About this podcast
Do you ever look up from your desk and wonder what is going on? Do you yearn to pierce the veil but find yourself trapped by the mundane? You are not alone. Join our hosts (two respectable professionals) as they leave the banal light of the everyday to poke around under the bonnet.
We talk of philosophy and history, narrative and consciousness, and what we did last week and why it was actually pretty strange when you think about it. And when we’ve finished arguing about evolutionary psychology and pretending to know more about physics than we do, we sometimes - sometimes - unearth something worthwhile. For the truth is not to be found above, it is to be found below.
Follow us underground.
Also follow us on Twitter: x.com/echoesundergrnd
New episode every time the muse descends (every couple of weeks)
Episodes
The newest 20 of 45 episodes
- On God · 1 h 12 min · Season 1 Episode 45Within the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable…
- On Kitesurfing in the Western Sahara · 49 min · Season 1 Episode 44Our co-host finds himself in the Western Sahara, the disputed and very deserty region to the South of Morocco. He’s there to kitesurf; conditions in Dakhla are perfect. The…
- Notes on Attending a Football Match · 57 min · Season 1 Episode 43Our intrepid correspondent attended a football match for the first time, and discovered within himself a surprising affinity for hooliganism. It was a women’s football match, the…
- On Ibiza (more or less) · 56 min · Season 1 Episode 42Ibiza is well-placed to set the stage for an Dionysian experience. It’s laced with history and mythology - there’s a Phonecian necropolis, a cave temple to moon goddess Tanit…
- On Shamanism · 56 min · Season 1 Episode 41Shamanism has been lurking in the background of our discussions since day one, and our “jingle” is just one of us playing a shaman drum. It was high time we had an episode on it…
- On Berlin: Ultimate Defeat · 55 min · Season 1 Episode 40Our co-host just got back from a work trip to Berlin, and his overwhelming impression was one of shiny scar tissue. All the buildings are new and glass and steel and modern, but…
- Life is Damage · 55 min · Season 1 Episode 39In the last episode we posited that in order to achieve self actualisation, purpose, or peak experience, you have to risk your more basic needs - food, shelter, safety. We…
- On Maslow's Hierarchy of (French) Needs · 60 min · Season 1 Episode 38Our co-host’s eye was drawn to a weathered tome in an antiquarian bookshop: The White Monk of Timbuctoo, by William Seabrook. It promised (and delivered) the life story of a…
- What do we mean by "Natural"? · 1 h 6 min · Season 1 Episode 37One of us thought we were going to talk about the nature of nature - what is it we’re thinking about when we think about nature? The other thought we were going to talk about…
- Terry Pratchett 4: Mort (On Death and Personification) · 1 h 0 min · Season 1 Episode 36We return to our occasional series on Terry Pratchett’s work, but with a difference. The fourth Discworld book, Mort, focuses on a personification of death. We therefore use it…
- On Museums · 1 h 0 min · Season 1 Episode 35What do we learn from a museum? What knowledge is conveyed when you look at an object? Put a bunch of school children in the Egypt room at the British Museum… are they gaining…
- Meditations on Violence · 1 h 0 min · Season 1 Episode 34We read Meditations on Violence by Sgt Rory Miller, a US corrections officer and martial artist, discovered in some Reddit argument on martial arts. We absolutely tore through…
- On Heidegger and Modernity · 52 min · Season 1 Episode 33Artem, guest extraordinaire, is back. He made us read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Age of the World Picture, and in this episode he achieves the impossible. Under his patient…
- On Opera and High Culture · 48 min · Season 1 Episode 32Is opera the pinnacle of high culture, or a boring anachronism? One of us has enjoyed some excellent recent operas at Covent Garden, the other’s exposure to the artform was a…
- On Bird Watching · 53 min · Season 1 Episode 31Our co-host has experienced the first stirrings of a desire to become a bird watcher. How did this happen? He looked out of the window, and saw what he now knows to be pied…
- On Competing · 51 min · Season 1 Episode 30Why are neither of us particularly interested in competitive sport? We’re both keen if beginner jiu jitsu white belts, and the sport spends a lot of time pushing you to compete…
- On Pontius Pilate · 56 min · Season 1 Episode 29Why is Pilate the only normal human being to be mentioned in the Nicean Creed? It’s an interesting selection of detail in a short and technical statement of theological belief to…
- In Praise of Shadows · 54 min · Season 1 Episode 28In Praise of Shadows is an essay on aesthetics by a Japanese man of letters, Junichiro Tanizaki. This was written in 1933 between the Meiji Revolution and the Second World War…
- On Sacrifice · 1 h 6 min · Season 1 Episode 27What was it like to live in a culture where blood sacrifice was a part of everyday life? Sacrifice was ubiquitous across all human cultures until very recently, but we have lost…
- On Self-Promotion · 48 min · Season 1 Episode 26This is our 26th episode, and we have not taken a single step to promote this podcast. These things are quite a lot of effort to record, edit and release to the public, we…
