Erratic & Dramatic

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 581, “Erratic & Dramatic,” with guest Josh Slocum, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Monday, June 6, 2022.

This episode of the podcast features a conversation that I recorded just yesterday with Josh Slocum. He is a podcaster, and his podcast is called The Disaffected Podcast. I’ll ask him why at the very beginning of the interview, which begins right now.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Disaffected from the left

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with fellow podcaster Joshua Slocum of The Disaffected Podcast. Josh, it’s good to talk to you.

Josh SlocumThanks for having me.

KMOJust before we started talking, I looked up the definition of the word “disaffected.” I regularly look up the definitions of words that I think I know already. To be disaffected is to no longer support or be satisfied with an organization or idea. What are you disaffected from?

JoshThe left. Liberalism. Current, contemporary left liberalism. No matter what I say, if I call it liberal, I will get complaints. If I call it leftist, I will get complaints. Don’t care. Choose your own word. Substitute any word you want for the one that you don’t want to hear me say, and that’ll be the right word.

So whatever you want to call that, that’s what I’m disaffected from. I have been, most of my adult life, a leftist, a registered Democrat. And although not as crazy as those we see today, you would have described me as woke ten years ago, before woke was turned woke. I’m not that person anymore, and I see the world very differently.

The idea behind the show Disaffected is that we, collectively, in the U.S. and in a greater sense the Western developed world, are in a situation that looks remarkably like a domestically abusive household with an unstable or narcissistic parent: an abusive parent who reigns supreme, distorts reality, makes up fictions about the world in order to service them, and recruits their children to do it for them.

I see the very same dynamics, the same abuse dynamics of my family, which was a very abusive home, happening now out in public: the emotional dysregulation; the turning on of histrionic tears in order to be considered a victim, to get clapped, and to be told, “You go, you tell your truth”; the absolutely inaccurate idea that women, gays, sexual minorities of any sort, Black people, immigrants, anyone who is not white, is not only oppressed, but so very oppressed in the year 2022 that it is as bad as or worse than it was before the Civil Rights Act, before women got the franchise.

We are acting and saying on the left—I shouldn’t say “we”; I’m not part of them anymore—that we live in a patriarchy, that we live in a systemically racist country, that cops are shooting Black men every day. None of these things are true.

I used to just accept these things without ever checking the original sources. When I began to be willing to listen to conservatives, or people who were libertarians or in the middle—these were people I refused to listen to before, because as a leftist I just knew that they were morally corrupt and everything they said was lies; yes, I am describing cult dynamics—when I listened to them and actually checked the sources, I realized that so much of my perceptions about the world were frankly just bullshit. They were never true.

The cluster B personality disorders

KMOI’m going to read some things now, which will be familiar to you. This is just to set the stage for the listeners. I’ll say I myself have for years heard the term “borderline personality disorder” and never really knew what it meant, and never had much reason to care, actually. But among personality disorders, there are three clusters: A, B, and C. I’m just going to run through a list of them right quick. I’m reading from the mayoclinic.org website.

Cluster A personality disorders are characterized by odd, eccentric thinking or behavior. They include paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder. I’m not going to read all of the symptoms of each, but paranoid personality disorder, I think most people have a pretty good intuitive understanding of what that is. You believe that the malevolent forces in the world are much greater than they actually are, and that people who are really either neutral toward you or positively disposed to you are actually scheming against you and are not to be trusted.

Schizoid personality disorder: these are people who are pretty much just disconnected from the human whole. Listed here: lack of interest in social or personal relationships, preferring to be alone; limited range of emotional expression; inability to take pleasure in most activities; inability to pick up normal social cues; appearance of being cold or indifferent to others; little or no interest in having sex with another person. Basically, these people are just isolated on their own. They are not integrated into the larger family or the social structure of their world.

And then there’s schizotypal personality disorder: peculiar dress, thinking, beliefs, speech, or behavior; odd perceptual experiences, such as hearing a voice whisper your name; flat emotions or inappropriate emotional responses; social anxiety and a lack of discomfort; magical thinking, believing you can influence people and events with your thoughts; that sort of thing. So not like the schizoid people, just unable to relate, but living in a different world from the rest of us.

I’m going to skip B for now and go on down to C. Cluster C personality disorders tend to be anxiety-related, so what we would consider to be neurotic.

But then, under cluster B: cluster B personality disorders are characterized by dramatic, overly emotional, or unpredictable thinking or behavior. They include antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. Now, I think most people have an intuitive understanding of narcissism.

JoshYes.

KMOAntisocial personality disorder: disregard for others’ needs or feelings; persistent lying, stealing, using aliases, conning others; recurring problems with the law; repeated violation of the rights of others; aggressive, often violent behavior; disregard for the safety of oneself or others; impulsive behavior; consistently irresponsible; lack of remorse for behavior. That’s antisocial personality disorder.

JoshYep.

KMOBorderline personality disorder: impulsive and risky behavior, such as having unsafe sex, gambling, or binge eating; unstable or fragile self-image; unstable and intense relationships; ups and downs, often as a reaction to interpersonal stress; suicidal behavior or threats of self-injury; intense fear of being alone or abandoned; ongoing feelings of emptiness; frequent, intense displays of anger; and stress-related paranoia that comes and goes.

And then histrionic personality disorder: constantly seeking attention; excessively emotional, dramatic, or sexually provocative to gain attention; speaks dramatically with strong opinions but few facts or details to back them up; easily influenced by others; shallow, rapidly changing emotions; excessive concern with physical appearance; thinks relationships with others are closer than they really are. And then comes the narcissistic, which I will just assume people are familiar with.

So I will stop there and just ask you to speak more generally about your interest in the cluster B personality disorders and how they relate to things we’ve already talked about.

Who suffers from the disorder

JoshSure. Those are the descriptions, and of course those are the accurate descriptions, but those kinds of clinical descriptions tend naturally to focus on the state of mind, the feelings, and the affect of the person themselves. That needs to be explained; people need to understand that. But my concern is with the effects that they have on other people.

And this bothers me a lot. We have a linguistic convention. I do it. You do it. Everyone who speaks English in this country does it. When we speak of such people, we will say, “She suffers from borderline personality disorder,” or “She suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.” No. You, we, the husband, the wife, the children, the coworkers: we suffer from her borderline personality disorder. We suffer from his narcissistic personality disorder.

