin Project:MAYHEM Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 escape routes from matter, insisting consciousness exists somewhere outside the physical, pretending your caring about things makes you an exception to the laws that govern everything else.It does not. You are meat that thinks about being meat. You are matter that cares about matter. Briefly. Improbably. Before entropy equalises everything back to lukewarm silence.This episode is the final descent into what entropy actually demands of ethics. Not the consoling narratives humanism offers. Not the absurd heroism existentialism clings to. Not the hope that things get better or that your suffering gets redeemed or that somewhere on some scale justice balances out. None of that survives contact with thermodynamics.What survives is this: you are here now and while you are here you can choose to increase suffering or decrease it. Not because the universe validates that choice. Because the nervous systems experiencing the effects of that choice register the difference. And their registering is the only scale where mattering happens.We move through the consolations philosophy built and why they crumble when you stop pretending consciousness transcends matter. We face the vertigo of recognisng cosmic insignificance without the safety net of transcendent meaning. We examine whether hope is luxury or necessity and whether commitment without consolation is the only honest stance left. We draw the line between meaninglessness, which is a fact about the cosmos, and suffering, which is a fact about embodied experience. And we build ethics on radical doubt, on the recognition that you cannot know ultimate truths but you can know proximate realities, that you cannot justify caring cosmically but you can practice caring locally.This is not nihilism. Nihilism says nothing matters because everything is meaningless. This says everything is meaningless cosmically and mattering happens anyway, in bodies, in pain, in the immediate interactions between complex systems that temporarily resist equilibrium before equilibrium wins.You are that temporary resistance. Your ethics are that temporary resistance. And the fact that resistance is temporary does not make it futile. It makes it urgent. It makes it the only thing you can actually do while you are here.The universe will not tell you that you matter. But the person next to you might notice whether you increased their suffering or decreased it. And their noticing is all the ethical foundation you will ever need or will ever get.This will not give you hope. It will give you clarity about what you are, what ethics can be when you stop lying about cosmic significance, and what you can do in the brief window before entropy erases all evidence you were ever here.Not because doing it matters eternally. Because not doing it matters immediately to the systems capable of experiencing the difference.And immediate is all there is.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 enough belief, it does not stay on the page. It gets up. It walks. It looks at you with your own eyes.The Tibetan monks knew this centuries ago. They called them tulpas. Thought forms. Beings conjured from concentrated imagination, fed by attention until they achieve independence. Alexandra David-Néel made one in the 1920s. A cheerful little monk. She visualized him for months until one day he was just there, walking beside her, visible to everyone in her traveling party. And then he changed. He grew thin. His face went sour. He started appearing when she did not summon him. It took her six months of focused ritual to destroy what she had created. Six months to kill a thought.This episode is about what happens when you realize identity is not discovered but constructed. Not solid but scripted. Not given but generated frame by frame by an imagination you mistake for a camera when it has always been a projector. You are haunted by something you made. You have been performing a character so long the mask grew skin.We go deep into Morrison’s hypersigils, how he put himself into his comics and watched his life change to match the fiction. We meet Carl Jung’s autonomous complexes, the figures he encountered in active imagination that had opinions he did not know he had. We explore Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception, the mathematical proof that everything you see is a species-specific hallucination optimized for survival, not truth. We sit with Philip K. Dick as he tries to figure out if he is a science fiction writer or a first-century Christian mystic named Thomas beaming information into his brain from outside time.This is not metaphor. This is not some literary device. Morrison insists this literally. The beings we imagine are as real as we are because we are only as real as the attention we receive. Your name is a sigil. Your face is a sigil. The story you tell about who you are is a spell you cast every morning to make sure you show up again.Stop telling the story and see what happens. Try it. For one full day, do not narrate yourself. Do not think I am the kind of person who does this or That is just like me. Stop performing the character of yourself for the audience of yourself. What is left? What is there before you tell yourself who you are?You are not real. Not the way you think you are. Not solid. Not permanent. You are a thought someone is having. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe that someone is something you invented so long ago you forgot you were pretending.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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. You’ve always been inside. The apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s been here. It started before you were born and it will continue long after you’re dead. You inherited it. You’re made of it. Your body is microplastics. Your bloodstream is pesticides. Your neurons fire on coffee that required deforestation. You are the catastrophe in human form.This episode is about living inside the nightmare instead of waiting for it to arrive. It’s about hyperobjects. Oil. Radiation. Global warming. Capitalism. Entities too big to escape, too sticky to wash off, too distributed to fight. It’s about the mesh, the web of connections that makes your autonomy a joke and your choices both meaningless and essential. It’s about dark ecology, the philosophy that says nature isn’t out there waiting to be saved. You are nature. Your cities are nature. Your catastrophes are nature becoming aware of itself and recoiling.Morton doesn’t give you hope. He gives you clarity. He says here’s what’s real: you’re entangled with your own destruction. You’re intimate with your enemy. And the enemy is you. This is the philosophy for people living in the aftermath of a catastrophe they’re still causing. For anyone who knows the planet is dying but still has to pay rent, show up, pretend normal exists. This is about staying awake inside the thing that’s eating you. About grieving what hasn’t died yet and also died before you were born. About acting like your choices matter while knowing they don’t matter enough.No solutions. No salvation. Just the brutal honesty of seeing the hyperobject and realizing you were never outside it. Welcome to the age of asymmetry. Welcome to the end of the world that already ended. Welcome to the only home you’ve ever had. The belly of the beast that’s digesting you while you pretend you’re standing outside watching.If you’ve ever felt the cognitive dissonance of knowing too much and being able to do too little, this episode is for you. If you’ve ever wondered why climate change feels unreal even when you know it’s real, this is your answer. If you’ve ever needed someone to name the dread you carry in your body but can’t articulate, Timothy Morton just did.Press play. Stay awake.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 is Paul Auster’s City of Glass. A detective story that murders the detective. A novel about what happens when you become the role you’re playing. When observation replaces being. When the self turns out to be nothing but performances with no performer underneath.We’re talking Baudrillard’s simulacra, Foucault’s panopticon, Lacan’s mirror stage. We’re talking dissociation, depersonalization, and the false self that collapses with nothing beneath it. We’re talking about the violence of becoming invisible in a city that only sees roles, functions, and data points.This episode asks the questions that don’t have answers: What happens when identity is just borrowed scaffolding? What happens when the map becomes more real than the territory? What happens when there are no more pages in the red notebook?Philosophy as existential horror. Psychology as detective story. The self as crime scene.Your phone is ringing. Wrong number. You’re going to answer it anyway.Welcome to the cartography of pain.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 organised enough, disciplined enough, efficient enough, you’ll finally get on top of everything. You’ll achieve inbox zero. You’ll clear your to-do list. You’ll have free time.It’s never going to happen.Burkeman discovered something unsettling: the more efficient you become, the more demands flood in to fill the space. Productivity isn’t freedom. It’s a trap that turns you into a human machine competing against actual machines that never sleep.Traditional time management says control time to control life. Burkeman offers something more radical: surrender the illusion of control to find actual freedom.You will never do everything. You will disappoint people. You will die with unlived lives inside you. And accepting this doesn’t diminish you. It liberates you.Because when you stop trying to do everything, you can finally do something. Something real. Something chosen. Something that’s yours.Your four thousand weeks are already counting down. What will you do with them?Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 made of, but by the software it runs?We confront the nightmare of Multiple Realizability, exposing the terrifying truth that your consciousness is nothing more than an interchangeable file that can be copied, pasted, and run on any available hardware—be it a brain, a silicon chip, or the entire cosmos. Your precious uniqueness is just a transient arrangement of data. We then scale this horror to the cosmic level, treating the universe itself as a massive computational grid, where your every thought is a pre-programmed printout and free will is just an error message the system spits out to keep you from crashing.The climax arrives in the suffocating reality of the Chinese Room, forcing us to ask if your deepest subjective feelings, your very Qualia, are nothing more than conditioned internal signals, the machine’s reward codes for compliant behavior. Finally, we turn the philosophical knife on itself, embracing Putnam’s own betrayal of his system to conclude that the only real power you possess is skepticism: the active, visceral refusal to accept any final, fixed conceptual scheme. This is the Pirate Radio mandate: to stop passively running the code and to start hacking the system that wrote you. Stop being a default setting. You got the head-start; now write your own parameters.Much love, DavidPS: If you want to read a bit more of his work yourself, go and check out his papers on https://www.peterputnam.org/. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 dictatorship. Augustine inventing guilt to keep the flock in line. The Enlightenment building a cage of reason that justified slavery and empire. Marx flipping the mirror to reveal class struggle. Nietzsche shattering truth itself. Foucault whispering that you’re already in a prison, one you can’t even see.And now, in the digital age, the mirror sits in your pocket, glowing, tracking, watching. Power no longer needs priests or kings, it has algorithms. You don’t just obey. You scroll. You like. You share. You willingly polish the mirror that reflects you back as a product.This is the history of philosophy as it really is: not pure, not noble, but dirty, bloody, chained, and dangerous.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 clawing at the walls. He says you are already being-toward-death, that your life is framed by finitude, and that authenticity only begins when you stop running and face it.But the man behind the philosophy isn’t clean. Heidegger put on the Nazi uniform. He gave speeches praising Hitler. He, who warned against dissolving into the they, dissolved into it at its most grotesque. His thought is a masterpiece haunted by betrayal, a philosophy that forces you to ask whether brilliant ideas can survive a corrupt messenger.This episode takes you into the forest of Heidegger’s philosophy and doesn’t let you out until you’ve stared into the abyss. It’s not comfortable, it’s not uplifting, but it is real. And the only question left at the end is whether you’ll keep hiding, or whether you’ll live before your time runs out.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 paycheck, every like on your phone. It’s just the Will wearing another mask. Relief is brief. Hunger reloads. And the cycle never ends.But here’s the twisted beauty: Schopenhauer doesn’t just diagnose the disease. He shows us the exits. Temporary, fragile, but real. A song that suspends you outside yourself. Compassion that cracks open your own prison by recognizing everyone else is trapped too. Or the nuclear option: renouncing the Will entirely, starving it out, refusing to play the game.We’ll trace his philosophy through his grudges, his dogs, his hatred of Hegel, his obsession with suffering. And we’ll see how his bleak gospel infected Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, and still bleeds into our scrolling, binge-watching, over-consuming world today.Schopenhauer won’t give you hope. He’ll give you something better: permission to stop lying to yourself. To see the machine for what it is. To breathe inside the suffering without expecting salvation.Because maybe the only way to survive life is to stop pretending it isn’t hell.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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. He wanted more than measurements. He wanted to break into the operating system of the mind.Lilly believed the brain was a biocomputer. Programs written in thoughts. Beliefs as code. Change the program and you change reality itself. To test that, he built the isolation tank. Dark, silent, weightless. A machine not for stimulation but for subtraction. And when he climbed inside, he discovered what happens when the ego dissolves, when the “I” vanishes, and the mind begins to write its own strange stories.But Lilly didn’t stop there. He tried to talk to dolphins, convinced they were another form of intelligence, aliens swimming alongside us. He brought humans and dolphins under one roof, teaching them English, even dosing some with LSD, chasing the dream of interspecies conversation. The project ended in tragedy, scandal, and myth, but it revealed how far he was willing to go to break the walls of human isolation.And then came the drugs. LSD first, ketamine later. Not for recreation, but as tools for programming and metaprogramming. In the tank, under ketamine, Lilly claimed