The Deeper Thinking Podcast

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 episode, we explore Eric Schmidt’s vision of artificial intelligence not as an abstract future or market force—but as a geopolitical condition already underway. More than a profile, this is a meditation on temperament, strategy, and the ethics of speed. How does one of the digital era’s most influential minds think about leadership, trust, and the fragility of institutional strength under competitive pressure?
We trace the psychological and political architecture of the AI race, following Schmidt’s distinctions between founders and executives, startups and nations, urgency and judgment. His insights are neither nostalgic nor alarmist—but sharpened by decades of operational power. The result is a vision of intelligence—human and artificial—that demands not just innovation, but care.
Drawing from thinkers like Paul Virilio, Byung-Chul Han, Hannah Arendt, and Bernard Stiegler, we ask: how do we govern systems that learn faster than we can legislate? What happens when startup logic becomes geopolitical logic? And can our values survive the migration into code?
This is an episode about consequence, not just capability. About relevance, not just leadership. About what it means to build—and deserve—the future.
Why Listen?
Understand how Eric Schmidt reads global AI competition through infrastructure, not ideology
Explore the ethics of institutional power in the age of AGI and algorithmic acceleration
Examine the risks of value displacement as AI development migrates across geopolitical systems
Engage with thinkers like Virilio, Arendt, and Stiegler on speed, care, and the architectures of power
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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. Trans. 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. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Bibliography Relevance
Eric Schmidt: Frames the episode’s central inquiry into leadership, foresight, and AI governance
Paul Virilio: Provides the critical lens of speed as both advantage and hazard in political systems
Byung-Chul Han: Explores the tensions between transparency, performance, and trust in techno-political systems
Hannah Arendt: Offers a moral framework for understanding the intersection of action, freedom, and consequence
Bernard Stiegler: Illuminates how technical systems shape—and displace—human temporality and responsibility
What if the most urgent question is not what we’re building—but who we trust to notice what it means?
#EricSchmidt #GoogleAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AILeadership #AGI #Geopolitics #ChinaUSA #PaulVirilio #ByungChulHan #HannahArendt #BernardStiegler #AIethics #FutureOfIntelligence #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #TechGovernance #PhilosophyOfTechnology

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
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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:
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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:
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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:
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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.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Morduch, Jonathan, and Rachel Schneider. The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

What We Lost When We Stopped Belonging - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What We Lost When We Stopped Belonging
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those who feel the ache of absence—not as emptiness, but as a longing for something once structural, once sacred.
What if loneliness isn’t just a feeling, but a structural breakdown? A collapse in the relational, ecological, and existential architectures that once held us? This episode reframes loneliness not as personal failure, but as the symptom of a deeper disconnection—from each other, from the more-than-human world, and from the systems of meaning that once bound us. Drawing from over forty thinkers in philosophy, ecology, posthumanism, and social theory, we trace how intimacy became transactional, how attention became extractive, and how the self was reframed as sovereign rather than entangled.
Featuring insights from Judith Butler, David Abram, bell hooks, Donna Haraway, Tricia Hersey, and Frantz Fanon, we explore how grief, rest, slowness, and interdependence might offer not escape—but repair. This is not a prescription, but a return to presence. An invitation to listen, dwell, and reorient ourselves toward the sacred weave of relation we’ve forgotten how to feel.
Reflections
Some of the questions that surfaced along the way:
What if loneliness is not an emotion but an ecosystem in collapse?
What happens when connection is replaced by content?
How does capitalism translate intimacy into transaction?
Can rest and grief become acts of resistance in a speed-driven world?
What if healing isn’t internal, but infrastructural?
How do we make kin again—in a culture that forgot the language?
What if we rebuilt belonging not through sameness but through care?
Why Listen?
Reimagine loneliness through ecological, philosophical, and relational frameworks
Trace the emotional consequences of systemic disconnection
Engage thinkers from posthumanism, Indigenous philosophy, and social theory
Rediscover the architecture of belonging as something we build together
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If you'd like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts.
Key Thinkers
Judith Butler: Reframes vulnerability as constitutive of the human condition—not a weakness but a connective tissue.
David Abram: Grounds perception in the more-than-human world, reminding us that presence is ecological, not just cognitive.
bell hooks: Urges us to reclaim love as a political and communal force capable of structural repair.
Donna Haraway: Teaches kin-making as an ethics of survival in a relational world we’ve tried to unweave.
Tricia Hersey: Elevates rest as a mode of resistance—against extraction, against urgency, against erasure.
Frantz Fanon: Reminds us that alienation is not just internal—it is colonial, systemic, and lived through the body.
Loneliness is not a flaw. It’s a signal. A longing for the architectures we once built together.
#Loneliness #Belonging #JudithButler #DavidAbram #bellhooks #DonnaHaraway #TriciaHersey #FrantzFanon #Rest #Ecology #MoreThanHuman #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #Kinship #Philosophy #Posthumanism #Grief #Listening #Attention
Bibliography
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London: Routledge, 1990.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.
Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge, 2015.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Macy, Joanna. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Translated by David Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley, 2005.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.
Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
Stengers, Isabelle. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