Yes, I acknowledge their suffering. I can see it. It’s in my family. My moral concern is not with their suffering. My moral concern is with their victims. And so I am biased. I do not apologize for it. That’s my stake.

And I’m mainly concerned with cluster B. These are called the erratic and dramatic personality disorders. And although only one of them is named narcissistic personality disorder, all four cluster B disorders share narcissism as a core trait. I know that there are some people, and there are some friends of mine, who disagree with me on that. I’m giving you my view. You may disagree, but the narcissism is present in all of them: the excessive self-concern, without concern, or without effective concern, for the effect of your behavior on people around you and people you claim to love.

So narcissistic personality disorder is probably one of the most recognizable, but people only recognize 50 percent of narcissistic personality disorder. It’s very easy to recognize the grandiose narcissist, right? I think Trump is a grandiose narcissist. I do not think he is as malignant as I used to believe. I think I made a very serious mistake. I had Trump derangement syndrome. I do think he is heavily narcissistic, but I do not think he is nearly as malignant as I believed he was.

There is another kind of narcissism. It is variously called covert narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, or sometimes empathic narcissism. These are professional victims. These are the self-absorbed people. Instead of being grandiose—they don’t flash their jewelry, they don’t flash their sports cars, they don’t go into bars and claim they’re the greatest lay ever, right?—instead, they moan and whine about how hard done by they are: how she’s a woman of color, and every white man she’s ever met has mistreated her; or he’s a man whose every single girlfriend was terrible and horrible, and they all took advantage of him, and he never did nothing wrong, and da-da-da-da. They’re wound collectors.

And they appear very soft and fragile and vulnerable. But when they are provoked—and by provoked, I mean when they are not serviced, when they are not catered to, when they are not flattered—they get aggressive, mean; they lie; they engineer smear campaigns to ruin your reputation. They try to turn your family and friends against you. They are not fragile little creatures. They are wearing something that I call the wounded bird camouflage.

The wounded bird camouflage

JoshDo you remember the cartoon from our childhood, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi?

KMOThe mongoose?

JoshYes. Do you remember that? Okay. Anybody who knows the Rudyard Kipling story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” or who remembers the 1970s cartoon that was made of it, will remember that the antagonists are a pair of cobras, and they are trying to get the human family’s baby. “Are they going to get that baby? Because that baby looks delicious,” right?

And one of the characters is a bird, and that bird wants to protect the human baby. She sees that the cobra is going for it. So what she does is she pretends that she has a broken wing, and she limps, and she lures the cobra away from the baby. Now, she did it in service of good. These people do it in service of evil. That is exactly the costume they put on to reel people in.

Now, when you get to antisocial personality disorder, that is the clinical term for what you know colloquially as psychopathy or sociopathy. And let me anticipate an objection that you are going to see in your comments. There will be at least one person who says no, and they will say it very emotionally: “You are wrong. There’s a difference between a sociopath, a psychopath, and antisocial personality disorder, and that difference is that psychopaths are born, but sociopaths are made.” No. That is one interpretation, but it is not true that that is the agreed-upon definition. You can find mental health pros who will confirm for you that it’s not true that the mental health bible says sociopathy and psychopathy are different things. Some people define it that way. I do not define it that way. It is subjective. It is disagreed on.

The psychopaths, the ASPDs, these are the people without conscience at all. They have no moral caring for other people. When you get to the other cluster Bs, it’s going to vary. I think some of them—people like my mother, who I would most closely describe as having both borderline and narcissistic personality disorders— My mother has a conscience, but it is a broken conscience, or it is a conscience that she almost never has access to. So in practical effect, she lives her life as a person who does not have a conscience. The effect is the same, even though she does have one.

And I think today, the more I look at this, that having these four allegedly discrete disorders that you listed off is helpful in understanding the taxonomy, but it can mislead as well. Because in my view today, there is a character type that we call cluster B, and most people within cluster B share these character traits. That’s what characterizes them. But they cannot be said to occupy only one discrete disorder. They’ve got a helping of borderline, a helping of narcissism, maybe a helping of histrionic sexual seductiveness. They may have secondary psychopathic traits, or tendencies to psychopathic behaviors. I think most people have a pick-and-mix within cluster B. Some of them hew more closely to the pure prototype, but many of them do not.

Borderline: between neurosis and psychosis

KMOI’ve already read the description, but there’s been a lot of conversational water under the bridge since then. So just for clarity’s sake, would you give a concise definition of borderline personality disorder?

JoshEmotionally unstable; no consistent sense of self or identity; constantly changing hair color, interests, sexual partners, lifestyle choices; rapid oscillation between moods of elation and happiness and absolute despair and suicidality, mixed in with explosive anger toward other people. Those are the core of borderline personality disorder. They often tend to be manipulative. They will lie. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re lying.

The interesting thing about borderline personality disorder—I’ll give you a little etymology, because the name is confusing to people. It gives the connotation that they’re not fully a thing, that they’re only on the border of a thing. That is incorrect. They are fully, completely personality disordered. They’re not on the borderline of having a personality disorder. They are there.

What borderline means—the origin of this term goes back to psychoanalysis—is describing someone who lives on the border between neurosis and psychosis. Neurosis, or neuroticism, is maladaptive mental habits: rumination, tendency to depression, overthinking and worrying, what they would have called in the ’60s and ’70s hang-ups, right? This is neuroticism. We all have a level of neuroticism. Some of us have very low neuroticism. Others—hello, me—have very high neuroticism. Psychosis, however, is when you become actually disconnected from reality. There’s a break there. So these people live on the border, and they vacillate between high neurosis and low psychosis.

And I’ll give you an example. There are many other examples of how a borderline can go into psychosis; this is just one that I offer you. My mother, for example, under extreme stress, would develop paranoid delusions that people were plotting against her. Yes, this does sound like what you described with schizoid or schizotypal. There is some crossover there. Paranoia is not limited to people who have a formal paranoia diagnosis. We’ve all been paranoid. Normal people get paranoid. Borderlines get paranoid a lot more. So she would have these persecutory fantasies that my siblings and I were talking about her behind her back, and that we were deliberately not answering her communications but were harvesting them so that we could plot some evil outcome for her. For many borderlines, that’s typical: the whole world is plotting against me, everybody hates me, that kind of thing.

