PODCAST · society
Echoes Underground
by Echoes Underground
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
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On God
Within 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 philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you....
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On Kitesurfing in the Western Sahara
Our 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 water’s flat, the wind is up, the people are hospitable, the food is excellent, and barren wilderness extends for hundreds…
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Notes on Attending a Football Match
Our 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 quarter final of the Champion’s League, Chelsea at home against Barcelona and losing 4-1 (8-2 agg). What did he learn?...
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On Ibiza (more or less)
Ibiza 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, and 500 year old forts everywhere, including a massive one overlooking the old town. It’s also laced with bohemian...
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On Shamanism
Shamanism 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. What is a shaman? We follow Manvir Singh in boiling it down to people who 1) enter non-ordinary states and then 2)...
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On Berlin: Ultimate Defeat
Our 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 the city lacks that sense of deep history and organic development that you get in most European cities. He imagined...
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Life is Damage
In 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 further posited that living damages you. You cannot live without taking damage, whether from the various knocks and blows,...
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On Maslow's Hierarchy of (French) Needs
Our 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 French defrocked priest living in great luxury in a mud palace in 1930s Timbuktu, all in electric prose and fitting into a...
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What do we mean by "Natural"?
One 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 barefoot shoes for strength training. This is our synthesis. Barefoot shoes promise a return to a “natural” way of…
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Terry Pratchett 4: Mort (On Death and Personification)
We 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 as a jumping off point to discuss personifications, and the personification of death in particular through history. We...
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On Museums
What 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 any propositional knowledge about Ancient Egypt? Or are they actually gaining something more valuable, more visceral?...
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Meditations on Violence
We 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 it, sub 24 hours, on a weekday too, day job in disarray. Miller is one of the men who is sent into a prison riot to sort…
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On Heidegger and Modernity
Artem, 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 tutelage what had previously been an impenetrable, fastidious German hallucination became clear, meaningful, even…
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On Opera and High Culture
Is 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 single regrettable unstaged Wagner playthrough at the Albert Hall. Both of us have had a couple of drinks. The problem is...
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On Bird Watching
Our 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 wagtails. They were flitting around the bins, darting around, wagging their tails, and he thought they were very charming…
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On Competing
Why 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 - but neither of us is particularly interested in this. Are we just cowardly and intimidated, afraid of public...
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On Pontius Pilate
Why 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 focus on the colonial governor who, under substantial local pressure, sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. For…
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In Praise of Shadows
In 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 - the old Japan is still there, with the new Japan growing on top of it but not yet reaching its fiery apotheosis. He...
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On Sacrifice
What 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 that visceral knowledge of how it felt and what it meant and as a result have a gap in our models of how people in the...
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On Self-Promotion
This 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 created an entire website and brand pack - why can’t we bring ourselves to tweet about it, or to generally hustle to bring in...
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On the Phantom Time Hypothesis
How do we know that the fall of Rome in 479 AD was 1,546 years ago? Empires have risen and fallen since then, a dark age took place, historical records are fragmentary, not continuous, and they are often politically motivated or even fabricated. Do we really have any confidence that the Earth has...
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What is Money?
We have our first guest! Artem is a philosopher of corporate ethics with an academic background in economics, and he’s helping us explore what money is. How do we even go about answering this question? Money is magic, it’s invisible, Marx spoke of the “alchemy of money”. We can trace the history…
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On Panspermia
Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions. The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically…
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On the Church of England
What’s gone wrong with the Church of England? We read a Spectator article by Marcus Walker about the process of becoming a bishop, which has become highly bureaucratic and secular - you are put on a management fast track and then hilariously have to apply for a Bishop job when it comes up. And…
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Genealogy as Blockchain
Why are so many rocks in the Arabian desert covered in ancient graffiti? And why is so much of this graffiti lists of ancestors? We coincidentally both read the same paper by Michael C.A. MacDonald, a complete legend, and it sparked an interesting chain of thought. An oral society is not less...
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On Revolution
We look at a book called The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme, which tells the story of Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire - Octavian (“a cold and mature terrorist”) vs Mark Anthony (of Anthony and Cleopatra). It was written in 1939, a charged year for any discussion about dictatorship, and...
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On Shoulder Injuries
We’ve both had reasonably legit shoulder injuries recently. How do we feel about it? What have we learnt? Well firstly it’s inconvenient. It turns out you use your shoulder for a lot of things. No more jiu-jitsu for a bit. Secondly, it hurts. While it’s positive to get the occasional…
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Matters of Sate 3: More Navy
Not content with one hour of arguing that Britain should double down on a powerful navy at the expense of all other military spending, we’re back for more - plus lamentations about not having joined the navy ourselves, examinations of our youthful decision making, tales of naval derring do from…
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On Audio Engineering
Get your four piece guitar band in a room, deliver a killer performance, capture it with expensive microphones and set the levels on your mixing desks and what comes out of the speakers will sound… terrible. Turns out that we need bearded men called either Butch or Andrew spending days in a room...
