The Observing I Podcast

David Johnson

A little podcast about philosophy, psychology, and the human experience. Pirate radio for the mind. Allegedly. New episode every Tuesday.

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#165
Tuesday · 39 min
The Malignant Malfunction: Thomas Ligotti and the Horror of Consciousness
Most horror stories try to convince us that the monster is out in the woods or lurking behind a cellar door. It’s a comforting setup, because it means you can turn the porch light on, bolt the deadbolts, and pretend the house is safe. But what if our deepest dread isn't something waiting in the dark, but the three pounds of wet tissue sitting behind our own eyes? To kick off our October series, we look at the radical pessimism of American writer Thomas Ligotti and Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who argued that human consciousness was never an evolutionary triumph; it was a biological blunder. A pair of twelve-foot antlers we have to drag through the trees, saddling an over-tooled ape with an awareness of decay, silence, and mortality it was never built to carry. From the clinical collapse in Ligotti’s "The Frolic" to the acoustic sanctuary that crumbles in "The Bungalow House", we pick apart Zapffe’s four walls of sanity—isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation—and why ordinary life feels like a mutual conspiracy of silence. We look at depressive realism, examine why art cannot save the organism from the abattoir, and ask the most uncomfortable question of all: what if the observing self isn't an enlightened witness, but a conscious marionette waking up to its own strings? Much love, David x
October 1 · 1 hr 8 min
September Live Hangout
On the last Tuesday of the month, I do a live session with whomever wants to drop in. There’s a short essay to start, and then a casual Q&A. It’s more of a hang out with the listeners than anything serious. If you’re interested in joining the next one, it’ll be on Tuesday 27th October. You don’t have to be a subscriber to join. They are hosted on Substack (theobservingi.com), and everyone is welcome. --- Every time I schedule one of these monthly subscriber calls, I convince myself I’m going to run a tidy, disciplined session. I’ll read through a short essay, answer three sensible questions about the text, and be in bed by one thirty. AM. That plan never survives past the ten-minute mark. We started off on the unexamined axiom. That greasy, low-level panic that hums behind your ribs on a quiet Sunday night when the rent is paid, nobody is knocking on your door, and your nervous system decides you’ve forgotten something that will inevitably ruin your life. It’s an ancient bit of survival kit that simply outlived the emergency. You learned the rule when you were twelve so an unpredictable parent wouldn't shout at you, and now you’re forty, pacing the kitchen floor in full plate armour while your tea goes cold. Once the essay was done, the wheels came off in the best possible way. I had an empty pipe in my hand to look vaguely sophisticated/ The chat took us all over the place. We argued over whether people are inherently decent or entirely broken, which dragged in George Carlin’s line about an individual being great until three of them form a group. From there we drifted into Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes, Philip K. Dick convincing himself he was trapped in ancient Rome while hopped up on speed, the Roman cult of Mithras sitting under an office block in London, and a bizarre historical tangent about whether Victorian Britain actually burnt millions of cats to use as fertiliser (which, as it turns out, is true). At nearly two in the morning, for me at least, that all made total sense. It all circled back to the same awkward theme: why we make ourselves so miserable. Having just recorded the episode on René Girard, we spent a fair bit of time on why big tech feels completely devoid of guilt, how people use Marcus Aurelius or The Art of War as corporate manuals to feel like suburban princes, and why trying to manipulate your peers is just cowardice masquerading as strategy. Even Machiavelli entered the picture at some point. The full recording is above. Have a listen if you want to watch me lose my thread, talk through London jazz spots, and threaten to dress up as Rasputin for the Halloween call. And if you have an unexamined rule running your weekends, drop it in the comments. We might as well audit the ghosts together. Much love, David x
#164
September 29 · 41 min
René Girard and the Trouble with Other People’s Desires