A cottage industry of borderline apologia

KMOSo in a recent show of yours that I took in, you made the claim that there is a movement and a group of people who either deny that borderline personality exists or are apologists for it. What are you talking about with that?

JoshI call it a cottage industry of borderline apologia. It is mainly women, and it is made up of people who have borderline personality disorder and clinicians—almost universally female clinicians—who in my view are not actually helpful therapists. They are toxic themselves. I think some of them are actually quite personality disordered, and that, yes, that is their motivation for denying the reality of borderline personality disorder. They do not want to take responsibility for it.

That’s one of the things about all the cluster B disorders. The very vexing problem with them is that part of the disorder itself is the unwillingness or inability to see any fault or responsibility in themselves. They do not believe anything is wrong with them. They will not accept it. If you cannot accept that you have a flaw, you will never mend your flaws. And this is why very few cluster Bs recover.

KMOWhere would somebody see the cottage industry at work? And what sort of claims would people in that industry be making?

JoshI’ll give you a good example. There’s a psychologist. She’s British. Her name is Dr. Jessica Taylor. She’s been prominently quoted in the media for the past two weeks complaining about the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp verdict. Jessica Taylor is a psychologist who says that borderline personality disorder does not exist. In her formula—this is very stereotyped—they’re not borderlines. They’re just traumatized women, and they’re called borderlines by misogynist men who don’t care about women, who want to call them hysterical and crazy, and who don’t care that they were traumatized.

It’s a very confused argument, because trauma is, in fact, the major ingredient that does create borderline personality disorder. Not all of them, but the vast majority of borderlines were abused as children. That’s real and true. My mother was abused as a child. It has a lot to do with why she has the disorder she does. But that’s not a moral excuse. But for these women, these therapists, it is a moral excuse. They’re not disordered; they’re traumatized women. They are not allowed to be aggressors. They are never allowed to be described as perpetrators. And people like this will go to extraordinary lengths to excuse the most vile, abusive bitch behavior, simply because she’s a woman and simply because she has these unregulated outbursts that, frankly, a lot of these psychologists have themselves.

And you see it on Tumblr; you see it in spaces where young women in trauma communities hang out, where everybody polishes and burnishes their mental illness to look sicker than everybody else, because that’s how you get social validation.

Check my show out tonight. I have an example of it, and I go through it step by step: a woman on Twitter who disclosed her diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and then enacted on me every single manipulative thing I’ve been describing to you here. She literally said, “We can act abusively, but it’s not because we’re abusive. We can abuse, but it’s not because we’re abusive.” What does that mean? “It’s because we’re traumatized and we got triggered.” No, sweetheart. By definition, when you enact an abusive act, you are being abusive. Yes, you are.

Explanations are not excuses. It is important to understand the mechanics of where these emotions come from, because these emotions translate into behaviors and actions. Anybody who wants to work on this, and anyone who wants to understand people like this, does need to understand these mechanics: that it’s usually preceded by childhood abuse, that the identity formation never gels completely, and that it becomes reactive this way. That is important to understand. They, however, don’t want it just for understanding. They want it for moral absolution.

And I’ll shut up after this, but this is the kind of thing that animates the MeToo bullshit, all this modern third-, fourth-wave feminism, girlbossery: “All men are rapists.” “Women have a gender wage gap, and they’re just not paid the same as men, and it’s just because men don’t want to.” You know, I’m making fun of it here. Yes, I’m not treating it seriously, because it’s not a serious claim. But this fits in. There’s a lot of overlap between these trauma communities justifying their borderline behaviors and this constant self-victimization. They blame men, and only men, for every bad thing that ever happens to them. And any bad thing they ever do is because a man made them do it.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Depp, Heard, and “believe women”

KMOOne of my modus operandi is that I do not let the news cycle, or the cycle of what’s current on social media, dictate what I talk about. But in this instance—and I won’t blame you; I was already going to bring it up—the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial captured the imagination of the world. I have a girlfriend in the Philippines who followed it religiously. I didn’t follow it from day to day, but it’s impossible to tune it out, really.

And after the jury sided with Johnny Depp and awarded him millions of dollars in damages and punitive measures—which the state of Virginia, I understand, is going to reduce all that to 350 grand—there’ll actually be no money changing hands except money going to lawyers, because their judgments will be equal. They’ll be flattened.¹ But it’s considered a moral victory for Johnny Depp. And afterward, Amber Heard issued a statement basically saying, see how the patriarchal system treats women. And I saw women on Twitter saying, “Don’t bring us into this. This is your bullshit.”

JoshI’m glad to say there are a lot of women— I don’t know how many women. The problem with this is—and when I say this—I do think that today we are in a completely feminized society. I think it’s exactly the opposite of what the feminists claim. I think that female relational rules have been imposed in every domain, and they’ve gotten out of control, and they will accept no countervailing pressure from the masculine side. And so we end up with the crap we’ve got now. We need balance. We don’t need just men in charge, but we sure as shit don’t need just women in charge.

I am meeting so many more women who tend to be more conservative, who see things the way I see them, and who say, “We get the same pushback and abuse from this kind of women. They say that we have internalized misogyny. They say that we’re pandering to men. They say that we’ve just buckled under to the patriarchy.” Those women, sensible women, won’t be listened to by these other women either. So I can’t tell you how it breaks down in terms of percentages.

But I think the reason why the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial did capture the public’s imagination, at least to some degree, is because it showed an example of something that millions of households already know and are already living through. I don’t care anything about celebrity. I’ve never been particularly interested in either of these actors. I don’t hate them; I’m just absolutely uninterested in them. I am interested in this trial, and I have featured it on my show, because it is a crystal-clear public example of what borderline and histrionic personality disorder can do in a relationship. Everything that was described on the stand—this is not celebrity behavior that only kooky Hollywood people do. This is personality-disorder behavior that abusive households go through with ordinary people every day.

KMOWhen MeToo was first emerging as the meme of the day, or the meme of the month, somebody I was in contact with—talking on Twitter with, and somebody I’ve met in real life, somebody I’ve been to conferences with, who is, you know, a Marxist, but Marxists weren’t so crazy when I was hanging out with him—we were discussing something, and I forget even what we were discussing, but I said something, and he came back with just the slogan “Believe women.” And I thought, that’s nuts. That’s absolutely nuts: that any time a woman makes an accusation, it should be taken as gospel until the man successfully defends himself. And with certain accusations, there is no defense. Your attempt to defend yourself is just evidence of your guilt.

