Jonny Thyne · Los Angeles
Podcast · Essays · Poetry
For people refusing to live by the script.
Subscriptions. Algorithms. Five-step plans. Three-minute summaries of books that took years to write. Somewhere along the way, somebody handed us a script for how to live and we just... took it. Without asking. Without checking. We hit "accept" and kept scrolling.
Refuse to Subscribe is the project I'm building against all of that. A podcast. A growing pile of essays. A poetry archive. It looks like a few different things, but it's really one thing: the slow, sometimes messy, sometimes uncomfortable work of taking your own goddamn life back.
I'm not here because I have it figured out. I'm here because I've been doing the work. Therapy. Long conversations. Hard questions. Moving across the country a few times. Leaving relationships. Losing people. Falling in love. Asking what the hell I actually want from this short little life. And I'd rather do all of that out loud than pretend I'm somewhere I'm not.
So if any of that lands, stick around. Put an episode on. Read a poem. Reach out and tell me what's on your mind. Whatever you do here, do it on your own terms. That's the whole point.
Los Angeles · Writing · Conversation · Presence
I'm Jonny Thyne: writer, podcaster, poet, and student of life based in Los Angeles. My work lives at the intersection of love, consciousness, depth, loss, and raw honesty, and the radical act of refusing to be who the world decided you should be. Whether through a podcast episode, an essay, a poem, or sitting across from someone, I'm interested in what's actually happening beneath the surface of a life. I want to keep my fingers on the pulse of what's actually happening.
I've had a full life, more than I could fit on this page. Relationships, therapy, meditation, falling down and getting up again, along with years of EMDR, taught me how to meet the hard parts and still keep showing up. I'm not here to teach what I've figured out. I'm here to share what I'm still figuring out, in case any of it lands for you too.
I'm a canvas still being painted. I don't have it all figured out. I don't have all the answers. I'm not better than anyone. I'm a flawed human with blind spots, committed to finding them and doing the work. My home is full of crystals, trailing vines, stacked books, and the amber light of a salt lamp at 2am. My friends tell me it looks like my brain splattered onto every surface in my abode. What can I say, I'm an intellectual realist who's whimsical at heart.
Also, in person, I'm much louder than this site suggests.
Sometimes you have to go off the rails because those rails aren't meant for you to keep on.
— Jonny ThyneA podcast about opting out of the noise and finding what's actually yours. Long conversations on consciousness, culture, creativity, and the life quietly waiting behind all the subscriptions.
Listen on Spotify →Essays on the examined life: philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and the kind of honesty that makes people uncomfortable in the best possible way.
Read on Substack →Fifteen years of poems. Imagistic, philosophical, brutally intimate. Work that circles a single question from every angle: what does it mean to be fully alive inside a human body?
Read the poems →Long conversations on consciousness, culture, creativity, and the life quietly waiting behind all the subscriptions. New episodes regularly.
I'm always looking for thoughtful conversations with people who have something real to say. Pitch yourself, someone you know, or a topic.
Pitch the podcast →Solitary and magnificent among
the modern tombs nearby,
an ageless Victorian stands
forgotten.
Beyond its open iron gates
light shines through the windows like a beacon calling the lost in.
But with each passerby marveling in
the neighboring, generic, gentrified shacks...
the luminescence wanes.
One cannot show a house
that doesn't want to be shown.
So it carries on,
drowning in a sea of contemporary concrete—
Unknown, forgotten,
in magnificent solitude.
Whatever the latest episode stirred up, whatever you've been sitting with, whatever you want to say out loud to someone. The door is open.
No algorithm. No noise. Just real fucking life.