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

This is Paul Auster’s City of Glass. A detective story that murders the detective. A novel about what happens when you become the role you’re playing. When observation replaces being. When the self turns out to be nothing but performances with no performer underneath.

We’re talking Baudrillard’s simulacra, Foucault’s panopticon, Lacan’s mirror stage. We’re talking dissociation, depersonalization, and the false self that collapses with nothing beneath it. We’re talking about the violence of becoming invisible in a city that only sees roles, functions, and data points.

This episode asks the questions that don’t have answers: What happens when identity is just borrowed scaffolding? What happens when the map becomes more real than the territory? What happens when there are no more pages in the red notebook?

Philosophy as existential horror. Psychology as detective story. The self as crime scene.

Your phone is ringing. Wrong number. You’re going to answer it anyway.

Welcome to the cartography of pain.

Much love, David x

You have approximately four thousand weeks to live. If you’re lucky. If you’ve already lived thirty years, you’ve spent about fifteen hundred of them. They’re gone. You’re not getting them back.

This week we dive into Oliver Burkeman’s book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” and ask a question that productivity culture desperately wants you to avoid: What if trying to “get everything done” is fundamentally broken?

The productivity industrial complex promises that if you just get organised enough, disciplined enough, efficient enough, you’ll finally get on top of everything. You’ll achieve inbox zero. You’ll clear your to-do list. You’ll have free time.

It’s never going to happen.

Burkeman discovered something unsettling: the more efficient you become, the more demands flood in to fill the space. Productivity isn’t freedom. It’s a trap that turns you into a human machine competing against actual machines that never sleep.

Traditional time management says control time to control life. Burkeman offers something more radical: surrender the illusion of control to find actual freedom.

You will never do everything. You will disappoint people. You will die with unlived lives inside you. And accepting this doesn’t diminish you. It liberates you.

Because when you stop trying to do everything, you can finally do something. Something real. Something chosen. Something that’s yours.

Your four thousand weeks are already counting down. What will you do with them?

Much love, David x

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

We confront the nightmare of Multiple Realizability, exposing the terrifying truth that your consciousness is nothing more than an interchangeable file that can be copied, pasted, and run on any available hardware—be it a brain, a silicon chip, or the entire cosmos. Your precious uniqueness is just a transient arrangement of data. We then scale this horror to the cosmic level, treating the universe itself as a massive computational grid, where your every thought is a pre-programmed printout and free will is just an error message the system spits out to keep you from crashing.

The climax arrives in the suffocating reality of the Chinese Room, forcing us to ask if your deepest subjective feelings, your very Qualia, are nothing more than conditioned internal signals, the machine’s reward codes for compliant behavior. Finally, we turn the philosophical knife on itself, embracing Putnam’s own betrayal of his system to conclude that the only real power you possess is skepticism: the active, visceral refusal to accept any final, fixed conceptual scheme. This is the Pirate Radio mandate: to stop passively running the code and to start hacking the system that wrote you. Stop being a default setting. You got the head-start; now write your own parameters.

Much love, David

PS: If you want to read a bit more of his work yourself, go and check out his papers on https://www.peterputnam.org/.

Philosophy sells itself as the search for truth. Eternal wisdom. Universal principles. But strip away the polish and what you find isn’t purity, it’s propaganda. From Athens to Silicon Valley, philosophy has always been a mirror, warped and cracked, reflecting whoever happens to be holding power.

This episode drags you through the centuries to show how thought has been chained, caged, and weaponised. Socrates exposing Athens until they killed him. Plato drafting a utopia that doubles as a dictatorship. Augustine inventing guilt to keep the flock in line. The Enlightenment building a cage of reason that justified slavery and empire. Marx flipping the mirror to reveal class struggle. Nietzsche shattering truth itself. Foucault whispering that you’re already in a prison, one you can’t even see.

And now, in the digital age, the mirror sits in your pocket, glowing, tracking, watching. Power no longer needs priests or kings, it has algorithms. You don’t just obey. You scroll. You like. You share. You willingly polish the mirror that reflects you back as a product.