And everybody knows lying, conniving, manipulative people, and everybody knows some women who are like that. And so the idea that women are to be believed upon their initial accusation, point-blank, to me is absolutely insane. And to see what I thought to be a normal, rational person just parrot that slogan, that was mind-blowing to me.

JoshThat slogan and that point of view is classic borderline. Classic borderline. Of course. Of course that’s what they want you to believe. You can see easily how it serves every single one of their purposes. They can never be wrong. They will never be disbelieved. They will always be seen as the victim. They are gorging themselves on this. They’re at a buffet with this.

It is insane. You’re right. It’s insane on its face. And all you need to do to see that is substitute the word men: “Believe men.” Everybody would be like, “All men? What are you talking about?” Oh, no, it’s a woman. It’s a woman. She must be telling the truth.

Abuse from the inside

JoshIt is so frustrating, because violence against women is real, and it’s dangerous. Men are stronger than women. When there’s going to be an abusive relationship, it is much more likely that the man will kill the woman than it is that the woman will kill the man. I have seen this with my own eyes. My stepfather tried to murder my mother in front of us when we were children. I know what male violence does. I know how frightening it is. It’s real. But it is not the case, simply because that’s the case, that all men are like that, or that all abusive relationships are only the man hurting the woman.

There’s no justification. There is no moral excuse that can be found anywhere for what my stepfather did to my mother. Okay? So what I’m about to say is not an absolution. However, my mother provoked many of these fights deliberately. I watched her do it. I watched her humiliate him. I watched her push his buttons to the point where he was shaking with anger, where she would not let him walk away, where she would follow him around and scream at him, and she would do it particularly in front of his mother or her mother. She wanted to emasculate him. And sometimes she ended up getting beaten. Doesn’t excuse him beating her. I am not saying that. But I can tell you from the inside that these domestically abusive relationships are often mutually antagonistic, because the psychological imbalances in both people are complementary and feed off each other.

KMOI think that’s one of the messages from the Depp–Heard trial. Absolutely. He’s a mess, too.

JoshYou know, and people saying, “He’s no innocent.” He’s no innocent? No, he’s not. But that’s not what you mean. And stop implying what you are trying to imply, because it’s bullshit. He may be no innocent, but there is no evidence that he ever physically brutalized her. Stop it. Stop eliding that. That is what you wish people to walk away with. When you say he’s no innocent, you want people—especially people who don’t know the whole story—to walk away thinking, “Oh, he must have hit her, too.” Stop doing that. There’s no evidence that he did. Yeah, he’s an addict. Yeah, he’s trashed rooms. He’s written nasty, filthy texts. Absolutely. But there ain’t no evidence that he brutalized her physically.

Masks in Vermont

KMOLet’s switch gears to COVID.

JoshThat was smooth, baby.

KMOYeah. Smooth transition. I was living in Vermont for COVID. I moved here to Arkansas last December. But in Vermont, I would walk around outdoors—not in a building, outside, under the big blue sky—with no mask on, and this happened repeatedly. I’m walking on the sidewalk in Bellows Falls, Vermont, and there’s a woman, usually an older woman, approaching me on the sidewalk. She’s wearing a mask. She sees that I’m not wearing a mask. She makes a show, an ostentatious show, of stopping, turning 90 degrees, and stepping into the street, stepping into traffic, to put distance between me and her, and then scowling at me, staring daggers at me as I walk by outdoors, in the wind, with no mask on.

Nuts to me. To step into traffic so as not to be within proximity of somebody who is unmasked outdoors: insane to me. That is absolutely insane. And that doesn’t happen in this part of Arkansas. Now, go over to Bentonville, go over to Fayetteville. There’s a lot of money over there. There are a lot of blue-tribe sensibilities over there. You will get people shaming you for not wearing a mask, but not here, not in rural Arkansas. This is just such a relief, to be here after five years in Vermont. People in Vermont are crazy over COVID, and it’s a lot saner here in Northwest Arkansas.

JoshYes, I bet it is a lot saner. That’s been my experience here, too. And people who’ve watched my show have seen— I’ve taken several episodes to describe incidents very like the one that you just described. I remember January—

KMOThat was a pattern of behavior. That was not an incident.

JoshGood. Yes, yes. I’m glad you pointed that out. He is correct, direct from another Vermonter here. These are not isolated incidents. This is normal, okay? It’s not just one person out of 200. You see this a lot. There’s less of it now, today, but it’s been throughout the whole thing.

January 2021, a Sunday morning, I was downtown in Burlington, walking on Pearl Street and window shopping. I was just window shopping, waiting for a food order to be ready for me to pick up and take home. I was on the street. It’s like 15 degrees outside, because it’s the Arctic. And a gentleman in his 70s is coming toward me wearing a mask. I’m not wearing a mask, because I’m outside and I’m not crazy. And I sensed something about him. He’s going to say something to me; I could see it in his eyes. And he was a big wimp about it, too. He waited until he was past me, so that we weren’t making eye contact, and as soon as he walked past me, he said really loudly, “Where’s your mask?” And I turned around to him and I said, “Where are your fucking manners?” Excuse me. That is what I said. But you may have to bleep me if this is a swearing-free show.

Many, many incidents like this. And in fact, I talk about one tonight that happened just this week at the grocery store. This is still going on here. A woman had a freak-out at the cash register because she was demanding that the cashier put on gloves to touch her order. And he said no, and she threw a fit.

Red tribe, blue tribe, and reflexive opposition

KMOSo you describe yourself as a former progressive Democrat. I have been culturally of the blue tribe my whole life, but electorally, mostly because of my opposition to the drug war, I voted Libertarian for decades. So I’m not really divorced from the Democratic Party, because I was never a Democrat.

JoshI see.

KMOBut I grew up in the ’80s, and in the ’80s, the people who were so proud of their own moral superiority, and who thought that it gave them license to coerce others, were conservative Christians.

JoshCorrect.

