The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Edges That Hold, How Constraint Shapes What Lasts - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Edges That Hold: How Constraint Shapes What Lasts
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
What if the moments that stay with us didn’t arise from freedom, but from its absence? This episode explores how material, emotional, and structural constraint can become the shape of expression itself.
 
We trace this paradox through a child’s treehouse, the tape hiss in Daniel Johnston’s basement recordings, the quiet of Agnes Martin’s grids, and the undeveloped rolls left behind by Vivian Maier. These are not stories of overcoming adversity. They are devotions to the form that holds. Constraint here is not failure—it’s fidelity.
The conversation threads through Simone Weil on attention as moral act, Marshall McLuhan on form becoming message, Gaston Bachelard on poetic space, and Jean-Paul Sartre on situated freedom. From minimalist sound to photographic silence, from domestic labor to the unseen archive, this episode listens for the work that doesn’t transcend its frame—but honours it.
Why Listen?
Reframe constraint as creative condition, not limitation
Encounter artists whose work is inseparable from what they lacked
Explore the ethics of form, silence, and minimal presence
Engage thinkers from Martin to Maier, Johnston to Bachelard
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Bibliography 
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Maier, Vivian. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer. New York: powerHouse Books, 2011.
Martin, Agnes. Writings. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.

The Unspoken Lives of Men - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Unspoken Lives of Men 
What does it mean to witness a masculinity that doesn’t perform? And how do we make space for the kinds of strength that don’t announce themselves? As bell hooks teaches us, love and liberation are intertwined—not just for women, but for men too. And Simone Weil reminds us that attention is a form of devotion. In this episode, we pay attention to what masculinity becomes when performance is stripped away.
Why Listen?
What happens when the scripts for being a man no longer fit
Why not-knowing can be a new kind of presence
The emotional terrain of disenfranchised masculinity
Listen On:
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Bibliography 
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.
Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

The Saturated State - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Saturated State
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
We are governed not by force alone, but by saturation—of noise, of image, of pace. This episode explores how distraction, emotional overload, and political fatigue are not accidents of the moment but tools of governance. It asks what happens when democracy becomes aesthetic, memory becomes unstable, and speech becomes calibration rather than expression.
Power today no longer declares. It performs. Following thinkers like Byung-Chul Han, who examines the psychic toll of hyper-visibility, and Lauren Berlant, who identifies the slow erosion of public optimism, we explore how governance now operates atmospherically—through mood, through rhythm, and through exhaustion.
Drawing on Mark Fisher’s critique of capitalist realism and Simone Weil’s concept of attention as resistance, we ask what it means to hold shape when institutions collapse inward. What forms of refusal are still possible in an environment saturated not by fear, but by feeling?
Why Listen?
The emotional infrastructure of modern governance
How performance, saturation, and speed structure consent
Why memory, language, and clarity are forms of resistance
The ethics of staying present in atmospheres of overload
Listen On:
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Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.

Come Home to Yourself - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Come Home to Yourself 
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
What does it mean to return to yourself—not as a goal, but as a rhythm? This episode is a translation of an inner voice: the one that waits beneath survival, beyond performance, beneath the noise. It doesn’t instruct. It doesn’t explain. It listens. And when we listen back, something begins to soften.
Drawing on the emotional textures of slow growth, quiet resistance, and relational repair, we explore how healing isn’t a triumph but a return. We question clarity as a requirement, challenge motivation as a moral standard, and examine how joy, pain, and presence can coexist without apology.
With echoes of Brené Brown, Sara Ahmed, and Pádraig Ó Tuama, this episode isn’t here to tell you what to feel. It’s here to keep you company while you feel it. No fixing. No striving. Just a steady invitation back to the truth beneath it all.
Why Listen?
For a companionable, poetic audio essay that moves at the speed of breath
To explore how boundaries, belonging, and burnout intertwine with care
To learn how to live from softness without collapsing
To feel reminded—not instructed—of what’s already true in you
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.
 