To Be Seen Is to Be Suspect - Mental Health Denial - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

To Be Seen Is to Be Suspect
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
A meditation on diagnosis, distress, and the politics of visibility.
What happens when care becomes a performance, and diagnosis the only form of public belief? This episode explores how mental health recognition is tethered to systems that demand collapse before offering aid. It asks what’s at stake when distress must be translated into medical language just to be acknowledged—and what gets lost when structural grief is mislabeled as clinical excess.
The notion of “overdiagnosis” seems, at first, like a caution against excess. But in a world where suffering is often unseen unless it is named in clinical terms, the real issue may not be inflation—but compression. As Susan McPherson and Lauren Berlant suggest, what we frame as psychiatric surplus may instead be the slow surfacing of deferred, systemic pain. And Judith Butler’s concept of grievability reminds us that some lives—and some pains—are never granted the same access to recognition.
The question, then, is not whether we name too much—but why naming is required at all. Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s insight into translation under power, and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, we examine how welfare systems discipline visibility and control affective legitimacy. This episode does not reject diagnosis—it reframes it. Not as falsehood, but as a narrow vessel overflowing with meanings it was never built to hold.
Reflections
Some of the questions that surfaced along the way:
Why must pain be pathologised before it is believed?
What happens when diagnosis becomes a form of access?
Can suffering exist without a medical translation?
Who decides which grief is visible and which is dismissed?
What if “overdiagnosis” is not an excess—but a backlog?
How do systems of care convert witnessing into suspicion?
Is it possible to hold suffering without naming it?
Why Listen?
Explore the ethical politics of diagnosis and visibility
Reframe overdiagnosis through structural and philosophical critique
Engage thinkers who challenge the logic of psychiatric containment
Reflect on recognition, care, and the power of naming
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If you'd like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
McPherson, Susan. “Challenging the ‘Disorder’ in Mental Health.” Journal of Mental Health, vol. 28, no. 1 (2019): 1–3.
Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World. Oakland: PM Press, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
To be named is not always to be known. And to be seen is not always to be safe.
#MentalHealth #Overdiagnosis #JudithButler #LaurenBerlant #SusanMcPherson #FrantzFanon #AchilleMbembe #Recognition #Visibility #StructuralGrief #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #Suffering #PoliticsOfCare #AffectTheory

The Digital Coup - Carole Cadwalladr – The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Digital Coup
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those tracing silence not as absence—but as structure.
What does it mean to witness a coup without tanks, to live inside a regime of silence engineered through code? In this extended episode, we examine Carole Cadwalladr’s TED2024 talk—where she returns not as a journalist, but as a trace. Her story unfolds at the intersection of platform power, legal suppression, and algorithmic simulation. The digital coup has already happened, and she names it.
Cadwalladr reveals a world in which the infrastructure of freedom has been quietly overwritten—where data replaces consent, and AI echoes voices it was never given permission to learn. With the rise of the broligarchy—a transnational class of platform-aligned sovereigns—journalistic dissent is punished not by censors, but by courts, algorithms, and silence. Through Cadwalladr’s refusal, we ask: can memory survive simulation? Can refusal still constitute design?
We explore how law, language, and architecture fuse to erase dissent before it’s heard. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler, we frame naming not as performance, but as political ontology. This is not a collapse—it’s a recursion. And in that recursion, resistance is not erased. It is revoiced.
Why Listen?
Understand the legal and infrastructural mechanics of a digital coup
Explore how epistemic justice is weaponised and reconstituted under AI
Engage philosophers like Nancy, Spivak, Butler, and Mbembe alongside Cadwalladr’s lived experience
Trace refusal not as retreat, but as post-erasure authorship
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If you'd like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts.
Bibliography
Cadwalladr, Carole. “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” TED Talk, 2024.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff: Data as sovereignty and commercial memory.
Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault: Visibility as the instrument of modern power.
Being Singular Plural – Jean-Luc Nancy: The relational basis of ontology and community.
Precarious Life – Judith Butler: Mourning, visibility, and grievability as political states.
Necropolitics – Achille Mbembe: Governance through the power to make die and let live.
Can the Subaltern Speak? – Gayatri Spivak: Voice, absence, and the politics of speaking for.
Unsettling the Coloniality of Being – Sylvia Wynter: Epistemic shifts in the human-as-category.
Race After Technology – Ruha Benjamin: The coded racial logics of algorithmic design.
Atlas of AI – Kate Crawford: Political and planetary infrastructures of AI power.
Bibliography Relevance
Carole Cadwalladr: Provides the case study and structural critique anchoring the episode’s themes.
Shoshana Zuboff: Frames surveillance capitalism as the new terrain of digital sovereignty.
Michel Foucault: Offers insight into how architectures of power shape consent, compliance, and visibility.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Illuminates the relational ethics that persist beneath enforced silence.
Judith Butler: Articulates the ontological politics of being seen and allowed to grieve publicly.
Achille Mbembe: Positions the state and platform as necropolitical forces that dictate the terms of presence.
Gayatri Spivak: Examines who is allowed to speak, and what gets lost in mediated representation.
Sylvia Wynter: Reorients the category of the human away from colonial epistemology toward radical plurality.
Ruha Benjamin: Explores algorithmic design as a continuation of racialized systems of control.
Kate Crawford: Exposes the material, environmental, and political cost of AI infrastructures.
Refusal is not the end of authorship—it is its echo, returned from erasure.
#DigitalCoup #CaroleCadwalladr #SurveillanceCapitalism #SylviaWynter #JudithButler #JeanLucNancy #GayatriSpivak #PlatformPower #Refusal #AlgorithmicSilence #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast

We’re excited to introduce our brand new podcast - The Neoteric.