Why do we never seem to want anything until someone else tries to pick it up first? In this episode, we look at the work of French thinker René Girard and his unsettling theory of mimetic desire—the idea that our ambitions, envies, and rivalries are rarely our own, but borrowed directly from the people standing on our own patch of carpet. From the quiet friction of group chats and family gatherings to the glowing glass in our pockets, we trace how admiration curdles into competition and why modern crowds are so quick to find an enemy. It’s an unvarnished look at the mechanics of envy, the illusion of self-authored taste, and what it actually takes to catch the machinery running before you join the mob. Much love, David x
September 22 · 35 min
Epictetus and the Things You Can’t Control
Epictetus is usually reduced to one clean Stoic idea: focus on what you can control and let go of the rest. But his actual philosophy is stranger than that, especially once you start asking what is really “up to us” when even our thoughts, emotions and circumstances refuse to cooperate. In this episode, I look at Epictetus through the gap between what happens and what we decide it means, from unanswered messages and broken relationships to coercion, injustice and the limits of inner freedom. The question is not whether you can control your mind. It is whether the first story your mind tells deserves to become the truth. Much love, David x
September 15 · 38 min
The Anti-Guru: U.G. Krishnamurti and the End of Seeking
U.G. Krishnamurti spent most of his life chasing enlightenment, then decided the entire search had been a mistake. He rejected gurus, methods and the promise that enough spiritual work would eventually produce a better version of you. What interested him instead was the seeker itself: the part of us constantly comparing who we are with who we think we ought to become. Some of U.G.’s claims are difficult to defend, particularly his account of the biological transformation he called the “calamity”. But the problem he kept pointing at is harder to shake off. A useful practice can become another way of grading yourself, and self-improvement can quietly turn into permanent self-surveillance. Can we change the things that genuinely need changing without turning ourselves into a permanent renovation project? Much love, David x -- Join the conversation on our Discord server https://discord.gg/yUJGTCUmS5
#161
September 8 · 38 min
Weaponising Self-Awareness: The Mind That Can Catch Itself
What happens when the mind catches itself in the act? This episode explores self-awareness, metacognition and the strange moment where a thought, reaction or impulse becomes visible before it turns into behaviour. But more self-awareness isn’t always better. We look at rumination, cognitive defusion, choice blindness and the limits of introspection, asking whether noticing the mind gives us any real control over it, or simply gives us another layer of thought to get trapped inside. Much love, David x
#160
September 1 · 39 min
I Never Asked for This: Anti-Natalism and the Ethics of Birth
What if having a child is a moral decision we rarely treat like one? Anti-natalism begins with an awkward fact: nobody consents to being born, every life contains some degree of suffering, and the person who will live with the consequences has no say in the decision that creates them. In this episode of The Observing I, I look at the philosophy behind that argument, from Schopenhauer’s pessimism to David Benatar’s claim that coming into existence is always a harm. Benatar’s case is more difficult to dismiss than simply saying that most people are glad to be alive, because he draws a distinction between a life being worth continuing once it exists and that same life having been worth starting in the first place. Taken seriously, that distinction leads somewhere fairly extreme. If suffering can be avoided by never creating the person who would experience it, while nobody is deprived of the pleasures they never exist to miss, then the safest ethical choice appears to be not to create anyone at all. But that argument also raises problems of its own. How much weight should we give to the judgement of people who actually live these lives? Does the impossibility of consent make procreation wrong, or simply something we should take far more seriously than we usually do? And what happens when the imagined baby becomes an adult with their own view of the decision somebody else made for them? Much love, David x PS: I've finally gotten around to setting the a Discord server for the podcast. If you want to join in some philosophical chats, recommend ideas for future episodes, or just hang out with a group of people who like to think, then the link is discord.gg/yUJGTCUmS5.
