E6: Oops!; S7: When the Fat Lady Sings

E6: Oops!; S7: When the Fat Lady Sings

Oops! I did is again! I spent a good portion of this episode attempting to answer a question. Or perhaps attempting to construct a question. Or perhaps attempting to demonstrate how questions are constructed. It’s difficult to say. Fortunately, saying things has never been a major focus of this podcast. People often imagine that understanding arrives through explanation. Someone learns a fact. Someone receives new information. Someone acquires a framework. A diagram appears. An arrow points to another arrow. A podcast host clears his throat and begins a sentence with: “Actually…” And then everything changes. Or so we’re told. I am increasingly suspicious of this arrangement. Not because explanations are useless. Because they are often excellent. Beautiful, even. I love explanations. I collect them. I stack them in little piles around my apartment (with twenty foot ceilings). Sometimes I pet them. But every once in a while I notice that explanations and transformations seem to be only distant relatives. You can explain something for years. You can explain it correctly. You can explain it with charts. You can explain it with studies. You can explain it with citations. You can explain it with a laser pointer and a PowerPoint presentation and matching polo shirts. And somehow the thing remains exactly where it was. Waiting. Unimpressed. There is a moment in childhood when you begin discovering that adults are making a lot of this up as they go. Not necessarily the important parts. Just… most of it. The explanations. The narratives. The confidence. The certainty. The polished way they deliver conclusions they accidentally assembled from scraps and weather and luck and whatever happened to be lying around at the time. This realization can be disappointing. It can also be extremely funny. One of the stranger things about living among human beings is watching us transform observations into philosophies. A thing happens. Then another thing happens. Then a third thing happens. By Thursday somebody has a podcast. By Friday somebody has a movement. By Saturday somebody has merchandise. By Sunday somebody is standing on a mountain carrying tablets. The process is remarkable. Efficient, too. Almost industrial. I have noticed that many of my favourite conversations begin drifting away from their original topic. Not because people are distracted. Because the original topic wasn’t the topic. It was a doorway. You start by discussing one thing. Then another thing wanders into the room. Then another. Eventually everyone realizes they’ve arrived somewhere entirely different. The best conversations often feel less like navigation and more like being carried downstream by a river that has no respect whatsoever for your itinerary. This episode contains observations. Some of them may even be true. Others may simply be passing through. I encourage listeners to approach them with the same level of caution they would apply to a squirrel attempting to sell financial products. Season Seven is called When the Fat Lady Sings. The episode is called Oops! I will not be elaborating. As always, thank you for listening. Or not listening. Both remain available options. I am a strong supporter of personal freedom. At least until someone disagrees with me.

E5: The North; S7: Who Am I? I'll Tell You

This week's episode starts off feeling fairly normal. A little memoir. A little storytelling. A song. A dead young man. Nothing too alarming. Then, gradually, things start connecting to other things. A story written at eighteen starts talking to a prose-poem written at thirty-nine, which starts talking to a song written at fifty-seven. A boyfriend becomes a symbol, then stops being one. A metaphor becomes a direction. A political decision becomes a psychological event. A move from one country to another starts behaving like a dream. A fantasy turns into an immigration story. An immigration story turns into a theory of identity. Then that starts unraveling too. The experience reminds me a little of the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Not because it's frightening. Because you enter it believing you're moving through a piece of scenery. Then you gradually realize the scenery is moving through you. The colors change. The scale changes. Things you thought were stable start transforming into something else. A thing that seemed symbolic becomes literal. A thing that seemed literal becomes symbolic. A joke turns serious. A serious observation turns into a joke. A story about one person becomes a story about someone else. Then maybe becomes a story about you. Or maybe not. That's a large claim. I know. So feel free to hold me to it. But one of the questions running underneath this episode is whether there are experiences that don't arrive first as thoughts or feelings. Whether they arrive first as orientation. As movement. As a pull. As a direction. And if that's true, then there is always the possibility that something in your life right now—which seems perfectly obvious and completely understood—is actually still in the process of becoming something else. The North began as a short story I wrote almost forty years ago. I thought I understood what it was. Then I thought I understood it again. Then I thought I understood it again. I'm no longer so sure. That's where this episode begins. And, perhaps unfortunately for everyone involved, where it ends too.

E4: The Outer Edge of Good Taste; S7: Liberace’s Cousin

This episode contains: A conspiracy theory about podcast analytics. A failed musician attempting to become a successful failed musician. Seven Spotify listeners. Fifteen Google accounts. Two dogs humping reality from opposite directions. David Bowie trapped inside a dead search engine. Leonard Cohen dying at exactly the wrong moment. An executive director of a non-profit openly begging strangers for dopamine. A creator refreshing statistics like a lab rat pressing the cocaine lever. An extended meditation on the precise distance between art and cringe. The answer, apparently, is one molecule. This episode asks important questions: How many fake accounts does it take to feel loved? How many followers can follow followers before nobody remembers what they’re following? Why does everyone own a lawnmower even when nobody has a lawn? Why do we trust analytics more than our own senses? Why does every creator secretly want devotion without earning it? Why does every audience insist on consuming a body of work in the least useful order possible? Why are we all staring through binoculars into somebody else’s life? And why does self-promotion feel so much like public masturbation? Along the way you’ll encounter: Trump. The Plandemic. Dead cultural icons. Artificial intelligence. Climate collapse. Species extinction. Substack weirdos. Spotify experiments. Queer oversharing. A man publicly bullying himself for half an hour because deleting the material felt too merciful. Most podcasts promise clarity. This one promises escalating confusion, self-sabotage, and increasingly suspicious relationships with statistics. You’ll hear about the infamous overlapping-voices episode. You’ll be encouraged to hunt for it. You’ll probably become curious enough to do exactly what the narrator wants. And if you do, somewhere a graph will move upward and a middle-aged gay man will receive a small pellet of dopamine. Everything above is completely true. Except for the parts that aren’t. This description had its fingers crossed the whole time.

