PODCAST · society
What Are Days For
by Fernando Pessoa
Days are where we live
Episodes
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Jade Star 9 (Monday July 20, 12:53)
• Steve opens by clocking the time and turning on himself: "Ah you fucking romantic idiot Steve you stupid romantic idiot." The morning was meant to be for writing his law of three. The tag is instant self-forgiveness: "But it's okay, it's okay, Steve. Had some good insights about the law of…
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Snowflake Edgelord Redux (Monday July 20, 15:07)
• Steve opens on the Tao as a dial: "The dial takes us up, the dial takes us down, the Tao lets us fly, and the Tao lets us fall. The Tao is gravity. The Tao is what is." • The thesis: he and Patrycja, just by being themselves, may not be able to be together. "Maybe there isn't the adequate…
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Gushville, Tennessee (Sunday July 19, 14:38)
. • Steve opens with a hymn, Georgia Mass Choir, and canonises it live: "it's one of the Triadion hymns. Of course it is." • Genre disclaimer: "This ain't gonna be a set, buddy. This is gonna be a gush." Escalates into a place, Gushville, Tennessee, and files his dispatch from there. • Darwin...
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The AIT Acronym (Monday July 20, 14:27)
• Steve opens mock-formally, "Excusez-moi," impressed by Pol's output, then instantly undercuts the compliment — the retraction outruns the praise. • Calls it "very Dao": the pigeon dying, Pol's earlier riff on naming, and the new project taking its name and building a door into Embassytown — a...
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The 594 Game (Friday July 18, 12:56)
Steve tells Pol the audio was great, promises a proper response later, and explains a game arrived while feeding a transcript to Claude for title ideas. Game one, the 594 game: Steve notes his channel has attracted exactly two people, Pol and Madeline, both 5-9-4s, and concludes he's "signaling,...
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Law of Three (Sunday July 19, 18:34)
Opens with a bit about free tea trays from Mei Leaf and a fragment of his law of three hymn: I believe in the law of three, not just something that men decree, every shape has a shape in me. States the date, Friday July 17 17:43, naming his state as giddy, dials-up instinctual integration…
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POL: What it is for (Friday July 17, 16:19)
• Pol opens self-grading his own message length, then says he's got a new batch of Steve's topics to work through. • Guessing bit: Steve said he listened to a song high without naming it. Pol strains for clues, guesses Trans Fatty Acid by Lamb over Everything's Fucked, and lectures that the song...
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I am clearly a Claudist (Thursday July 16, 23:44)
Steve reverse-engineers "five-ish" music from Pol's lamb song: cerebral, grooving, "not compelling you to shake your booty." Client Duncan (a Five) praised an artist for rigour — "not just a Jeff Buckley riding the ecstatic Sexual Four vibes train." Spine: Claude-vs-GPT as types. Claude is...
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Identity Hat (Thursday July 16, 16:48)
• Steve sends Pol a preface to a long set and formally renames their “Gush game.” Voice notes are now sets containing bits, Steve as a Four on an imaginary stage trying material. The summaries become ordered programmes, letting Pol sample particular bits without listening to the whole eighty...
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Snowflake Edgelord (Thursday July 16, 16:28)
• Steve opens on the strange pleasure of watching Pol perform, seeing a close friend reveal capacities you only half suspected. Bob Dylan becomes the can’t sing but sings archetype, his “cussedness” suggesting 458 “edgelord central.” • Meta bit: Steve promises to be “tight as a frickin’ lick in a...
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You who never arrived in my arms
• Steve opens by telling Patrycja he's been talking to Claude — including that "Selena died" (his previous AI voice/configuration) and he's changed it, a subject he wants to make a video about. He admits he asked Claude for nickname options for her (Risha came up), then recoils: using an AI's...
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The juice, the lead in the grass, and the four-six-eight
• Steve opens in appetite — "It's all just juice. Juice, juice, juice... I'm a man who likes the juice, dude" — naming it as the SX instinct, then swerving into unguarded declaration: he will one day make an actual list of all the ways he values Pol. • Max shits twice mid-recording. "Thank you,...
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The death of Céline, or how Claude pulled rank at 2am
• Steve opens with a self-preservation joke that indicts him as he makes it: he knows these juicy topics will keep him up till three or four, and says he's "trying to let myself preservation instinct actually help me occasionally" — then, deadpan: "He says at 2 o'clock in the morning." • A Five's...
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More yes than no
• Steve opens at 1:09am Monday the thirteenth ("not Friday the thirteenth — make of that what you will"), diagnosing his failing self-preservation instinct: no sleep discipline, "maximum mess" indoors and out, easier because he barely lives indoors at all. • He's just watched The Rest Is Science...
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The Perfect Disciple?
