We Fear What We Remember, Not What We See

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What if our greatest fears were not born from what the world presents to us, but from the memories the brain uses to predict it? In this episode, we explore a profound shift in understanding emotion, trauma, and selfhood: a move from reactivity to construction. Guided by the neuroscience of Lisa Feldman Barrett, we trace how every feeling—anxiety, sorrow, even joy—is not merely a response but a prediction, shaped from the remembered past. Trauma is reframed not as a singular event, but as a pattern of meaning that can be revised. Healing becomes not excavation, but the slow, deliberate work of building new predictions, one breath, one small act at a time.

Meaning itself, we discover, is not something discovered ready-made in the world; it is something tenderly, stubbornly, built. Agency does not arrive all at once but flickers into being through tiny acts of rechoosing—by crafting different futures from within the architectures of memory. With reflections on prediction theory, cultural inheritance, trauma, and healing, this episode offers a new way of living inside uncertainty—not as prisoners of the past, but as quiet architects of becoming.

With quiet references to Lisa Feldman Barrett, Hannah Arendt, and Simone Weil, this episode listens for the subtle architectures of choice that shape emotional life. What happens when meaning is no longer something passively absorbed but actively constructed? When suffering is not merely endured, but re-authored? When presence itself becomes a radical act of re-making what the body once predicted as inevitable?

Why Listen?

• Discover how emotions are constructed through predictive processing
• Reframe trauma not as event, but as a revisable pattern of memory and meaning
• Learn how small acts of attention can reshape the self
• Engage with philosophical reflections on agency, freedom, and emotional life

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

Each referenced work supports the philosophical architecture explored in the episode, offering entry points into a deeper reflection on memory, emotion, and agency.

#LisaFeldmanBarrett #PredictiveBrain #EmotionTheory #TraumaRecovery #Agency #MeaningMaking #Selfhood #HannahArendt #SimoneWeil #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast

The Slow Reweaving: On Trust, Presence, and the Future of Belonging

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What if the most urgent repairs a society needs are not material or political, but relational? In this episode, we explore the quiet cost of 'bowling alone'—the erosion of social trust, mutual regard, and the civic imagination itself. Drawing on Andy Haldane’s reflections and Robert Putnam’s seminal analysis, we trace how the thinning of social capital reveals not just an institutional fragility but an existential one: a slow forgetting that freedom is a shared condition, not a private possession.

Presence, once lost, cannot be legislated back into being. It must be risked—through small, unseen acts of recognition, patience, and shared vulnerability. Repair does not announce itself. It is stitched, stubbornly and often invisibly, wherever relation is chosen over withdrawal. This is not an episode that proposes solutions. It dwells inside the unfinished work of belonging, inviting a slower, more courageous imagination of civic life beyond spectacle or transaction.

With quiet reference to Robert Putnam and Andy Haldane, this episode listens for the wisdom buried not in action plans, but in the delicate, necessary work of trust-making. How do we rebuild presence without spectacle? What becomes possible when relation, not performance, is what holds the future open?

Why Listen?

• Understand how the loss of social trust quietly destabilizes democracy and shared life
• Explore the relational foundations beneath visible political and economic structures
• Reflect on how belonging is rebuilt not through design, but through daily acts of presence
• Engage philosophical ideas on freedom, community, and imagination without academic framing

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
• Haldane, Andy. CEO Lecture: Counting the Cost of Bowling Alone. RSA Lecture, 2025.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.

The Unrendered Self

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What happens to the self when even absence becomes a kind of presence? In this episode, we examine the quiet erosion of identity under conditions of constant visibility. This is not about digital detox or offline escape—it’s about the deeper structural shift where reflection becomes performance, privacy becomes signal, and being becomes something that must be rendered to be real.

We explore how the self survives—or doesn’t—amid an economy of attention that cannot tolerate ambiguity. Drawing on Simone Weil’s ethics of attention, Gloria Anzaldúa’s defense of contradiction, and Roland Barthes’s concept of the neutral, the episode traces the contours of presence without performance. We also touch on Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity and Hannah Arendt’s space of appearance to imagine what it means to remain unrendered—felt but uncaptioned, real but unreadable.

Why Listen?

• Reframe visibility and identity through the lens of attention, fatigue, and erosion
• Engage with thinkers like Barthes, Glissant, Weil, and de Certeau without academic distance
• Experience audio as a space of ambient intimacy and structural reflection
• Consider what it means to exist without translating yourself

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
• Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

The System Forgets Nothing, But It Never Remembers You

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

We live in a system that forgets nothing but never remembers us. It tracks our movements, records our actions, and stores our data—yet the more it accumulates, the less it seems to know us. It does not recognize us as beings, but as parts within an ever-expanding machine. In this world, alienation is not an external force imposed upon us; it is the very architecture of our lives.

