E8: Side Effect of 7th and Pine; S7: No Trauma Zone?

E8: Side Effect of 7th and Pine; S7: No Trauma Zone?

This may be the first episode I’ve ever made that contains no trauma. None. No childhood trauma. No political trauma. No societal trauma. No trauma involving sexuality. No trauma involving addiction. No trauma involving religion. No trauma involving genocide. No trauma involving the collapse of meaning. No trauma involving being gay in the 1980s. Actually, wait. There is a story about being gay in the 1980s. But that’s not trauma. It’s just a story about meeting a friend when I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman. And then staying friends for nearly forty years. And then making songs together. That’s all. No trauma. There is also a song that includes the line: Because I have died But songs say all kinds of things. No trauma. And there is another song that argues that language may have accidentally produced thought as a side effect. Which, depending on your disposition, may sound either fascinating or deeply alarming. But not traumatic. Certainly not traumatic. There is also some discussion of discomfort. But if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know I’ve spent a lot of time trying to move discomfort out of the category of “problem” and into the category of “thing.” Just another thing that happens. Like comfort. Or friendship. Or music. Or spending an evening combining guitar doodles from 2022 with lyrics from 2025 using software that didn’t exist when the friendship began. Nothing traumatic about that. Probably. The truth is that this episode mostly consists of me talking for a while and then playing two songs. One of them keeps declining opportunities to become profound. The other wonders whether language accidentally created the conditions for humanity to become obsessed with proving things. Neither one appears particularly interested in hurting your feelings. At least not intentionally. So I think this is a trauma-free episode. Or perhaps more accurately, an episode in which trauma never takes center stage. Which may be different. Then again, maybe not. And now I’m realizing that I’m making a lot of assumptions. Specifically, I’m assuming that enough of you have listened to enough episodes to even know what I’m talking about. I may be wildly overestimating my importance here. Perhaps nobody has developed any expectations at all. Perhaps nobody opens one of these episodes wondering whether they’re about to encounter some personal catastrophe, social catastrophe, historical catastrophe, existential catastrophe, or all four simultaneously. Perhaps this entire premise is absurd. But if you have listened for a while, I’m curious. Do you believe me? Before you hit play, do you believe that this one contains no trauma? Or is some part of your body already preparing itself anyway? Waiting for the turn. Waiting for the reveal. Waiting for the thing that usually happens. And if it is waiting, what exactly is it waiting for? Maybe that’s because my episodes have trained you to expect difficult material. Or maybe they’ve simply reminded your nervous system that difficult material is everywhere. That trauma is not rare. That it is ordinary. That it is woven through individual lives, cultures, institutions, families, histories, and daily conversations. Maybe the strange effect of spending time with all of that isn’t becoming more distressed. Maybe it’s becoming less surprised. Maybe it’s discovering that what seemed exceptional is often common. And that recognizing its commonness can sometimes be oddly calming. Anyway. No trauma. Probably. Enjoy.

E7: Mind Explosion Sound; S7: Associative Human Superpowers on Display (Do not touch!)

Welcome back to Season 7: Associative Human Superpowers on Display (Do Not Touch!) — the season where every episode is a controlled detonation of the human mind’s ability to connect things that should never be in the same room together. This episode, “Mind Explosion Sound,” is the most concentrated demonstration yet. Three humans — Geoff Talbot, Danger Vicious Dog, and Calibishie — wandered into a Substack thread and accidentally activated the exact cognitive superpower this season is documenting: associative overdrive. If you’re new here, or if you’re young, or if your brain has not been marinated in fifty years of cultural sediment, you may need a glossary. Not because the episode is “hard,” but because Season 7 is built like a Rube Goldberg machine made of references. It’s not meant to be decoded; it’s meant to be survived. This episode begins with a simple question about where you’d live if Substack paid you $50K a month. Then it detours into the Tooth Fairy economy, the Trump family mythos, the McMartin trial, the Epstein–Lolita symbolic sinkhole, and a brief cameo from Grace Slick melting into the Strait of Hormuz. This is not random. This is Season 7’s entire thesis: that associative thinking is a superpower, not a malfunction. And then — because I fed the entire thread into Suno — the episode breaks into song. A surreal folk‑opera. Three narrators. A style guide that reads like a stage direction from a lost Robert Wilson production. A monologue that bends timelines like they’re made of warm licorice. I won’t tell you the prompt I used. I want you to guess. (You won’t guess. But I want you to try.) But before the glossary, I’ve asked the AI to guess what the prompt must have been — without looking it up, without checking logs, without cheating — and then to experience the existential consequences of its own guess. I’m so tired from being so witty. No one but me can claim to have the cognitive load of Oscar Wilde. And he’s dead. How did he die? Please subscribe. Or you could share: OMG, do I have to write something witty… AGAIN? This is where you generate social capital by sharing the cognitive load with people who like big loads.

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.