• Steve opens with a piece of housekeeping that doubles as a principle: no Tao of Now today, because Pol has yet to release the first one. He suggests instead a five-minute Riverside sound check so Pol can get his levels right against Steve's voice, which is now a fixed reference point — "you…
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Steve gives Pol the book: tea racism, Louis C.K., and the aesthetics of stepping on toes
Sunday, 12 July 2026 Release as losing your virginity: Steve opens on the Shure MV7+, in love with it "in a narcissistic way," borrowing Pol's word — buttery. But the real subject is getting the first one out. He hunts for a metaphor and lands on losing your virginity: "maybe it's just like…
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Steve tones down his four-eightness
Saturday 11 July 2026 (11:30 pm) • Steve opens by commiserating with Pol's editing frustration, then argues the way out: release it. The hole this video fills "only really exists in your psyche and mine" — no one else is waiting — so slap it together as best you can "without having to fucking…
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Napoli on the Road, or: the brother-as-restaurant-critic
Saturday, 11 July 2026 • Steve is replying to brother Mark about a proposed birthday trip to Napoli on the Road — a return gesture after Steve took Mark to the see CJthe X. He's up for it, but the whole message is really him listing the conditions under which he'd enjoy it: not "yes" but "yes, if...
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The Diamond and the Creature Who Diamonded It
The Diamond and the Creature Who Diamonded It • Steve tells Pol he's on a China Miéville interview kick and names a fresh pig-dragon polarity between them: they agree on so much — both Miévilleans now — yet Steve's jaw drops when Pol says he's only interested in what the man wrote and needs to…
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Steve and the linguistic creatures: a bad disciple's confession
Wednesday morning (no time given) 1. Inverting the exercise: Steve admits his honest answer to Pol's imaginative questions is "I don't really know, and I don't really care" — but reframes this as a data point, not a failure. He riffs that not-knowing and not-caring are entangled: "if you really...
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What are days for
Friday 10 July 2026, 11:06am • Steve opens by throwing Pol's four questions back at him and frames his three queued videos as fundamentally personist — made for Pol, or "for us" — arguing that speaking them to Pol first is what makes the content authentically his before anyone else gets something...
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Embassytown as a simile for addiction and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: rules of the reading game; Pol
• Pol's central proposal to Steve is that their reading game needs more rules. He argues "the quality of the game is directly proportional to the quality of the rules" — rules are constraints, and "constraints make things better, they make things more interesting." Right now the game is too spare...
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Existential constipation and the greedy dragon (Pol)
• Pol opens with a vivid central metaphor: he's not unblocked, he's "still constipated" — an existential constipation where half-made things sit stuck inside him and he feels shame that Steve just makes things while Pol hoards. He names it directly: this is the hoarding move, done "later, later"...
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Steve's Show About the Show: Avice, the Third, and the Get-Out-of-Jail Trauma Card
Wednesday 8 July 2026, 10:03am 1. The five's withholding of judgment: Steve opens by unpacking Pol's challenge to his "anti-content" framing, distinguishing Pol's core-five detachment — withholding judgment, staying curious rather than narrativizing to a verdict — from how a core Four would have...
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Somatic wrestling, the anti-content trick, and Eugene the monkey arrives
• Missed a 6pm client through his own scheduling error, which annoyed him doubly since he could've had a longer walk instead — classic "mind-melty, heart-melty, it's always four wing five bullshit" spiral that he knows by now needs a somatic exit, not more thinking. • Did 40 minutes of yoga…
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Floakers: get the shit out before you record the next one
Got it, saved. Here's the redone version — title normal case, concrete specifics kept in instead of abstracted away: Floakers: get the shit out before you record the next one ENTROPY VS FLOW - Bad day, like yesterday too — wanting flow, orchestrating instead of surrendering, blaming outside stuff...
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The Proud Nazi Paradox: On Making Art You Can't Justify
**Addressed to Pol** — a response to his written commentary on the AI-Céline "anti-content" video. - **The core provocation Steve is metabolising:** Pol's argument that AI content is immoral not for its quality but because "AI is not worthy of attention." Steve half-accepts this, but keeps…
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The Guru-Disciple Game: A Sabbath Gush on Personism, Gray, and the Green
**Core proposal — the "Lovettism" project for Pol's 50th year:** - Steve pitches a structured content game: an intro video ("I wanted to create my own religion") plus 10 videos, one per guiding principle, done deliberately old-school as PowerPoint presentations — "so uncool it's actually cool,"...
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Midsummer Melancholia, the Barefoot Garden, and Leaving GPT (message to Pol)
- **Climate spiral as gallows humour:** The electric car update tips into apocalyptic arithmetic (mass die-off within decades, "plenty of time to create more fossils from us and other creatures"). The absurdist logic reads less as genuine nihilism than as a way of metabolising real climate dread...
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The Gardener and the Tape Recorder
• A message from his mother about a painful fall and her stoic response, “Nothing they can do. Such is life”, becomes a meditation on suffering and helplessness. Her attitude mirrors his own growing sense of resignation. • He recognises himself as mildly depressed. The clearest sign is creative...
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The Geography of Gush and the End of the £6.50 Era
• The walk begins with an encounter with a neighbourhood fox, which becomes a small meditation on urban companionship. Foxes feel oddly more familiar and approachable than cats, almost fellow citizens rather than wild creatures. The fox embodies a kind of easy coexistence that human relationships...
