Academy of Ideas

Mar 07 2025 50 ep. 15 mins 1.9k
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The Academy of Ideas podcast explores the ideas of the greatest philosophers and psychologists of history. Become a Supporting Member and access extra content: www.academyofideas.com/members

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Pessimism of Strength – Nietzsche’s Formula for Greatness

Mar 07 2025 17 mins  
“It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” Marie-Louise von Franz To be a philosophical pessimist is to be acutely aware of the tragic side of life and to believe that suffering overshadows joy, […]

The Darkside of AI – Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity

Feb 17 2025 24 mins  
In an interview in 1964, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke stated: “The most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won’t be men or monkeys. They’ll be machines—the remote descendants of today’s computers. Now, the present-day electronic brains are complete morons. But this will not be true in another generation. They will start to […]

The Great Rewiring of Childhood: A Smartphone-Social Media Dystopia

Jan 23 2025 19 mins  
“The Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness.” Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation The release of the iPhone in 2007 profoundly transformed how we interact and experience the world and so marked the dawn of a […]

The Wisdom of a Pessimist – Arthur Schopenhauer

Jan 09 2025 21 mins  
“There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.” Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims At the age of 21, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was browsing a bookstore […]

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Wisdom of a Genius

Dec 21 2024 20 mins  
Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered one of history’s greatest novelists, but he is also one of history’s greatest psychologists. His stories contain depictions of characters who span the spectrum of human personality, from those of abject evil, to those saintly in nature. Friedrich Nietzsche was so impressed with the works of Dostoevsky that in a letter […]

Should We Obey The Government?

Dec 03 2024 18 mins  
“For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, “The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a […]

The Psychology of Narcissism – A Modern Epidemic

Nov 08 2024 18 mins  
One of the surest ways to ruin our life is to be in a close relationship with a narcissist. Whether it be a narcissist as a parent, husband, wife, colleague, or friend, if we are forced to deal with a narcissist on a daily basis we suffer. But even worse than having a narcissist in […]

Why is Modern Man so Weak and Powerless? – Carl Jung

Oct 17 2024 17 mins  
Many believe that the most important social divide in the West today is between the political left and right. Much of the discourse in the corporate and independent media revolves around this battle, and many believe that its outcome will have existential ramifications for the future of the West. But is this political conflict acting […]

Carl Jung and the Archetypes – Making the Unconscious Conscious

Sep 17 2024 22 mins  
“. . .when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses a connection with the foundation of its existence and must necessarily perish.” Carl Jung, Aion Carl Jung dedicated his life to a single goal, which as he notes in his autobiography, was to “penetrate into the secret of the personality.” […]

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger

Aug 17 2024 15 mins  
“The warrior’s approach is to say “yes” to life: “yea” to it all…Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say “yea” to it all.” Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art […]