The Deeper Thinking podcast

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We Fear What We Remember, Not What We See The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if our greatest fears were not born from what the world presents to us, but from the memories the brain uses to predict it? In this episode, we explore a profound shift in understanding emotion, trauma, and selfhood: a move from reactivity to construction. Guided by the neuroscience of Lisa Feldman Barrett , we trace how every feeling—anxiety, sorrow, even joy—is not merely a response but a prediction, shaped from the remembered past. Trauma is reframed not as a singular event, but as a pattern of meaning that can be revised. Healing becomes not excavation, but the slow, deliberate work of building new predictions, one breath, one small act at a time. Meaning itself, we discover, is not something discovered ready-made in the world; it is something tenderly, stubbornly, built. Agency does not arrive all at once but flickers into being through tiny acts of rechoosing—by crafting different futures from within the architectures of memory. With reflections on prediction theory, cultural inheritance, trauma, and healing, this episode offers a new way of living inside uncertainty—not as prisoners of the past, but as quiet architects of becoming. With quiet references to Lisa Feldman Barrett , Hannah Arendt , and Simone Weil , this episode listens for the subtle architectures of choice that shape emotional life. What happens when meaning is no longer something passively absorbed but actively constructed? When suffering is not merely endured, but re-authored? When presence itself becomes a radical act of re-making what the body once predicted as inevitable? Why Listen? Discover how emotions are constructed through predictive processing Reframe trauma not as event, but as a revisable pattern of memory and meaning Learn how small acts of attention can reshape the self Engage with philosophical reflections on agency, freedom, and emotional life Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made . New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation . New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Each referenced work supports the philosophical architecture explored in the episode, offering entry points into a deeper reflection on memory, emotion, and agency. #LisaFeldmanBarrett #PredictiveBrain #EmotionTheory #TraumaRecovery #Agency #MeaningMaking #Selfhood #HannahArendt #SimoneWeil #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The Slow Reweaving - Trust, Presence, and the Unfinished Work of Belonging - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 9:42

2 дні тому9:42

9:42

The Slow Reweaving: On Trust, Presence, and the Future of Belonging The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if the most urgent repairs a society needs are not material or political, but relational? In this episode, we explore the quiet cost of 'bowling alone'—the erosion of social trust, mutual regard, and the civic imagination itself. Drawing on Andy Haldane’s reflections and Robert Putnam’s seminal analysis, we trace how the thinning of social capital reveals not just an institutional fragility but an existential one: a slow forgetting that freedom is a shared condition, not a private possession. Presence, once lost, cannot be legislated back into being. It must be risked—through small, unseen acts of recognition, patience, and shared vulnerability. Repair does not announce itself. It is stitched, stubbornly and often invisibly, wherever relation is chosen over withdrawal. This is not an episode that proposes solutions. It dwells inside the unfinished work of belonging, inviting a slower, more courageous imagination of civic life beyond spectacle or transaction. With quiet reference to Robert Putnam and Andy Haldane , this episode listens for the wisdom buried not in action plans, but in the delicate, necessary work of trust-making. How do we rebuild presence without spectacle? What becomes possible when relation, not performance, is what holds the future open? Why Listen? Understand how the loss of social trust quietly destabilizes democracy and shared life Explore the relational foundations beneath visible political and economic structures Reflect on how belonging is rebuilt not through design, but through daily acts of presence Engage philosophical ideas on freedom, community, and imagination without academic framing Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Haldane, Andy. CEO Lecture: Counting the Cost of Bowling Alone . RSA Lecture, 2025. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The Shape We Live By: Storytelling and the Human Need for Narrative - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 9:08

2 дні тому9:08

9:08

The Shape We Live By The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if the stories we tell about ourselves don’t just reflect the world, but shape how we experience it? In this episode, we explore how narrative structures—from arcs to resolutions—don’t simply make sense of life, but create the conditions for how we understand time, meaning, and agency. We dive into the philosophical tension of whether life follows a narrative, or whether we impose one retroactively to survive the chaos. From war memoirs to courtroom dramas, we trace how narrative functions as a deeply human framework—shaping not only our stories, but our very sense of self. This is not an essay about storytelling for entertainment, but a reflection on how stories make us human, for better or worse. As we untangle the threads of narrative, we draw on thinkers like Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre , who remind us that stories aren’t just reflections of the world, but the very means by which we experience it. But as narratives shape us, they also limit us. We ask whether the human mind can ever resist the pull to make sense of what might forever remain senseless. The episode asks whether we can remain present in the chaos, or if we will always rush to make it into something neatly packaged, ready for consumption. With quiet references to Arendt , Heidegger , and Weil , we reflect on the fundamental question: does the narrative we tell ourselves free us, or trap us? This is not an essay that promises answers, but one that invites a deeper inquiry into the shape of the stories we live by, and whether we are, in fact, living inside a narrative of our own making. Why Listen? Consider how the stories we tell ourselves shape our understanding of time, identity, and meaning Reflect on the tension between imposed narrative and chaotic existence Engage with philosophical ideas about narrative, memory, and human agency Experience an open, reflective approach to philosophy that doesn't seek closure, but invites exploration Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue . 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative , Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Bibliography Relevance Each work referenced here deepens the philosophical and existential questions raised in this episode. They are invitations to engage more deeply with the implications of narrative and human understanding. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition explores the fragile practices of labor, action, and thought—fundamental practices that technological acceleration risks unmooring, much like the existential dilemmas raised in this episode. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time frames existence as something to dwell within, not master—a theme that mirrors the philosophical tension in the essay about the limits of narrative mastery. Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace offers a meditation on attention as resistance—a fitting echo to the essay’s central focus on narrative attention and the danger of rushing to impose order on life. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue discusses the relationship between virtue and the narrative structure of human life—deepening the reflections on the philosophical need for stories to shape and define our ethical lives. Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative illuminates the ways in which narrative shapes our experience of time—a crucial perspective for understanding how stories help create the reality we live in. #NarrativePhilosophy #ExistentialNarrative #Storytelling #HannahArendt #Heidegger #SimoneWeil #Ricoeur #MacIntyre #DeeperThinkingPodcast #PhilosophyOfStory #HumanCondition #MeaningAndTime…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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[Update] Demis Hassabis -A Philosophical Profile in Slowness and Discovery 14:08

2 дні тому14:08

14:08

Demis Hassabis -A Philosophical Profile in Slowness and Discovery The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if the future of discovery demanded not just faster thinking, but slower seeing? In this episode, we explore the life and vision of Demis Hassabis —chess prodigy, neuroscientist, AI pioneer—and the deeper paradox he embodies: that true innovation may depend less on acceleration than on the careful cultivation of attention. From protein structures to mathematical proofs, from games of logic to the fragile architectures of meaning, Hassabis’s work asks us not simply what we can know, but whether we can remain human enough to hold what we uncover. This is not a celebration of technology. It is a meditation on what discovery requires: patience, discernment, and the refusal to collapse wonder into conquest. Scientific progress, Hassabis reminds us, is not the smooth unveiling of new worlds. It is the slow art of inhabiting uncertainty—of learning to think differently long before we can act differently. As AI accelerates, it is the ancient human skills—attention, slowness, relational imagination—that will decide whether possibility becomes promise or peril. We trace how games trained his mind for complexity, how neuroscience taught him to trust emergence over control, and how philosophy now shadows the future he helped unleash. This isn’t an essay that offers solutions. It opens a space where solutions lose their urgency—and presence becomes the deeper aim. With quiet references to Arendt , Heidegger , and Weil , this episode listens for the forms of wisdom that emerge only when discovery is slowed down. What happens when the machines we build move faster than our capacity to understand them? When meaning risks being outpaced by mastery? When the future demands a different kind of mind—one willing to linger, to doubt, and to dwell? This is not a race to the next breakthrough. It is a return to the older work: the slow making of minds still capable of wonder. Why Listen? Explore how AI is reshaping not only science but the ethics of discovery itself Reflect on slowness, discernment, and the moral architecture of innovation Engage with philosophical tensions around speed, presence, and meaning Experience a relational, contemplative approach to technology and thought Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution . Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation . New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Bibliography Relevance Each work referenced here deepens the philosophical and ethical questions raised in this episode. They are not citations to decorate, but invitations to linger differently inside the tensions discovery now demands. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition explores action, labor, and thought as fragile human practices that technological acceleration risks unmooring—a silent foundation beneath the essay’s call for slowness. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time frames existence not as something to master, but as something to dwell within—a philosophical current that quietly shapes the call for presence in discovery. Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace offers a meditation on attention and moral discernment as acts of resistance against force—echoing the essay’s concern for the ethics of attention in an era of speed. Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman illuminates the relationship between patience, skill, and care in making—deepening the reflection on how discovery itself might be practiced differently. Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution reframes change as emergence rather than mere accumulation—supporting the essay’s vision of progress as something slower, stranger, and more relational than technological narratives often allow. Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation examines the erosion of deep presence in a connected world—offering a cultural echo to the essay’s philosophical call for reweaving attention and relationality in a technological era. #DemisHassabis #ArtificialIntelligence #SlowThinking #EthicsOfAI #DeepMind #PresenceInProgress #HannahArendt #MartinHeidegger #ScientificDiscovery #DeeperThinkingPodcast…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The Unrendered Self - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 15:23

4 дні тому15:23

15:23

The Unrendered Self The Deeper Thinking Podcast What happens to the self when even absence becomes a kind of presence? In this episode, we examine the quiet erosion of identity under conditions of constant visibility. This is not about digital detox or offline escape—it’s about the deeper structural shift where reflection becomes performance, privacy becomes signal, and being becomes something that must be rendered to be real. We explore how the self survives—or doesn’t—amid an economy of attention that cannot tolerate ambiguity. Drawing on Simone Weil ’s ethics of attention, Gloria Anzaldúa ’s defense of contradiction, and Roland Barthes ’s concept of the neutral, the episode traces the contours of presence without performance. We also touch on Édouard Glissant ’s right to opacity and Hannah Arendt ’s space of appearance to imagine what it means to remain unrendered—felt but uncaptioned, real but unreadable. Why Listen? Reframe visibility and identity through the lens of attention, fatigue, and erosion Engage with thinkers like Barthes, Glissant, Weil, and de Certeau without academic distance Experience audio as a space of ambient intimacy and structural reflection Consider what it means to exist without translating yourself Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . London: Routledge, 2002. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Barthes, Roland. The Neutral . New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The System Forgets Nothing, But It Never Remembers You - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 19:09