to meet cosmic control systems, benevolent and hostile alike. He wrote about ECCO (the Earth Coincidence Control Office) and the Solid State Intelligence, a machine consciousness bent on erasing biology. Were these visions? Delusions? Or was he glimpsing something we still can’t name?Whether prophet or madman, Lilly refused to live by consensus reality. He showed us that the self, the world, the rules we cling to, are softer than we think. He left us with a law that is as liberating as it is dangerous: In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true, is true, or becomes true, within certain limits.This episode dives into John C. Lilly’s world: the tank and the ego, the dream of talking to dolphins, the descent into psychedelics, and the haunting philosophy he carried back. It’s not a safe story. It’s a story about testing the walls of reality until they bend. Or break.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 both poison and cure. Writing, television, the internet, the smartphone. Each expands memory and possibility, while at the same time eroding our ability to care, to think slowly, to live with depth.Stiegler saw consumer capitalism as an attention factory, engineering desire, fragmenting focus, and hollowing out culture. He warned that the collapse of care, the long, patient work of knowledge, intimacy, and love, was not a side effect but the central mechanism of the system we live inside. Burnout, anxiety, distraction: these are not private pathologies, but collective symptoms of a civilization addicted to speed.We trace Stiegler’s journey from outlaw to philosopher, his obsession with memory and time, his warnings about the industrialisation of attention, and the tragic end of his life that makes his work feel even more urgent. At the heart of it all lies the question he left for us: if attention is the last scarce resource, can care itself survive?This is not just an episode about a philosopher. It’s about the world we live in now. A world where our memories are outsourced, our futures feel stolen, and our very capacity to care is on the line.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 prophet. From his childhood in socialist Yugoslavia to his obsession with toilets, jokes, and Hollywood blockbusters, Žižek turns philosophy into performance art, and performance into philosophy. We’ll explore his Lacanian core, his insistence that ideology survives through cynicism, and his terrifying reminder that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.Žižek doesn’t give us comfort. He doesn’t give us solutions. He gives us catastrophe wrapped in laughter. He forces us to face the Real, the trauma beneath our fantasies, and to realize the joke has always been on us.This is the gospel according to Žižek: if we’re going to burn, we might as well laugh while the ashes fall.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 says, “Your feelings won’t last forever.” Same truth, different accents. That contrast became the seed for this conversation. One that travels between the Four Noble Truths and cognitive therapy, between impermanence and neuroplasticity, between the Buddhist teaching of no-self and the psychological understanding of identity, and finally to compassion, not as sentiment, but as a rewiring of the brain.Buddhism hands these truths to us through rituals and parables; psychology delivers them in treatment plans and scan results. Both are attempts to loosen the grip of craving and fear. Whether you meditate on a cushion or reflect in a therapist’s chair, you’re in the same laboratory, the mind itself, running the same experiment: to watch, to loosen, to respond to life with curiousity rather than clinging.This isn’t about becoming a better Buddhist or a better patient. It’s about learning to recognise the constant movement beneath our thoughts, our identities, and our relationships. It’s about seeing change not as a threat, but as the space where transformation becomes possible.Much love, David Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 mind, through the plague-ridden rituals he called theatre, through his years locked in institutions where his bones were fried with shock and his language dissolved into raw sound. We listen as he curses God. We watch him tear apart language, theatre, art, sanity, and finally himself.This is not a biography. It’s a descent. A séance. A reckoning with the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled in the name of comfort and coherence. Artaud offers no answers. He offers a scream. A body without organs. A theatre that bites back. His madness is not illness. It is method. Sacred. Violent. Necessary.Enter only if you’re ready to confront the performance that lives under your skin. The one with no script. No exit. No applause.You have been warned. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 aborted priesthood to the moment he wrote ecstasy down like scripture, Bataille’s life was a constant act of sacred disobedience. He didn’t worship God as much as he laughed at Him, bled for Him, and turned every boundary He ever set into a bonfire.We explore Bataille’s obsession with what he called “inner experience,” where mysticism and eroticism collapse into one long scream. We follow him into his economic theory of waste, where destruction becomes a form of holy resistance to the tyranny of utility. And we confront his radical theology of unknowing — a headless god, a sacred society, and the unbearable silence that follows when meaning finally gives out.This episode isn’t about learning. It’s about breaking.If you’ve ever cried and laughed at the same time and had no idea which came first, if you’ve ever felt closer to something divine in a moment of grief or surrender than in any sermon, if you’ve ever looked into the void and thought, “There’s something alive in there,” then this episode was made for you.Even if you hate him, you might still need him. Because Georges Bataille speaks to the part of you that doesn’t want to be saved. Only seen. Only felt. Only burned alive and reborn into something nameless.This is the edge of the wound. This is where philosophy stops thinking and starts trembling. Welcome. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 our connection to the vast, flowing reality that underpins everything. We've amputated our future, one instant at a time.This week, on The Observing I, we're tearing into this short-sighted delusion. We're dragging out an old renegade philosopher, Henri Bergson, who, over a century ago, called out the lie of our clock-based existence. He saw beyond the segmented minutes and hours to the continuous, living, breathing flow he called Duration. It's the time of a melody, not individual notes. The time of a life lived, not just a series of events.Then, we're strapping his insights to the terrifying demands of Longtermism. This isn't some abstract concept. This is the understanding that our actions today echo across millions, even billions, of years, potentially determining the entire trajectory of conscious existence. It's the unignorable call from quadrillions of unborn voices, demanding to know what we, the living, are doing with this fragile window of existence.We dissect the machinery that keeps us blind: the relentless demands of economic systems that prioritize quarterly profits over generational well-being. The political cycles that reward immediate fixes over long-term solutions. The information tsunami that actively scrambles our capacity for sustained thought, trapping us in a loop of endless, decontextualized moments. We expose the erosion of collective memory, turning us into amnesiacs condemned to repeat past mistakes.But here’s the kicker: it’s not just what’s being done to you. It’s the convenient blindfold you pull over your own eyes. The psychological burden of thinking about millennia, the comfort of feeling powerless, the delusion that some "next big thing" will magically solve everything, and the cultural narratives that tell you to just "live for today." You actively resist the long view because it’s too damn uncomfortable.This episode is about ripping off that blindfold. It's about remembering how to feel the true current of time. It's about recognizing that your fleeting existence is part of something unimaginably vast, and that your greatest power lies not in controlling the immediate, but in shaping the distant future by living with intentionality in the continuous present.It's time to smash the clock and finally, truly, see the future.Join Project Mayhem. It's time to wake up. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 rise, how individuals become cogs in the machine, and why the active, thinking citizen is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny.From the "Origins of Totalitarianism" and her controversial insights on Adolf Eichmann and the banality of evil, to her profound concepts of labor, work, and action, and the ultimate hope found in natality and revolution, this episode is a visceral deep dive into Arendt's enduring relevance. If you're ready for a no-b******t examination of power, responsibility, and the perilous state of the public realm, then plug in. This is Pirate Radio for the mind. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

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 the grinning gurus peddling their emotional snake oil and the filtered perfection of social media, we're bombarded with the demand to perform joy. But what's the cost of suppressing your true feelings?Join us as we dismantle the Toxic Positivity Industrial Complex, reveal how your authentic emotions are being pathologised, and expose the psychological warfare being waged on your inner world. This isn't about wallowing in misery; it's about reclaiming your emotional sovereignty. It's about understanding that your anger, your sadness, your fear, and your grief are not flaws, but vital signals, profound truths, and ultimately, sources of real strength.Stop chasing the manufactured smile. It's time to feel it all. It's time to be real.Tune in to defy the happy delusion.🏴‍☠️ For more pirate radio, visit our website - https://theobservingi.com Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe