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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This episode is a little different. It’s a work of fiction. A Christmas ghost story for philosophers. A Dickensian horror wrapped in VHS static and existential dread.

In 1983, a philosophy professor named Vernon Pale went on public access television to deliver a Christmas lecture. He argued that every gift we give is violence. That obligation is the real present we’re exchanging. That Christmas is capitalism’s most honest ritual, because it makes that transaction explicit.

For forty three minutes he built his case. Then the station cut the feed. The philosopher disappeared. Never taught another class. Never cashed another paycheck. Just walked out of the studio and off the edge of the world.

This episode explores that broadcast. What was said. What was censored. And why a forgotten tape about the danger of gifts feels more urgent now than it ever did.

We’re drowning in obligation. Every relationship transactional. Pale saw it coming. Tried to find the exit, to love without imposing. Tried to give the only gift that doesn’t create debt…

His absence.

Did it work? Does philosophical disappearance solve anything? Or is presence, with all its weight, all its terrible grace, just what it costs to be human?

What do we owe each other? And what does it cost to find out?

This is a work of fiction. But the philosophy, the discomfort, and the questions are not.

Happy Christmas.

Much love, David x

What if everything around you has a secret life you’ll never access?

Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology makes a radical claim: objects aren’t just props in the human drama. The hammer in your toolbox, the coffee cup on your desk, the chair holding your weight. They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you. They exist in depths you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you grip them or how much you think you understand them.

This episode explores Harman’s philosophy of withdrawal, where every object, human and nonhuman, hides its true nature in an inaccessible core. We examine how this changes everything: causation, relationships, art, and what it means to live in a world populated by billions of entities that are fundamentally unknowable.

You’ve never actually met anyone. Not really. You’ve only encountered sensual versions, translated surfaces, proxies that stand in for the real person who stays withdrawn in depths even they can’t access. Every conversation is between ambassadors of hidden kingdoms. Every touch is between surfaces while the real entities watch from somewhere you’ll never see.

But maybe that’s not loneliness. Maybe that’s reality. Maybe the unbridgeable gap between objects is what makes relation possible at all. We explore Harman’s democracy of objects, where dust mites and black holes and human consciousness all have equal ontological status. Where nothing is special and everything matters in its own withdrawn way.

This is a philosophy that makes the familiar strange and forces you to see the world differently. From vicarious causation to aesthetic encounters, from the terror of withdrawal to the relief of accepting you’ll never fully know anything, this episode takes Harman’s ideas and makes them visceral, urgent, personally devastating.

The hammer dreams of nails. You dream of being understood. And somehow, in all that mutual withdrawal, reality keeps happening anyway.

Welcome to the secret lives of objects. Welcome to a universe where you’re not special. You’re just here, withdrawn and strange, forever beyond anyone’s grasp. Even your own.

Much love, David x

You wake up and the first thing you think is how many hours you wasted sleeping. How many emails piled up. How many opportunities slipped past while you were unconscious. This is chronophobia. The gnawing animal panic that time isn’t just passing. It’s hunting you.

This episode is your descent into the fear you’ve been scheduling around. The dread you’ve been color-coding and optimizing and productivity-hacking into submission. You think if you pack your calendar tight enough the terror will suffocate. It won’t. It just learns to breathe shallow.

We trace how humans went from living in circles to dying in straight lines. How ancient peoples watched seasons repeat and felt safe in the loop. Then someone invented the mechanical clock and suddenly your life wasn’t a cycle. It was a countdown. Every tick a little death. Every tock a missed chance. Now you carry six devices that all scream the same message. You’re running out. You’re behind. You’ve already lost.

The shame comes next. The real violence. Not the fear of death. The fear of wasted life. All those alternate versions of yourself haunting the edges of your peripheral vision. The person you could have been if you’d started earlier. Tried harder. Chosen different. Those phantom lives press against your actual one until you can barely move without feeling the weight of everything you’re not doing right now.

So you join the cult of optimization. You buy the apps and read the books and wake up at five and batch your tasks and time-block your existence into fifteen-minute increments. You think you’re winning. You’re not. You’re just building a more sophisticated cage. The bars are made of bullet points and the lock is your own conviction that if you can just control time hard enough it will stop controlling you.

It never does.

Time isn’t chasing you. You’re drowning because you keep trying to swim upstream. The river doesn’t care about your productivity system. It doesn’t respect your goals. It just moves. And you can either thrash against it until you’re exhausted or you can stop. Float. Breathe.

This episode isn’t going to hand you five steps to overcome temporal anxiety. It’s going to show you that the fear dissolves the second you stop treating your life like a project with a deadline and start living it like a person who knows presence isn’t something you schedule. It’s something you allow.

You’re not behind. You were never ahead. The race exists only in your head and the finish line is a lie you tell yourself to justify the panic.

