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.