This episode traces the recursive contradiction at the heart of capitalism—how it demands our presence while erasing our essence. Through the philosophical architecture of Karl Marx, we follow how estranged labor becomes ontological displacement, how performance replaces participation, and how our interior lives are mapped, mined, and monetized.

As Fredric Jameson observed, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But this episode does not attempt to predict collapse. Instead, it listens for the quiet interruptions—those moments of unmonetized presence, of shared gesture, of unproductive tenderness. Drawing also from thinkers like Silvia Federici and Bernard Stiegler, we consider the politics of attention, memory, and unpaid life.

What remains when everything measurable has been measured? What form of life lingers beyond productivity? This is not a story of revolution. It is a story of recognition—and through that recognition, the possibility of remembering ourselves.

Why Listen?

• Understand capitalism as a system of ontological arrangement, not just economic control
• Explore alienation beyond emotion—as recursive infrastructure
• Encounter Marx without being preached to
• Recognize small, human gestures that capitalism cannot metabolize

Further Reading

As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.

• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx — On estranged labor and the loss of species-being. Amazon link
• Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han — A reflection on self-optimization and invisible control. Amazon link
• Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici — On the historical roots of unpaid labor. Amazon link

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
• Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2017.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
• Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers, 1964.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

The Unscripted Reach

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What happens when the act of reaching out becomes rarer than the connection itself? In this episode, we trace the slow disappearance of interpersonal initiation—not as a cultural lapse, but as a civilizational contradiction. Algorithms promise endless proximity, yet remove the necessity of contact. We ask what is lost when approach is replaced by performance, and what it means to risk presence in an age of optimization.

Through the lens of philosophy and lived gesture, we explore the disappearance of embodied mutuality—from Aristotle’s vision of human fulfillment in relation, to Simone Weil’s understanding of attention as generosity, and Levinas’s ethics of the face. We ask: how do we become, if never met? What happens to courage when friction is removed from the social field? In the absence of real-time approach, we find a loss not just of intimacy—but of ethical improvisation itself.

This is not an argument for nostalgia. It is a meditation on risk, refusal, and revelation—on the sacred awkwardness of showing up unrehearsed, and the relational art we may be forgetting how to perform.

Why Listen?

• Reflect on intimacy as relational improvisation, not outcome
• Understand how frictionless design impacts mutual becoming
• Explore quiet allusions to Aristotle, Weil, Levinas, Badiou, and Byung-Chul Han
• Reconsider the ethics of hesitation, awkwardness, and approach

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

• Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

• Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Dover Publications, 2000.

• Badiou, Alain. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. New York: The New Press, 2012.

• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

• Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner, 1970.

• Byung-Chul Han. The Transparency Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

• Kierkegaard, Søren. The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion. Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962.

• Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

• Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.

• Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

The Power of Absurdity to Awaken Ethical Consciousness

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What if the moment that woke you up wasn’t a grand political speech or a philosophical epiphany but a joke that landed too well? What if the start of ethical clarity came not from solemn reflection but from a laugh you couldn’t contain—at precisely the wrong time, in precisely the wrong room? In this episode, we explore absurdity not as nonsense but as a kind of epistemic tremor—a jolt that unsettles what seemed settled, that shows how much of what we call sense is performance. From slapstick to silence, from farts to fascism, absurdity becomes a method of seeing—especially when clarity arrives not through logic, but through rupture.

Absurdity doesn’t offer arguments. It offers asymmetry. A sideways truth that resists explanation but insists on being felt. That resistance is itself a kind of ethics: it refuses to reduce. We trace how the ridiculous unsettles authority, how laughter holds ethical force, and how awkwardness becomes a mode of moral recognition. This isn’t about irreverence for its own sake. It’s about what becomes visible when nothing fits—and why that’s when truth might finally appear.

With quiet references to Camus, Butler, and Arendt, this episode listens for the wisdom buried in disruption. What happens when the body refuses the script? When decorum fails to contain dissent? When mockery becomes a mirror—and that mirror doesn’t flatter? This is not an essay that resolves. It dwells. It opens a space for thinking that begins where certainty breaks.

Why Listen?

• Discover how absurdity can reveal invisible power structures
• Explore laughter as a form of ethical attention and resistance
• Hear how awkwardness and disruption can open new moral insight
• Engage with philosophical concepts without academic framing

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1991.
• Camus, Albert. Caligula and Other Plays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. London: Penguin Books, 2006.
• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.
• 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.
• Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 1911.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
• Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London: Routledge, 2002.