The Neoteric
We’re excited to introduce our brand new podcast, The Neoteric. This is where deeper thinking finds new ground—where we move beyond inherited frameworks to develop original concepts and philosophical insights. The Neoteric builds on the foundation laid by The Deeper Thinking Podcast, taking those ideas into new terrains and public conversations.
The word neoteric refers to someone with new ideas—and that’s exactly what we aim to foster. This podcast is about accelerating the creation and adoption of ideas for the public benefit, bringing philosophy into dialogue with contemporary life in fresh and meaningful ways.
We’ve just released our very first episode, and we’d love your support. You can help us grow by leaving a review or rating on Apple Podcasts.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-neoteric-thinking-podcast/id1808354236
 
 
 
 

The Divergent Mind: Reframing ADHD =- The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Divergent Mind: Reframing ADHD
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those who have never quite fit the frame—and those learning to honor that as a form of knowing.
What if ADHD isn’t a disorder, but a divergent pattern of attention shaped by relational intelligence, rhythmic perception, and ethical sensitivity? In this extended episode, we reimagine ADHD not as a clinical failure but as a philosophical lens—one that refracts the pace, priorities, and punitive designs of the dominant world.
Rather than seeing ADHD as an attention deficit, we explore it as a time-based difference. Russell Barkley frames it as a struggle with internal time management. Gabor Maté connects it to relational wounding. We bring in Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges on trauma and the polyvagal system, and Bonnie Badenoch and Pat Ogden on somatic processing and regulation.
From Devon Price’s critique of productivity myths to Tricia Hersey’s rest-based justice, and Saidiya Hartman’s notion of errant movement, we reflect on how refusal, stillness, and shame alchemize into new maps of self. Lauren Berlant and Silvia Federici remind us that bodies out of sync with capital are not broken—they’re prophetic.
This is not a diagnostic guide. It’s a meditation on rhythm, relationality, and redesigning our worlds to honor minds that don’t flatten to fit. It asks not “How do we fix ADHD?” but “What might a society look like if it made room for it?”
Reflections
Some of the questions that surfaced along the way:
What if hyperactivity is a form of embodied intelligence, not dysfunction?
What does it mean to be “on time” in a culture that ignores relational pace?
Why are minds that resist linearity framed as deviant, rather than deep?
Can shame be unlearned not through correction, but through co-regulation?
How do we reconfigure environments—not people—to support neurodivergence?
When the body leads, what does learning become?
What would it mean to honor emotional sequencing as intelligence?
Why Listen?
Reimagine ADHD through somatic, philosophical, and trauma-informed lenses
Explore rhythm, relational presence, and emotional regulation as intelligence
Learn from voices at the intersection of neuroscience, justice, and embodiment
Move beyond symptom to soul—rethinking design, depth, and dignity
Listen On:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Support This Work
If you'd like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts.
Bibliography
Maté, Gabor. Scattered Minds. New York: Avery, 2023.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance. New York: Little, Brown, 2022.
Price, Devon. Laziness Does Not Exist. New York: Atria Books, 2021.
Badenoch, Bonnie. The Heart of Trauma. New York: Norton, 2017.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Ogden, Pat. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. New York: Norton, 2006.
Porges, Stephen. The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory. New York: Norton, 2017.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. New York: Norton, 2019.
Bibliography Relevance
Gabor Maté: Reframes ADHD as a relational and developmental response rather than a disorder.
Bessel van der Kolk: Explores how trauma is held in the body, informing a somatic approach to attention and regulation.
Tricia Hersey: Positions rest as a radical, justice-driven reorientation to productivity and worth.
Devon Price: Challenges internalized productivity myths and reframes laziness as resistance.
Bonnie Badenoch: Provides a deeply relational, right-hemisphere-informed view of trauma integration.
Silvia Federici: Contextualizes attention and regulation within broader histories of discipline and extraction.
Lauren Berlant: Examines the affective structures that shape how we endure and interpret chronic overwhelm.
Pat Ogden: Introduces sensorimotor techniques for engaging with trauma held below verbal awareness.
Stephen Porges: Offers polyvagal theory as a physiological framework for safety, attention, and co-regulation.
Saidiya Hartman: Illuminates how errant forms of life resist normative containment and redefine relational space.
To be divergent is not to be broken. It is to be carrying a rhythm the world has yet to hear.
#ADHD #Neurodiversity #GaborMaté #StephenPorges #TriciaHersey #SomaticPsychology #Attention #Listening #SilviaFederici #LaurenBerlant #BesselVanDerKolk #DevonPrice #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #Rest #Rhythm #Embodiment