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Channel • 9 Shows

Self-Improvement

Self-Improvement

Updated 09/17/2025
History

History

Updated 10/09/2025
History

History

Updated Monthly
Technology

Technology

Updated Monthly
Film History

Film History

Updated 09/08/2025
Music History

Music History

Updated Weekly
Mental Health

Mental Health

Updated 09/14/2025

10/09/2025

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths from an armchair. Instead, he prowled through archives of asylums, prisons, and clinics to uncover how modern society quietly defines what is normal and what is deviant. Born Paul-Michel Foucault in nineteen twenty-six in the provincial city of Poitiers, France, he came of age in a country rebuilding after World War Two. He studied philosophy and psychology in the elite halls of Paris, just as existentialist ideas and structuralist theories were buzzing. But Foucault would soon strike off on his own path. By the time of his death in nineteen eighty-four, he had become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, a historian of ideas and social critic whose works unsettled our understanding of sanity, punishment, sexuality, and even the nature of truth. Produced by Selenius Media
11/19/2025

Noam Chomsky – The Cognitive Revolution

In a small office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s, chalk dust hangs in the air like a thin fog. The blackboard that dominates one wall is layered with symbols and arrows, phrases crossed out and rewritten in a neat but relentless hand. A young professor, slight and dark-haired, stands back from the board and squints for a moment, taking in the forest of diagrams he has just drawn. Niklas S Osterman BHPRN, BSN, MA Song: Nowhere else to be. Apple Music
10/09/2025

Buddha

Picture an old sage riding on the back of a water buffalo, departing the gates of an ancient city as the sun sets. This wise old man is Laozi – literally “Old Master” – the legendary philosopher of ancient China. According to tradition, Laozi grew weary of the moral decay and turmoil of his time. In his twilight years, he chose to leave civilization behind, traveling westward toward the mountains, seeking solitude. At a frontier pass, a guard named Yinxi recognized the sage and begged him to record his wisdom before he vanished into the wilderness. Laozi stopped and composed a slender book of aphorisms and poetry – the Daodejing, or “Classic of the Way and Virtue.” Handing over this manuscript, he rode beyond the border and out of history, never to be seen again. Produced by Selenius Media
11/13/2025

Rollo May – Anxiety, Freedom, and the Human Condition

Anxiety, Freedom, and the Work of Being Human New York City, late 1960s. On an upper floor of a modest Manhattan office building, a man in his late fifties sits across from a young advertising executive who cannot stop shaking his leg. Traffic murmurs far below; steam hisses in the radiators; the office is quiet enough that the ticking of a clock punctuates every silence. The patient has just finished describing a familiar, hollow ritual: wake before dawn, skim headlines, catch the train, sell images of products he doesn’t believe in, drink too much in the evening, lie awake wondering why he is so afraid when “nothing is really wrong.” The therapist—broad-shouldered, with a heavy brow and searching eyes—does not immediately ask about childhood traumas or offer a diagnosis. Instead he leans forward and asks, almost conversationally, “What is it, exactly, that you are afraid will happen if you stop?” The question is simple, but the air changes. The young man hesitates. He is afraid, he realizes, of discovering that beneath the motion there is nothing solid, that without his job and the busyness and the noise he will be exposed as a fraud. The fear is not of losing money or status; it is of finding no answer to the question, “Who am I?” That, the therapist suggests, is not a problem to be medicated away. It is an existential anxiety—a signal that something essential in his way of living has become false. Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA
11/22/2025

Aaron Beck – Thoughts That Heal

On a gray morning in the mid-1960s, a middle-aged man sits on the edge of a hospital cot in a psychiatric research unit at the University of Pennsylvania. His shoulders are slumped, his bathrobe hangs loosely from his frame, and his eyes are fixed on the floor as if reading something written there that no one else can see. The psychiatrist across from him, a quiet, neatly dressed man with rimless glasses, asks a simple question: “What went through your mind just then?” The patient hesitates. He is used to doctors asking about his childhood, about his parents, about long-buried memories. No one has ever seemed much interested in the words running through his mind in the present moment. Niklas S Osterman BHPRN, BSN, MA Song: Nowhere else to be. Apple Music
09/17/2025

