We Don’t Know w/ Sylvia

About We Don’t Know w/ Sylvia

An unhinged gospel to the unknown—a feral playground for exploring uncertainty, cultivating solidarity, and challenging the status quo. Not self-help and not for everyone, but everyone is welcome. Content Warning: This podcast contains explicit language and is intended for mature audiences.

Publisher

Sylvia Saether

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

5 Jun 2025

Latest episode

4 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Jun 2026

   S3E10: Season Finale: From California to Norway

   This final episode begins in pure grid logic (LAX airport vibes) and lands somewhere closer to ocean logic (mother-nature Norway vibes). I recorded this unhinged gospel to the unknown at the last minute en route to live in Norway for two months. Part of it was recorded in Los Angeles, then Minneapolis (so hot for that accent), before finally grounding in the fjords, where I now type this at 11 p.m. in order to make this goddamn Thursday deadline I set for myself. Jet lag is a real doozy. The sun sank behind the horizon hours ago, but it’s still light out. This land of the midnight sun never ceases to amaze me. I know things are pretty crazy out here. I do hope June and July treat you well and that you treat them well too. I’ll probably be back with Season 4 in the fall, but who knows. Thank you for tuning into this latest season and riding this wild and messy ride with me. I’m very grateful for you. Please do have an ungovernable, incorruptible, and tender summer. xSylvia Norway photos on Substack, if you fancy.

2. 

   28 May 2026

   S3E9: Reality Often Sucks But At Least It's Real

   I was emotionally hungover when I recorded this yesterday. Today is better. I think. Too early to tell. I find mornings especially tender sometimes. It’s just so paradigm-shattering and grief-inducing to clearly see how much stability I once borrowed from the future (in both art and love) in order to inhabit the present. Ugh. I’m feeling a lot of grief around many things as I reconcile with different levels of reality in a deeply non-linear way. Accepting reality sucks sometimes… but at least it’s real. And just to be clear, the distinction isn’t “real vs unreal” or “good vs bad,” but more like negotiated reality vs the future I was leaning on to get through uncertainty. Reality is always negotiated, but the future was unknowingly being used as a stabilizing strategy. And I can’t currently make meaning in the way I used to in order to feel held while things are uncertain. Thankfully, I do know that feeling the grief, and honoring wherever I am, keeps things from getting stuck while also keeping my heart open. I can remain strong and soft, protective and open, full of grief and also so much love. Because for me, openness is not a personality trait; it’s an ongoing decision made under conditions of disappointment and heartache. And I refuse to harden or close my heart. This is the full Mary Oliver poem “Lead” (https://wordsfortheyear.com/2020/06/18/lead-by-mary-oliver/) I mention in the episode, which touches on all this and has stayed with me ever since I first read it. I used to have the last part of it taped to my fridge door. Go to Substack (https://wedontknowwithsylvia.substack.com/p/s3e9-reality-often-sucks-but-at-least) to see the water color void comic convo that comes along with this post. xSylvia

3. 

   22 May 2026

   S3E8: Discerning Between Vagueness, Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and the Unruly Unknown.

   This week’s episode is about discernment and the personal practice of telling subtle things apart in both the mind and body — and what that practice is in service of for me personally is coherence. Not certainty, but coherence: an internal alignment between what I feel, what I say, and what I do. For me, coherence isn’t the absence of contradiction, but the ability to remain in relationship with contradiction without fragmenting. When I lose coherence, I usually become confused, dysregulated, and trapped in my head. When I have it, I’m more grounded in my body and able to move with clarity even inside total uncertainty. We unpack four things that often get collapsed into one experience: ambiguity, uncertainty, vagueness, and the unknown. They blurred together for me for years, and honestly, they still do sometimes. But when I can actually feel the difference between them (and not just intellectually categorize them but sense them in my body) something shifts. Clarity returns. Ultimately, this episode explores how we can learn to know when to stay in the question, when to tolerate ambiguity, and when discernment is asking for action instead. Discernment helps me tell the difference between ambiguity that’s alive and generative versus vagueness that’s obscuring something or keeping me stuck. It helps me recognize when uncertainty is asking me to build capacity instead of escape discomfort. And it helps me distinguish intuition from trauma — what’s an actual knowing, what’s a triggered response, what’s truly serving me and others, and what’s simply familiar. The episode also keeps circling back to the relationship we have with ourselves while we’re figuring all this out. Because discernment without compassion can become self-punishment, but compassion without honesty can become avoidance. Part of the practice, at least for me, is learning how to be rigorously honest with myself without becoming mean to myself. Cliff notes version: don’t be an asshole to yourself. Our inner critic is a habit pattern of the mind, and habit patterns can be retrained, albeit slowly, repetitively, and super imperfectly. And look, I know this can be incredibly difficult — especially if we’re dealing with things like depression, addiction, ADHD, PTSD, anxiety, burnout, etc. But from my experience, it’s really hard to transform anything internally while constantly fighting ourselves or talking shit to ourselves. Nothing here is black-and-white or one-size-fits-all. This is personal, not prescriptive. We all need as much support as possible with this stuff so I hope you have it or get it. As always, just take what works and leave the rest. See ya later alligators, xSylvia

Reach and audience

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

YouTube views

109

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 26 / 100

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

Quality

14

Social presence

0

YouTube

64

Engagement

32

Contact We Don’t Know w/ Sylvia

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

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