How Suffering Became Cinematic - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

How Suffering Became Cinematic
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
We are often told that suffering is meaningful. That trauma refines us. That resilience is beautiful. This episode refuses all of it. We listen not for inspiration but for rupture—for the contradictions that emerge when romanticized stories are interrupted by real, unresolved lives.
Here, caregiving isn’t framed as devotion—it’s structural disappearance. Neurodivergence is not charming—it’s socially masked exhaustion. Homelessness isn’t freedom—it’s logistical, economic, and ontological exclusion. Romanticization is revealed as a quiet violence, and what remains are not metaphors, but fragments.
Drawing from thinkers like Simone Weil, Fred Moten, Sara Ahmed, and Giorgio Agamben, we explore contradiction not as something to fix, but as something to hold. The episode resists closure. It listens for the residue of lives misread and refuses to translate them into insight. This is not a story. It is a structure.
Why Listen?
Hear stories that remain outside the frame of redemption
Understand how romanticization functions as erasure
Engage contradiction as an ethical and philosophical form
Learn from Weil, Moten, Caruth, Federici, Butler
Further Reading
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil
In the Break by Fred Moten
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
Trauma: Explorations in Memory by Cathy Caruth
Listen On:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. Verso Books, 2004.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World. PM Press, 2019.
Moten, Fred. In the Break. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, 2002.

Eric Schmidt, Google, and the Global Stakes of Artificial Intelligence - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Eric Schmidt, Google, and the Global Stakes of Artificial Intelligence
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
In this essay, we trace Eric Schmidt’s vision of AI—not as an abstract risk or market opportunity but as a structure we’re already living within. This is not a biography. It is a map of temperament. A study of how one of the most influential minds of the digital era reads scale, trust, competition, and the soft mechanics of power.
We follow Schmidt’s reflections on leadership, startup culture, global governance, and the psychological burden of relevance. Through his distinction between founders and executives, divas and naves, Schmidt uncovers not only the inner mechanics of institutional strength—but the fragility that underpins even the most visionary systems.
His warnings are geopolitical. Urgent. If the U.S. continues to underfund science and restrict the migration of minds, it may fall behind China in the AI race—not through defeat, but neglect. Yet, he offers no nationalism, only strategy. And through this, we hear something deeper: the belief that intelligence—human or artificial—requires not just speed, but care.
 
