The Observing I Podcast

Antonin Artaud didn’t want to entertain you. He wanted to infect you. He wanted to burn down the theatre, then climb into the ashes and scream until the gods woke up. His Theatre of Cruelty was never a metaphor. It was a ritual, a possession, a violent reminder that behind every mask of civilization there is a jaw, and behind every jaw, a scream waiting to be released.

In this episode of The Observing I, we do not study Artaud. We survive him. We walk with him through the electric corridors of his mind, through the plague-ridden rituals he called theatre, through his years locked in institutions where his bones were fried with shock and his language dissolved into raw sound. We listen as he curses God. We watch him tear apart language, theatre, art, sanity, and finally himself.

This is not a biography. It’s a descent. A séance. A reckoning with the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled in the name of comfort and coherence. Artaud offers no answers. He offers a scream. A body without organs. A theatre that bites back. His madness is not illness. It is method. Sacred. Violent. Necessary.

Enter only if you’re ready to confront the performance that lives under your skin. The one with no script. No exit. No applause.

You have been warned.

This episode is not clean.

It doesn’t try to sanitize the grotesque or turn philosophy into polite conversation. It doesn’t quote thinkers to make you sound smarter at dinner parties. This episode crawls through the blood, the filth, and the sacred excess of Georges Bataille. A man who tried to turn his life into a ritual and his suffering into something divine.

In this journey, we don’t just talk about Bataille’s ideas. We enter them. We sit inside the madness. From his shattered childhood and aborted priesthood to the moment he wrote ecstasy down like scripture, Bataille’s life was a constant act of sacred disobedience. He didn’t worship God as much as he laughed at Him, bled for Him, and turned every boundary He ever set into a bonfire.

We explore Bataille’s obsession with what he called “inner experience,” where mysticism and eroticism collapse into one long scream. We follow him into his economic theory of waste, where destruction becomes a form of holy resistance to the tyranny of utility. And we confront his radical theology of unknowing — a headless god, a sacred society, and the unbearable silence that follows when meaning finally gives out.

This episode isn’t about learning. It’s about breaking.

If you’ve ever cried and laughed at the same time and had no idea which came first, if you’ve ever felt closer to something divine in a moment of grief or surrender than in any sermon, if you’ve ever looked into the void and thought, “There’s something alive in there,” then this episode was made for you.

Even if you hate him, you might still need him. Because Georges Bataille speaks to the part of you that doesn’t want to be saved. Only seen. Only felt. Only burned alive and reborn into something nameless.

This is the edge of the wound. This is where philosophy stops thinking and starts trembling. Welcome.

You know that nagging feeling, right? That relentless pressure of the "now"? The constant urge to scroll, to react, to optimize for the immediate? We're all in it. Chasing the next hit, the next notification, the next fleeting distraction. Our attention spans are shattered, our patience non-existent. We're living in a world that's forgotten how to truly see beyond the blink of an eye.

This isn't just about being "busy." This is a profound, dangerous amnesia. We’ve forgotten Deep Time. We’ve severed our connection to the vast, flowing reality that underpins everything. We've amputated our future, one instant at a time.

This week, on The Observing I, we're tearing into this short-sighted delusion. We're dragging out an old renegade philosopher, Henri Bergson, who, over a century ago, called out the lie of our clock-based existence. He saw beyond the segmented minutes and hours to the continuous, living, breathing flow he called Duration. It's the time of a melody, not individual notes. The time of a life lived, not just a series of events.

Then, we're strapping his insights to the terrifying demands of Longtermism. This isn't some abstract concept. This is the understanding that our actions today echo across millions, even billions, of years, potentially determining the entire trajectory of conscious existence. It's the unignorable call from quadrillions of unborn voices, demanding to know what we, the living, are doing with this fragile window of existence.

We dissect the machinery that keeps us blind: the relentless demands of economic systems that prioritize quarterly profits over generational well-being. The political cycles that reward immediate fixes over long-term solutions. The information tsunami that actively scrambles our capacity for sustained thought, trapping us in a loop of endless, decontextualized moments. We expose the erosion of collective memory, turning us into amnesiacs condemned to repeat past mistakes.

But here’s the kicker: it’s not just what’s being done to you. It’s the convenient blindfold you pull over your own eyes. The psychological burden of thinking about millennia, the comfort of feeling powerless, the delusion that some "next big thing" will magically solve everything, and the cultural narratives that tell you to just "live for today." You actively resist the long view because it’s too damn uncomfortable.

This episode is about ripping off that blindfold. It's about remembering how to feel the true current of time. It's about recognizing that your fleeting existence is part of something unimaginably vast, and that your greatest power lies not in controlling the immediate, but in shaping the distant future by living with intentionality in the continuous present.

It's time to smash the clock and finally, truly, see the future.

Join Project Mayhem. It's time to wake up.

Project Mayhem, prepare yourselves. This week on The Observing I, we’re tearing into the mind of Hannah Arendt, the radical thinker who redefined our understanding of evil, freedom, and human existence.

Arendt, a survivor of 20th-century totalitarianism, didn't offer comforting answers. Instead, she delivered unsettling truths: that the greatest evils can be "terrifyingly normal," committed by those who simply fail to think. We'll brutally dissect her seminal works, exploring how insidious systems rise, how individuals become cogs in the machine, and why the active, thinking citizen is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny.

From the "Origins of Totalitarianism" and her controversial insights on Adolf Eichmann and the banality of evil, to her profound concepts of labor, work, and action, and the ultimate hope found in natality and revolution, this episode is a visceral deep dive into Arendt's enduring relevance. If you're ready for a no-b******t examination of power, responsibility, and the perilous state of the public realm, then plug in. This is Pirate Radio for the mind.

