Soulcruzer

In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.

What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.

- Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
- Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
- The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
- soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
- Wisdom Walks as thinking time
- Walking, motion, and changing perspective
- The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
- AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
- The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
- Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
- Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
- Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
- Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness

In this episode, I explore one of Jung's most striking images: the unconscious as both dragon and treasure. What if the fear, resistance, and chaos you encounter when you turn inward aren't signs that something is wrong but signs that you're getting close to something valuable? Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, NLP, and the logic of myth, I unpack why the very thing guarding your buried gold is often indistinguishable from the thing you most want to avoid and what it actually means to face it.

This one started with me sitting down in the studio and noticing a pattern that’s been floating around the last couple of days. Everywhere I turn, people are talking about where we’re going as human beings, what we’re becoming, and how all this change is messing with our sense of place. AI is in the background of that conversation, obviously, but this episode isn’t me doing an “AI episode” as such. It’s more me circling the deeper question behind the noise.

Over the past 48 hours I’ve been listening to and watching a bunch of stuff, and it’s all orbiting the same gravitational pull. Humans feel displaced. Not just “the job market is weird” displaced, but identity displaced. Like: if the world changes this fast, what happens to the version of me that was built for the old world?

This all hit extra hard because I’ve been recovering from a tooth that’s been giving me grief for a year. It got infected again, they finally pulled it, and last night I was in that familiar post-dentist zone where the numbness wears off and the universe feels personally offensive. I was curled up on the couch, cycling between old Game of Thrones episodes and YouTube.

That’s when I landed on Sinead Bovell’s show (on YouTube, even though we call everything a podcast now). The show is called I’ve Got Questions, and she had an episode featuring Alexander Manu titled something like “Once in a Lifetime Career Reset is Coming.” That title alone just grabs you by the collar. Because that’s the vibe, isn’t it? A mass career and identity reset. Not gradual. Not polite. A reset.

And it brought me back to the question I’ve had from the start: What are we becoming? We can’t stay the same. So what’s the next iteration?

One of the things I’ve been chewing on is how most people’s first move with AI has been to retrofit it into the current paradigm. Same game, faster tools. Write quicker. Create quicker. Code quicker. Spreadsheet quicker. Become “10x productive,” “100x productive,” whatever. And I’m finding myself more and more allergic to that productivity obsession. Because why are we racing? Do we actually want to do more and more, or do we want to live better?

I noticed something about my own choices here too. My day job includes corporate training. The obvious play would be to jump on the trend and become “the AI guy,” training companies how to use AI. But I deliberately didn’t go that route. I wanted to be a practitioner. I wanted to push into the frontier and ask: not “how do I do the old thing faster?” but “what’s the new thing that wasn’t possible before?”

I used painting as a metaphor for this, because we’ve seen this cycle a thousand times. People painted on cave walls, then on canvas. Then the camera came along and painters freaked out. “That’s not art.” Then photography becomes its own art form, because real artists don’t just defend old tools. They explore new ones and invent new forms.

That’s where I think we are now. There’s resistance because people are having an existential crisis about identity, livelihood, meaning, and the role of humans. But there’s also that other camp: the folks who see a new tool and think, “Okay… what can we make now that we couldn’t make before?”

One of Manu’s points that really landed for me is that these tools could create the space for us to be more human, not less. If machines can handle repeatable, mundane stuff better, that should free us to focus on the parts of life that require presence, depth, relationship, contemplation. The being, not just the doing. That line hit me right where I live.

From there, my brain hopped tracks into Robert Anton Wilson territory, because I’ve just started reading Chapel Perilous, the biography of RAW. And it’s lighting my mind up. Reading about his thought processes reminds me what excites me most: consciousness, reality, philosophy of mind, and the question of what humans even are.

That’s what led me into this weird but wonderful blend I started playing with: Buddhism and anarchism. RAW had both currents running through him, and I found myself asking: how can those two coexist?

Here’s what clicked for me. Buddhism, at least in one of its core teachings, points at non-self (anatta). No independent permanent self. The “I” we cling to is more like a process, a pattern, a swirl of causes and conditions. Meanwhile anarchism, at its philosophical core, questions fixed rulers and permanent authority. No fixed ruler. No default assumption that someone must be in charge.

So one becomes an inner liberation practice, the other becomes an outer liberation practice. Inner freedom from attachment to the constructed self. Outer freedom from attachment to constructed authority. Same song in two octaves.

And then I went off, as I do, on the conditioning theme. Because this is the part that keeps bothering me in the best way. I was walking through town yesterday paying attention to my own reactions as I moved through the world, and I kept thinking: how much of my day-to-day behaviour is just conditioning? Automatic reactions. Scripted responses. Learned reflexes. Not conscious choice.

Try this: pick any belief you hold and trace it back. Where did it come from? Family? School? Culture? Religion? Government? Trauma? A moment you never questioned? We’re “programmed” from the start, and most of it we never opted into. And the self we think is “me” is often a patchwork of inherited code.

