wtf is life takes an irreverent look at what makes the human condition, truly human. Each episode will guide listeners through an engaging interview and/or video essay on the state of us, i.e. psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy of mind and their underlying ontologies. Ultimately, the show remains steadfast in its pursuit of restoring what makes life meaningful, funny and absurd.
What does it actually take to heal, not just manage symptoms or get through the week, but to grow? Dr. Irene Hurford, MD, is a psychiatrist who works from a non-biological frame. She sees the person and their development first, and the diagnosis and prescription pad second. In this conversation we get into what robust psychological treatment can look like, including with people experiencing psychosis, a population often written off as reachable only through medication. Irene talks about medication as a supplement rather than a cure: sometimes helpful, sometimes necessary, but rarely the whole story. We also explore what developmental pain feels like from the inside: the disorientation, the grief, the sense that something is breaking when something may actually be forming. Irene makes the case that this process isn't reserved for the severely ill. It's a human one, and most of us are somewhere in it. Both of us being proud patients in analytic treatment. Heal on my dudes!
22 Sept 2026
The Luxurious & Licentious Languages Liberally Locomoting Our Lugubrious Lives ft. Dr. Darren Haber
We think language describes reality. What if it's actually building the room you're stuck in?
This episode goes deep into psycholinguistics, Wittgenstein, and the strange architecture of the analytic mind — asking what happens when the words available to you become the walls around you. We talk about alexithymia not as a deficit but as a kind of exile: what it means to feel something with no linguistic door back out. And we look at analytic training itself as a slow, often disorienting process of being handed a new vocabulary — one that can either free you to think thoughts you didn't have language for, or quietly cage you inside someone else's theory.
Is language the thing that lets the soul speak, or the bars it speaks through? Probably both. That's the episode.
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10 Sept 2026
how many holes we got anyway? ft. dr kristian kemtrup
This episode we ask the dumbest smart question we could find: how many holes does a body actually have? It's a topology bit that turns into an epistemology bit, because it turns out "how many holes" depends entirely on how you define a hole — and that's basically the whole problem with diagnosing a mind too. We get into why mental illness makes a lot more sense as a functional disease than a static one — not a broken part, but a broken process, which is a very different thing to try to fix. That takes us from William James's pragmatism all the way to Mark Solms's neuropsychoanalysis, with some cybernetics and emergent-systems thinking in between, because apparently we can't talk about the mind for twenty minutes without also talking about ontology. We get it wrong a few times along the way. That's kind of the point though. Thanks again Dr. Kristian!
Who has been a guest on wtf is life
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Melanie
Dr Graham Husick
Dr Kristian Kemtrup
Dr John Smith
Dr Awais Aftab
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.0 / 5
4 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 9 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
18
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
0
Contact wtf is life
Guest appearances
Does not typically book guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
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