Nietschze

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village in Saxony (now Germany). His father was a Lutheran pastor who died young; Nietzsche was raised in a pious household of women (mother, sister, grandmother). A precocious student, he excelled in classical philology (the study of Greek and Roman texts). At 24, he became a professor at Basel, Switzerland – extraordinarily young. But academic life didn’t suit his fiery spirit for long. He was deeply influenced by composer Richard Wagner (they were friends for a time) and by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (the idea of life as driven by irrational will). Nietzsche’s own philosophy began with works like The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he introduced his famous dichotomy of the Apollonian (order, reason, beauty) vs Dionysian (chaos, passion, ecstasy) elements in Greek tragedy – reflecting his view that life needs both structure and wild creativity, and that modern society was too Apollonian, suppressing the Dionysian vital force. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
10/09/2025

Confucius

In a small walled town in ancient China over two and a half millennia ago, a child was born who would become one of history’s most influential teachers. This child, born in 551 BCE in the state of Lu, was named Kong Qiu – later known to the world by the Latinized name Confucius, meaning “Master Kong”. At the time of his birth, China was not a unified empire but a patchwork of feudal states. The once-glorious Zhou dynasty was in decline; its authority had fragmented, and local lords ruled their domains like independent kingdoms. It was an age of political turmoil and moral crisis. Warlords vied for power, common folk suffered the ravages of constant wars, and the old order seemed to be fading into chaos. In this atmosphere of uncertainty and change, Confucius grew up with a profound sense of history and a yearning for order. Little could anyone have guessed that this humble man from Lu would, through the power of his ideas and example, fundamentally shape the civilizations of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and beyond. His influence on East Asian intellectual and social history is immeasurable – so much so that he has been revered as the Great Sage and teacher for thousands of years. Yet Confucius’s own life was far from lofty or easy, and understanding his journey offers a poignant glimpse into how one person’s search for virtue and harmony echoed across the ages. Produced by Selenius Media
09/17/2025

Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven. Brilliant and strong-willed, Arendt studied philosophy at university under some of Germany’s greatest thinkers – including Martin Heidegger at Marburg (with whom she had a youthful love affair) and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She completed a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love. But Arendt’s academic career in Germany was cut short by the rise of the Nazis in 1933. As an outspoken Jew, she could no longer live freely in her home country. Arendt fled to Paris, where she worked aiding Jewish refugees. There she met literary and Zionist circles, married Heinrich Blücher (her second marriage; her first had been brief). When the Nazis invaded France, Arendt was interned in a camp as an “enemy alien” – but she managed to escape. In 1941, she and Blücher secured passage on one of the last ships out of Europe to America. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
09/17/2025 • Subscribers Only

AI - Synthetic Media and the Collapse of Trust

Deepfakes, voice clones, and algorithmically tailored propaganda blur the line between real and fabricated. This episode shows how authenticity collapses when seeing is no longer believing. The danger is not only that people fall for fakes, but that truth itself becomes contestable. In such a fog, accountability erodes, propaganda flourishes, and democracy weakens. The battle for trust will define whether societies can hold a common reality in an AI-saturated media landscape. Produced by Selenius Media
09/17/2025 • Subscribers Only

AI - Ownership and the Stack

Who controls the means of intelligence? This episode examines the AI infrastructure stack—chips, cloud, data, and models—now concentrated in a few corporations and nations. Like oil or steel in earlier eras, AI has become a chokepoint of economic and geopolitical power. Open weights promise freedom but accelerate misuse; secrecy entrenches oligarchy. The debate over ownership is not academic: it determines whether AI becomes a public utility or a rent-extraction machine. Selenius Media

Selenius Media unites our shows in one place: Philosophy for Beginners (with upcoming Eastern Philosophy for Beginners and Writers of Note), the Giants series (Science, Classical Music, Filmmaking), AI — An Uncertain Future, and Addiction — Not a Moral Failing. We start from first principles, tell clear stories, and credit the humans that shaped us. Human contribution is what we all depend on. This Channel is a celebration of the ones that came before us. Members get ad-free listening, early access to new drops, and subscriber-only extras: the monthly Selenius Media channel. Most public series release weekly; members can often binge full runs immediately. We keep Addiction — Not a Moral Failing free for everyone; member support funds the reporting, editing, and music that make all of this possible.

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Michel Foucault

Noam Chomsky – The Cognitive Revolution

Buddha

Rollo May – Anxiety, Freedom, and the Human Condition

Aaron Beck – Thoughts That Heal

Nietschze

Confucius

Arendt

AI - Synthetic Media and the Collapse of Trust

AI - Ownership and the Stack

AI - Synthetic Media and the Collapse of Trust

AI - Ownership and the Stack

AI - Societal Collapse

AI - Labor, Wages, and the Consumer Paradox

AI - Geopolitical Unraveling

Robert Bresson – The Ascetic of Cinema

Renoir

Kierkegaard

Prokofiev

Rumi

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