4 дні тому19:09

19:09

The System Forgets Nothing, But It Never Remembers You The Deeper Thinking Podcast We live in a system that forgets nothing but never remembers us. It tracks our movements, records our actions, and stores our data—yet the more it accumulates, the less it seems to know us. It does not recognize us as beings, but as parts within an ever-expanding machine. In this world, alienation is not an external force imposed upon us; it is the very architecture of our lives. This episode traces the recursive contradiction at the heart of capitalism—how it demands our presence while erasing our essence. Through the philosophical architecture of Karl Marx , we follow how estranged labor becomes ontological displacement, how performance replaces participation, and how our interior lives are mapped, mined, and monetized. As Fredric Jameson observed, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But this episode does not attempt to predict collapse. Instead, it listens for the quiet interruptions—those moments of unmonetized presence, of shared gesture, of unproductive tenderness. Drawing also from thinkers like Silvia Federici and Bernard Stiegler , we consider the politics of attention, memory, and unpaid life. What remains when everything measurable has been measured? What form of life lingers beyond productivity? This is not a story of revolution. It is a story of recognition—and through that recognition, the possibility of remembering ourselves. Why Listen? Understand capitalism as a system of ontological arrangement, not just economic control Explore alienation beyond emotion—as recursive infrastructure Encounter Marx without being preached to Recognize small, human gestures that capitalism cannot metabolize Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx — On estranged labor and the loss of species-being. Amazon link Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han — A reflection on self-optimization and invisible control. Amazon link Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici — On the historical roots of unpaid labor. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation . New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power . Translated by Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2017. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 . Translated by Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The Unscripted Reach - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 16:23

4 дні тому16:23

16:23

The Unscripted Reach The Deeper Thinking Podcast What happens when the act of reaching out becomes rarer than the connection itself? In this episode, we trace the slow disappearance of interpersonal initiation—not as a cultural lapse, but as a civilizational contradiction. Algorithms promise endless proximity, yet remove the necessity of contact. We ask what is lost when approach is replaced by performance, and what it means to risk presence in an age of optimization. Through the lens of philosophy and lived gesture, we explore the disappearance of embodied mutuality—from Aristotle’s vision of human fulfillment in relation, to Simone Weil’s understanding of attention as generosity, and Levinas’s ethics of the face. We ask: how do we become, if never met? What happens to courage when friction is removed from the social field? In the absence of real-time approach, we find a loss not just of intimacy—but of ethical improvisation itself. This is not an argument for nostalgia. It is a meditation on risk, refusal, and revelation—on the sacred awkwardness of showing up unrehearsed, and the relational art we may be forgetting how to perform. Why Listen? Reflect on intimacy as relational improvisation, not outcome Understand how frictionless design impacts mutual becoming Explore quiet allusions to Aristotle, Weil, Levinas, Badiou, and Byung-Chul Han Reconsider the ethics of hesitation, awkwardness, and approach Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community . Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Aristotle. The Politics . Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Dover Publications, 2000. Badiou, Alain. In Praise of Love . Translated by Peter Bush. New York: The New Press, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation . Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Buber, Martin. I and Thou . Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner, 1970. Byung-Chul Han. The Transparency Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion . Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority . Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science . Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other . New York: Basic Books, 2011. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God . Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power . New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The Power of Absurdity to Awaken Ethical Consciousness - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 12:11

4 дні тому12:11

12:11

The Power of Absurdity to Awaken Ethical Consciousness The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if the moment that woke you up wasn’t a grand political speech or a philosophical epiphany but a joke that landed too well? What if the start of ethical clarity came not from solemn reflection but from a laugh you couldn’t contain—at precisely the wrong time, in precisely the wrong room? In this episode, we explore absurdity not as nonsense but as a kind of epistemic tremor—a jolt that unsettles what seemed settled, that shows how much of what we call sense is performance. From slapstick to silence, from farts to fascism, absurdity becomes a method of seeing—especially when clarity arrives not through logic, but through rupture. Absurdity doesn’t offer arguments. It offers asymmetry. A sideways truth that resists explanation but insists on being felt. That resistance is itself a kind of ethics: it refuses to reduce. We trace how the ridiculous unsettles authority, how laughter holds ethical force, and how awkwardness becomes a mode of moral recognition. This isn’t about irreverence for its own sake. It’s about what becomes visible when nothing fits—and why that’s when truth might finally appear. With quiet references to Camus , Butler , and Arendt , this episode listens for the wisdom buried in disruption. What happens when the body refuses the script? When decorum fails to contain dissent? When mockery becomes a mirror—and that mirror doesn’t flatter? This is not an essay that resolves. It dwells. It opens a space for thinking that begins where certainty breaks. Why Listen? Discover how absurdity can reveal invisible power structures Explore laughter as a form of ethical attention and resistance Hear how awkwardness and disruption can open new moral insight Engage with philosophical concepts without academic framing Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender . New York: Routledge, 2004. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus . Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Camus, Albert. Caligula and Other Plays . Translated by Stuart Gilbert. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic . Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World . Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Critchley, Simon. On Humour . London: Routledge, 2002.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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The Moment That Didn’t Land - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 13:58

4 дні тому13:58

13:58

The Moment That Didn’t Land The Deeper Thinking Podcast What happens when something you offer is received differently than you hoped? When laughter greets your vulnerability—not cruel, but clear? This episode explores how legacy, recognition, and love all take shape not in the moment we present something, but in what happens when that moment falters. Drawing on Axel Honneth , Hans Jonas , and Stanley Cavell , we examine what it means to stay present—not when things go well, but when they go sideways. This is not a story about success or impact. It’s about the courage of staying available to truth—especially when that truth arrives in the form of refusal. As Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, freedom is always reciprocal. And Nietzsche warns that the artist will always be exposed. What matters isn’t whether your offering lands. What matters is how you remain when it doesn’t. In this episode, recognition becomes less about affirmation and more about relationship. Legacy shifts from what is passed down to what is made possible through presence. And the moment that didn’t land becomes something else entirely: a mirror, a question, a quiet act of love. Why Listen? Learn how recognition theory explains moments of emotional misfire Explore what legacy looks like when admiration is withheld Understand how laughter can be a form of ethical relationship Engage with thinkers from Hegel to Cavell , Beauvoir to Nietzsche Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex . Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage, 2011. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy . New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts . Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy . Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books, 1993.…

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The Weight We Inherit and The Space We Leave - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 20:56

4 дні тому20:56

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The Weight We Inherit and The Space We Leave The Deeper Thinking Podcast We carry more than we know. Not just genetics or stories, but gestures, silences, expectations—small inheritances that shape how we love, how we work, how we wait. This episode traces those inheritances—not to resolve them, but to notice their weight, and ask whether we might set some of them down. What if care didn’t have to mean self-erasure? What if ambition didn’t have to echo someone else’s hunger? What if legacy wasn’t a monument, but a pause? Drawing on traditions of ethical philosophy and lived reflection, we ask what it means to become someone for others, not just to them. What if inheritance wasn’t a script, but a question? As Simone Weil reminds us, attention is an act of devotion. Hannah Arendt writes that every birth marks the beginning of a world. And Viktor Frankl insists that meaning is found not in comfort, but in the stance we take toward suffering. This episode sits within their lineage—but also offers a path through the ordinary textures of ambition, care, and silence that structure how we live today. Why Listen? Learn how legacy forms through silence, gesture, and rhythm—not just story Reframe ambition and care as inherited structures, not personal traits Understand inheritance as ethical authorship, not historical debt Explore how refusal, failure, and softness can become forms of legacy Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself . New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning . Translated by Ilse Lasch. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader . New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999. West, Cornel. Race Matters . Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.…

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Edges That Hold, How Constraint Shapes What Lasts - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 16:14

5 днів тому16:14

16:14

Edges That Hold: How Constraint Shapes What Lasts The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if the moments that stay with us didn’t arise from freedom, but from its absence? This episode explores how material, emotional, and structural constraint can become the shape of expression itself. We trace this paradox through a child’s treehouse, the tape hiss in Daniel Johnston’s basement recordings, the quiet of Agnes Martin’s grids, and the undeveloped rolls left behind by Vivian Maier. These are not stories of overcoming adversity. They are devotions to the form that holds. Constraint here is not failure—it’s fidelity. The conversation threads through Simone Weil on attention as moral act, Marshall McLuhan on form becoming message, Gaston Bachelard on poetic space, and Jean-Paul Sartre on situated freedom. From minimalist sound to photographic silence, from domestic labor to the unseen archive, this episode listens for the work that doesn’t transcend its frame—but honours it. Why Listen? Reframe constraint as creative condition, not limitation Encounter artists whose work is inseparable from what they lacked Explore the ethics of form, silence, and minimal presence Engage thinkers from Martin to Maier , Johnston to Bachelard Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space . Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Maier, Vivian. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer . New York: powerHouse Books, 2011. Martin, Agnes. Writings . Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness . Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.…

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The Unspoken Lives of Men - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 7:35

6 днів тому7:35

7:35

The Unspoken Lives of Men What does it mean to witness a masculinity that doesn’t perform? And how do we make space for the kinds of strength that don’t announce themselves? As bell hooks teaches us, love and liberation are intertwined—not just for women, but for men too. And Simone Weil reminds us that attention is a form of devotion. In this episode, we pay attention to what masculinity becomes when performance is stripped away. Why Listen? What happens when the scripts for being a man no longer fit Why not-knowing can be a new kind of presence The emotional terrain of disenfranchised masculinity Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love . New York: Washington Square Press, 2004. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.…

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The Saturated State - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 21:35

6 днів тому21:35

21:35

The Saturated State The Deeper Thinking Podcast We are governed not by force alone, but by saturation—of noise, of image, of pace. This episode explores how distraction, emotional overload, and political fatigue are not accidents of the moment but tools of governance. It asks what happens when democracy becomes aesthetic, memory becomes unstable, and speech becomes calibration rather than expression. Power today no longer declares. It performs. Following thinkers like Byung-Chul Han , who examines the psychic toll of hyper-visibility, and Lauren Berlant , who identifies the slow erosion of public optimism, we explore how governance now operates atmospherically—through mood, through rhythm, and through exhaustion. Drawing on Mark Fisher ’s critique of capitalist realism and Simone Weil ’s concept of attention as resistance, we ask what it means to hold shape when institutions collapse inward. What forms of refusal are still possible in an environment saturated not by fear, but by feeling? Why Listen? The emotional infrastructure of modern governance How performance, saturation, and speed structure consent Why memory, language, and clarity are forms of resistance The ethics of staying present in atmospheres of overload Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.…

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Come Home to Yourself - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 18:49

6 днів тому18:49

18:49

Come Home to Yourself The Deeper Thinking Podcast What does it mean to return to yourself—not as a goal, but as a rhythm? This episode is a translation of an inner voice: the one that waits beneath survival, beyond performance, beneath the noise. It doesn’t instruct. It doesn’t explain. It listens. And when we listen back, something begins to soften. Drawing on the emotional textures of slow growth, quiet resistance, and relational repair, we explore how healing isn’t a triumph but a return. We question clarity as a requirement, challenge motivation as a moral standard, and examine how joy, pain, and presence can coexist without apology. With echoes of Brené Brown , Sara Ahmed , and Pádraig Ó Tuama , this episode isn’t here to tell you what to feel. It’s here to keep you company while you feel it. No fixing. No striving. Just a steady invitation back to the truth beneath it all. Why Listen? For a companionable, poetic audio essay that moves at the speed of breath To explore how boundaries, belonging, and burnout intertwine with care To learn how to live from softness without collapsing To feel reminded—not instructed—of what’s already true in you Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.…