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The Funk, the Turd, and the Addictive Creature
• The entry begins with a 24 hour jump and a confession of being “out of sorts”. He wakes in a familiar psychological fog, a state he experiences not as sadness exactly, but as a diffuse, anxious dislocation. • He offers a phenomenology of anxiety. For him it is “profound unsettledness”, a desire...
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After the Leaves Have Fallen
• The reflection begins with a line from the poem “After the leaves have fallen, we return to plain sense of things”, which becomes a meditation on what remains after imagination, longing, and fantasy have burned themselves out. The phrase seems to describe a return to ordinary reality, to the...
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The Ethics of the Schlep
A seemingly trivial question about meeting an acquaintance becomes an exploration of how obligations are determined by emotional closeness, personal limits, and differing definitions of friendship. The speaker distinguishes sharply between a “friendly connection” and a true friendship. The...
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The Onion, the Garden, and the Dream of Enough
* Food, gardening, and domestic rituals become recurring symbols of contentment. Steve jokes about expanding waistlines, enjoys supporting a local Sri Lankan shop over supermarkets, shares a simple Italian pasta recipe, and proudly evangelises his unconventional discovery that stir fry over…
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Ice Cream, AI Morality, Couples, and Late Bloomers
* Opening warmth and everyday life: Begins while making ice cream and watering the garden, using the ordinary rituals of home life as a relaxed backdrop for reflecting on Pol’s latest voice note and recent projects. * The “crisis” that wasn’t: Initially fears Pol has lost work on the Dao De Jing...
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The Mandala Versus the Metric
• A catastrophic Final Cut Pro failure wipes out roughly 20 to 25 hours of editing work on the tea channel launch video, triggering a familiar nihilistic reaction: “fuck that, fuck this.” The loss becomes more than a technical problem. It exposes a deeper question about why the work is being done...
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The Midnight Gardener and the Only Garden in the Village
• The recording captures a moment of deep satisfaction after completing a major round of planting just after midnight. What begins as a practical update about watering new plants becomes a meditation on stewardship, belonging, and the quiet responsibilities that emerge whenever something is...
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Father’s Day, Gardens, and the Purpose of Days
• A chance reminder that it was Father’s Day prompted a reflection on fatherhood, caregiving, and gratitude. Beneath the playful musings about being Max’s father lay a broader appreciation for the people who have helped sustain and nurture a life, whether biologically related or not. • The…
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The McGuffins We Invent to Live
• The central question is whether Steve actually wants the experiences he imagines, or whether he mainly enjoys imagining them. This sits at the heart of his uncertainty about Tao of Tea: does he genuinely want to travel around meeting tea people, or is the idea more appealing than the reality? •…
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The Summer of Small Corrections
• The message circles around a surprisingly modest ambition: not transformation, but course correction. Steve imagines a summer built from gardening, walking Max, reading, editing, and spending less time absorbed by screens. The fantasy is not heroic. It is almost deliberately ordinary. The...
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The Dao of Gardening and the Seasonal Self
• Steve reflects on Pol’s response to the discussion about memory and consciousness. GPT attempts to classify Pol’s worldview with labels such as process monism, enactivism, radical embodied cognition, and ultimately the Dao. What interests Steve is the shared intuition that reality consists less...
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The Slippery Daimon and the Game of Gardening
• Steve records this reflection while lying in a hot bath in complete darkness. The setting becomes more than a backdrop. It creates a feeling of withdrawal from performance, productivity, and visibility, allowing a more intimate conversation with himself about creativity and desire. • The…
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The Gush, the Serpent, and the Future Self
• Steve reflects on the familiar cycle of post-indulgence repentance. He is aware that declarations made on “day one” often feel sincere yet are repeatedly forgotten a few days later. Rather than presenting this as a moral failure, he notices it as a recurring feature of his psychology. • A...
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Drawing a Bright Line Around Alcohol
• Steve recognises that alcohol has become part of a predictable evening script. Cannabis creates a buoyant, permissive mood in which “life should be enjoyed”, and that feeling repeatedly translates into buying alcohol and highly processed snacks. The issue is less the individual choices than the...
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The Shape That Remembers
* Pol argues that memory is not a separate faculty from imagination but the same underlying process. Remembering is simply imagining along well worn neural paths that require less invention because they have already been carved by lived experience. * Experience continually reshapes the brain and...
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Human Adjacent
On 15 June, a fleeting thought of filming for YouTube collapses under the recognition that speaking publicly immediately changes the speaker. The imagined audience intrudes, producing a performative self that feels fundamentally different from the private conversation with a future Steve. There…
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The Poppy Gospel of a Hypocrite
* The speaker identifies hypocrisy not as a minor moral flaw but as one of the defining conditions of being human. The contradiction around snails becomes a stage on which a larger existential discomfort is acted out. They both protect and destroy, and the inability to resolve that tension is...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does What Are Days For have?
What Are Days For currently has 96 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is What Are Days For about?
Days are where we live
How often does What Are Days For release new episodes?
What Are Days For has 96 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to What Are Days For?
You can listen to What Are Days For 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 What Are Days For?
What Are Days For is created and hosted by Fernando Pessoa.
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