September 1922. A German steamship loaded with Russia’s most dangerous weapons. Not bombs. Not guns. Philosophers. Seventy intellectuals who committed the ultimate crime against the Soviet state. They wouldn’t stop thinking.

Among them, a man named Nikolai Berdyaev. Aristocrat turned Marxist turned mystic turned professional pain in the ass to every authority that ever tried to tell him what truth looked like. Lenin personally approved his deportation. Think about that. The man who orchestrated a revolution was scared of a philosopher. Not scared enough to kill him. Scared enough to make him someone else’s problem.

Berdyaev’s scandalous idea, the one that got him exiled, was this: Freedom doesn’t come from God. Freedom comes before God. It’s not a gift. It’s not earned. It’s the primordial chaos that existed before anything existed, and even God has to respect it.

We follow Berdyaev from his aristocratic childhood through his revolutionary phase, watching him get exiled once by the Tsar for being too radical, then exiled again by the Bolsheviks for being too free. We explore his core philosophy: that humans aren’t here to obey. They’re here to create. That every system - communist, fascist, capitalist - tries to turn persons into things, subjects into objects, unrepeatable individuals into predictable units.

We watch him survive Lenin, Stalin’s early terror, Nazi occupation, spending twenty-six years in exile writing warnings nobody wanted to hear. Warnings about the mechanization of the soul. The objectification of persons. The slavery we volunteer for because comfort is easier than freedom.

Berdyaev died in 1948, but he saw your life coming. The algorithm-curated existence. The dopamine-harvested attention. The productivity-optimized, self-quantified, perpetually-performing version of yourself that you mistake for freedom. He watched the Bolsheviks try to engineer New Soviet Man, and he’s watching you engineer yourself into the optimal unit for whatever system you’ve decided to serve.

The question Berdyaev asked for seventy-four years, through revolution, exile, occupation, and loneliness, is the same question waiting for you right now:

Are you a person or a thing? Are you creating or consuming? Are you choosing freedom or choosing comfort? Are you living or are you performing life for an audience that’s also performing for you while nobody’s actually present?

Berdyaev chose exile over silence. Chose the terrifying responsibility of freedom over the comfort of any system that promised to tell him who to be.

So if you need to hear that creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s a spiritual necessity, or if you’re tired of being a function and want to remember what being a person feels like, then I dedicate this episode to you.

Much love, David x

Warning: This isn’t comfortable listening. Berdyaev doesn’t offer you five steps to a better life. He offers you a choice you’ve been avoiding. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Your life is being optimized into a coffin. Every app on your phone, every metric at your job, and every "wellness" routine you follow is designed to turn you into a predictable, manageable, frictionless unit of production. They want you to live in a Crystal Palac. A world of glass and iron where everything is calculated, every need is met, and every "correct" choice is incentivized. They want to convince you that two times two always equals four, and that if you’re still miserable, it’s just because you haven't updated your software yet.

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw this coming a hundred and fifty years ago, and he hated it. He hated it enough to spend his life documenting the exact moment the human soul decides to stick its tongue out at perfection and burn the whole palace to the ground. In this episode, we’re not doing a literature lesson; we’re pulling apart the modern ego like meat from the ribs.

We’re tracing Dostoevsky’s descent from a mock execution in a frozen St. Petersburg square, where he had five minutes to live, to the Siberian labour camps where he realised that humans don't actually want happiness. We want intensity. We want friction. We want the right to be a disaster.

We go deep into the Siberian Laboratory to understand why a ten-pound shackle is a better teacher than a self-help book, and we confront the Grand Inquisitor’s Deal to see why we’ve traded our terrible freedom for the digital bread of the Feed. This is the story of the Roulette of Grace, exploring why your life only starts making sense when the math fails and the Extraordinary Man you’ve been playing finally hits the floor.

Stop trying to fix yourself. Stop trying to be rational. The firing squad is already leveling their rifles, and the only question is what you’re going to do with the five minutes you have left. Get out of the palace. Go find some friction.

Much love, David x

Welcome to 2026. The calendar flipped, but the gears didn’t stop grinding.

Most people think Franz Kafka wrote fantasy. They think he dreamed up giant bugs and invisible judges because he had a colourful imagination. They’re wrong. He wrote the user manual for the meat-grinder of modern life.

He spent his daylight hours at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, putting a dollar sign on human misery. He was the guy who decided exactly how much a crushed pelvis was worth in the eyes of the law. He was a suit. A corporate drone. A high-performing variable in a bureaucratic equation that never quite balanced.

At night, he performed the surgery. He took the sterile, bloodless prose of the office and used it to describe the smell of the machine that eats us alive.

In our first episode of the new year, we’re tearing the skin off the machinery of modern dread. Consider it a survival guide for the cubicle. We’re diving into the logic of the eternal Trial, where you’re guilty by default and the charges are redacted for your own protection. We’re looking at the Metamorphosis, where the horror isn’t turning into a vermin, but worrying about missing the 5:00 AM train while you’re doing it.

We’re talking about the Castle, that god of Middle Managers, where authority is everywhere and nowhere, and “help” is always one more form away. We’re witnessing the Penal Colony, where the company handbook is carved directly into your nervous system with glass needles until you finally “understand” the policy.

You’ve been standing at the gate for long enough. You’ve been waiting for an acquittal that isn’t coming and a permission slip that was never printed. The machine only has power as long as you believe it has a purpose.

If you’ve ever felt like a glitch in someone else’s software, this episode is for you.

The court is in session. Don’t bother bringing a lawyer.

Much love, David x

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