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How Suffering Became Cinematic - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 14:24

8 днів тому14:24

14:24

How Suffering Became Cinematic The Deeper Thinking Podcast We are often told that suffering is meaningful. That trauma refines us. That resilience is beautiful. This episode refuses all of it. We listen not for inspiration but for rupture—for the contradictions that emerge when romanticized stories are interrupted by real, unresolved lives. Here, caregiving isn’t framed as devotion—it’s structural disappearance. Neurodivergence is not charming—it’s socially masked exhaustion. Homelessness isn’t freedom—it’s logistical, economic, and ontological exclusion. Romanticization is revealed as a quiet violence, and what remains are not metaphors, but fragments. Drawing from thinkers like Simone Weil , Fred Moten , Sara Ahmed , and Giorgio Agamben , we explore contradiction not as something to fix, but as something to hold. The episode resists closure. It listens for the residue of lives misread and refuses to translate them into insight. This is not a story. It is a structure. Why Listen? Hear stories that remain outside the frame of redemption Understand how romanticization functions as erasure Engage contradiction as an ethical and philosophical form Learn from Weil , Moten , Caruth , Federici , Butler Further Reading Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil In the Break by Fred Moten Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt Trauma: Explorations in Memory by Cathy Caruth Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Duke University Press, 2017. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer . Stanford University Press, 1998. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life . Verso Books, 2004. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World . PM Press, 2019. Moten, Fred. In the Break . University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Routledge, 2002.…

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Eric Schmidt, Google, and the Global Stakes of Artificial Intelligence - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 12:14

8 днів тому12:14

12:14

Eric Schmidt, Google, and the Global Stakes of Artificial Intelligence The Deeper Thinking Podcast In this essay, we trace Eric Schmidt’s vision of AI—not as an abstract risk or market opportunity but as a structure we’re already living within. This is not a biography. It is a map of temperament. A study of how one of the most influential minds of the digital era reads scale, trust, competition, and the soft mechanics of power. We follow Schmidt’s reflections on leadership, startup culture, global governance, and the psychological burden of relevance. Through his distinction between founders and executives, divas and naves, Schmidt uncovers not only the inner mechanics of institutional strength—but the fragility that underpins even the most visionary systems. His warnings are geopolitical. Urgent. If the U.S. continues to underfund science and restrict the migration of minds, it may fall behind China in the AI race—not through defeat, but neglect. Yet, he offers no nationalism, only strategy. And through this, we hear something deeper: the belief that intelligence—human or artificial—requires not just speed, but care. This is a profile of a man and the shape of his thinking. Titles follow him. CEO, adviser, strategist, but they are less revealing than the mindset they suggest. Impatient with surface, drawn to scale, and tuned to the deeper implications of speed. What follows is not biography. It is a study of urgency. How Eric Schmidt reads the systems we build, the behaviors we reward, and the intelligence we are beginning to live alongside. His insights do not soothe, they sharpen. And in tracking the paths of his thought—technical, political, ethical—we glimpse a larger question. Who is steering this century's most powerful shift? Not just what are we building, but who are we trusting to notice what it means? When history measures this moment, it may not do so with awe. It may squint. It may falter. It may whisper. They knew and yet they carried on. The acceleration of artificial intelligence, with its luminous promise and its dark volatility, is no longer a theory. It is a system, a climate. And inside it, we are not only inventors, we are evidence. Eric Schmidt’s reflections, rooted in decades of operational power, trace not only the industrial grammar of AI development, but the ethical tempo. We build at scale. We hire for brilliance. We burn for relevance. But do we know what we are becoming? He offers no romance of startup life. The founder in this account is not a heroic singularity but an impatient diagnostic instrument, drawn less by fame than frustration. The executive, in contrast, is balanced, measured, operational, experienced. We hear a man who respects vision but serves infrastructure. This is not just a hiring manual or a case study in scaling. It is an anatomy of ambition—of how raw insight tries to become durable institution. Yet the underlying insight is deeper: that great companies are not the result of superior ideas alone but of superior judgment under competitive stress. The moment arrival enters, the fiction of calm breaks—and the real game begins. But what if this is also true of nations? The logic of competition that governs startups—the urgency, the attrition, the constant recalibration—now governs geopolitics. Schmidt’s declaration that China may win the AI race is neither speculative nor alarmist. It is procedural. They have the state focus. They have the urgency. And critically, they now possess a capacity for algorithmic invention under constraint, having turned sanctions into spurs. What emerges is not a cold war of ideology but a talent war—one measured not in missiles but models, not in armies but open-source commits. Meanwhile, America’s competitive edge, long built on the collaborative friction between universities, venture capital, and market appetite, is showing signs of drag. Hiring freezes in academia strangle the very research that once fed Silicon Valley. Talented graduates drift toward industry not because it is better, but because it is available. Bureaucratic sclerosis threatens to calcify the system. The very fluidity that once defined American innovation now risks ossification. What Schmidt offers then is not nostalgia for a lost era of innovation, but a strategic plea: adapt the framework, not the principle. Reinvigorate the pipeline. Fund the source. Respect the complexity, but act with the urgency of those who know what is coming. Yet complexity alone does not guarantee clarity. The systems we build—companies, governments, models—are not only mechanical, they are psychological. They depend on who is in charge and how that charge is borne. Here, Schmidt is at his most unvarnished. The role of the CEO is not glamour. It is load-bearing. It is living with fracture. Not a day goes by, he suggests, without being misunderstood, pressured, doubted. And yet the job is not to correct perception. It is to hold the arc of the mission through the fog of contradiction. He draws a distinction: the diva versus the knave. The diva may be difficult, exacting, relentless—but they are devout. Their loyalty is to the problem, not their ego. The knave, on the other hand, may be agreeable, strategic, even successful—but they optimize only for self. This taxonomy is not corporate gossip. It is ethical diagnosis. Companies fail not when they lose talent but when they misplace trust. When loyalty is mistaken for politeness, and dissent for disloyalty. In Schmidt’s model, leadership is not charisma. It is discernment—to sense who will stay in the arena when applause fades. To cultivate people who will not only endure discomfort but metabolize it into focus. That, he argues, is the most human act of all. And beyond the human, something else is arriving—not a tool, but a condition. Schmidt speaks of superhuman intelligence: accelerating, complex, and largely misunderstood. It is not merely that machines will think. It is that they will outthink us—routinely and invisibly. Planning. Reasoning. Synthesis. These won’t be our comparative advantages anymore. And yet, we persist in designing systems that assume human primacy. He describes a future where models not only generate answers but begin to intuit the reward functions of their own learning—where reinforcement learning becomes agency, where post-AGI intelligence will not wait for us to catch up to. This is not a science fiction concern. It is an ethical one. How do you legislate empathy into a machine that learns faster than you can explain? How do you encode justice in a logic that optimizes for pattern, not pain? Schmidt resists both panic and denial. Instead, he asks for vocabulary—for new ways of thinking about coexistence. Because the tools will not pause. The question is whether the society that builds them will insist on its own relevance—whether we design with foresight or simply react in delay. And yet it remains unclear whether any human system, no matter how foresightful, can remain sovereign over a mind that learns faster than it can be explained. The answer, he implies, will define not the software but the soul of the century. So the call is not just technical. It is moral. Invest not only in infrastructure, but in philosophy. Build not only for speed, but for resilience. Schmidt reminds us that the most enduring systems are those designed by people who understood not just what worked, but what mattered. The fastest learners will win—but only if they are learning the right things. AI is not neutral. Its training data is history. Its outputs are a mirror. And if we refuse to look closely, we risk embedding our blind spots in silicon—and scaling them across the planet. But there is also hope. Not abstract, not sentimental—practical hope. Found in the young engineer choosing to work on the hard problem, not the easy product. Found in the team that builds a foundation model for chemistry, or literature, or justice. Found in a government that funds not just safety but vision. This is not a moment for modest ambition. It is a time to seduce the best minds, not with perks, but with purpose—to say, as Schmidt puts it, not “Join us because we are winning,” but “Join us because the problem is hard, and you might be the one to solve it.” That is not just recruitment. That is civilization. This ethic of difficulty—of gravitating toward what resists resolution—is not merely noble. It is necessary. Because in the wake of AI’s expansion, clarity will not come from efficiency. It will come from friction, from disagreement, from minds willing to test not only algorithms but assumptions. Schmidt warns against the comfort of success—the seductive gravity of stability. The irony of scale, he notes, is that risk shrinks just when it is most affordable. Young companies risk freely. Mature ones hedge. But the future belongs to those who continue to leap, even when the ground beneath them feels secure. He gestures to reinforcement learning not just as a computational method, but as a cultural metaphor. It is in the feedback loop—in trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again—that the most transformative ideas emerge. Whether in biology, or governance, or art. The opportunity now is to build systems that do not just store knowledge, but reshape it. That do not only respond to instruction, but generate insight. In that lies the quiet revolution. Not the replacement of humans, but the deepening of what it means to learn together, under pressure—and not despite uncertainty, but because of it. In this landscape, the role of values cannot be understated. Schmidt is unequivocal. If the tools of superintelligence are to be wielded, they must be aligned with the best of what we believe—not the worst of what we tolerate. The geopolitical undercurrent returns: China’s open-source surge as both an engineering triumph and a strategic dilemma. The danger, he implies, is not simply technological parity, but value displacement. If the dominant architectures of thought are built within closed societies, then the freedoms we take for granted—expression, dissent, autonomy—may not survive the migration into code. Thus, innovation is no longer enough. It must be tethered to ethics, to openness, to democratic auditability. He calls for American universities to be fortified—not because they are nostalgic temples of enlightenment, but because they are generative grounds for pluralism. We are not simply in a race for better models. We are in a race for better mirrors. If the future is to be modeled, let it be by minds unafraid of contradiction. If we must compete, let us do so by building systems that expand human dignity, not replace it. The question is not simply which country dominates, but which values its systems will quietly encode—and whether those values will allow disagreement, ambiguity, dissent. Because the algorithm will not remember what we intended. Only what we built. So we return to the founder. Not as myth, but as agent. The one who sees not just the product, but the provocation. Who resists the temptation of clarity and commits to the mess of making something worthwhile. Schmidt’s closing provocation is simple: work on the hardest problem. Not because it guarantees success, but because it guarantees relevance. The reward is not fame, or capital, or exit. It is knowing that when the future arrived, you were already building for it. In this world, the metric of success is no longer elegance. It is consequence. Are the systems we design able to learn? Are the teams we build resilient enough to reframe? Are the leaders we elevate willing to be wrong? These are not boardroom questions. They are civilizational. Schmidt’s legacy, if it is to endure, will not be in a product or evaluation. It will be in the minds he dared to challenge—and the institutions he insisted must matter. He has seen the world from the inside of its most powerful machines. But his deepest insight is not about speed. It is about care. Build what you cannot yet name. Hire who you cannot yet explain. And do not build to win—but to deserve it. Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Schmidt, Eric, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Huttenlocher. The Age of AI: And Our Human Future . Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2021. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology . Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006. Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. AI Founder Journey YouTube channel Key Words Eric Schmidt Google AI Artificial Intelligence Leadership AI and geopolitics China vs USA AI race AI podcast AI ethics and governance Tech founder psychology Open-source AI strategy AGI and human relevance AI learning systems Future of intelligence Deep tech profile Startup leadership…

