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

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