KMOAnd so I’m not disappointed in the behavior of the right. They haven’t changed that much, from my perspective. But over the last decade and a half, the blue tribe has lost their shit. I mean, they rub their shit in their hair now. Whereas when I grew up, when I was forming my opinions about the world and my political orientation and my social orientation, the Democrats seemed like the adults in the room. And now they just seem not just childish, but deranged.

But at the same time—like Trump derangement syndrome; a lot of people don’t even like to hear that phrase, but I see it—there’s a danger. I see Democrats who think that if Trump says it’s Tuesday, it must be Saturday. So if you’re going to take the opposite position reflexively, then you’re very easy to manipulate.

So I’m concerned that defining oneself in opposition to the insanity of the blue tribe can drive you into an insane position: that it’s not helpful to be consistently just focused on the insanity of the blue tribe and then taking the opposite position. I think the term is reflexive radicalization,² or it’s like a mirror image of the radicalization of the left: that people just rejecting the current craziness of the left can push themselves into just a diametrically [opposed] but identical position. It’s equally unworkable.

JoshYes, reflexive opposition. I would say, about the right: you are correct about who the censorious people were, who wanted to impose the way they lived onto other people. You are correct that it was the Christian right. And I may not have heard you correctly, but if I did hear you say that they haven’t changed much, I would disagree with you. I believe that the right has changed as much as the left has changed, but in a better direction.

I was there for this. I remember the Moral Majority. I know what forces made my homosexuality as a young teenager difficult. So I experienced those people. Those people are not nearly as numerous anymore, and they do not have a cultural megaphone. Even by conservatives, they’re not seen as that respectable. So no, they have indeed changed. They are not in the catbird cultural seat anymore.

And one of the big problems with the left is the left is continuing to pretend that it’s 1982, just like BLM is pretending that it’s pre–Civil Rights Act, just like hardcore feminists are pretending it’s pre-suffrage. It’s nonsense. It’s not true. Why are they doing this pretending? Very simple: because they need a conflict to build their identity on.

Don’t believe these people. Don’t take them at face value. They don’t want to solve problems. I know they say they do. I know they say they want to solve racism, they want to solve poverty, they want to solve what they call misogyny. None of that is true. They are living for conflict. They get narcissistic and egotistical supply from acting out a role where they are seen as public saviors, getting rid of the terrible, persecutory man who’s making everything miserable for everybody else. That is why they are never satisfied. That is why, when they do get a law passed that addresses some of their concerns, they move on to the next thing, and they continue to say it’s as bad as it ever was. This is an endless conflict, because for them it has to be endless, because solving the problem would take their identity away from them.

KMOYeah, that’s a point that many progressives make today: the Democrats are in power. They’ve been in power for a while now. They could well have shored up the right to an abortion. They could well have taken action to reduce the availability of dangerous weapons, and they haven’t, because it is the anxiety, it is the fear, that gives them power. It’s a fundraising tool. It’s just useful to have the threat be ever-present.

A private studio, Medicaid, and testosterone

KMOWell, we are near the end of our time. Let me switch things to a lighter topic. I get the impression that you’re doing your show from a community TV station in Vermont. Is that the case?

JoshNo, it’s a private studio. I have a business partner. The other guy behind the show—the show is only 50 percent me—the other guy is Kevin, my friend and business partner. He is actually a professional audio and video technician. He has studios in multiple parts of the country. This is one that he keeps in Burlington. So the only reason that the show looks and sounds the way it does has nothing to do with me. It’s all to do with Kevin’s expertise and his infrastructure. I could not have produced the kind of thing I produced on my own. So yeah, it’s not a— I mean, we’ve just got a black curtain behind us right now, because we don’t have enough money to build a new set.

KMOWhen I was living in Vermont, I shot video for a local community access TV station, and I would do my own live streams from their studios. And I had somebody in a control room live-switching it. And that was—

JoshYeah, yeah. That’s what Kevin’s doing, except he’s doing it in Albany while I sit in Burlington.

KMOOh, I see. I see. Yeah. There were things that I really loved about Vermont, even the political culture of Vermont. I did a radio show, and I did live streams. I could get the lieutenant governor on the phone for a comment with no notice, really. It’s a small state. I could get elected representatives to comment on anything. That was nice.

I don’t make a lot of money, and I don’t qualify for Medicaid here in Arkansas, but I did in Vermont. Let me tell you a fun story about that, though. As I mentioned, I’m 54. I’m on TRT, testosterone replacement therapy. And it’s fairly expensive, and I’d rather not pay for it. So I wanted to see if the state of Vermont would pay for it. I got an appointment with an endocrinologist, and he said no. He said he would want me to completely go off of it, and then he would introduce very small doses. And the only thing that he thought was a legitimate reason for a man to take testosterone was erectile dysfunction. And I wasn’t sexually active. That’s not the only thing that our bodies need testosterone for. Well, in his opinion, it was. So he said, “Absolutely not. No, I won’t prescribe it for you.” But then, in passing, he mentioned—

JoshUh-huh. I know where this is—

KMO—that he was prescribing it to trans men.

JoshUh-huh. Because women— Trans men are women. There’s no such thing as a trans man. No one ever changes sex. There’s no such thing as trans women. They are men.

It is freaking incredible to me that allegedly educated men and women in medicine, who allegedly, at least to some degree, on paper, are supposed to have been scientifically educated, can actually stand there and spout that kind of baloney nonsense, just from an intellectual standpoint: to look at a man who has a testosterone deficiency, and to deny the knowledge that they know, that men do need testosterone, and not just for our hard-ons, and then to say, but it is legitimate to give it to women, for whom it is poisonous. It is an exogenous dose of testosterone that is poisonous to the female body at these levels. They’re actually poisoning them. You’re deliberately poisoning them, and that’s a valid use of it. But you, who actually need it— So that’s the intellectual side. The moral side—the lack of moral compass scares me. Scares me. What that says about a person.

Distrust of doctors, and a torn retina

JoshI’m a heart patient. I had an unexpected and early coronary at age 36. So I take a lot of medication that’s very expensive. I have a cardiologist appointment every year. I get blood work done every year. I’m not doing it anymore. And I’m not telling people what to do, and I’m not saying that what I’m doing is a good idea. This is not medical advice. This is a description of my choices.