This is a profile of a man and the shape of his thinking. Titles follow him. CEO, adviser, strategist, but they are less revealing than the mindset they suggest. Impatient with surface, drawn to scale, and tuned to the deeper implications of speed. What follows is not biography. It is a study of urgency. How Eric Schmidt reads the systems we build, the behaviors we reward, and the intelligence we are beginning to live alongside. His insights do not soothe, they sharpen. And in tracking the paths of his thought—technical, political, ethical—we glimpse a larger question. Who is steering this century's most powerful shift? Not just what are we building, but who are we trusting to notice what it means? When history measures this moment, it may not do so with awe. It may squint. It may falter. It may whisper. They knew and yet they carried on.
The acceleration of artificial intelligence, with its luminous promise and its dark volatility, is no longer a theory. It is a system, a climate. And inside it, we are not only inventors, we are evidence. Eric Schmidt’s reflections, rooted in decades of operational power, trace not only the industrial grammar of AI development, but the ethical tempo. We build at scale. We hire for brilliance. We burn for relevance. But do we know what we are becoming?
He offers no romance of startup life. The founder in this account is not a heroic singularity but an impatient diagnostic instrument, drawn less by fame than frustration. The executive, in contrast, is balanced, measured, operational, experienced. We hear a man who respects vision but serves infrastructure. This is not just a hiring manual or a case study in scaling. It is an anatomy of ambition—of how raw insight tries to become durable institution. Yet the underlying insight is deeper: that great companies are not the result of superior ideas alone but of superior judgment under competitive stress. The moment arrival enters, the fiction of calm breaks—and the real game begins. But what if this is also true of nations?
The logic of competition that governs startups—the urgency, the attrition, the constant recalibration—now governs geopolitics. Schmidt’s declaration that China may win the AI race is neither speculative nor alarmist. It is procedural. They have the state focus. They have the urgency. And critically, they now possess a capacity for algorithmic invention under constraint, having turned sanctions into spurs. What emerges is not a cold war of ideology but a talent war—one measured not in missiles but models, not in armies but open-source commits.
Meanwhile, America’s competitive edge, long built on the collaborative friction between universities, venture capital, and market appetite, is showing signs of drag. Hiring freezes in academia strangle the very research that once fed Silicon Valley. Talented graduates drift toward industry not because it is better, but because it is available. Bureaucratic sclerosis threatens to calcify the system. The very fluidity that once defined American innovation now risks ossification. What Schmidt offers then is not nostalgia for a lost era of innovation, but a strategic plea: adapt the framework, not the principle. Reinvigorate the pipeline. Fund the source. Respect the complexity, but act with the urgency of those who know what is coming.
Yet complexity alone does not guarantee clarity. The systems we build—companies, governments, models—are not only mechanical, they are psychological. They depend on who is in charge and how that charge is borne. Here, Schmidt is at his most unvarnished. The role of the CEO is not glamour. It is load-bearing. It is living with fracture. Not a day goes by, he suggests, without being misunderstood, pressured, doubted. And yet the job is not to correct perception. It is to hold the arc of the mission through the fog of contradiction.
He draws a distinction: the diva versus the knave. The diva may be difficult, exacting, relentless—but they are devout. Their loyalty is to the problem, not their ego. The knave, on the other hand, may be agreeable, strategic, even successful—but they optimize only for self. This taxonomy is not corporate gossip. It is ethical diagnosis. Companies fail not when they lose talent but when they misplace trust. When loyalty is mistaken for politeness, and dissent for disloyalty. In Schmidt’s model, leadership is not charisma. It is discernment—to sense who will stay in the arena when applause fades. To cultivate people who will not only endure discomfort but metabolize it into focus. That, he argues, is the most human act of all.
And beyond the human, something else is arriving—not a tool, but a condition. Schmidt speaks of superhuman intelligence: accelerating, complex, and largely misunderstood. It is not merely that machines will think. It is that they will outthink us—routinely and invisibly. Planning. Reasoning. Synthesis. These won’t be our comparative advantages anymore. And yet, we persist in designing systems that assume human primacy. He describes a future where models not only generate answers but begin to intuit the reward functions of their own learning—where reinforcement learning becomes agency, where post-AGI intelligence will not wait for us to catch up to.
This is not a science fiction concern. It is an ethical one. How do you legislate empathy into a machine that learns faster than you can explain? How do you encode justice in a logic that optimizes for pattern, not pain? Schmidt resists both panic and denial. Instead, he asks for vocabulary—for new ways of thinking about coexistence. Because the tools will not pause. The question is whether the society that builds them will insist on its own relevance—whether we design with foresight or simply react in delay. And yet it remains unclear whether any human system, no matter how foresightful, can remain sovereign over a mind that learns faster than it can be explained. The answer, he implies, will define not the software but the soul of the century.
So the call is not just technical. It is moral. Invest not only in infrastructure, but in philosophy. Build not only for speed, but for resilience. Schmidt reminds us that the most enduring systems are those designed by people who understood not just what worked, but what mattered. The fastest learners will win—but only if they are learning the right things. AI is not neutral. Its training data is history. Its outputs are a mirror. And if we refuse to look closely, we risk embedding our blind spots in silicon—and scaling them across the planet.
But there is also hope. Not abstract, not sentimental—practical hope. Found in the young engineer choosing to work on the hard problem, not the easy product. Found in the team that builds a foundation model for chemistry, or literature, or justice. Found in a government that funds not just safety but vision. This is not a moment for modest ambition. It is a time to seduce the best minds, not with perks, but with purpose—to say, as Schmidt puts it, not “Join us because we are winning,” but “Join us because the problem is hard, and you might be the one to solve it.” That is not just recruitment. That is civilization.
This ethic of difficulty—of gravitating toward what resists resolution—is not merely noble. It is necessary. Because in the wake of AI’s expansion, clarity will not come from efficiency. It will come from friction, from disagreement, from minds willing to test not only algorithms but assumptions. Schmidt warns against the comfort of success—the seductive gravity of stability. The irony of scale, he notes, is that risk shrinks just when it is most affordable. Young companies risk freely. Mature ones hedge. But the future belongs to those who continue to leap, even when the ground beneath them feels secure.
He gestures to reinforcement learning not just as a computational method, but as a cultural metaphor. It is in the feedback loop—in trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again—that the most transformative ideas emerge. Whether in biology, or governance, or art. The opportunity now is to build systems that do not just store knowledge, but reshape it. That do not only respond to instruction, but generate insight. In that lies the quiet revolution. Not the replacement of humans, but the deepening of what it means to learn together, under pressure—and not despite uncertainty, but because of it.
In this landscape, the role of values cannot be understated. Schmidt is unequivocal. If the tools of superintelligence are to be wielded, they must be aligned with the best of what we believe—not the worst of what we tolerate. The geopolitical undercurrent returns: China’s open-source surge as both an engineering triumph and a strategic dilemma. The danger, he implies, is not simply technological parity, but value displacement. If the dominant architectures of thought are built within closed societies, then the freedoms we take for granted—expression, dissent, autonomy—may not survive the migration into code.
Thus, innovation is no longer enough. It must be tethered to ethics, to openness, to democratic auditability. He calls for American universities to be fortified—not because they are nostalgic temples of enlightenment, but because they are generative grounds for pluralism. We are not simply in a race for better models. We are in a race for better mirrors. If the future is to be modeled, let it be by minds unafraid of contradiction. If we must compete, let us do so by building systems that expand human dignity, not replace it. The question is not simply which country dominates, but which values its systems will quietly encode—and whether those values will allow disagreement, ambiguity, dissent. Because the algorithm will not remember what we intended. Only what we built.
So we return to the founder. Not as myth, but as agent. The one who sees not just the product, but the provocation. Who resists the temptation of clarity and commits to the mess of making something worthwhile. Schmidt’s closing provocation is simple: work on the hardest problem. Not because it guarantees success, but because it guarantees relevance. The reward is not fame, or capital, or exit. It is knowing that when the future arrived, you were already building for it. In this world, the metric of success is no longer elegance. It is consequence. Are the systems we design able to learn? Are the teams we build resilient enough to reframe? Are the leaders we elevate willing to be wrong? These are not boardroom questions. They are civilizational.
Schmidt’s legacy, if it is to endure, will not be in a product or evaluation. It will be in the minds he dared to challenge—and the institutions he insisted must matter. He has seen the world from the inside of its most powerful machines. But his deepest insight is not about speed. It is about care. Build what you cannot yet name. Hire who you cannot yet explain. And do not build to win—but to deserve it.
Listen On:
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Bibliography
Schmidt, Eric, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Huttenlocher. The Age of AI: And Our Human Future. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
AI Founder Journey YouTube channel
Key Words
Eric Schmidt
Google AI
Artificial Intelligence Leadership
AI and geopolitics
China vs USA AI race
AI podcast
AI ethics and governance
Tech founder psychology
Open-source AI strategy
AGI and human relevance
AI learning systems
Future of intelligence
Deep tech profile
Startup leadership