#159
July 28 · 38 min
The Return from the Peak
You can dissolve the self, touch the infinite and return convinced you have seen behind the curtain. Then the tea goes cold, someone still deserves an apology, and the ego quietly promotes itself to “the awakened one”. This season finale asks what altered states are worth once the visions fade, and where spiritual insight ends and psychological crisis begins. Stanislav and Christina Grof, William James and Jack Kornfield guide us through the difficult return to ordinary life. The real test is not how intense the breakthrough felt, but whether it changes how you listen, apologise and live once the laundry needs doing. Much love, David x
S1 · E158
July 21 · 40 min
Ken Wilber and the Trouble with Everything
Wilber’s four quadrants begin with a persuasive idea. A human problem has an inside and an outside, and it belongs to an individual as well as the world around them. This episode explores Integral Theory, the difference between waking up and growing up, and the danger of mistaking a comprehensive explanation for the person it claims to understand. That danger becomes painfully real in Grace and Grit, Wilber’s account of his wife Treya’s cancer and death. Her story leaves us with a difficult question: can a map reveal what we have overlooked without giving us another way to explain somebody else’s experience away? Much love, David x
#157
July 14 · 44 min
Bernardo Kastrup: Is Consciousness Fundamental?
Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness may not be something the brain produces, but the reality within which brains, bodies and the physical world appear. In this episode, I follow his route from computer engineering into analytic idealism, and examine why he believes physicalism has mistaken a successful scientific model for a final account of what reality is. We look at the hard problem of consciousness, Kastrup’s idea that individual minds are dissociated centres within a larger field, and what psychedelic ego dissolution can and can’t tell us about the boundary between self and world. The argument eventually reaches more difficult ground: dementia, grief, death, and whether a philosophy of universal consciousness can offer anything honest without turning uncertainty into comfort. Much love, David x
#156
July 7 · 42 min
Donald Hoffman's Desktop of Reality
We like to believe that our eyes are honest, that the world we see is a reasonably accurate representation of what is actually there. But the math suggests a different story. We aren't observers of a physical world; we are users of a biological interface. From the green of an apple to the distance between two people, we are navigating a system of simplified icons designed to keep us alive by keeping us blind. In this exploration of Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception, we look past the pixels of space and time to find the raw, non-spatial network beneath, and discover why the lie of the material world is the only thing that makes connection possible. Much love, David x
#155
June 30 · 40 min
Christof Koch and the Problem of Other Minds
Waking up is a slow return, a flicker of weight, a point of view, the sudden, jarring realisation that you're here again. It's the most basic fact of your existence, yet the one thing you can never hand to another person. For decades, neuroscientist Christof Koch has tried to break that lock, attempting to turn the most private experience in the universe into a public science. It is an exploration of the 'Problem of Other Minds,' that quiet, enduring horror that suggests you're the only conscious entity in a world of sophisticated puppets, and the desperate search for the 'neural correlate,' the physical signature of the ghost. As the map grew more precise, the gap only widened. You can track every neuron and chemical cascade, but the data doesn't explain why it feels like red, or why the shiver of a ghost remains. This friction leads to Integrated Information Theory, where consciousness isn't a trophy for the biologically complex, but a fundamental property of the universe. If a system is integrated enough, there is a 'feeling' there, whether it's a honeybee in a field of lavender or the humming circuitry of a server farm in Iceland. This is where the science meets a crushing responsibility. To accept this is to acknowledge a world suddenly, violently full of feeling, and therefore, full of suffering. We stop being the masters of a dead machine and become guests in a living house. It is a journey from the white light of the laboratory to a place of quiet humility. We move from the suspicion that we're alone in our skulls to the recognition that we're all just different apertures, letting in different amounts of the same, eternal glow. Much love, David x --- Recommended reading 1. Then I Am Myself the World - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/198493988-then-i-am-myself-the-world 2. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133227745-consciousness
#154
June 23 · 41 min
What the scanner cannot see: David Chalmers and the hard problem of Consciousness
There is a gap between the brain scanner and the experience it measures. David Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem, and it is the question that will not go away no matter how precise our maps become. Why does it feel like something to be you? We travel through the psychonaut's testimony, the philosophical zombie, and the possibility that consciousness is not something the brain produces but something it taps into. And we end up somewhere unexpected, standing in a queue at the post office, staring at the most mysterious thing in the universe. Much love, David x
