No Shortcuts to Now

K.L. Homme
  • 4.8 (5)
  • PHILOSOPHY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

No Shortcuts to Now is a philosophy and mythology podcast exploring resistance, meaning, and myth in an age of authoritarianism. Hosted by K.L. Homme, each episode blends Greek myth, Stoic philosophy, and creative nonfiction to examine how we endure — and defy — the rising tide of disinformation, strongmen, and cultural collapse. From ancient wisdom to modern politics, No Shortcuts to Now invites thoughtful listeners into a trail of reflection, resilience, and moral imagination. noshortcutstonow.substack.com

  1. 1D AGO

    🎧 Waypoint 4.5—Only the God Changed

    🎧 Waypoint 4.5 — Only the God Changed: On the Return of the Repressed What happens when a god dies—but the ritual remains? This is the next audio installment of No Shortcuts to Now—a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode: a goat in a chasm, vapors rising through fractured stone, the birth of the Oracle at Delphi, geology beneath theology, Nietzsche on invented knowledge, Arendt on revolutions that turn conservative—and the quiet persistence of the priestess beneath changing gods. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack. You can Begin Here. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images follow below, or click here. ☕ Support the work: buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    9 min

  2. FEB 17

    🎧 Waypoint 4.4—The Oracle at Dolphin

    🎧 Waypoint 4.4 — The Oracle at Dolphin: The Dragon Still Breathes What survives when power buries what it fears? In this Waypoint, we return to Delphi—to the cave beneath the polished marble, to the dragon who guarded the earth’s navel, and to the god who claimed the site as his own. The slaying of Python is often told as a simple triumph myth. Here, it becomes a meditation on how authority establishes itself—how conquest becomes consecration, and how breath becomes prophecy. As the arrows fly and the dragon falls, something older remains. Vapors rise. Priests gather. Ritual forms around what was once wild. The sanctuary stands—but it stands over a wound. This episode traces how legitimacy is constructed, how fear is managed, and how institutions learn to speak through what they have subdued. The dragon is slain. But the dragon still breathes. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack. You can Begin Here. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images follow below, or click here. ☕ Support the work: buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    13 min

  3. FEB 3 · BONUS

    🎧 Field Note 4.3—X Marks the Name of The Father

    🎧 Field Note 4.3 — X Marks the Name of the Father What does power reveal when it stops guarding its words? In this Field Note, we listen closely to a White House press conference delivered one year into the administration. Rather than arguing with its claims, the piece attends to its language—its slips, repetitions, and sudden turns inward. As speech loosens, private memory and public authority blur. Childhood scenes surface. Fear reaches instinctively for bars, buildings, and institutions meant to keep the world contained. This is not an argument, but an act of listening—tracking what rises from beneath the surface, and what it reveals about the structures quietly taking shape around us. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack. You can Begin Here. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images follow below, or click here. ☕ Support the work: buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    13 min

  4. JAN 20

    🎧Waypoint 4.3—The Wombstone

    🎧 Waypoint 4.3 — The Wombstone Why does power fear what comes next? In this episode, we enter the ancient myth of Cronus—the Titan who devours his children to stop time, prevent succession, and secure his rule. Drawing on Greek myth, etymology, and cosmological symbolism, this waypoint traces a recurring pattern: liberation hardening into domination, anxiety masquerading as wisdom, and authority attempting to swallow the future. Stones, wombs, caves, shields, milk, and honey become symbols of false security and hidden growth, as Rhea and Gaia work against repression, and Zeus matures in secret. This is not a story about monsters, but about structures—about how fear turns power inward, and why attempts to freeze the world inevitably fail. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images follow below ☕ Support the work: buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    10 min

  5. JAN 6

    🎧 Field Note 4.2—An Ontology of Equality

    🎧 Field Note 4.2 — An Ontology of Equality Why authority collapses when it forgets the ground that made it possible. What does it mean to say that all beings are equally real—and what changes when we take that claim seriously? In this Field Note, we pause along the trail to reflect on the conceptual ground crossed in Waypoints 4.1 and 4.2, moving from questions of knowledge and language into questions of ethics, authority, and care. The reflection begins with description itself—how words order the world, how power flattens language to secure obedience, and why slowing down to notice and describe for ourselves is an act of resistance against epistemic capture. From there, the piece turns toward equality—not as a moral slogan, but as an ontological claim: that all beings participate equally in Being, even when their roles, capacities, and responsibilities differ. This Field Note explores how hierarchies become distorted when they forget this fact, and how authority—when grounded in ontological equality—is transformed into custodianship rather than control. Together, we consider: • How language shapes reality—and how authoritarian power narrows description to maintain dominance. • Why ontological equality must precede ethics, if authority is to earn consent. • The difference between equality of being and equality of value. • Parenting and teaching as custodial roles grounded in care rather than ownership. • Why not all lessons are equal—and why denying children access to shared knowledge is a failure of responsibility, not neutrality. • How imagining the future adult a child will become clarifies what care requires in the present. This Field Note asks what kind of authority can be trusted—one that remembers the conditions of dependency, care, and shared reality from which it arose. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack — and keep walking where myth, memory, ecology, and power meet. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images follow below. Or, click here. 🗂️ New here? → 📘 Begin here. ☕ Support the forge: Buy me a coffee — or paste buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow into your browser if your player doesn’t link properly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    12 min