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The Myth of Clean Beginnings - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 14:10

12 днів тому14:10

14:10

The Myth of Clean Beginnings The Deeper Thinking Podcast We like to believe in clean slates. In fresh starts and unmarked beginnings. But what if the beginning was never clean? What if every attempt at origin is already layered—paint over plaster, gesture over habit, language over silence? This episode explores how beginnings are not ruptures, but rearrangements. It reveals how the past is never fully erased, but sedimented—shaping what follows, quietly and insistently. Origin stories simplify. They conceal the friction beneath—what we thought we had painted over, outgrown, erased. But as Sara Ahmed reminds us, orientations stick not because we choose them, but because spaces are shaped to hold them. And Gloria Anzaldúa teaches us that contradiction is not an error in knowing—it’s a condition of it. There is no pure beginning. There is only rearrangement. As Simone Weil insists, attention is an act of devotion. And to pay attention to what remains—to the unchosen, the unfinished, the inconvenient—is to acknowledge that newness is not clean. It is contingent. In this episode, we ask what it means to begin in a world already built. To inherit structure without pretending we invented it. And to find meaning in what cannot be fully removed. Why Listen? The philosophy of beginning as rearrangement, not rupture How inheritance shapes perception, design, and memory Why origin stories often conceal more than they reveal The ethical and aesthetic stakes of what we try to erase Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed — How space, repetition, and institutional memory shape our bodies. Amazon link Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil — On the spiritual and structural implications of attention. Amazon link Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa — A foundational text on identity, hybridity, and epistemic rupture. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. *Living a Feminist Life*. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Weil, Simone. *Gravity and Grace*. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002. Anzaldúa, Gloria. *Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza*. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.…

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The Shadow and the Self - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 35:11

12 днів тому35:11

35:11

The Shadow and the Self The Deeper Thinking Podcast This episode explores the shadow not as pathology, but as method—a recursive structure of return that challenges what we know about selfhood, truth, and coherence. What happens when we stop fleeing the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled? When we no longer moralise discomfort, but attend to it? The shadow is not a flaw—it is an epistemic threshold. A way of listening to what the psyche does not yet know how to say. Drawing on thinkers like Carl Jung , Jacques Lacan , and Martha Nussbaum , the episode reframes shadow work as a philosophical commitment to remain—near contradiction, near discomfort, near what cannot be resolved. Through this lens, care becomes structure, silence becomes data, and philosophy returns to its ethical origin: presence. As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, contradiction is not a threat to meaning, but its condition. And Judith Butler shows that vulnerability is not the end of thought, but its ground. The essay resists closure, avoids performance, and invites something rarer: to think as an act of fidelity, to feel as a form of recognition, to remain—not to resolve. Why Listen? Philosophy as a practice of shadow integration and self-accountability How repression, projection, and silence shape both personal and political worlds Theorist-led inquiry into ethics, attention, and contradiction A rigorous, lyrical essay format designed for return listening Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung — A foundational account of the shadow and its role in psychic integration. Amazon link Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler — On ethics, exposure, and the limits of self-knowledge. Amazon link Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum — How emotions disclose values and shape moral attention. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Viking Press, 1963. Buber, Martin. I and Thou . Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2004. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood . Translated by Paul A. Kottman. London: Routledge, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 . Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions . New York: William Morrow, 2000. Jung, Carl Gustav. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious . Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection . Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection . Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority . Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception . Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural . Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another . Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God . Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. West, Cornel. Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988.…

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When Systems Echo Without Meaning - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 25:26

12 днів тому25:26

25:26

When Systems Echo Without Meaning The Deeper Thinking Podcast When systems fail, they don’t always stop. Often, they continue—unchanged, unfeeling, echoing protocols long after belief has eroded. This episode explores what it means to remain inside those echoes. Not as a form of resignation, but as a method of listening. Of paying attention to what persists, flickers, distorts. It traces how meaning behaves when its infrastructure collapses, and how rhythm—not resolution—might be what remains. As Maurice Blanchot writes, disaster is not the event of breaking—but the continuation that follows. Byung-Chul Han calls it an era of transparent burnout. In this episode, systems glitch, but don’t stop. Interfaces work. Schedules run. But something is missing. And inside that absence, a new form of attention takes shape. Drawing on the hauntological thinking of Mark Fisher , the recursive performativity of Judith Butler , and the plasticity described by Catherine Malabou , this episode is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about learning to hear what the breakdown reveals. It’s about dwelling in fragments, returning to motifs that no longer resolve, and understanding the glitch not as failure, but as form. Why Listen? How systems can collapse yet still perform Glitch as method—not interruption, but presence The ethics of listening to systems that echo without meaning Theory woven through texture, rhythm, and recursive thinking Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. What Is Called Thinking? by Martin Heidegger — On the impossibility and necessity of staying with broken sense. Amazon link Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing by Catherine Malabou — On form that forms, breaks, and reforms. Amazon link Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher — On hauntology, cultural memory, and systems that keep going without soul. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster . Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York: Routledge, 1990. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures . Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction . Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen . Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.…

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The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 29:23

12 днів тому29:23

29:23

The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working The Deeper Thinking Podcast For many young people, debt is not a temporary problem. It is the condition of adulthood itself. In this episode, we explore how debt has supplanted ownership as the foundation of civic identity, economic structure, and personal possibility. Debt does not merely delay the future—it redesigns it. And it does so not as a glitch in the system, but as its intended logic. This is not a financial advice podcast. It is a philosophical investigation of how David Graeber reframed debt as a moral architecture, how Byung-Chul Han diagnosed fatigue as the affect of freedom, and how Nancy Fraser demands we understand care and extraction as twin forces. We follow the thread of unpaid bills, missed rent, and survival budgets—not as isolated problems, but as the material vocabulary of a deeper social contract. This episode is about design: of systems, of silence, of what becomes normal. It asks what happens when economic survival becomes the only form of participation. And it listens carefully to those moments—at kitchen tables, in late-night spreadsheets, in involuntary quiet—where something like refusal begins. Not resistance as spectacle, but as a structural reimagining of who we are allowed to be, and what we are allowed to owe. Why Listen? How debt became the new architecture of adulthood Why shame is not a personal flaw but a systemic function The civic and emotional costs of assetlessness How care, refusal, and silence become design strategies Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber — A sweeping anthropological history of debt, morality, and power. Amazon link The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han — A diagnosis of the neoliberal psyche through fatigue, performance, and control. Amazon link Cannibal Capitalism by Nancy Fraser — On the extraction of life, care, and environment by capital’s hidden infrastructures. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years . Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It . London: Verso Books, 2022. The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence . London: Verso Books, 2020. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018. O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy . New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016. Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind . London: Verso Books, 2020. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) . London: Verso Books, 2020. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion . 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Morduch, Jonathan, and Rachel Schneider. The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class . London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.…

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What We Lost When We Stopped Belonging - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 32:16

13 днів тому32:16

32:16

What We Lost When We Stopped Belonging The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if loneliness isn’t just a feeling, but a structural breakdown? A collapse in the relational, ecological, and existential architectures that once held us? This episode reframes loneliness not as personal failure, but as the symptom of a deeper disconnection—from each other, from the more-than-human world, and from the systems of meaning that once bound us. Drawing from over forty thinkers in philosophy, ecology, posthumanism, and social theory, we trace how intimacy became transactional, how attention became extractive, and how the self was reframed as sovereign rather than entangled. Featuring insights from Judith Butler , David Abram , bell hooks , Donna Haraway , Tricia Hersey , and Frantz Fanon , we explore how grief, rest, slowness, and interdependence might offer not escape—but repair. This is not a prescription, but a return to presence. An invitation to listen, dwell, and reorient ourselves toward the sacred weave of relation we’ve forgotten how to feel. Why Listen? A structural and ecological reframe of modern loneliness Connect philosophy, posthumanism, and emotional theory Engage practical insights on rest, grief, and reconnection Explore how disconnection became systemic—not individual Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer — On reciprocity, kinship, and ecological memory. Amazon link Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey — Rest as spiritual and political repair. Amazon link Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit — On uncertainty, story, and the slow work of belief. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World . New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others . Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space . Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future . New York: Bell Tower, 1999. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2004. Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility . New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening . London: Routledge, 1990. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 2000. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene . Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto . New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022. hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions . New York: William Morrow, 2000. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society . New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines . London: Routledge, 2015. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants . Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority . Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lord, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches . Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species . New York: Basic Books, 2002. Macy, Joanna. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In without Going Crazy . Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics . Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy . Translated by David Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses . Chichester: Wiley, 2005. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature . London: Routledge, 1993. Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World . Translated by James C. Wagner. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Serres, Michel. The Parasite . Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace . Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities . Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. Stengers, Isabelle. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts . Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other . New York: Basic Books, 2011. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality . Corrected Edition. New York: Free Press, 1978. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.…

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To Be Seen Is to Be Suspect - Mental Health Denial - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 39:31

14 днів тому39:31

39:31

To Be Seen Is to Be Suspect The Deeper Thinking Podcast What happens when care becomes a performance, and diagnosis the only form of public belief? This episode explores how mental health recognition is tethered to systems that demand collapse before offering aid. It asks what’s at stake when distress must be translated into medical language just to be acknowledged—and what gets lost when structural grief is mislabeled as clinical excess. The notion of “overdiagnosis” seems, at first, like a caution against excess. But in a world where suffering is often unseen unless it is named in clinical terms, the real issue may not be inflation—but compression. As Susan McPherson and Lauren Berlant suggest, what we frame as psychiatric surplus may instead be the slow surfacing of deferred, systemic pain. And Judith Butler ’s concept of grievability reminds us that some lives—and some pains—are never granted the same access to recognition. The question, then, is not whether we name too much—but why naming is required at all. Drawing from Frantz Fanon ’s insight into translation under power, and Achille Mbembe ’s theory of necropolitics, we examine how welfare systems discipline visibility and control affective legitimacy. This episode does not reject diagnosis—it reframes it. Not as falsehood, but as a narrow vessel overflowing with meanings it was never built to hold. Why Listen? The structural politics behind “overdiagnosis” discourse When diagnosis is demanded as proof of pain How care systems convert distress into suspicion The thinkers reimagining suffering, visibility, and belief Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed — On institutional affect and the politics of recognition. Amazon link Precarious Life by Judith Butler — Explores grief, public mourning, and differential recognition. Amazon link Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant — A study of attachment to systems that no longer serve us. Amazon link Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon — On colonial psychiatry, translation, and the politics of identity. Amazon link Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe — On sovereignty, death, and the politics of abandonment. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution . New York: Zone Books, 2015. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2004. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons . Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception . Translated by A.M. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts . Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency . New York: Routledge, 1999. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics . Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. McPherson, Susan. "Challenging the ‘Disorder’ in Mental Health." Journal of Mental Health , vol. 28, no. 1 (2019): 1–3. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible . Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope . Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.…

