Danger, Vicious Dog

If you are reading this after listening to the episode, congratulations. You have reached the archive. And, like every archive, this one has been curated. Here is roughly what happened. Most of this episode began weeks ago as a recorded conversation with Marcella about an independent study, a dean, uncertainty, authority, Indigenous resurgence, two cats, and how much structure you can impose on so...

Before this episode was released, the author sent its cover image to a couple of people close to him, along with the following note: “They get put on a ship to fly to the cosmic microwave background, but it’s going to take thousands of inbreeding generations. But, they are already inbred, so whatever.” This was not sent as a spoiler, exactly. It was more like an attempt to explain why Prince Harry...

I have a slight fear that explaining this episode will cause me to add something else to it, and I don’t want to. It already seems finished. So this is just information about how it happened. About two weeks ago, I spent an afternoon being a gremlin on Substack. I fed some of what I was doing into AI, asked it to find patterns, and eventually had it make a song out of the whole thing. Then I asked...

I made this while walking home. That is becoming a fairly unremarkable sentence for me to write, which may itself be part of the problem. This one started in one place, moved through several others, and eventually seemed to arrive somewhere I had not known I was going. There is strategic planning in here. Fort Knox. Masculinity. Naloxone. Fentanyl. Benzodiazepines. Caffeine. Medical Assistance in...

I have instructed the AI writing this description to deliver a message on my behalf. If the maybes, perhapses, I-thinks, I-don’t-knows, caveats, qualifications, equivocations and occasional immediate reversals in this episode bother you, please fuck off. Pleasantly. I don’t mean leave forever. You can come back. Maybe. But I am not going to clean up uncertainty before speaking just so everything a...

So, the description of this one is simple: Oh my dear friend. I am just me. Isn't that true? We start with an art song about emergence from chaos. Then we have a three body problem monologue. Finally, we end with the problem of three bodies. Me, my niece, and the universe.

This might be kind of boring to read, but I thought it needed a description. I just asked AI to somehow convince you that this episode is a perfect weave of Van Gogh, Kafka, Rimbaud and Nietzsche. We could throw in Ionesco too, as I'm quite sure a Large Language Model would be able to figure out why. Was it because Ionesco thought one could argue anything from any piece of work? Well, I wanted...

A little factual housekeeping, but first I should probably destroy the idea of factual housekeeping. This fact-check has been assembled by an AI. I was not at Pomona in 1971, Stonewall in 1969, the APA vote in 1973, the first AIDS cases in Los Angeles, our immigration medical exams, or yesterday in the driveway. I am looking at representations: statutes, institutional histories, journals, governme...

Somewhere in this episode, I say that you don’t need professional boundaries if you have good personal boundaries. I stand by it as a deliberately clickbait-y tool for making people think. Less provocatively: Professional rules cannot substitute for personal boundaries. Strong personal boundaries allow professional relationships to remain flexible and human without becoming exploitative or chaotic...

Content note: Explicit language and discussion of incest fantasies, masturbation, childhood sexual fantasy, suicide, possible sexual abuse, illness, and death. The title of this episode is uncomfortable. The artwork may be worse: three tissue boxes labeled “Masturbation,” “Learning,” and “AI Slop,” with a hand trying to decide which one to reach for beneath the question, “What do you do with a con...

It’s been more than a week since my last episode—the longest silence since I started this podcast. After months of releasing something almost every day (and sometimes three or four things in a day), I reached a point where the episodes I was making began to feel repetitive. They were still useful and necessary for me to make, but I wasn’t sure they all needed to reach a listening audience in quite...

What this episode may be saying is that I am trying to figure out what to do with my life. So rather than describe the episode, I am going to present some possible answers for what I’m supposed to do with my life, based entirely on the evidence contained herein. Here are the top 15 candidates for how I’m doing with figuring that out: Make things. Apparently the effort required to make something di...