After the past two years, I do not trust doctors at all. I do not trust them not to lie to me. I don’t trust them to have morals. I don’t trust them to have any spine or backbone whatsoever. I do not believe a single thing they say, because they have demonstrated to me that they are incapable of taking in objective information, that they are very capable of taking in propaganda. I will never trust medical doctors again. I will go in for acute care, but I will not go in— I’m not relying on them for anything but emergencies. Maybe that will be to my detriment, but they earned that distrust.

KMOYeah. So just to complicate matters, just before I left Vermont, I suffered a detached retina.

JoshOh, my friend, I’m sorry.

KMOActually, it wasn’t fully detached. It was a torn retina.

JoshOh, but it’s terrible.

KMOBut because I was on Vermont Medicaid, Green Mountain Care, the day that it happened, I was in touch with an optometrist at Dartmouth Medical Center, which is premier, world-class medicine. I got an appointment for the next morning.

JoshYou have to. That’s an emergency. It has to be taken care of right away.

KMOThe next day, I got emergency laser surgery on my eye. And if that had happened when I was here in Arkansas, I just wouldn’t be able to see out of that eye.

JoshJeez.

Staying or leaving

JoshYou know, yeah, there are some things— I mean, the things you’ve said about Vermont, the fact that it’s a small state. And we say we have citizen legislators, and that’s true. It’s not a brand name. They really are just citizens, most of them. They’re people that work in the general store or the law office next to you. They’re part-time, and they are very accessible. You can walk right into the statehouse and go right into a committee room and sit there as a witness or as an invited speaker. And I like this. I like it a lot.

And, of course, it’s beautiful. New England feels like home to me. The architecture, the New England–ishness of it, feels like home to me. Other parts of the country do not. The Plains, Texas: they have lots of charms going for them. The landscape, I find a nightmare. But those things are now outweighed for me by the lockstep, authoritarian, woke, liberal agenda in this state.

I find myself unable to socialize. I rarely leave my house except for necessities. I don’t spend time with my neighbors anymore. We used to barbecue with each other and have dinner parties. It’s not like anybody had a fight, but I purposefully drifted away, because everybody here is liberal. And I know I’m not making it up. I’m not borrowing trouble. I know it because I’ve seen it happen. If I were to say anything now about my political change of mind, or disagree, I would immediately be socially ejected. So I have ejected myself from having relationships with people here. And I know that there are people who are not like that. But, KMO, the problem is we are all too afraid to identify each other to each other, right? How do we find each other?

KMOWell, I’m a malcontent. I’ll stand out on purpose. But yeah, no, I hear you. So are you waiting for the craziness to blow over, or are you thinking of relocating?

JoshI’m certainly thinking of relocating, but there are a lot of things that need to be in place in terms of my financial life, and the roots that I put down here, that need to be taken care of before I can get to that place. But that is a future goal. Yeah, I’m— yes and no on that. You just moved to Arkansas. So, I mean, it’ll be interesting to talk to you again in six months or a year and see what you think about your decision, because I am, um—

KMOI’m from Arkansas.

JoshOh, you’re from— okay. So it’s all right. All right. That’s a little bit different, in some senses. I could probably live anywhere, because honestly, the older I get, the less I’m interested in person-to-person socializing to a great degree. I would like to have back what I used to have. I’d like to have a group, a small group of friends, and we have dinner at each other’s houses, and movie nights, and adult entertain— I don’t mean adult. I mean the way adults used to entertain each other in the ’50s and ’60s. You’d have people over for cocktail hour. That’s the life I like. I’d like to have that again.

I’m not a joiner. I’m not a group person. I don’t like crowds. I used to love to go to parties and hold court, but I also used to be an alcoholic, so a lot of the things that I used to do aren’t as appealing anymore. I could probably land anywhere that I had enough space around me that I didn’t have to hear other people, and a good internet connection, and I’d probably be happy.

KMOWell, hey, I would like to talk again in six months. Let’s do that.

JoshOkay.

KMOBut for now, this has been a very enjoyable get-to-know-you conversation. So thanks so much.

JoshThank you for having me. Take care.

KMOYou too.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

After the conversation: how Josh does it

KMOAll right. That was Josh Slocum. And Josh does everything right as a podcaster, I would say. He is on point in so many places where I just am not. He does his show on a particular schedule. I used to. Gosh, for more than ten years, I put out a podcast every Wednesday, rain or shine. It’s gotten very erratic, as you know, and not just for the main C-Realm Podcast; the long-suffering C-Realm Vault listeners also have to put up with a very erratic publication schedule from me.

Josh sticks to one topic, a topic that he knows very well, and he can talk about it at length, at the drop of a hat. Whereas not only do I get bored with the topics that I’ve talked about for a long time, there’ll come a point where I just actively reject them, as was the case with my public renunciation of peak-oil doomerism, which, career-wise, was an absurd move, because that cost me more than half the audience. The hunger for doom is great. And I notice people who used to be longtime listeners to this podcast publicly praising other doom-oriented podcasts.

Josh also is attacking on all fronts. He’s got a podcast, which is audio-only, and he’s got some audio-only exclusive material that you can’t get on YouTube, but most of his stuff is also up on YouTube. Whereas, again, I’m pretty haphazard with YouTube, and most of what you’ll find of me on YouTube is just me blathering into a smartphone camera, unscripted, without even bullet points prepared in advance, just kind of saying it as I see it in the moment.

And also, Josh has a newsletter that he sends out. Now, I have a newsletter that I send out once in a blue moon, and it’s usually just to promote some new project. For example, in the coming days, I am going to get together once again— I don’t know how many times Doug Lain³ and I have talked. More than a dozen, I’m sure. But we’re going to talk for my new podcast. It is the Padverb Podcast, which you can find at en.padverb.com.

And fortunately for everybody involved, I’m just the host of the Padverb Podcast. I’m just the guy who jabbers into a microphone and interviews people. I don’t edit the material. I don’t do any of the back-end stuff. I don’t post it. There’s a team of people who do all that. And most importantly, there are people who are keeping the pipeline full, arranging interviews with guests. That’s where I really fall down as a podcaster.

And I should give special public thanks to Tim, who contacted me months ago on MeWe.com and suggested that I check out Josh Slocum’s show. It took me a while to follow up on Tim’s recommendation, but when I did listen, I knew immediately that it was a great recommendation, and I reached out to Joshua right away. So thanks to Tim for that recommendation. And this is to anybody who has somebody in mind, somebody you think I should talk to: let me know. And, more importantly, let them know.