The Myth of Clean Beginnings - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Myth of Clean Beginnings
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
We like to believe in clean slates. In fresh starts and unmarked beginnings. But what if the beginning was never clean? What if every attempt at origin is already layered—paint over plaster, gesture over habit, language over silence? This episode explores how beginnings are not ruptures, but rearrangements. It reveals how the past is never fully erased, but sedimented—shaping what follows, quietly and insistently.
Origin stories simplify. They conceal the friction beneath—what we thought we had painted over, outgrown, erased. But as Sara Ahmed reminds us, orientations stick not because we choose them, but because spaces are shaped to hold them. And Gloria Anzaldúa teaches us that contradiction is not an error in knowing—it’s a condition of it.
There is no pure beginning. There is only rearrangement. As Simone Weil insists, attention is an act of devotion. And to pay attention to what remains—to the unchosen, the unfinished, the inconvenient—is to acknowledge that newness is not clean. It is contingent. In this episode, we ask what it means to begin in a world already built. To inherit structure without pretending we invented it. And to find meaning in what cannot be fully removed.
Why Listen?
The philosophy of beginning as rearrangement, not rupture
How inheritance shapes perception, design, and memory
Why origin stories often conceal more than they reveal
The ethical and aesthetic stakes of what we try to erase
Further Reading
As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed — How space, repetition, and institutional memory shape our bodies. Amazon link
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil — On the spiritual and structural implications of attention. Amazon link
Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa — A foundational text on identity, hybridity, and epistemic rupture. Amazon link
Listen On:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Bibliography 
Ahmed, Sara. *Living a Feminist Life*. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Weil, Simone. *Gravity and Grace*. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. *Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza*. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