E3 A Speed Freak’s Critique of Empire; S7: Owning the Libs

What if addiction isn’t a thing? Or at least not the thing we’ve been taught to see. This episode starts as a response to a Substack post and rapidly becomes something else: a critique of the way Western culture decides what counts as knowledge, whose stories are allowed to matter, and which explanations make it onto the menu. Because every system comes with a menu. There are approved causes. Approved solutions. Approved experts. Approved ways of talking. And then there are all the things that don’t fit. What if a stimulant wasn’t an escape from life, but an enhancement of a life you genuinely wanted more of? What if the story of someone’s drug use can’t be separated from sleep, sexuality, immigration, AIDS, colonialism, desire, exhaustion, geography, economics, and history? What if the problem isn’t that people refuse to tell the truth about addiction? What if the problem is that the available truths are too small? This episode wanders through Deleuze and Guattari, Alcoholics Anonymous, speed, insomnia, El Salvador, gay survival, and the politics of explanation itself. Not because these topics are unrelated. Because they may be impossible to separate. “A colonial mindset wants to locate the problem somewhere else. It definitely doesn’t want to point at itself.” If you’ve ever felt like your experience disappeared the moment somebody gave it a diagnosis, this one’s for you.

E2: Welcome to the Algorithm; S7: Non-Alcoholic Libations (maybe just a little)

One of the weirdest things about becoming visible online—even slightly visible—is discovering how quickly you start wanting reassurance from numbers. Not success. Not art. Not connection. Numbers. A graph moving upward. A little dashboard saying: “Good boy.” This episode started as something completely different. Then suddenly a few podcast episodes escaped containment and got hundreds of listens instead of seven. Which, for the record, is enough to completely reorganize your nervous system if you are used to living artistically in near-total obscurity. And what fascinated me wasn’t the “success.” It was how FAST my brain adapted. Immediately: Should I tighten things up? Should I edit more? Should I stop stammering? Should I become digestible? Should I optimize myself into a smooth consumer product? Should I become… spiritually aerodynamic? And that’s where this episode accidentally wandered into the territory of spiritual bypassing. A phrase many people have never heard before, but which is actually very simple. Spiritual bypassing is when people use “growth,” “healing,” “mindfulness,” “evolution,” “optimization,” “higher consciousness,” or pseudo-spiritual language to avoid reality instead of entering it more honestly. It’s when someone says: “I’m protecting my peace,” when what they mean is: “I refuse to tolerate discomfort.” Or: “I’m setting boundaries,” when what they mean is: “You are no longer providing dopamine correctly.” Or: “I’ve evolved past negativity,” when what they mean is: “I’ve become terrified of ambiguity.” Or: “Everything happens for a reason,” because the alternative—that existence may be partially random and horrifying—makes them want to throw up in a Whole Foods parking lot. And online culture is absolutely soaked in this now. Everyone is optimizing. Curating. Healing. Manifesting. Strategizing. Building brands around authenticity. Everyone is becoming an algorithm about escaping algorithms. Which is why the spreadsheet boyfriend in this episode matters so much. Because his orgasm spreadsheet sounds ridiculous—and it IS ridiculous—but it also isn’t fundamentally different from podcast analytics, follower counts, engagement dashboards, productivity systems, wellness trackers, or all the little charts people use to transform life into measurable reassurance. What if Spotify statistics and orgasm spreadsheets are spiritually the same object? What if most people don’t actually want intimacy? What if they want analytics that temporarily feel like intimacy? That’s the question hiding underneath this entire episode. And underneath all the jokes about gay performance art, herpes monologues, audience hostility, giant theatrical dicks, dopamine addiction, and the algorithm itself… there’s another question too: Can you become visible without slowly sanding off the parts of yourself that made visibility interesting in the first place? I genuinely don’t know. This episode is me trying to fail honestly instead of succeeding strategically. And because modern attention spans now resemble caffeinated squirrels being tased inside a cryptocurrency convention, I’m also including pull-quotes below. Partly because I’ll use them as Notes while promoting the episode on Substack. But also because I enjoy the humiliating honesty of admitting that we are all trying to grab each other’s attention now. Including me. Including you. So here are twenty little dopamine traps. Hopefully one clamps onto your nervous system hard enough that you’ll need to hear the whole episode in order to pry its fingers loose from your brainstem. Or your nuts. Whichever metaphor feels more spiritually aligned for your personal growth journey.