Clinical labels and plain moral language

KMOAll right. As you probably know, if there was any place in the conversation with Joshua where I disagreed with him, I’m not going to make any objections at this point, after he has left the stage. So I will just talk in very general terms about trends that kind of bother me.

One thing I really don’t like—and this isn’t anything Josh can do anything about, given the subject matter that he’s engaged with—is taking the vocabulary of psychiatry and hearing it applied by non-psychiatrists to people, often diagnosing somebody they’ve never interacted with, never met, and just have no business assigning a diagnosis to.

And I really, strongly dislike terms like homophobia or transphobia or Islamophobia. These are cultural fighting words. They’re typically not hurled at people by mental health professionals, and yet the “phobia” part carries the implied imprimatur of a mental health professional’s diagnosis. Somebody who was raised in a conservative Christian milieu, and has been told that the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination, and believes it because they’ve been told that from a child, doesn’t have a phobia. They’re not phobic. That language is deeply dishonest, and I really, really don’t like it.

I started following up on some of the notes that I made in the conversation with Joshua, and I found a couple— I’m very sympathetic to their project. This is a couple—I don’t know if they’re man and wife, but it’s a man and a woman—and they are a publishing team. And they talk about what Joshua calls this cottage industry of borderline personality apologia. They say, look, there are some therapists out there who claim to specialize in borderline personality cases. They’re counselors, and they’re typically counseling couples. But if you fall into the clutches of one of these counselors, and you are not the borderline personality partner, you’re the other partner, the counselor is going to take the side of the borderline personality and tell you that you have to go to any length that they demand to accommodate them.

Now, I have no problem with anything that I’ve told you so far. The thing that I disliked was the use of the word “characterological disorder,” a disorder of character. Having poor character—I just don’t think that that needs to be couched in clinical language. If you’re a liar, it’s not a pathology. You’re a liar. If you have no empathy for people, and you abuse them, and you manipulate them for your own ego gratification—narcissist is enough of a colloquial term that I’m okay with it, but putting any other language on it, to pathologize it or to make it sound clinical, I just don’t think that’s helpful. Unless, of course, you work in a mental health field.

So again, nothing that I’m saying here should be construed as a criticism of Josh. These are just the issues that come up for me when I start talking about human interactions: the way people behave toward one another, the way they manipulate one another, the way they form large social structures to coerce people into doing things that they don’t want to do. I think that the normal, colloquial language that we have developed over hundreds and thousands of years to talk about responsibility, duty, fair play, and honesty is not improved via the application of clinical labels and pathological diagnoses.

And I’m not saying anybody anywhere in the world should do anything differently than they are doing now. Now, of course, I do believe people should behave differently than they do, but I’m not offering up any broad public prescription for changes in vocabulary or verbal behavior. In fact, that’s one of the things I really, really dislike about the current left movement: the constant policing of people’s vocabulary and speech, as if somebody who’s in their forties, fifties, eighties should be as obsessed with making sure that their vocabulary and their linguistic behaviors are right up to the bleeding edge of the concerns of people on campus, or in HR departments and big tech corporations. Normal people don’t talk that way, and there’s absolutely no reasonable expectation that they should accommodate the obsessions of people who obsess over this stuff.

Mocha

KMOAnd if it sounds like I’m emotionally charged on this issue, to some degree I am. But also, those of you who have listened for years know that I have, or at least had, a three-legged black cat named Mocha who has lived with me. She started her life in Arkansas and then moved to Maryland, and then Tennessee, and then New York, and then Vermont, and finally back here to Arkansas. She died earlier today. I buried her in the garden. So I’m not eliciting sympathy, but I know that a lot of you have been hearing about her and her antics for over a decade now. To say that she will be missed is quite the understatement.

Announcements: the Vault and GEB

KMOOkay. On the topic of announcements, directing you to other things that I’ve worked on and that I would very much appreciate you checking out: first, of course, thanks to the C-Realm Vault subscribers, who have for years been doing the heavy lifting to make podcasting a viable activity for me economically.

There is another 25 minutes of conversation with Josh Slocum, and you can hear that on the most recent episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast. That’s episode number 428. It’s not anything that comes after what you’ve heard. It’s actually the more informal get-to-know-you chitchat that took place before the portion of conversation that you just heard.

So, in the very unlikely event that you don’t know about the C-Realm Vault podcast: I used to say it’s a second podcast that I do. Now I suppose I should say a third podcast that I do. But it is a behind-the-paywall podcast that new subscribers can only access via my Patreon page, which is at patreon.com/KMO.

And then there is also the GEB webcomic. GEB stands for Greater Earth Betterment Bureau, and it is a story about a bunch of aliens who live under the Antarctic ice. They do what aliens are reputed to do, which is kidnap people and give them anal probes. They don’t enjoy it. They don’t see any point in it. They certainly don’t find any satisfaction in it. They only do it because it’s their job. And really, the story is about all the other things they do to try to find some meaning in their lives, because their jobs are so meaningless. There are three print issues of the GEB comic now, and personally, I think that printed on paper is the way to read comics. You can order printed versions of the comic book at geb.io, or you can read the whole story for free right there on the website. It’s just not on paper. You don’t get to turn pages, and it’s a different experience, but the content is still there, and it’s all free. So check it out.

Not a bootstrapper

KMOAnd finally, when I was talking to Josh about reciprocal radicalization—I’m not suggesting that Josh is a radical, but he has changed his views pretty dramatically from a viewpoint that suited him and seemed stable for most of his life, and it is in response to craziness from his own team. So I can definitely relate to chafing more at the bad behavior on one’s own side, perpetrated by people who ostensibly you agree with. That bothers me more than people who I feel no affiliation with behaving badly.

Now, as I said to Josh, I’m not red tribe or blue tribe. I’m definitely, you know, the outsider of a cultural blue triber [wording unclear], who, because of my opposition to the drug war, has been voting for Libertarian presidential candidates since the nineties. Although I did cast a vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary, and I also did send money to Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. In hindsight, I can’t say that I’m heartbroken that Yang didn’t win. And I was never a huge fan of the idea of universal basic income, really. I liked the man more than I liked his signature policy.