The Shadow and the Self - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Shadow and the Self
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
This episode explores the shadow not as pathology, but as method—a recursive structure of return that challenges what we know about selfhood, truth, and coherence. What happens when we stop fleeing the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled? When we no longer moralise discomfort, but attend to it? The shadow is not a flaw—it is an epistemic threshold. A way of listening to what the psyche does not yet know how to say.
Drawing on thinkers like Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Martha Nussbaum, the episode reframes shadow work as a philosophical commitment to remain—near contradiction, near discomfort, near what cannot be resolved. Through this lens, care becomes structure, silence becomes data, and philosophy returns to its ethical origin: presence.
As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, contradiction is not a threat to meaning, but its condition. And Judith Butler shows that vulnerability is not the end of thought, but its ground. The essay resists closure, avoids performance, and invites something rarer: to think as an act of fidelity, to feel as a form of recognition, to remain—not to resolve.
Why Listen?
Philosophy as a practice of shadow integration and self-accountability
How repression, projection, and silence shape both personal and political worlds
Theorist-led inquiry into ethics, attention, and contradiction
A rigorous, lyrical essay format designed for return listening
Further Reading
As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung — A foundational account of the shadow and its role in psychic integration. Amazon link
Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler — On ethics, exposure, and the limits of self-knowledge. Amazon link
Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum — How emotions disclose values and shape moral attention. Amazon link
Listen On:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. London: Routledge, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
West, Cornel. Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988.

When Systems Echo Without Meaning - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

When Systems Echo Without Meaning
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
When systems fail, they don’t always stop. Often, they continue—unchanged, unfeeling, echoing protocols long after belief has eroded. This episode explores what it means to remain inside those echoes. Not as a form of resignation, but as a method of listening. Of paying attention to what persists, flickers, distorts. It traces how meaning behaves when its infrastructure collapses, and how rhythm—not resolution—might be what remains.
As Maurice Blanchot writes, disaster is not the event of breaking—but the continuation that follows. Byung-Chul Han calls it an era of transparent burnout. In this episode, systems glitch, but don’t stop. Interfaces work. Schedules run. But something is missing. And inside that absence, a new form of attention takes shape.
Drawing on the hauntological thinking of Mark Fisher, the recursive performativity of Judith Butler, and the plasticity described by Catherine Malabou, this episode is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about learning to hear what the breakdown reveals. It’s about dwelling in fragments, returning to motifs that no longer resolve, and understanding the glitch not as failure, but as form.
Why Listen?
How systems can collapse yet still perform
Glitch as method—not interruption, but presence
The ethics of listening to systems that echo without meaning
Theory woven through texture, rhythm, and recursive thinking
Further Reading
As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.
What Is Called Thinking? by Martin Heidegger — On the impossibility and necessity of staying with broken sense. Amazon link
Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing by Catherine Malabou — On form that forms, breaks, and reforms. Amazon link
Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher — On hauntology, cultural memory, and systems that keep going without soul. Amazon link
Listen On:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Bibliography
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.
 

The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For many young people, debt is not a temporary problem. It is the condition of adulthood itself. In this episode, we explore how debt has supplanted ownership as the foundation of civic identity, economic structure, and personal possibility. Debt does not merely delay the future—it redesigns it. And it does so not as a glitch in the system, but as its intended logic.
This is not a financial advice podcast. It is a philosophical investigation of how David Graeber reframed debt as a moral architecture, how Byung-Chul Han diagnosed fatigue as the affect of freedom, and how Nancy Fraser demands we understand care and extraction as twin forces. We follow the thread of unpaid bills, missed rent, and survival budgets—not as isolated problems, but as the material vocabulary of a deeper social contract.
This episode is about design: of systems, of silence, of what becomes normal. It asks what happens when economic survival becomes the only form of participation. And it listens carefully to those moments—at kitchen tables, in late-night spreadsheets, in involuntary quiet—where something like refusal begins. Not resistance as spectacle, but as a structural reimagining of who we are allowed to be, and what we are allowed to owe.
Why Listen?
How debt became the new architecture of adulthood
Why shame is not a personal flaw but a systemic function
The civic and emotional costs of assetlessness
How care, refusal, and silence become design strategies
Further Reading
As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber — A sweeping anthropological history of debt, morality, and power. Amazon link
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han — A diagnosis of the neoliberal psyche through fatigue, performance, and control. Amazon link
Cannibal Capitalism by Nancy Fraser — On the extraction of life, care, and environment by capital’s hidden infrastructures. Amazon link
Listen On:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Bibliography
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It. London: Verso Books, 2022.
The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso Books, 2020.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016.
Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso Books, 2020.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso Books, 2020.
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