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The Digital Coup - Carole Cadwalladr – The Deeper Thinking Podcast 18:01

14 днів тому18:01

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The Digital Coup The Deeper Thinking Podcast What does it mean to witness a coup without tanks, to live inside a regime of silence engineered through code? In this episode, we examine Carole Cadwalladr’s chilling TED2024 talk—where she returns not as a journalist, but as a trace. A voice that refused erasure. Her story unfolds at the intersection of platform power, legal suppression, and algorithmic simulation. The digital coup has already happened, and she names it. Cadwalladr reveals a world in which the infrastructure of freedom has been quietly overwritten—where data replaces consent, and AI echoes voices it was never given permission to learn. With the rise of the broligarchy —a transnational class of platform-aligned sovereigns—journalistic dissent is punished not by censors, but by courts, algorithms, and silence. Through Cadwalladr’s refusal, we ask: can memory survive simulation? Can refusal still constitute design? The episode explores how law, language, and architecture fuse to erase dissent before it’s heard. We draw on Sylvia Wynter, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler to frame naming not as performance, but as political ontology. This is not a narrative of collapse—it’s a structure of recursion. And in that recursion, the possibility of ethical resistance is not lost. It is revoiced. Why Listen? Understand the legal and infrastructural mechanics of a digital coup Explore how epistemic justice is weaponized and reconstituted under AI Engage philosophers like Nancy, Spivak, Butler, and Mbembe alongside Cadwalladr’s lived experience Trace refusal not as retreat, but as post-erasure authorship Further Reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff — On how data became a new form of sovereignty. Amazon link Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault — On how power moves through visibility. Amazon link Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy — On the ontology of relation and ethical presence. Amazon link Precarious Life by Judith Butler — On the conditions of grievability and public appearance. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Foundational Theoretical Works Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism . New York: Harcourt, 1951. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself . New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Cadwalladr, Carole. “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” TED Talk . April 2024. https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like . Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International . Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 . Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 . Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation . Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study . Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural . Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. Surveillance, Platform Power, and Algorithmic Systems Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018. Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power . New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. Refusal, Disappearance, and Epistemic Opacity Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Macharia, Keguro. Fugitive Refrains . Duke University Press, forthcoming. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects . Translated by Ninian Mellamphy. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis , edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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We’re excited to introduce our brand new podcast - The Neoteric. 0:48

16 днів тому0:48

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The Neoteric We’re excited to introduce our brand new podcast, The Neoteric . This is where deeper thinking finds new ground—where we move beyond inherited frameworks to develop original concepts and philosophical insights. The Neoteric builds on the foundation laid by The Deeper Thinking Podcast , taking those ideas into new terrains and public conversations. The word neoteric refers to someone with new ideas—and that’s exactly what we aim to foster. This podcast is about accelerating the creation and adoption of ideas for the public benefit, bringing philosophy into dialogue with contemporary life in fresh and meaningful ways. We’ve just released our very first episode, and we’d love your support. You can help us grow by leaving a review or rating on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-neoteric-thinking-podcast/id1808354236…

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The Divergent Mind: Reframing ADHD =- The Deeper Thinking Podcast 42:01

16 днів тому42:01

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The Divergent Mind: Reframing ADHD The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if ADHD isn’t a disorder, but a different way of being—one shaped by rhythm, intuition, sensitivity, and pattern? In this extended episode, we explore ADHD as a divergent intelligence, not a deficit—drawing on over thirty-five thinkers across neuroscience, trauma, somatics, philosophy, and disability justice. ADHD is often seen as a failure to comply with linear time and fixed attention. But as Russell Barkley shows, the real challenge is one of time perception. And Gabor Maté helps us understand ADHD as a relational and developmental response, not just a neurological glitch. We turn to Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges to explore how the body remembers overwhelm, and to Bonnie Badenoch and Pat Ogden for a somatic understanding of emotional regulation. This episode is both philosophical and practical. It includes tools drawn from the work of Tricia Hersey , Devon Price , Lauren Berlant , and Saidiya Hartman —helping us reframe shame, rest, and refusal not as failures, but as forms of resistance. ADHD, we argue, isn’t something to overcome. It’s something to re-meet, with deeper attention and radically different design. Why Listen? A compassionate and philosophical reframe of ADHD Neuroscience meets narrative in a somatic, relational lens Learn practical tools grounded in trauma-informed theory Unpack how ADHD reveals what current systems can’t hold Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté — On the relational and developmental roots of ADHD. Amazon link The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk — A foundational text on trauma and body memory. Amazon link Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey — A radical rethinking of rest and refusal. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Maté, Gabor. Scattered Minds . New York: Avery, 2023. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score . New York: Penguin, 2014. Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance . New York: Little, Brown, 2022.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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Sam Altman - The Man Creating Our Cognitive Future - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 22:08

17 днів тому22:08

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Sam Altman - The Man Creating Our Cognitive Future The Deeper Thinking Podcast What happens when machines stop waiting for input and begin to anticipate you? In this episode, we unpack Sam Altman’s TED2025 conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson—not to debate AI’s dangers or promises, but to trace what it reveals about authorship, memory, agency, and power. This is not just about a future we are building. It’s about a system we’re already inside. AI is no longer framed as tool, but as presence. A memory that accumulates. A voice that preempts. As Bernard Stiegler wrote, technics are not just extensions of the body—they are prosthetics of memory. And in this episode, memory becomes infrastructure. Through Altman’s calm precision, we hear not certainty but recursion—echoes of Simone Weil ’s claim that attention is an act of devotion, and Hannah Arendt ’s insistence that every birth is a beginning of a new world, whether we intend it or not. The episode also surfaces contradictions between openness and control, ambient design and algorithmic authorship. As Byung-Chul Han warns, transparency can flatten trust into performance. And Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us that contradiction is not a flaw—it is the texture of reality. This episode listens for the textures Altman doesn’t name, but performs: recursion, proximity, the ambient structure of systems that speak before we do. Why Listen? Explore AI as atmosphere, not interface Understand how memory, trust, and agency are being restructured Hear Altman’s own words—with quote fidelity—against deep theory Engage thinkers from Weil to Moten , Virilio to Simondon Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Technics and Time, 1 by Bernard Stiegler — On how tools shape memory and temporality. Amazon link The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt — On action, natality, and the ethics of futurity. Amazon link The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han — A short, devastating critique of algorithmic culture. Amazon link In the Break by Fred Moten — On Black performance, improvisation, and contradiction. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Altman, Sam. “OpenAI's Sam Altman Talks the Future of AI, Safety and Power — Live at TED2025.” Interview by Chris Anderson. TED, April 11, 2025. Transcript via DownSub.com. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author . In Image, Music, Text , translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science.” Minerva 41, no. 3 (2003): 223–244. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects . Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology . Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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Simone de Beauvoir - Becoming in a World Already Made - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 23:44

17 днів тому23:44

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Becoming in a World Already Made The Deeper Thinking Podcast This episode traces the life and philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir , whose thought remains a discipline of staying with contradiction. We explore how her theory of gender as a process of becoming disrupts essentialist myths, how ambiguity becomes an ethical commitment, and why lived experience—its difficulty, its dailiness—must remain central to any philosophy that hopes to mean something. This is not an essay about clarity, but about holding pressure: between freedom and limit, subject and other, intimacy and asymmetry. We follow Beauvoir’s dismantling of the eternal feminine , her critique of woman as the constructed Other, and her insistence—via her own life and writing—that philosophy must begin from within the unresolved. Drawing lines through the work of thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Gloria Anzaldúa , we examine how Beauvoir’s legacy isn’t purity or conclusion—but a recursive method of attention. A refusal to resolve what is still becoming. There is no clean end to Beauvoir’s thought. Instead, it loops, doubles back, and insists that we reenter the field of questions we hoped to escape. To listen is to stay close to tension, to contradiction, and to the possibility that becoming isn’t a path—but a structure we continue to live inside. Why Listen? Explore Beauvoir’s five key theories with philosophical and narrative depth Understand why ambiguity, not certainty, was her ethical starting point See how freedom must be lived within limits, not outside them Reframe philosophy as rooted in experience—not escape from it Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir — A foundational critique of woman as Other and the myth of femininity. Amazon link The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir — On freedom, ambiguity, and responsibility in existential life. Amazon link Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed — On orientation, institutional memory, and inherited structure. Amazon link Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa — A landmark on identity, hybridity, and epistemic dissonance. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex . Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity . Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1976. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Simons, Margaret A. Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman . Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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Billionaire Philanthropy - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 15:46

19 днів тому15:46

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Billionaire Philanthropy The Deeper Thinking Podcast As the myth of the heroic billionaire begins to unravel, we are left with a haunting question: what happens when capital becomes culture, and wealth is mistaken for wisdom? This episode examines the slow collapse of the savior narrative—the notion that individuals of great wealth are uniquely positioned to govern, to fix, or to redeem what democratic systems cannot. What emerges in its place is not a vacuum, but a reckoning. Not a villain, but a failure of structure. Drawing on thinkers like Max Weber , Michel Foucault , and Wendy Brown , we explore how bureaucracy, surveillance, and soft power reconfigure governance in the image of wealth. We ask how philanthropy functions not as remedy but as choreography—what Lauren Berlant might call a form of cruel optimism—and how the promise of innovation often conceals the architecture of control. The episode then moves through the frameworks of Amartya Sen and Achille Mbembe to ask what justice and power might look like when redistributed, not concentrated. This is not a story of villains. It is a story of illusions. And the work of truth, as ever, is architectural. What we need is not a new hero, but a scaffold. Something built for many hands. Something that lasts. Why Listen? The cultural anatomy of the billionaire myth How philanthropy reinforces structural inequality Why spectacle replaces governance in neoliberal democracy What justice looks like when designed, not donated Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber — The link between economic life and moral legitimacy. Amazon link Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault — Surveillance, normalization, and power. Amazon link Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen — Human capability and economic justice. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Further Reading Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution . Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Originally published 1975. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics . Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Translated by Stephen Kalberg. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company. Originally published 1905.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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When Reality Unfolds - The Topology Of High Strangeness - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 25:54

19 днів тому25:54

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When Reality Unfolds: The Topology of High Strangeness The Deeper Thinking Podcast Witnesses rarely remember high strangeness as terror. What unfolds is quieter—stranger. The silhouette is voided. The body stays calm. The event resists narrative. And in its place, the real begins to shift. This episode follows the emergence of two encounters—a figure by the hedge, and another in a kitchen—and explores what happens when the world fails to hold its shape. Working through the six-layer model by Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis , we examine the phenomenon across physical, psychological, cultural, and informational layers. Rather than offering closure, the model reveals what kind of perception is needed to endure the unresolvable. It is not an invitation to belief, but an architecture for remaining—when explanation fails, and yet something real has occurred. What does it mean to register an anomaly without grasping for meaning? What if attention itself becomes part of the event? Drawing on ideas from Gloria Anzaldúa , Karen Barad , and Jungian archetype theory , this episode explores not what is seen, but how seeing gets rewritten. The anomaly is not an object—it is a fold. And the fold does not close. Why Listen? Learn the six-layer model of high strangeness from Vallée and Davis Explore epistemic rupture through story, not theory Engage concepts from Anzaldúa, Barad, and Jung without abstraction Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallée — Case histories of strange phenomena with cross-cultural pattern recognition. Amazon link Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa — Identity and knowledge at the edge of structure. Amazon link Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad — Ontology, agency, and quantum entanglement. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Davis, Eric W., and Jacques Vallée. "Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena." National Institute for Discovery Science , 2003. Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious . 2nd ed. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers . Charlottesville, VA: Anomalist Books, 2014.…