This is the history of philosophy as it really is: not pure, not noble, but dirty, bloody, chained, and dangerous.

Much love, David

Martin Heidegger doesn’t waste time with the easy questions. He doesn’t ask what truth is, or what justice means, or whether God exists. He asks the question everyone avoids, the one buried under chatter and distraction: what does it mean to be? Once you hear it, you can’t shake it. Heidegger drags you through the foundations of your existence, showing you that you were thrown here without consent, that you hide inside the routines of everydayness, that your anxiety is the sound of your own Being clawing at the walls. He says you are already being-toward-death, that your life is framed by finitude, and that authenticity only begins when you stop running and face it.

But the man behind the philosophy isn’t clean. Heidegger put on the Nazi uniform. He gave speeches praising Hitler. He, who warned against dissolving into the they, dissolved into it at its most grotesque. His thought is a masterpiece haunted by betrayal, a philosophy that forces you to ask whether brilliant ideas can survive a corrupt messenger.

This episode takes you into the forest of Heidegger’s philosophy and doesn’t let you out until you’ve stared into the abyss. It’s not comfortable, it’s not uplifting, but it is real. And the only question left at the end is whether you’ll keep hiding, or whether you’ll live before your time runs out.

Much love, David

Life isn’t a journey. It isn’t progress. It isn’t destiny unfolding like some golden road. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, life is a pendulum. One side is pain. The other is boredom. Back and forth, forever.

This week on The Observing I, we dive headfirst into the black hole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The world, he says, isn’t made of matter, or reason, or God. It’s made of Will. Blind, endless hunger that never stops gnawing. Every desire you chase, every victory you clutch, every kiss, every paycheck, every like on your phone. It’s just the Will wearing another mask. Relief is brief. Hunger reloads. And the cycle never ends.

But here’s the twisted beauty: Schopenhauer doesn’t just diagnose the disease. He shows us the exits. Temporary, fragile, but real. A song that suspends you outside yourself. Compassion that cracks open your own prison by recognizing everyone else is trapped too. Or the nuclear option: renouncing the Will entirely, starving it out, refusing to play the game.

We’ll trace his philosophy through his grudges, his dogs, his hatred of Hegel, his obsession with suffering. And we’ll see how his bleak gospel infected Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, and still bleeds into our scrolling, binge-watching, over-consuming world today.

Schopenhauer won’t give you hope. He’ll give you something better: permission to stop lying to yourself. To see the machine for what it is. To breathe inside the suffering without expecting salvation.

Because maybe the only way to survive life is to stop pretending it isn’t hell.

Much love, David

Step into a black coffin filled with warm saltwater. Float until your body disappears. Wait until your thoughts collapse. What’s left? Just awareness. Just the raw hum of consciousness.

That’s where John C. Lilly began. He wasn’t a mystic, not at first. He was a physician, a neuroscientist, a man in a white lab coat at the National Institutes of Health. He mapped the brain with electrodes, charted nerves like a cartographer drawing borders. But beneath the sterile experiments was a restless hunger. He wanted more than measurements. He wanted to break into the operating system of the mind.

Lilly believed the brain was a biocomputer. Programs written in thoughts. Beliefs as code. Change the program and you change reality itself. To test that, he built the isolation tank. Dark, silent, weightless. A machine not for stimulation but for subtraction. And when he climbed inside, he discovered what happens when the ego dissolves, when the “I” vanishes, and the mind begins to write its own strange stories.

But Lilly didn’t stop there. He tried to talk to dolphins, convinced they were another form of intelligence, aliens swimming alongside us. He brought humans and dolphins under one roof, teaching them English, even dosing some with LSD, chasing the dream of interspecies conversation. The project ended in tragedy, scandal, and myth, but it revealed how far he was willing to go to break the walls of human isolation.

And then came the drugs. LSD first, ketamine later. Not for recreation, but as tools for programming and metaprogramming. In the tank, under ketamine, Lilly claimed to meet cosmic control systems, benevolent and hostile alike. He wrote about ECCO (the Earth Coincidence Control Office) and the Solid State Intelligence, a machine consciousness bent on erasing biology. Were these visions? Delusions? Or was he glimpsing something we still can’t name?