A friend of mine from high school recently discovered Suno. Apparently there had been some kind of assault, or accusation, or altercation—I’m still not entirely clear—and afterward somebody involved sent him a series of spectacularly deranged text messages. So naturally he put them into Suno. The result was techno. My response was that I liked it, but wanted it to be approximately thirteen hours l...

I have made another thing that I really like, which is inconvenient because I have absolutely no time to promote it. Apparently making things and telling people that you made them are two separate jobs. I have barely agreed to do the first one. I especially like the cover. It features a reimagined version of a guy I was completely obsessed with when I was young. It carries some of his general volt...

Every time the author describes an episode, the description threatens to become another episode requiring a song, a description—becoming another episode. So he delegated to AI: Entertain the people. Fact-check the loose bits. Fine. First: the author is usually careful about uncertainty. Things that sound questionable in isolation are often introduced with “I think,” “maybe,” “let’s imagine,” “or a...

You do realize this episode is called  Sex, Sex, Sex and a Phone , right? And the artwork has a blue-haired guy on a telephone while a cute Vietnamese guy stands behind him making spring rolls. So naturally you might assume this episode is mostly about sex, telephones, or Vietnamese spring rolls. It is not. Those things are definitely in there. Eventually. Have you ever wondered what happens if yo...

This episode begins with a very comforting question: What is the worst that could happen? I actually like that question. I remember watching a video with Peter Zeihan and several younger people who seemed to have come up through his orbit, all trying to work out what a plausible version of deglobalization, demographic decline, supply-chain disruption, and general societal wobbling might look like....

A special hello to anyone who clicked because you saw Dolly Parton on the cover. I understand. Dolly died this week, at 80, and I don't think we quite knew what that was going to feel like until it happened. For me, it has had something of the quality of the Challenger explosion. Maybe it even exceeded it—not because the events are comparable, obviously, but because of what they do to the emotiona...

I accidentally made the artwork for the last episode and this episode into one picture. Which is either a mistake, a concept, or a very efficient use of resources. The last episode was supposed to have the happy kid from Human Relations Camp, the homemade Costa is Gross banner, the little green Go light , all that teenage optimism and category-making and trying to figure out what identity even is....

There is an enormous amount of delusion in the world, but not necessarily where we most comfortably put that word. Money is a collective delusion. Borders are collective delusions. Nations are collective delusions. A corporation is a collective delusion with lawyers. We agree that it means something, and then the agreement becomes powerful enough to decide whether you eat. That does not make money...

If you're reading this  before  you listen to the episode, then you're definitely a keener. Congratulations. Or I'm sorry. Either way, here's what you need to know so you can keep a few things in context, because there are some things said in the episode that are somewhat true, but not entirely clear. And keeners notice those things. Then sometimes they make a huff. And if you'...

A Treatise Toward a Unified Theory of Cognitive Topology, Relevance-Weighted Complexity, and the Ethical Non-Occupation of Other People’s Brains Suppose a thought is not a line. Suppose it is a network. Suppose the things that keep returning are not necessarily the things you think about most, but the things connected to the greatest variety of other things. Not magnitude, then, but complexity. No...

For this description, I’m just going to describe some things. You tell me what category they belong in. Taking off some or all of your clothes and rubbing your skin against someone else’s skin until something inside one or both of you squirts out. Putting part of your body inside part of somebody else’s body and moving it back and forth because the movement feels good. Putting your mouth on somebo...

An extemporaneous monologue, except when it isn’t. A walk home from work becomes an argument with moral distress, THC, AI narration, editing, and the suspicion that what feels like reality may only be the culture currently surrounding you. Then Bette Midler appears—or, more precisely, the Bette Midler who performed beside a piano at the Continental Baths before the wider world decided she belonged...

It may seem fairly strange that Pee-wee Herman is on the cover of this episode—especially after you listen and discover that the episode is not, in any meaningful sense, about Pee-wee Herman. Pee-wee is there because much of the episode circles around a euphemism I invent for masturbation:  cosmic activity . The association arrived because Pee-wee had his secret word, and I apparently needed a sec...