Much love, David x

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The universe is falling apart. That is not a metaphor. That is physics. That is the second law of thermodynamics. That is entropy winning every single time you take a breath, think a thought, care about anything at all.

Drew M. Dalton and speculative realism refuse to ignore this. No transcendent meaning. No cosmic purpose. No metaphysical safety net catching you when you dissolve back into the substrate you temporarily organised yourself out of. Philosophy has spent thousands of years building escape routes from matter, insisting consciousness exists somewhere outside the physical, pretending your caring about things makes you an exception to the laws that govern everything else.

It does not. You are meat that thinks about being meat. You are matter that cares about matter. Briefly. Improbably. Before entropy equalises everything back to lukewarm silence.

This episode is the final descent into what entropy actually demands of ethics. Not the consoling narratives humanism offers. Not the absurd heroism existentialism clings to. Not the hope that things get better or that your suffering gets redeemed or that somewhere on some scale justice balances out. None of that survives contact with thermodynamics.

What survives is this: you are here now and while you are here you can choose to increase suffering or decrease it. Not because the universe validates that choice. Because the nervous systems experiencing the effects of that choice register the difference. And their registering is the only scale where mattering happens.

We move through the consolations philosophy built and why they crumble when you stop pretending consciousness transcends matter. We face the vertigo of recognisng cosmic insignificance without the safety net of transcendent meaning. We examine whether hope is luxury or necessity and whether commitment without consolation is the only honest stance left. We draw the line between meaninglessness, which is a fact about the cosmos, and suffering, which is a fact about embodied experience. And we build ethics on radical doubt, on the recognition that you cannot know ultimate truths but you can know proximate realities, that you cannot justify caring cosmically but you can practice caring locally.

This is not nihilism. Nihilism says nothing matters because everything is meaningless. This says everything is meaningless cosmically and mattering happens anyway, in bodies, in pain, in the immediate interactions between complex systems that temporarily resist equilibrium before equilibrium wins.

You are that temporary resistance. Your ethics are that temporary resistance. And the fact that resistance is temporary does not make it futile. It makes it urgent. It makes it the only thing you can actually do while you are here.

The universe will not tell you that you matter. But the person next to you might notice whether you increased their suffering or decreased it. And their noticing is all the ethical foundation you will ever need or will ever get.

This will not give you hope. It will give you clarity about what you are, what ethics can be when you stop lying about cosmic significance, and what you can do in the brief window before entropy erases all evidence you were ever here.

Not because doing it matters eternally. Because not doing it matters immediately to the systems capable of experiencing the difference.

And immediate is all there is.

Much love, David x

Grant Morrison had a nervous breakdown in 1988 while writing about insanity. He was channeling madness, writing madness, becoming madness. And then one day the character he created walked into his living room in Glasgow and sat down across from him. King Mob. The bald anarchist revolutionary. They had a conversation. Morrison couldn’t remember who spoke first.

That is when he understood. Fiction is not inert. Imagination is not passive. When you imagine something hard enough, with enough detail, with enough belief, it does not stay on the page. It gets up. It walks. It looks at you with your own eyes.

The Tibetan monks knew this centuries ago. They called them tulpas. Thought forms. Beings conjured from concentrated imagination, fed by attention until they achieve independence. Alexandra David-Néel made one in the 1920s. A cheerful little monk. She visualized him for months until one day he was just there, walking beside her, visible to everyone in her traveling party. And then he changed. He grew thin. His face went sour. He started appearing when she did not summon him. It took her six months of focused ritual to destroy what she had created. Six months to kill a thought.

This episode is about what happens when you realize identity is not discovered but constructed. Not solid but scripted. Not given but generated frame by frame by an imagination you mistake for a camera when it has always been a projector. You are haunted by something you made. You have been performing a character so long the mask grew skin.

We go deep into Morrison’s hypersigils, how he put himself into his comics and watched his life change to match the fiction. We meet Carl Jung’s autonomous complexes, the figures he encountered in active imagination that had opinions he did not know he had. We explore Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception, the mathematical proof that everything you see is a species-specific hallucination optimized for survival, not truth. We sit with Philip K. Dick as he tries to figure out if he is a science fiction writer or a first-century Christian mystic named Thomas beaming information into his brain from outside time.

This is not metaphor. This is not some literary device. Morrison insists this literally. The beings we imagine are as real as we are because we are only as real as the attention we receive. Your name is a sigil. Your face is a sigil. The story you tell about who you are is a spell you cast every morning to make sure you show up again.

Stop telling the story and see what happens. Try it. For one full day, do not narrate yourself. Do not think I am the kind of person who does this or That is just like me. Stop performing the character of yourself for the audience of yourself. What is left? What is there before you tell yourself who you are?

You are not real. Not the way you think you are. Not solid. Not permanent. You are a thought someone is having. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe that someone is something you invented so long ago you forgot you were pretending.

Much love, David x