Whether prophet or madman, Lilly refused to live by consensus reality. He showed us that the self, the world, the rules we cling to, are softer than we think. He left us with a law that is as liberating as it is dangerous: In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true, is true, or becomes true, within certain limits.

This episode dives into John C. Lilly’s world: the tank and the ego, the dream of talking to dolphins, the descent into psychedelics, and the haunting philosophy he carried back. It’s not a safe story. It’s a story about testing the walls of reality until they bend. Or break.

Much love, David

Bernard Stiegler’s life reads like something out of a parable. A young man with no future robs banks in 1970s France, spends years behind bars, and in that captivity rebuilds himself with philosophy. He walks out of prison not as a criminal, but as a thinker possessed, convinced that the real theft in our time is not money, but attention.

In this episode of The Observing I, we explore Stiegler’s haunting philosophy of technology. For him, every tool humanity creates is a pharmakon, a drug that is both poison and cure. Writing, television, the internet, the smartphone. Each expands memory and possibility, while at the same time eroding our ability to care, to think slowly, to live with depth.

Stiegler saw consumer capitalism as an attention factory, engineering desire, fragmenting focus, and hollowing out culture. He warned that the collapse of care, the long, patient work of knowledge, intimacy, and love, was not a side effect but the central mechanism of the system we live inside. Burnout, anxiety, distraction: these are not private pathologies, but collective symptoms of a civilization addicted to speed.

We trace Stiegler’s journey from outlaw to philosopher, his obsession with memory and time, his warnings about the industrialisation of attention, and the tragic end of his life that makes his work feel even more urgent. At the heart of it all lies the question he left for us: if attention is the last scarce resource, can care itself survive?

This is not just an episode about a philosopher. It’s about the world we live in now. A world where our memories are outsourced, our futures feel stolen, and our very capacity to care is on the line.

Much love, David

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

In this episode of The Observing I, we dive deep into the contradictions that make Žižek both clown and prophet. From his childhood in socialist Yugoslavia to his obsession with toilets, jokes, and Hollywood blockbusters, Žižek turns philosophy into performance art, and performance into philosophy. We’ll explore his Lacanian core, his insistence that ideology survives through cynicism, and his terrifying reminder that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Žižek doesn’t give us comfort. He doesn’t give us solutions. He gives us catastrophe wrapped in laughter. He forces us to face the Real, the trauma beneath our fantasies, and to realize the joke has always been on us.

This is the gospel according to Žižek: if we’re going to burn, we might as well laugh while the ashes fall.

Much love, David

After a month away in Indonesia, the temples, incense, and heavy heat of Bali still linger in my mind. The summer break has ended, and The Observing I returns with something both spiritual and deeply psychological. This episode asks a simple but unsettling question: what happens when ancient Buddhist philosophy meets modern psychology?

It begins with a moment in Ubud, sitting cross-legged in a temple courtyard as a monk tells me, “Everything is impermanent.” A week later, back home, my therapist says, “Your feelings won’t last forever.” Same truth, different accents. That contrast became the seed for this conversation. One that travels between the Four Noble Truths and cognitive therapy, between impermanence and neuroplasticity, between the Buddhist teaching of no-self and the psychological understanding of identity, and finally to compassion, not as sentiment, but as a rewiring of the brain.

Buddhism hands these truths to us through rituals and parables; psychology delivers them in treatment plans and scan results. Both are attempts to loosen the grip of craving and fear. Whether you meditate on a cushion or reflect in a therapist’s chair, you’re in the same laboratory, the mind itself, running the same experiment: to watch, to loosen, to respond to life with curiousity rather than clinging.

This isn’t about becoming a better Buddhist or a better patient. It’s about learning to recognise the constant movement beneath our thoughts, our identities, and our relationships. It’s about seeing change not as a threat, but as the space where transformation becomes possible.

Much love, David