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On Growing Mushrooms
One of our co-hosts has started growing lion’s mane mushrooms at home. Is this the early phases of a midlife crisis? After all it’s all the fun of a veggie patch, for those who live in London and don’t have gardens. You get to deal with reality, with nature herself, which is a refreshing change…
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On the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
Why does everyone love the beach? We can think of no better explanation than us having evolved there. This theory is clearly ridiculous, but very hard to argue against - to our knowledge the scientific establishment has offered no strong rebuttal. After all, it makes quite a lot of sense if you...
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On Playing Games
This is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We’re talking about games. We have racked up literally thousands of hours playing the Total War series, and countless Sundays spent staring suspiciously at each other over a gaming board. Why do we do this? Why do we enjoy it? Games sometimes have…
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On LARPing
Do you have the feeling that Christmas is just a LARP? Do you worry the perfect Christmas is always happening elsewhere? Do you find the pressure to have a good time overwhelming? Would you rather just be on your own? Well you’re doing Christmas wrong, and should embrace the LARP for the good of...
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Terry Pratchett 3: Equal Rites
Onto the third Discworld book, and we can see Terry Pratchett starting to hunt bigger game. This book is about magic and sex, as in biological sex, and really goes in on exploring a theme in a way that none of his later books do. It does this by looking at male magic vs female magic. Neither is...
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On using a burner phone
So our co-host has cast aside his smartphone, and has bought a £25 Nokia ripoff. No maps, no Whatsapp, no social media, no internet. It’s terrible. It’s transgressive. It’s the future. In this episode, he defends his life choices. This isn’t about the hazards of social media, he claims - this is...
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Matters of State 2: On Democracy
Controversial opinion of the day. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst way of running a state apart from everything else we’ve tried. One of our hosts rejects this, and says that actually we know of and have tried far better ways of steering the ship of state. We talk of…
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Terry Pratchett 2: The Light Fantastic
We make our way chaotically through The Light Fantastic, the sequel to the Colour of Magic. We don’t concern ourselves too much with the plot, for what it is - a frenetic chase across the Discworld culminating in a special effects extravaganza in Ankh Morpork - and instead talk about Terry...
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Terry Pratchett 1: The Colour of Magic
We go through Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld book, the Colour of Magic, with a particular focus on the first six pages. A turtle swims through space to an unknown destination, a great city burns, and in the middle of it all the Discworld’s first tourist receives an inept guided tour from a...
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Reading Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett has had an enormous intellectual impact on both of us, and we discuss how a man from the eighties who wrote frenetic novels about wizards and dragons could have that effect. We find one answer in a speech he gave about folklore. Pratchett’s stories are deeply grounded in the myths...
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On Hobbies
We have both invested thousands of hours into activities with no obvious utility. Music, sport, photography, travel, poetry, writing an entire unpublished novel… starting a podcast. Is this all just a hubristic waste of time, a shallow self-indulgence, or is there some value to these activities...
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Carl Jung on UFOs
A riposte to our earlier episode on how the UFO phenomenon is best understood as the faeries of old viewed through a modern lens. Aliens are not faeries, they are portents. Carl Jung wrote a book about UFOs that functions well as an application of his broader theoretical work. When we observe a...
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The Greeks and the Irrational
Baby naming ceremonies, except in the nude and with gifts of cuttlefish! Wandering shamans preaching the mystical power of numbers! A living oral tradition that goes back to the last Ice Age! Behold, the Ancient Greeks! In the face of some scepticism, it is argued that they were stranger and more...
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Matters of State
Welcome to our failed attempt at a CURRENT AFFAIRS EPISODE. The aim was a discussion of unfolding events in the Middle East, now too long ago to be relevant (things move quickly). The actual result was twenty minutes of reminiscing about life among the Houthis in Yemen, followed by a MANIFESTO on...
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Aliens are Faeries
Are aliens just American faeries? One of our hosts read Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers and took it literally. UFOs exist, and they are the same phenomenon as faeries and elves but reinterpreted by a twentieth century audience. This view is met with some...
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On Drinking Alcohol
We look at alcohol’s ritual, psychological, and cultural function. Starting with Dionysus and the ancient Greeks, we compare alcohol with psychedelics and other drug and explore what’s going on beneath the surface at after-work drinks through this lens. Can you really trust someone you have never...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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)
HOSTED BY
Echoes Underground
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Echoes Underground have?
Echoes Underground currently has 45 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Echoes Underground about?
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...
How often does Echoes Underground release new episodes?
Echoes Underground has 45 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Echoes Underground?
You can listen to Echoes Underground on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Echoes Underground?
Echoes Underground is created and hosted by Echoes Underground.
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