Hacking State

About Hacking State

Exploring how technology changes our relationship to power, each other, and ourselves. Making sense of the techno-acceleration, Alex Murshak conducts in-depth interviews on the philosophy of technology. Hacking State is about doing more with less, pushing limitations, and finding gainful exploits at every level of the human operating system; from minds, to bodies, to tools, organizations, governments, and higher order social systems. Heidegger describes the nature of technology as a kind of revealing. It remains to be seen where and whether technology gives us Nietzschean will-to-power-like mastery over nature and ourselves or, as Plato warns, we are liable to be lead astray by novel ideas. Our capacity to harness nature has never been greater. Science and technology have unlocked immense power. Yet the human animal remains remarkably similar across millennia. In such a situation, discernment is our greatest asset. It is our relationship to ourselves, our systems, and one another, that will determine our future.

Publisher

Alex Murshak

Category

arts · science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

25 May 2023

Latest episode

15 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 60 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   15 Sept 2026

   60 - Garrett Dailey: A Neighborhood Where All Your Friends Live

   Garrett Dailey is a designer and brand consultant, and the founder of Lucid, a consultancy that helps startups simplify their pitches and messaging. He is a former philosophy writer and a fixture of the Austin startup ecosystem. We discuss the death of third places, Walt Disney's original plan for EPCOT, why the network state fails, charter cities, Dunbar's number, his three-house co-op on an Austin cul-de-sac, and how to build a neighborhood where all your friends live. pitchlucid.comx.com/garrettcdaileygdailey.com Basetown is in our hearts. --- SIGN UP for the Hacking State newsletter: https://hackingstate.substack.com/subscribe If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes. Listen on:Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshakApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hacking-state/id1689677076Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XB9XYULrAY4dp0qIJVvCgRSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

2. 

   5 Jul 2026

   59 - Tom Mullaney: How We Disappear — The Art of Being Forgotten

   I sit down with Thomas S. Mullaney — professor of modern Chinese history and the history of technology at Stanford, Guggenheim Fellow, and director of Stanford's Program in Science, Technology & Society — to discuss his new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton). It's his eighth book and first with a trade press, following The Chinese Typewriter and The Chinese Computer, and it turns from how information comes into being toward how it degrades, collapses, and disappears. Our conversation begins with the ordinary ways the past is lost — not fires or catastrophes, but the everyday decisions that quietly erase records, like a family clearing out a box of irreplaceable papers after a death. Mullaney sets this against entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, and his argument that you can't hack your way out of decay — you can only slow it down. We discuss his central thesis for the digital age: that digitization is not preservation. Mullaney explains why magnetic and optical media are among the most fragile formats ever made, why even Stanford has digitized only one to two percent of its archives, and why he'd rather see institutions invest in better finding aids than in mass scanning that produces files without meaning. The conversation turns to why any of this matters. Mullaney argues that writing history is the same act as living a life — both are acts of compression that throw out nearly everything to hold onto a coherent story. We explore how this connects to identity, to compression as a definition of intelligence, to Durkheim's anomie, and to the difference between biological death and the death of the creative impulse. We get into the politics of forgetting: the EU's right to be forgotten, "design for forgetting" as an engineering principle, and Mullaney's view of what a dignified disappearance looks like — the park bench a stranger sits on without ever knowing whose name is on it, rather than the statue no one reads. He makes the case for being "okay and not okay with it at the same time," rejecting both nihilism and hedonism as easy ways out. We close on the AI angle, connecting Mullaney's finding-aid argument to my own work building tools like an MCP server for congress.gov — the idea that archives need a navigable map more than they need total digitization. Get the book: How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton) Follow Tom Mullaney: X/Twitter | Stanford profile --- SIGN UP for the Hacking State newsletter: https://hackingstate.substack.com/subscribe If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes. Listen on:Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshakApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hacking-state/id1689677076Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XB9XYULrAY4dp0qIJVvCgRSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

3. 

   24 Mar 2026

   58 - Aidan Beshoff: Below the Surface of the Mind

   I sit down with Aidan Beshoff, a qualified hypnotist, certified practitioner of clinical hypnotherapy, past life regression, QHHT, and ceremonial magick, and the founder of Higher Self Hypnosis. For the past five years, Aidan has helped others overcome deep subconscious patterns through an unconventional path that bridges ancient wisdom and modern science. Our conversation begins with Aidan's own story — hitting a breaking point during COVID after years of anxiety and depression, and discovering meditation as a gateway into the subconscious mind. He describes the subconscious as a dimension of ourselves that extends beyond what we can directly perceive, using the iceberg model and a VR simulation analogy to illustrate the relationship between conscious awareness and the deeper layers beneath it. We discuss why the subconscious is so difficult to study empirically, and why that difficulty has kept practices like hypnosis in the same category as witchcraft until relatively recently. We then turn to the mechanics of hypnosis itself — what differentiates it from meditation, how it employs imagery, symbolism, and emotion to bypass the conscious mind's filtering layer, and why suggestibility and agreeability are such critical factors in whether hypnosis works for a given person. Aidan walks through the surprising efficacy data: a 70-80% success rate for chronic pain versus only 40-45% for addiction, and explains why — with addiction, part of you still does not want to change, whereas with pain, all systems are on board except the one that isn't. The conversation goes into deeper territory as we explore past life regression. Aidan argues you don't need to believe in reincarnation for the practice to be useful — the subconscious is essentially painting a movie you can extract wisdom from, drawing from what he describes as a collective source. He shares that people with narrow belief systems tend to regress to childhood, while those with broader frameworks have reported experiences on different planets or as pure energy. The point, he insists, is never who you were but why you had that experience. We close with Aidan's personal motivation — a childhood obsession with fantasy and magic that was stripped away during adolescence, and how engaging with these practices remystified his life. He describes ceremonial magick as "a cross-section between art and math," and likens these practices to becoming a better surfer: they don't take away the waves, but they make you better at riding them. Aidan on Instagram: @hi.subconscious | @higherselfhypno SIGN UP for the Hacking State newsletter: https://hackingstate.substack.com/subscribe If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes. Listen on: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hacking-state/id1689677076 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XB9XYULrAY4dp0qIJVvCg RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Inside a recent episode

42 - Daniel Schwarzhoff: Meditations on Emotional Resilience in Politics

Published 16 Jan 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] And it's pretty basic. I don't have a mantra or anything like that. I don't do a lot of visualization. I sort of sit if I can in a quiet place, although that honestly shouldn't even be required. And then, you know, I try to sort clear my mind, right? I don't even know what term for this is it's not it's not transcendental, but essentially I'm trying to to to not get attached to the thoughts that come up and whatever thoughts do come up, let them flow over me and drop them as soon as I realize that I'm trapped in thought and then return back to trying to say present. And this is sort of the technique that I learned a long time ago. […]

Who has been a guest on Hacking State

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Kyle Housley
• Charles Herrman
• Cody Moser

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

25,816,778

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 66 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

68

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

68

Contact Hacking State

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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