Then you flip it outward again to politics, law, power. Left, right, centre, everybody’s got an agenda. And the law often seems to apply differently depending on how much power you have. That’s the thing that makes me itch. I don’t trust big systems that claim they’re acting in your best interest while quietly feeding a power structure.

I’ll say this clearly: I stop short of the “burn it all down” impulse. My instinct is more “reduce it to the bare minimum.” Voluntary cooperation. Mutual aid. Less coercion. More sovereignty.

That word became the real anchor of the episode: sovereignty.

Because here’s the tricky part of this sci-fi world we’re living in. We’re already soft cyborgs. Look at how entwined we are with phones, watches, laptops, earbuds, glasses. Put them all in a drawer and turn them off and most of us can’t really function in the modern world the same way. I even talk about my “metaglasses” as this extension of perception, a way to connect to the hive mind, the collective intelligence, whatever you want to call it. And with AR coming, that overlay of digital on physical is going to make the cyborgness even more literal. You’ll be walking down the street in two worlds at once.

I actually like being a soft cyborg. I’m not anti-tech. I’m not anti-AI. I’m pro-consciousness.

Because the danger, or at least the risk, is that conditioning becomes exponential. Influence becomes subtle. Systems compete for your attention, your beliefs, your emotions, your identity. Governments, advertisers, religions, corporations, platforms. Everybody wants a piece of your psyche. They want to shape what you think, what you fear, what you desire, what you believe is true.

So my challenge, to myself and anyone listening, is: don’t abdicate your humanity. Don’t abdicate your sovereignty. Think for yourself. Question things. Ask what the hidden agenda is. Ask who ...

Today’s episode was one of those “running to catch up with myself” kind of days. Busy. On the move. Meaning to sit down and record… and then something else pops up. But I don’t mind that rhythm. There’s something alive about feeling like you don’t quite know whether you’re coming or going. So this one turned into a proper ramble. A stream-of-consciousness audio blog. No tight structure. Just what was on my mind.

And what was on my mind? Social audio.

Whatever Happened to Short-Form Social Audio?

Show Notes: Self-Observation Without Judgment

So I'm talking about the practice nobody wants to do but everyone needs: watching yourself without judgement. Not manifestation tricks, not affirmations. Just brutal honesty about where you actually are.

I break down three levels of observation: data logging (just notice your reactions), state recognition (identify what state those reactions reveal), and non-identification (realize you're not the state, you're just occupying it).

The "uncritical" part is huge. The moment you criticize or justify a reaction, you bind yourself to it. You make it yours and get stuck there.

I give you a simple daily practice: morning intention, catch 3-5 reactions during the day, 15-minute evening review. Use the formula "When X happened, I reacted with Y." Look for patterns. Don't try to fix anything yet.

Here's what's wild: you can't change what you don't observe, but observation itself begins the change. That pause between stimulus and response is where choice becomes possible.

Start tonight. Five minutes before bed. Three reactions. No explanations. Do it for seven days and prepare to be shocked.

Full post at soulcruzer.com.

The printing press gave us access to knowledge. AI gives us access to alien intelligence.

I dive into Hans Vaihinger's Philosophy of As If and explore how our minds create "useful fictions" to help us navigate life. The big insight: we don't think to know the world perfectly, we think to act effectively within it. I connect this to my narrative alchemy work, examining how the scripts running in our unconscious minds either serve us or hold us back. I also share my morning pages practice, unpacking the metaphors that emerged (the worm turning, the wolf at the door, the drain, the landing, and the flow) and explain Hillman's approach to seeing through images rather than just interpreting them. If you're interested in how the stories we tell ourselves shape our reality and how we might rewrite them, this one's for you.

In this episode, I explore why we feel restless and incomplete even after achieving our goals or finding spiritual practices that seem to work. I argue that our perpetual longing isn't a sign of failure or proof we're on the wrong path but rather the fundamental nature of consciousness itself, constantly reaching and questioning. The real insight is recognising that seeking is the finding, that the journey itself is home, and learning to treat our restlessness as fuel rather than a problem to solve.

What Do You Do When You've Done Everything?

On a Saturday wisdom walk past the polo grounds, I reflect on the evolution of my weekends across different life phases: from spontaneous single days to cultural exploration as a married couple, through child-rearing years, my sports hippie adventure phase, and the indie music scene period. But then came the slump: when I've climbed mountains before, visited museums, experienced the activities that once excited me, what happens when the novelty fades? Now at 57, approaching Act Three of life, I explore what it means to revisit old passions with new eyes and what to focus on as the final act unfolds. Plus: an impromptu creek crossing and a field full of ravens.

A raw, unfiltered audio reflection on aging, experience, and finding meaning in familiar territory.

This was one of those weeks where infrastructure building and conceptual exploration happened in parallel. The kind of week where you're simultaneously laying cable and exploring new intellectual territory, each feeding the other.