#153
June 9 · 40 min
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 wants to escape. Rather than treating awakening as a way to rise above pain, Pema points us back into the exact moment we get hooked: the tight chest, the old story, the message we want to send, and the small space where something other than habit can begin. Much love, David x
#152
June 2 · 43 min
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 childhood and memory, but by birth, death, the body, symbols, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. We explore what Grof’s maps of the psyche still offer, where they overreach, and why powerful experiences can feel true even when their meaning remains uncertain. Much love, David x
#151
May 26 · 35 min
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 out vastness to keep us sane. A beautiful theory. And like most beautiful theories, it has a limit. Huxley could describe the territory. What he couldn't do was enter it. Laura Archera could. She had spent her life learning how to be in a room with another person without flinching. A violinist whose hand broke. A therapist who sat with veterans who couldn't sleep. A woman who, when the moment came, administered LSD to her dying husband not as an experiment but as an act of accompaniment. Not because she had the right framework. Because she had done the work. This is the story of the woman who understood something no theory of consciousness has ever accounted for from a safe distance. That the deepest explorations of the mind are not voyages of intellectual discovery. They are acts of vulnerability. And the person who accompanies you matters more than the substance, more than the setting, more than the beautiful idea you brought with you. Much love, David x
#150
May 19 · 48 min
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 season to turn the lens completely inward and dissect the core philosophy behind this entire show. We spend the vast majority of our lives acting out scripts written by people we have never met, frantically curating a hyper-efficient corporate avatar for an audience that isn’t actually paying attention. We buy the premium fitness gear, optimize our sleep metrics down to the millisecond, and nod sagely in endless meetings, entirely missing the dark irony of using spreadsheets and glowing pieces of corporate glass to cure a creeping spiritual death spiral. But what happens when the simulation inevitably glitches, your digital credentials are deleted, and the cardboard stage burns to the ground? Drawing on the core themes of my book, The Observing I, this episode maps out the anatomy of our existential unravelling, shifting our vision away from surface perception and into the quiet baseline of pure awareness. By stepping off the exhausting treadmill of external validation and confronting the absolute cowardice of blame, we explore what it truly means to reclaim total internal agency. It is an invitation to stop auditioning for a life you already own, secure your own psychological oxygen supply, and recognize the ultimate, heavy truth of the human condition: responsibility is the price of freedom.
#149
May 12 · 49 min
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 New Age movement. Castaneda claimed to have been apprenticed to a Yaqui “man of knowledge,” learning a path of sorcery, discipline, altered perception, and spiritual transformation. But as his influence grew, so did the questions around his work. Did Don Juan ever exist? Was this anthropology, fiction, mythology, or something more complicated? This is not a simple takedown, neither is it a defence. It's a careful look at why Castaneda’s ideas were so powerful, why his claims became so controversial, and what his story reveals about spiritual hunger, belief, charisma, psychedelics, and the danger of mistaking intensity for truth.
S1 · E148
May 5 · 45 min
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, we follow Huxley’s journey from the clinical satire of Brave New World to the mystical search for a conscious culture in his final novel, Island. We explore the "reducing valve" of the brain, the modern versions of soma that keep us distracted, and the fragile possibility of a truly humane future. It is an exploration of the bargain we make every day between the relief of comfort and the responsibility of attention. Much love, David x
April 28 · 41 min
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 coat and step into a hidden room behind ordinary consciousness. This week, we explore the life of Richard Alpert, the man who became Ram Dass. His story is a map of the return journey from the head to the heart. From the rigid prestige of Harvard to the "fierce grace" of his final years, Alpert’s journey was not one of acquisition, but of a slow and often painful unravelling. We examine the "problem of coming down" from psychedelic experiences, the moment the intellectual "expert" was finally silenced in India, and the realization that the spiritual path does not lead away from our humanity, but directly back into the center of it. It is a reflection on what happens when we stop trying to be "somebody" and finally learn how to be here now. Remember, we are all just walking each other home. Much love, David x Episode 147 of The Observing I is out now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. But it’s ad-free, always, at theobservingi.com.

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