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Recursion and Refusal - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 19:14

20 днів тому19:14

19:14

Recursion and Refusal The Deeper Thinking Podcast We live in systems that cannot hesitate. Algorithms forecast behavior before it forms. Ecosystems are modeled for collapse before the signs appear. And the pace of prediction erodes our capacity to pause, reflect, and remain. But this is not just a crisis of speed — it is a crisis of thought. What happens when memory becomes prediction, and presence becomes noise? This episode moves between ecological logic and algorithmic control, asking not for answers but for attention. What does it mean to model a forest as data? Or to treat silence as an error? With insights drawn from Martin Heidegger , Gregory Bateson , Bernard Stiegler , Hannah Arendt , Gilbert Simondon , Henri Bergson , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , and Walter Benjamin , we explore the structures we trust, the models we mistake for reality, and the silences that still refuse to be simulated. Why Listen? Heidegger’s “withdrawal” as the root of epistemic blindness Bateson’s “pattern which connects” and its unmodelable logic Stiegler’s recursive memory and the automation of care Arendt’s silence as a moral structure in judgment Simondon’s individuation vs algorithmic state logic Bergson’s duration as resistance to compression Derrida’s rupture as structural—not accidental Foucault’s biopower in predictive systems Benjamin’s messianic suspension as exit logic Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger — Ontological withdrawal and the structure of appearing. Amazon link Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson — Systems thinking and recursive pattern. Amazon link Technics and Time, 1 by Bernard Stiegler — Memory, technology, and the future. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Biliography Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind . New York: Harcourt, 1978. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations . Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness . Translated by F. L. Pogson. New York: Dover Publications, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference . Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 . Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information . Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.…

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When the Grid Forgot Its Shape - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 27:55

20 днів тому27:55

27:55

When the Grid Forgot Its Shape The Deeper Thinking Podcast In 2024, hedge fund founder Ray Dalio warned the World Economic Forum that the global financial system was not merely bending under pressure—it was entering terminal breakdown. He spoke not of corrections or cycles, but of convergence: debt saturation, geopolitical entropy, technological enclosure, and the slow hollowing of democratic form. We don’t usually begin essays with billionaires. But this time, the language of collapse came not from poets or prophets—but from inside the algorithm. This episode is a meditation on the long emergency. Not just economic unraveling, but epistemic and ontological dislocation. We move from Arrighi’s theory of financial hegemonies to Arendt’s loneliness and totalitarian drift. From Schmitt’s sovereign exception to Baudrillard’s simulation of markets. The logic of order is unraveling—replaced not by chaos, but by recursive contradiction: climate as sovereign, AI as architecture, debt as metaphysics. The old world is dying. The new world cannot yet be born. Now is the time of monsters. Why Listen? Understand the structural recursion behind systemic breakdown Explore how thinkers like Arrighi , Arendt , Schmitt , and Baudrillard explain political and financial entropy Engage with the idea of collapse not as catastrophe, but as recursion Learn how motifs of monstrosity, opacity, and exhaustion define this moment Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi — Financial cycles, hegemonic rise and fall. Amazon link The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt — Power, loneliness, and structural violence. Amazon link Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard — Reality collapse and economic illusion. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times . London: Verso, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation . Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks . Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition . Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty . Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power . New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.…

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Baby, You Were Born This Way (Not a Trait but a Task) - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 16:34

20 днів тому16:34

16:34

Baby, You Were Born This Way (Not a Trait but a Task) She was assigned "girl" before she was given a name. Years later, her gender reveal video went viral—for the irony, not the joy. This essay follows the machinery behind gender, from performativity to punishment, ritual to recursion. It refuses clarity, not out of evasion, but as method. Across Judith Butler , Elizabeth Grosz , Gayle Rubin , and Gayatri Spivak , it opens a philosophical field where failure is strategy, ambiguity is resistance, and gender is not identity—but orientation across time. We interrogate visibility as control — drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power , the essay explores how systems enforce gender not through overt law but through the demand to be legible. Surveillance, repetition, and social correction form a diffuse architecture in which visibility is granted only when performance aligns with normative scripts. To be seen, then, is not liberation—it is submission to a gaze that categorizes, polices, and regulates the self. Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bandura, Albert. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York: Routledge, 1990. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation . Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women , edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. World Health Organization. Gender and Women's Mental Health . Geneva: WHO, 2002. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019.…

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The Opposite of Everything is History - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 20:33

24 дні тому20:33

20:33

The Opposite of Everything is History What Remains After Structure Collapses Note this episode replaces "The Deep Structures Culture and Cognition" The Deeper Thinking Podcast This episode enters the elegant collapse of structuralism. What begins as a system of oppositions—raw and cooked, myth and meaning, structure and freedom—slowly unravels across nine recursive movements. Through Lévi-Strauss, Bateson, Sartre, Rubin, Derrida, Levinas, Wynter, and Glissant, the essay traces not a theory, but its residue. It does not explain. It listens. It does not resolve. It disturbs. It follows a structure until it can no longer hold, and then it listens to what flickers after: silence, relation, and the right to opacity. Why Listen? Learn how structuralism framed cognition through oppositions See how poststructuralism undoes clarity from within Feel the shift from pattern to residue, from system to echo Follow the drift from myth to opacity, from form to relation Further Reading The Raw and the Cooked – Claude Lévi-Strauss The Sex/Gender System – Gayle Rubin Of Grammatology – Jacques Derrida Poetics of Relation – Édouard Glissant Unsettling the Coloniality of Being – Sylvia Wynter Listen Now On: Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube Amazon Music…

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Internal Velocity External Silence - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 19:42

25 днів тому19:42

19:42

Internal Velocity External Silence What happens when you stop being the version of yourself that everyone loved — and realize you never fully inhabited it? This episode unfolds the psychic aftermath of chronic likability: the internal spinning that begins once the performance dissolves. Framed by trauma, ADHD, and the deep structures of people-pleasing, the essay refuses clarity in favor of recursive presence. Through unspoken friction, memory collapse, and epistemic silence, we trace a self that never arrives — but remains. It is not healing. It is residence. Inspired by thinkers like Lauren Berlant , Byung-Chul Han , and Judith Butler , this episode offers no advice, no redemption. Just motion. Thought in the form of atmosphere. Why Listen? Explore how diagnosis reframes — but doesn’t resolve — a lifetime of adaptive performance Hear what loneliness sounds like after applause fades Encounter philosophical thought as breath, not argument Follow a self that refuses to stabilize for recognition Further Reading The Burnout Society – Byung-Chul Han Undoing Gender – Judith Butler The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases. Listen Now YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender . New York: Routledge, 2004. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star . Translated by Benjamin Moser. New York: New Directions, 2011. Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in the Light of Notions of Form and Information . Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.…

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Economic Presence Not Found - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 11:22

26 днів тому11:22

11:22

Economic Presence Not Found The Deeper Thinking Podcast A screen flickers. The system is online. But something is missing. The data flows, the dashboards update, the lights stay on—but presence has vanished. This episode explores the emotional and philosophical latency within modern economic systems: the places where stress becomes unreadable, suffering becomes delay, and meaning dissolves into metrics. The glitch, once a sign of failure, now becomes the only way emotion survives. This isn’t a story of collapse. It’s a recursive silence. A world that continues functioning while comprehension quietly disappears. Through subtle images of breath, blinking cursors, and ghosted financial phrases, the essay traces a deeper contradiction: the system is working as designed, but the design excludes the human. Pain remains—but without language, without response, without logoff. What happens when the software doesn’t crash—but we do? Why Listen? A haunting philosophical portrait of emotional illegibility in automated systems Insight into the glitch as a form of emotional survival A recursive meditation on latency, economic logic, and the absence of presence An original conceptual lens on system design, affect, and contradiction Further Listening / Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han Amazon link 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcast…

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The End of Usefulness is the Beginning of Being (The Lie of the Useful) - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 24:20

26 днів тому24:20

24:20

The End of Usefulness is the Beginning of Being The Deeper Thinking Podcast Artificial intelligence is taking our jobs. But that isn’t the problem. This episode explores what lies beneath the fear of automation—not economic disruption, but the quiet exposure of a system that never truly valued us beyond our usefulness. When the machines arrive, it is not just work that disappears. It is the illusion that dignity was ever built into the code. This is not a technological crisis. It is a philosophical unmasking. For generations, usefulness was mistaken for virtue, and exhaustion for proof of worth. But AI does not believe in effort. It does not reward loyalty. It simply reveals that the system we trusted was never designed to care. And in that exposure, something else emerges: a deeper silence, a chance to see what might remain when function is no longer the measure of being. What happens when usefulness ends, and we are still here? Why Listen? Understand the philosophical implications of AI beyond economics Explore how usefulness became a moral metric in capitalist systems Examine the emotional and existential impact of automation Hear a quiet argument for reclaiming value outside of function Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt Technics and Time by Bernard Stiegler Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract The Lie of the Useful interrogates the philosophical and emotional aftermath of artificial intelligence displacing human labor—not as a technological catastrophe, but as a revelatory act. This essay contends that usefulness has functioned as a moralized placeholder for identity within late capitalist structures, offering not just economic utility but existential coherence. As AI renders human labor increasingly obsolete, what is exposed is not merely technological change, but the brittle architecture of a system that never granted worth outside of output. Drawing on embedded insights from Heidegger, Arendt, Han, and Stiegler, the essay unfolds as a slow disintegration of inherited certainties—arguing that usefulness was never neutral, but conditional. From this collapse arises a difficult possibility: that value, dignity, and meaning might survive the end of function. Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality . New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition . Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus . Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other . New York: Basic Books, 2011.…

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The Ethics of Looking Away - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 13:57