But these days, I certainly do not look to electoral politics to be the guiding hand that shifts us onto a more adaptive and sustainable path. That’s just not where I place my hopes. And I’m also not a bootstrapper. I certainly reject the notion that the only way that humanity and human civilization is going to find a more stable footing is if every human being adopts some spiritually enlightened perspective. I think that’s silly. I think that people respond reliably to certain types of incentives, and if you give them options which allow them to do well materially, and at least have a dignified life according to the agreed-upon criteria of their culture— Not everybody gets to be rich, and we’re certainly not going to have a world in which everybody is materially equal. That’s just not in the cards. It’s not even on offer. But we have had periods where just about everybody had the opportunity, without Herculean effort, to achieve a lifestyle which was not only materially stable and comfortable, but also respectable. And that’s key.

And it doesn’t take global consensus, and it doesn’t take a spiritual singularity for everybody to level up spiritually and take a more enlightened and universal view, in order to create a more humane and sustainable and workable social arrangement. I don’t think that everybody in the Scandinavian countries is a bodhisattva. They just have good social planning, and it didn’t require everybody’s buy-in. It didn’t require consensus. It required the creation of some useful, reliable, rationally oriented institutions.

Now, I think those institutions are probably in danger right now, and I don’t think that the standard of living that the Scandinavian countries have established for the vast majority of their population is guaranteed. I don’t think it’s assured. But I’m certainly not cheerleading for them to falter and shift onto some dark path. I’m holding them up as an example of what rational, intelligent social planning can achieve. And I’m definitely goal-oriented here.

Now, this is all in the service of me saying I’m not a bootstrapper. I’m not saying that the outcome of all of us is dependent on every single one of us getting our shit together, because there’s a lot of people who just are never going to get their shit together. But at the same time, there is nobody listening to this podcast who has the authority or the resources to dictate universally, unilaterally: “Okay, we’re going to change the way we run society from now on. It’s going to be like this.” And so, while I’m not saying that everybody has to do something in particular in order to make the world a better place, everybody listening to this does have options available to them to make their own life better. And it is in no way selfish to take actions that reliably improve one’s quality of life.

Exercise, meditation, and signing off

KMOWhat am I talking about? The low-hanging fruit is physical exercise. If you’re not getting any, start getting some. You don’t have to be heroic about it. If you’re not doing anything right now, take a walk. Walking half an hour a day, with some very gentle stretching at the end, compared to just sitting and looking at a screen all day, is going to do you a world of good. If you’re a man, you really can’t beat weightlifting in terms of the return for the effort invested. But go easy. If you haven’t been doing it for a long time already, go easy, because you really can injure yourself, particularly your joints, by trying to do too much too early.

But that’s the thing with the low-hanging fruit: you don’t have to be a hard-charging fanatic to get anything out of it. If you’re not doing much to start with, then doing just a little bit is going to return something noticeable.

And the other thing that I strongly recommend is meditation. I’ve been meditating on and off most of my adult life, but I’ve been consistently on for a few years now. And it’s amazing. And I only do it ten minutes a day, sometimes twenty, but I’m certainly not sitting in the lotus position for hours every day. A little goes a long way. I’m not saying it’s going to save the world. I’m not saying it’s going to make a more sane society. But if you do it, your life will be better. Your quality of life will improve.

And I say all this as a way to bring the conversation around—and it’s not even conversation; it’s me just jabbering—to the topic of meditation, because I’ve got some recorded material that I actually recorded for the Padverb Podcast. It is with a bodybuilder and entrepreneur. His name is Shiru Angrish [spelling unverified]. He’s a big name in bodybuilding. He basically brought bodybuilding to India. He’s organized lots of shows in both India and South America. And we talked for a long time. And for reasons I won’t get into, we’re not going to use that recording on the Padverb Podcast, but I do want to excerpt parts of it where we’re talking about meditation for an upcoming episode of this podcast. I was inspired by that conversation, and I’m looking forward to editing it, because I know that in re-listening to it to edit it, I’m likely to get inspired again.

Okay, so this is me trying to wrap up the podcast and not doing a very good job of it. But now I guess I’m just going to draw a line in the sand and say, no further. I will proceed no further with this monologue. But I will be back, particularly if you’re a C-Realm Vault subscriber; you’ll hear me again quite soon. But if you’re not ready to jump behind the paywall, but you would like to hear more content from me, remember the Padverb Podcast. Again, the website is en.padverb.com, P-A-D-V-E-R-B. We release new shows late in the day every Thursday, around 5 p.m. Eastern—New York City time, for you international folk.

All right, that’s all for this episode of the podcast. Thanks for listening. I hope you’ll check out Josh Slocum’s podcast, The Disaffected Podcast, and I hope that you’ll tune in for the next installment of the C-Realm Podcast, which will be available pretty soon. Talk to you then. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. On June 1, 2022, the jury awarded Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages; Virginia’s statutory cap reduced the punitive award to $350,000, for a total of $10.35 million. Heard was awarded $2 million on one count of her counterclaim. The two judgments were not equal. Sources: Fairfax County Circuit Court final judgment order, June 2022 (copy filed as Exhibit D in a later federal case: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.856770/gov.uscourts.cacd.856770.1.4_2.pdf); NPR, June 1, 2022 (npr.org/2022/06/01/1102118755/depp-heard-trial-verdict). ↩

2. Later in this episode [01:00:24], KMO calls this “reciprocal radicalization.” ↩

3. Spelled “Lain” here. “Lain” and “Lane” sound the same, so the recording cannot settle the spelling; it rests on who is meant. The Doug whom KMO says he has talked with “more than a dozen” times matches Douglas Lain (novelist, host of the Diet Soap and Zero Squared podcasts, and Zero Books publishing manager from 2015 to 2021), whom the C-Realm episode index lists as a guest on 45 main-show, Vault, and C-Realm Radio episodes from 2009 through 2021 (for example, episode 170, “Oh Nine Oh Nine Oh Nine,” 2009, and episode 526, “Bash Bash Conversation,” 2018). The index lists no guest named Doug Lane. Sources: c-realm.com episode index (site staging export, guest id guest-2d0d0594ccd1); Wikipedia, “Douglas Lain” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lain). ↩