Alright, Project Mayhem, this isn't another episode about chasing good vibes. This week, The Observing I rips apart the shiny façade of forced positivity and exposes the rotten core of the Tyranny of Happiness.

We've been sold a lie: that constant happiness is the only acceptable emotional state, and if you're not perpetually beaming, you're broken. From the insidious conditioning of history to the grinning gurus peddling their emotional snake oil and the filtered perfection of social media, we're bombarded with the demand to perform joy. But what's the cost of suppressing your true feelings?

Join us as we dismantle the Toxic Positivity Industrial Complex, reveal how your authentic emotions are being pathologised, and expose the psychological warfare being waged on your inner world. This isn't about wallowing in misery; it's about reclaiming your emotional sovereignty. It's about understanding that your anger, your sadness, your fear, and your grief are not flaws, but vital signals, profound truths, and ultimately, sources of real strength.

Stop chasing the manufactured smile. It's time to feel it all. It's time to be real.

Tune in to defy the happy delusion.

🏴‍☠️ For more pirate radio, visit our website - https://theobservingi.com

You’re trapped. Not by physical walls, but by invisible ones. The constant, self-confirming loop of your feed, your tribe, your chosen narrative. Every voice is an echo of your own. Every thought, pre-approved. They've sold you certainty, but they've stolen your mind.

In this episode of The Observing I, we rip the comfort blanket from your face and forces you to confront the intellectual padded cell you've built around yourself. We take Plato's Allegory of the Cave and drag it into the digital age, exposing how algorithms feed your biases and turn information into mere affirmation. We dissect Habermas's idea of the public sphere, showing how it's been blown to hell, leaving behind a haunted house of fragmented shouts instead of genuine dialogue.

Discover why your brain loves the intellectual comfort of conformity, turning you into a predictable node in a network of controlled information. And witness how this lethal cocktail fuels a tribalism so deep, it feels like the very fabric of shared reality is tearing apart.

But there’s a way out. We offer a hammer, not a whimper. A brutal, uncomfortable, but essential path to reclaim your mind from the digital echo chamber. This isn't just about what you believe; it's about whether you're capable of thinking at all.

What happens when the walls close in, and the only sound is the scream of your own unchallenged thoughts, forever alone in your "truth"? Find out. This is "Pirate Radio for the Mind."

Listen. Think. Resist.

Much love, D

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

We'll explore the philosophical implications of living in a world where your potential is monetized and your very being is observed, analysed, and manipulated. This is about more than just apps; it’s about regaining your sovereignty. Discover how to reject their rules, cultivate true intrinsic motivation, and forge a path where your victories are real, unquantifiable, and solely your own. Break free from the score and remember what it means to simply be.

Much love, D

What if the ground beneath your feet remembered more than you do? What if the stories you inherit, the ones whispered across centuries, aren’t just echoes, but living forces shaping who you are?

In this episode of The Observing I, we journey into the brutal and beautiful world of memory - how it survives in land, in language, in blood. Through the lens of the Icelandic sagas and the raw tension between the outsider and the remembered, we explore the haunting question: are you in the story, or are you the story?

We’ll examine how memory becomes a weapon, a mirror, a map. How sagas are more than folklore, they’re survival strategies wrapped in narrative. How identity is not something you choose, but something handed to you in the form of ancestral pain, half-truths, and rituals you're still learning to name.

This episode is for anyone who’s ever felt like a stranger in their own life, a witness to histories they can’t fully claim but feel in their bones. A reflection on what it means to carry stories that aren't yours, and to live a life that is a saga, whether you realize it or not.

This isn’t nostalgia. This is war. This is memory with teeth. This is the story speaking through you.

Much love, David

You were told this world was real. That flesh was truth. That gravity meant something.

But what if none of it was supposed to happen?

This is the dream.

The broken one.

Welcome to Sophia’s Dream - the story of a divine feminine being who reached too far, fell too hard, and accidentally gave birth to a blind god who built this world like a prison with beautiful wallpaper. His name is Yaldabaoth. He thinks he’s God. He’s not. He’s just the architect of your forgetting.

This isn’t spirituality. It’s myth with teeth. It’s philosophy with blood under its fingernails. It’s consciousness trapped inside a loop, screaming to remember what it is.

You're not just in the dream. You are the dream.

And the dream is watching you back.

We talk recursion. Cosmic code. The observer and the observed. Why pain keeps repeating. Why you can’t stop thinking there’s something behind the curtain. Why waking up hurts like hell - and why you still have to do it.

If you’ve ever looked around and thought, “This can’t be all there is”, you’re already halfway out.

This episode won’t save you. It’ll make you remember you were never lost.

Much love, David

We cheer the hero. We hiss at the villain. But what if we've had it backwards all along?

In this episode of The Observing I, we dig deep into the ethics of monsters, and uncover the uncomfortable truth: villains might be the only ones telling it like it is. From Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor to Killmonger, Tyler Durden, Joker, and Walter White, we peel back the polite layers of morality and ask “who gets to be the hero, and who gets exiled for telling the truth?”.

This episode is not about justifying evil. It's about exposing the hypocrisy in our heroes, the selective morality of modern storytelling, and the monsters we bury inside ourselves to stay “good.” Through psychological and philosophical lenses - Jung, Nietzsche, utilitarianism, and narrative propaganda - we confront the darker mirror of the human psyche.

This is your warning: we’re not pulling punches. No capes. No redemption arcs. Just raw truth and ethical dissonance bleeding under the spotlight.

Forget good versus evil. This is truth versus comfort, and only one walks out.

My microphone has died, so I had to record this one on the iPad. That means the audio is a bit choppy but, fear not, a new mic is on it’s way. Next week we’ll be back to the usual levels of compression.

Much love, David