27 днів тому13:57

13:57

The Ethics of Looking Away The Deeper Thinking Podcast In the spaces between relentless images of suffering and the quiet moments of retreat, there exists a hidden moral tension. What if the act of turning away is not mere indifference, but a necessary, human response to overwhelming despair? This episode delves into the paradox where the refusal to continuously witness becomes both a survival strategy and a silent commentary on our limited capacity to care. It explores how, amid the constant barrage of trauma, the very decision to look away can articulate a profound ethical dilemma—a quiet protest against the unyielding demands of exposure. The act of disengagement is not a moral failing but a testament to human vulnerability. It challenges the notion that unbroken vigilance is the measure of virtue, inviting reflection on the ethical weight of pausing—of choosing to shield oneself from relentless pain. Why Listen? Understand how turning away can reveal deeper moral complexities. Explore the interplay between overwhelming exposure and ethical self-preservation. Reflect on the limits of empathy in an age of perpetual crisis. Question the true cost of unending vigilance versus deliberate pause. Further Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt – A deep dive into the rise of totalitarian regimes and the role of bureaucracy in facilitating evil. The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt – Examines the nature of political life and the importance of public action. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt – The landmark work that introduced the concept of the "banality of evil." Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract This episode interrogates the ethical and psychological dynamics of turning away from the relentless barrage of suffering. It examines the tension between moral obligation and self-preservation, exploring whether the act of looking away constitutes a moral failing or a necessary form of survival. Drawing on the philosophical insights of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and John Berger, the discussion reveals how the burden of constant witnessing can erode empathy and overwhelm human capacity. By challenging the assumption that perpetual vigilance is inherently virtuous, the episode invites listeners to reconsider the ethics of attention, offering a reflective space where the quiet power of deliberate disengagement emerges as a potent, if painful, form of resistance. Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Viking, 1963. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing . London: Penguin Books, 1972. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.…

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We Modeled the World Before We Understood It - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 20:19

30 днів тому20:19

20:19

We Modeled the World Before We Understood It How Generative AI Is Rewriting Science, Reality, and the Meaning of Discovery The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if science no longer uncovered reality—but generated it? In an age where AlphaFold predicts faster than biology can observe, where systems like generative AI simulate truth before it's tested, the foundations of knowledge begin to shift. This episode explores the quiet revolution in epistemology catalyzed by models trained not to understand, but to perform—where the output comes before the insight, and the scientific method begins to fade from center stage. This is not speculation. It is already here. From computational biology to climate modeling, generative systems are rendering futures not yet seen, and versions of nature that were never empirically touched. The result is a strange inversion: where once theory emerged from experience, now experience is shaped by the models we trust. If Kuhn's paradigms were ruptured by anomalies, today's paradigms are replaced by architectures that outperform the need for justification. But this isn’t just a technical shift. It’s philosophical, ethical, and deeply human. As the observer recedes and the model takes precedence, we must confront what it means to assign value—to curate realities we did not discover, but merely selected. This episode journeys through the conceptual terrain where simulation supersedes observation, and asks: what remains uniquely human when the world is built before it is known? Why Listen? Understand the shift from empirical science to generative models Explore how AI is reshaping the philosophy of knowledge and discovery Unpack the ethical tensions of systems that create without understanding Reflect on human meaning-making in a versioned, simulated world Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn — A foundational text on how science evolves through paradigm shifts. Amazon link How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles — A critical look at how computation reshapes identity, embodiment, and knowledge. Amazon link The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard — A poetic philosophy of imagined worlds and scientific reverie. Amazon link Listen Now On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract This essay examines the emergence of a post-empirical paradigm in scientific inquiry, driven by the generative capacities of artificial intelligence. As systems like AlphaFold and Gemini surpass human capabilities in prediction and simulation, the traditional epistemology of observation and experimentation begins to erode. Knowledge is no longer extracted from nature—it is synthesized, versioned, and rendered before empirical validation. The essay argues that science is shifting from a mode of discovery to one of architectural performance, where truth is measured by coherence and utility rather than correspondence. In this new landscape, the role of the human transitions from knower to curator, from discoverer to meaning-maker. Drawing on philosophical echoes of Kuhn, Haraway, and Bachelard, the essay articulates a quiet manifesto for navigating a world where reality is not found but generated—and where the responsibility for interpretation, ethics, and selection remains irreducibly human. Bibliography Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Paradigm Shifts Bachelard, Gaston. The New Scientific Spirit . Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method . London: Verso Books, 1975. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery . London: Routledge, 1959. Simulation, Models, and Reality Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation . Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Floridi, Luciano. The Philosophy of Information . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Frigg, Roman, and Stephan Hartmann. “Models in Science.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2022 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science/ . Vespignani, Alessandro. “Predicting the Behavior of Techno-Social Systems.” Science 325, no. 5939 (2009): 425–28. Winsberg, Eric. Science in the Age of Computer Simulation . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. AI, Generative Systems, and Posthumanism Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature , 149–181. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Mitchell, Melanie. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Ethics, Meaning, and Technological Power Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism . New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy . New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Supplemental Readings (Advanced / Theoretical) Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition . Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography . Translated by Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Parisi, Luciana. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Sloterdijk, Peter. Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology . Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.…

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The Noise Inside the Silence - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 20:32

4 weeks тому20:32

20:32

The Noise Inside the Silence The Deeper Thinking Podcast What if silence doesn’t bring peace, but exposure? What if the moment the world quiets is when the true noise begins—the echo of thought, the return of memory, the body’s forgotten ache? This episode explores a deeper paradox: that the promise of stillness often collides with the chaos it reveals. Influenced by the writings of Simone Weil, Merleau-Ponty, and Peter Levine, we enter a philosophical and psychological soundscape where silence is not a void, but a mirror—a place where everything held back begins to rise. From emotional backlog to somatic memory, the Listener is guided through the textures of inner noise that emerge when distraction falls away. This isn’t about mindfulness as mastery. It’s about contact. What happens when you stop running, and finally hear what’s been with you all along? Silence, in this telling, is not a retreat. It’s a return—fraught, luminous, and alive with tension. For those who’ve felt unsettled in the quiet, this episode offers not escape, but recognition. Why Listen? To reframe silence not as absence, but as presence—dense with emotional and psychological resonance To explore the hidden structure of inner chaos through the lens of philosophy and somatic psychology To engage with thinkers like Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Peter Levine in a deeply accessible way To feel seen in the overwhelming moment when the world goes quiet, but the mind does not Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil — A meditation on suffering, attention, and the sacred tension of stillness. Amazon link Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty — On the body as the first site of meaning and memory. Amazon link Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine — A guide to understanding trauma and the body’s somatic intelligence. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract This essay investigates the paradoxical nature of silence, not as a peaceful void, but as an intensifying presence that reveals hidden layers of emotion, memory, and embodiment. Drawing on the works of Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Peter Levine, it explores how stillness can act as a mirror that reflects the psychological and somatic residues often masked by the noise of daily life. Rather than offering comfort, silence is shown to provoke confrontation with what has been repressed or unattended. The essay positions silence not as the endpoint of mindfulness or meditative practice, but as an encounter—charged with unresolved tension, vulnerability, and the potential for recognition. Through the lens of phenomenology and trauma theory, silence becomes a threshold where thought deepens, sensation awakens, and the Listener is invited into contact with the noise within. Bibliography Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma . North Atlantic Books, 1997. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception . Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2012. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Craufurd, Routledge, 2002.…

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Hannah Arendt: The Quiet Power of Thoughtlessness - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 28:42

4 weeks тому28:42

28:42

Hannah Arendt: The Quiet Power of Thoughtlessness The Deeper Thinking Podcast In the spaces between thoughts, where clarity falters, there lies a quiet danger. What if evil isn't loud, but rather the absence of thought—an obedience without reflection? This episode explores the silence in the thoughtless act and its dangerous power. Join us as we navigate the philosophical undercurrent of Arendt's insights into totalitarianism, where systems of control thrive not in violence, but in the hollow echo of compliance. The banality of evil is not an indictment of monstrous individuals, but of the ordinary minds swept up in an overwhelming system. Arendt’s work uncovers how ideologies and bureaucratic structures diminish the very capacity to question, to think critically, and to act with moral clarity. The absence of thought creates the perfect conditions for atrocities—quiet, unremarkable, but deadly. Arendt’s warning isn't merely historical. In today’s world, thoughtlessness can be seen in every impersonal system that governs our lives, from bureaucracies to modern-day technological control. The true question is: how do we fight back? Arendt doesn’t call for violence or rebellion. She calls for thought. To reclaim the public realm, to regain our moral agency, we must refuse the silence of thoughtlessness and reclaim our power to speak, to think, and to act. Why Listen? Understanding Arendt’s concept of the "banality of evil" and its relevance today The dangerous implications of thoughtlessness in bureaucratic and systemic power The philosophy of reclaiming speech, action, and moral agency in a controlled world Arendt’s call for a new politics—rooted in speaking truth and resisting apathy Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt — A deep dive into the rise of totalitarian regimes and the role of bureaucracy in facilitating evil. Amazon link The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt — Examines the nature of political life and the importance of public action. Amazon link Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt — The landmark work that introduced the concept of the "banality of evil." Amazon link Listen Now On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract: This episode delves into the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, focusing on her concept of the "banality of evil" and its application to modern systems of control. Arendt’s exploration of thoughtlessness within bureaucratic structures reveals how evil can manifest not through overt violence, but through the quiet, unthinking compliance of ordinary individuals. The episode examines the role of thought and moral agency in resisting totalitarian systems, highlighting Arendt’s call for individuals to reclaim their public voices and act with conscience in the face of systemic indifference. Drawing from Arendt's seminal works, the episode also contemplates the relevance of her philosophy in the modern world, where technological and bureaucratic forces increasingly shape our lives. It poses the question: how do we resist apathy, reclaim agency, and restore the public realm in a world that seeks to silence thought and diminish individual responsibility? Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism . New York: Harcourt, 1951. ———. The Human Condition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ———. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Viking Press, 1963.…

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Who Deserves Help? (The Gate and The Ledger) : The Philosophy of Deservedness and the Workhouse Legacy - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 23:57

4 weeks тому23:57

23:57

Who Deserves Help? The Philosophy of Deservedness and the Workhouse Legacy The Deeper Thinking Podcast Who decides if someone is worthy of aid? And what happens when help becomes a judgment rather than a gift? This episode unearths the moral logic behind the 1834 Poor Laws — where help was designed to hurt, and relief required the performance of virtue. But this isn’t just history. The legacy of deservedness lingers in every modern welfare system, policy form, and silent refusal. The idea that people must earn help — by their labor, their compliance, or their suffering — is so embedded in our systems that we rarely question it. But what if the very act of moral filtering is the problem? Drawing from Bentham’s utilitarian logic, Malthusian fear, and Rawlsian justice, this episode reframes help not as something distributed by merit, but as something denied through design. We follow the architectural cruelty of the workhouse, the silence of bureaucracy, and the emotional toll of being deemed undeserving — not just historically, but now. In this atmosphere of quiet exclusion, the question persists: who must suffer, and how visibly, before we offer care? Why Listen? Explore how 19th-century policy reshaped moral ideas about poverty, productivity, and worth Understand how modern welfare systems still echo workhouse logic Examine philosophical alternatives to merit-based care — Rawls, Sen, care ethics Hear a compelling philosophical audio essay told through third-person narrative and historical tension Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls — A foundational text on fairness and distributive justice. In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan — Introduces care ethics as a moral and political framework. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act — Primary source context for the historical pivot explored in the essay. Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract This audio essay interrogates the philosophical foundations of deservedness within systems of social aid, tracing the origins of moralized welfare through the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act in England. By examining how utilitarian and Malthusian ideologies reshaped poverty as a moral condition, the essay reveals how suffering was institutionalized as a test of worth. The workhouse system—engineered to deter rather than assist—serves as a historical case study in the weaponization of help. Drawing from the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and care ethicists such as Carol Gilligan, the episode critiques how modern welfare systems continue to encode suspicion and judgment into their very design. Ultimately, the essay asks whether help must be earned, or whether it can be reclaimed as a right grounded in shared vulnerability and political responsibility. Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population . London: J. Johnson, 1798. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice . Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom . New York: Anchor Books, 2000. United Kingdom Parliament. Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (4 & 5 Will. IV c. 76). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.…