  6. 12/23/2025

    🎧 Waypoint 4.2—The Wombfish

    🎧 Waypoint 4.2 — The Wombfish How sea-goddesses, dolphins, eggs, and fish with feet reveal the deep, watery origins we still carry within us. What does it mean to remember that we come from the sea—and never fully left it? In this episode, we descend from Lassen’s alpine slopes into deep time, following a trail that runs from mountain heather and melting snow into mythic oceans, ancient wombs, and the evolutionary improvisations that carried life from water to land. Biology and mythology braid together as stories of Doris and the Nereids open into dolphins, eggs, placentas, gill slits, breath, and voice—revealing a lineage that links ocean, mother, and song. This waypoint dwells on origins not as nostalgia, but as continuity: life adapting, carrying memory forward in soft tissues and borrowed forms. Together, we trace: • Alpine heather Phyllodoce, named for a sea-nymph, binding mountain and ocean. • Doris, Nereus, and the Nereids—figures of flow, care, and transformation predating Olympian hierarchies. • Delphus, the womb, and what the word dolphin reveals about mammalian kinship. • Fish with feet, eggs, and the improvisation that led from mud to womb. • Gill slits, umbilical cords, and aquatic structures repurposed into jaw, ear, and voice. • Why dolphins sing their calves’ names—and why humans emerge from water learning to breathe and speak. This waypoint asks what it means to belong to a lineage older than monuments and nations—carried not in stone, but in breath, blood, milk, and memory. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack — and keep walking where myth, memory, ecology, and power meet. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images follow below. Or, click here. 🗂️ New here? → 📘 Begin here. ☕ Support the forge: Buy me a coffee — or paste buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow into your browser if your player doesn’t link properly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    15 min

  7. 12/09/2025

    🎧 Waypoint 4.1—Of Roots, Rhizomes, and Fish with Feet: The Lurid Bait of Egotism

    🎧 Waypoint 4.1 — Of Roots, Rhizomes, and Fish with Feet: The Lurid Bait of Egotism How mountain heather, ancient rhizomes, and deep time unmask the arrogance of kings, conquerors, and modern Ozymandians. What happens when we stop mistaking what blooms for what endures? In this episode, we climb Lassen’s volcanic slopes—where butterflies rise on summer winds, heather crowns the blasted heath, and woody runners weave a hidden underworld beneath our feet. Here, among flowers that wear tiny crowns, we begin to see how much of life’s architecture is decentralized, ancient, and quietly resistant to the myth of the solitary hero. This is the hinge point where geology, mythology, and political metaphor converge: a reminder that the structures holding up the world are horizontal, not hierarchical—and that the ego’s dream of standing at the center is always an illusion. Together, we trace: • How mountain heather creates a crown with no queen—and why its architecture rebukes the authoritarian imagination. • The rhizome’s deep-time story, from the Devonian period to the present, and how its networks quietly shaped the living world. • Persephone, Pluto, and the mythic underworld that mirrors these hidden connections. • Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and why the monuments of “king of kings” crumble while rhizomes persist for millions of years. • How fish with feet—and the first wanderers onto land—inherit the labor of ancient roots that stabilized the world long before humans mythologized it. This waypoint asks what truly lasts: the monuments of proud men, or the quiet, ancient systems that hold the vertical world up—and what it might mean, in an age of demagoguery, to live as creatures of the rhizome rather than subjects of the throne. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack — and walk with me through the places where myth, memory, ecology, and power meet. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text and images of this waypoint follow below on Substack. 🗂️ New here? → 📘 Begin here. ☕ Support the forge: Buy me a coffee — or paste buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow into your browser if your player doesn’t link properly. ❤️ If this episode resonates, tap “Share.” It helps the signal travel farther down the trail. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    17 min

  8. 11/25/2025

    🎧Waypoint 3.4—From the Rhetoric of Valley Forge to the Forge of Fallacies

    🎧Waypoint 3.4 — From the Rhetoric of Valley Forge to the Forge of Fallacies How Reagan empowered creationism, undermined science education, and reshaped the American political landscape. What happens when presidential rhetoric sanctifies doubt over discovery? In this episode, we travel back to August 1980—when Ronald Reagan told a stadium of evangelical voters that he had “a great many questions” about evolution. A few polished questions—delivered at the right moment, to the right audience—shifted the ground beneath American science education for generations. This is the hinge point where a politician’s wink toward “both sides” set the stage for a nationwide epistemic crisis. Together, we trace: • Reagan’s Valley Forge performance—and how staged humility became a weaponized doubt. • The rise of creationist activism—from grassroots pamphlets to national policy. • How the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal supercharged misinformation in classrooms and living rooms alike. • The rhetorical sleight-of-hand that made “just asking questions” a political technology. • The long shadow of 1980—how that moment prepared the soil for our modern post-truth landscape. This waypoint asks how a nation that once sent astronauts to the moon became a nation where public schools fear teaching evolution plainly—and how much of that shift was born not from theology, but from strategy. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now on Substack — and walk with me along the fault lines where myth, memory, and politics collide. 📖 Prefer to read? The full text of this waypoint follows below on Substack. 🗂️ New here? → 📘 Begin here. ☕ Support the forge: Buy me a coffee — or paste buymeacoffee.com/NoShortcutsToNow into your browser if your player doesn’t link properly. ❤️ If this episode resonates, tap “Share.” It helps the signal cut through the static. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noshortcutstonow.substack.com

    21 min
See All (30)

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

4.8
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

No Shortcuts to Now is a philosophy and mythology podcast exploring resistance, meaning, and myth in an age of authoritarianism. Hosted by K.L. Homme, each episode blends Greek myth, Stoic philosophy, and creative nonfiction to examine how we endure — and defy — the rising tide of disinformation, strongmen, and cultural collapse. From ancient wisdom to modern politics, No Shortcuts to Now invites thoughtful listeners into a trail of reflection, resilience, and moral imagination. noshortcutstonow.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    K.L. Homme
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    30
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kim Lee Homme
  • Show Website
    No Shortcuts to Now