The Observing I Podcast
David Johnson
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Recent Episodes
No Exit, No Problem: Pema Chödrön’s Inner Frontier
In this episode of The Observing I, we enter the work of Pema Chödrön, exploring shenpa, groundlessness, tonglen, and the uncomfortable spiritual practice of staying present when everything in us…
The Unconscious Has Bad Manners: Stanislav Grof and the Psychedelic Psyche
In this episode of The Observing I, we enter the work of Stanislav Grof, the Czech-born psychiatrist whose psychedelic research led him to a stranger view of the unconscious: one shaped not only by…
When the Music Stops: Laura Huxley and Relational Consciousness
Aldous Huxley sat in his study in 1953, watched a vase of flowers become the first thing he had truly seen, and wrote it down. Millions read it. The reducing valve, he called it. The brain filtering…
The Observing I: Deconstructing My Own Philosophy
Against all odds, we have reached episode one hundred and fifty. To mark this milestone of collective survival, we are taking a brief, unannounced intermission from our Realm of the Psychonauts…
Carlos Castaneda: Wisdom, Fiction, and the Desire to Believe
In this episode, we explore the strange and troubling legacy of Carlos Castaneda, the anthropologist and author whose books about Don Juan Matus helped shape modern psychedelic spirituality and the…
S1E148 The Tyranny of Pleasure: Aldous Huxley and his Brave New World
We often imagine tyranny as a heavy hand from the outside, but Aldous Huxley understood a more unsettling possibility. He saw that we can be persuaded to enjoy our own containment. In this episode,…
Be Here Now: The Great Unmaking of Richard Alpert
Human beings are often drawn to transformation because we aren't entirely comfortable being ourselves. We imagine that if we can just find the right door, we can shed our old personality like a heavy…
S146E146 Terence McKenna and the Problem of Enchantment
In this episode of The Observing I, I explore the life and ideas of Terence McKenna, one of the most fascinating and controversial voices in psychedelic thought. More than just a writer or lecturer,…
Turn on, tune in, drop out: The life and ideas of Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary is often remembered as a prophet of psychedelic liberation, but his story is more complicated than that. In this episode, we look beyond the slogans, the counterculture mythology, and…
Emil Cioran and the Insomnia of Being
Emil Cioran was the most honest philosopher of the twentieth century. He believed, with total intellectual sincerity and forensic rigour, that being born was a catastrophe nobody asked for, that…
Not Yet: The Philosophy of Ernst Bloch
Not yet.Ernst Bloch was born in a factory town on the Rhine in 1885 and spent the next ninety-two years refusing to accept that the present tense was the final word on anything. He built an entire…
Leszek Kolakowski, the man who autopsied his god
What do you do when the thing you used to explain everything stops explaining anything?Leszek Kołakowski was born in Poland in 1927. He grew up under Nazi occupation, educated in secret because the…
Vladimir Solovyov and the Philosophy of the World Soul
Three times in his life, Vladimir Solovyov saw her. Once at nine years old in a Moscow church. Once in a lecture hall mid-sentence. Once face down in the Egyptian desert alone at night. He called her…
Nikolai Federov: The Librarian who declared war on Death
What if your acceptance of death isn't wisdom? What if it's surrender with better branding? What if the most dangerous idea humanity ever had wasn't pride or violence or the will to power, but the…
Jan Patočka and the Philosophy of Living in Truth
Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher who spent thirty years banned from teaching, running illegal philosophy seminars in private apartments, passing hand-typed manuscripts through networks of people…
Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self
You are not one person. You never were.This is not a metaphor about complexity or depth. This is not inspirational content about containing multitudes. This is a structural diagnosis of how…
Lev Shestov and the Violence of Reason
Lev Shestov spent his entire life at war with the most dangerous idea in human history. Not God. Not death. Not the void. Reason itself. The belief that things must be as they are. That necessity is…
The Berdyaev Problem: What If You're Afraid of Freedom?
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.…
Dostoevsky: Patient Zero of the Nervous Breakdown
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,…
Kafka and the Machinery of Modern Dread
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…
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The Observing I Podcast has published 153 episodes since January 2023, covering topics in Philosophy, Society & Culture.
The Observing I Podcast is currently highly active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 35m.
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