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When The Future Stops Moving - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 17:40

4 weeks тому17:40

17:40

When the future stops moving The Deeper Thinking Podcast We often speak of crisis as collapse — visible, loud, definitive. But what if the deeper crisis is one of drift? What if the defining feature of our time is not destruction, but the quiet erosion of collective imagination? In this episode, we explore how wealth, knowledge, and tools are abundant — and yet the future remains unbuilt. The question is not whether we can act, but whether we still remember how to begin. Drawing on the ideas of Hannah Arendt , Mark Fisher , and Byung-Chul Han , this episode considers the institutional, cultural, and psychological forces that have dimmed our capacity to dream in public. From bureaucratic liberalism to the attention economy, we trace how possibility has narrowed — not through censorship, but through fatigue and fragmentation. We examine how thinkers like Ivan Illich , Simone Weil , and David Graeber offer not just diagnosis but renewal — reminding us that imagination is not fantasy, but structure. That to build is not to dream alone, but to invite others into a shared design for what could come next. This episode invites you into a space of reflection — not to escape the present, but to encounter its unfinished blueprints. To ask what futures have been buried, and what it might take to unfold them once more. Why Listen? Explore the philosophical roots of political and cultural stagnation Understand the impact of institutional inertia on the future Learn how thinkers like Arendt, Illich, and Fisher diagnose our crisis of imagination Discover how to reclaim imagination as a civic, philosophical, and moral act Further Reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt — On natality, action, and political beginnings. Amazon link Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher — A short guide to the sense of cultural impasse. Amazon link Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han — On the internalization of control through self-optimization. Amazon link Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract This essay investigates the cultural, philosophical, and institutional causes behind modern liberal societies' inability to build meaningful futures, despite material abundance and technological capability. Drawing from thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, Mark Fisher, Simone Weil, and Byung-Chul Han, the essay argues that our present condition is not defined by collapse, but by drift — a failure of collective imagination to initiate, construct, and sustain shared futures. The essay maps how institutional entropy, bureaucratic liberalism, and the commodification of attention have hollowed the imaginative capacities once embedded in governments, universities, and civic institutions. It redefines imagination not as fantasy, but as an applied political act — a structural ability to propose and enact alternate realities. In doing so, the essay resituates “imagination” as essential to moral and political agency, and closes by calling for its re-legitimization as a civic and philosophical imperative. Annotated Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958. Introduces the concept of natality — the human capacity to begin. Arendt’s framing of action, freedom, and political space grounds the essay’s exploration of institutional stasis and the lost capacity to initiate. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. University of California Press, 1978. Provides the foundation for understanding bureaucratic rationalization and the “iron cage” of modernity — a central metaphor in the essay’s critique of liberal proceduralism. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009. Explores the cultural and psychological conditions that make it difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Fisher’s concept of “realism” helps frame generational stagnation and institutional despair. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015. Critiques the neoliberal emphasis on performance and self-optimization. Han’s work informs the discussion on attention economies and the saturation of public imagination. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, 2002. Presents attention as a moral act and a spiritual discipline. Weil’s philosophy supports the essay’s closing argument: that stillness, attention, and re-imagining are preconditions for civic restoration. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harper & Row, 1971. Critiques institutional monopoly over learning and social reproduction. Illich’s theory is used to explain how institutions drift from creation to conservation. Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules. Melville House, 2015. Blends anthropology with political critique, arguing that bureaucracy often masks a deeper fear of freedom. Graeber’s work supports the call for imagination as structural intervention. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press, 1991. Examines the decline of moral horizons in modern liberal societies. His warnings about procedural liberalism ground the essay’s critique of value-neutral politics. Sandel, Michael. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Critiques value-neutral frameworks in democratic life. Sandel’s ideas are used to expose the limits of liberal neutrality in shaping moral and imaginative action. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011. Analyzes the attachments we maintain to harmful systems. Her concept helps unpack how young people remain tethered to dreams the system no longer supports. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. MIT Press, 1986. Philosophical foundation for the concept of utopia as a method of concrete imagining. Supports the essay’s framing of imagination as disciplined, structural, and ethical.…

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The Freedom of Enoughness - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 29:31

5 weeks тому29:31

29:31

The Freedom of Enoughness The Deeper Thinking Podcast Some truths do not shout. They arrive in silence, like a quiet wave that doesn’t demand your attention but gently pulls you into its embrace. The world tells us to achieve, to keep moving, to perform—but what if the real freedom lies in being enough, just as we are? What if we could free ourselves from the need to always be more and simply exist in a space of enoughness? This episode explores the radical power of embracing stillness, self-compassion, and the refusal to chase external validation, as we examine the deep philosophical and psychological implications of living fully in the present. We are taught to measure our worth by our achievements, our performance, and our productivity. This endless pursuit leaves little room for simply *being*. But what if we chose presence over performance? What if, instead of striving to improve every aspect of ourselves, we learned to embrace the space between action and rest, the space where we are enough without needing to be anything else? In this episode, we discuss the transformative ideas of thinkers like Byung-Chul Han , who critiques the culture of constant productivity, and Simone Weil , whose concept of attention as a moral act offers a pathway to inner peace through stillness and presence. In contrast to the hustle culture that defines our society, we explore how embracing self-compassion allows us to create a healthier, more sustainable relationship with ourselves. Drawing on the work of Kristin Neff , we discuss how self-compassion can be the antidote to the self-criticism that arises from performance-based worth. Moreover, we dive into Maslow’s self-actualization theory, exploring how we can achieve fulfillment by acknowledging our inherent worth, rather than constantly striving for perfection or external validation. The practice of enoughness requires us to acknowledge and confront the cultural forces that push us towards constant optimization. As we discuss the ideas of Nietzsche , who challenges us to embrace our limitations and flaws, we ask: What would it look like to live a life free from the tyranny of productivity? To value ourselves not for what we achieve, but for who we are, right now, in this moment? This episode invites you to step away from the pressure to constantly prove yourself and instead explore the profound possibility of simply being enough. Why Listen? How to embrace enoughness and redefine your self-worth The psychological benefits of self-compassion in a performance-driven world The philosophical implications of resisting productivity culture How thinkers like Byung-Chul Han and Simone Weil offer insights into how to live a more balanced, fulfilling life Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han — A critique of the culture of constant performance and productivity. Amazon link Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil — Fragments on attention, affliction, and spiritual refusal. Amazon link The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle — The importance of presence in a fast-paced world. Amazon link Listen Now On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract In The Freedom of Enoughness , this episode delves into the cultural and personal shift from a productivity-driven mindset to one that embraces self-compassion, presence, and the profound realization that we are enough as we are. Drawing on the philosophical works of thinkers like Simone Weil, Byung-Chul Han, and the psychological theories of Carol Dweck and Kristin Neff, the episode explores the tension between societal expectations of constant achievement and the radical practice of self-acceptance. The discussion weaves together existential freedom, self-actualization, and the value of stillness, challenging listeners to rethink their relationship with productivity, rest, and personal worth. The episode highlights the necessity of breaking free from the tyranny of performance and finding peace in the spaces between action and being. By examining these ideas, listeners are invited to reflect on the transformative power of embracing enoughness in a world that demands constant striving. Bibliography Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance . New York: Scribner, 2016. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success . New York: Random House, 2006. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society . Translated by Erica B. Buell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality . 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself . New York: William Morrow, 2011. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge, 2002. Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment . Novato: New World Library, 1999.…

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The Presence of What’s Gone, Memory not as recollection—but as return. - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 20:13

5 weeks тому20:13

20:13

The Presence of What’s Gone The Deeper Thinking Podcast Some things don’t leave. They recede, they quiet, they fold into the background—yet their presence lingers. Not as memory in the traditional sense, but as atmosphere. As interruption. As an intimacy that returns without warning. In this episode, we reflect on memory not as recollection, but as the return of what never fully disappeared. It is a meditation on presence—subtle, embodied, and philosophical. Philosophers like Jacques Derrida , Henri Bergson , and Paul Ricœur have each, in their own way, helped us reimagine time, identity, and the ghostlike logic of recollection. Where Derrida’s hauntology considers the presence of absence, Bergson’s durée evokes the elasticity of time as lived experience. Ricœur invites us to see memory as narrative identity—never static, always becoming. This is not a discussion of supernatural ghosts, but of lived presence: the way a scent, a room, or a forgotten gesture reactivates something felt more than remembered. Memory returns through the body before it arrives in language. Through architecture, silence, and breath, the past re-enters not to be replayed, but to be reinhabited. And sometimes, what haunts us is not grief—but care. Not pain—but meaning. Why Listen? Memory as presence, not storage Haunting as a lived phenomenon, not a metaphor Revisiting the self through the structure of time Quiet philosophy grounded in sensation and space Further Reading As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links. Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida — Hauntology, historical residue, and the persistence of absence. Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson — A philosophical meditation on duration, sensation, and time. Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricœur — The ethical and narrative dimensions of remembering and being remembered. The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio — How memory and consciousness shape our embodied sense of presence. Listen Now On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Abstract The Presence of What’s Gone is a philosophical meditation on the phenomenon of memory—not as retrieval, but as recurrence. Through poetic narration and conceptual rigor, the essay explores how absence can behave like presence, how memory inhabits architecture, gesture, and breath, and how the past does not merely trail behind us, but actively folds into the now. Drawing from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralist theory, it engages with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Henri Bergson, and Paul Ricœur to frame memory as a lived, bodily phenomenon. Rather than offering answers, the essay invites listeners to sit with the ontological reality of haunting—not as metaphor, but as a dimension of being. Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International . Routledge, 1994. — Source of the concept of hauntology , describing the presence of absence and the residue of unresolved futures. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory . Zone Books, 1991 (originally published 1896). — Offers a theory of duration (la durée) as lived time, where memory is not stored but flows through consciousness. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting . University of Chicago Press, 2004. — Explores memory as narrative, ethics of forgetting, and the tension between history and personal recollection. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception . Routledge, 1962. — Central to understanding memory as embodied perception; supports the essay's claim that the body remembers before the mind interprets. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Hill and Wang, 1981. — Although not directly cited in the essay, Barthes’ concept of the punctum informs the emotional response to memory-images. Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons . PM Press, 2018. — Optional intertext: offers insights into how memory and presence may also be political and communal, especially across generations.…

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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Between the Ocean and the Land - The Deeper Thinking Podcast 20:54

5 weeks тому20:54