Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 380: Dan Harmon

Episode Date: April 18, 2020

Dan Harmon, co-creator of Rick and Morty and owner of a dangerous Tesla reactor, joins the DTFH! Duncan's new show, The Midnight Gospel, debuts April 20th on Netflix! Created by Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) and produced by Titmouse Studios (nearly every cool cartoon of the last 15 years). This episode is brought to you by: BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. 

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I'm having some kind of announcement from the industry prepared to receive funding from Fremont's Ocon to tonight. So I'm working on it right now. I'm just going to cut to the same Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Adamsel with Abdul Seimer. In our vision once ISRW. It was an apesinian mate.

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And drank the milk of paradise. Gary, what is that? I'm getting that weird interference thing. You know that, you know, that's cut that out. Gary, can you stop there? Great. Sorry about that gang. We're all experiencing, you know,

varieties of temporal distortions and then there are the amorphous and the Jewish and it's definitely happening with my technology. I think that that filter I just put on has stopped the interruptions, which is great so that I could continue the introduction of my podcast. For those of you who are new listeners, welcome. My name is Duncan Russell.

And you're watching the Duffie Special from Family Out of My Cast. Fantastic. God dammit. Gary, here it is again. An announcement from Veynen Indus. Just cut to commercial and then let's figure this out. When you're on a planet, you don't know what might happen.

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Blue chew is the better, cheaper, faster choice, and I thank them for sponsoring the DTFH. Okay, enough of this cowardly escape into surrealism and absurdity. Friends, here's what's been going on with me. I have been promoting the Midnight Gospel, which comes out on Netflix on April 20th. It's been one of the most surreal, poignant weeks of my life.

During a global pandemic, has been to put it mildly alive. Gary's doing it again! All right, well, I don't know how to stop this. I don't know what to do about it. So maybe we should just start the podcast. Yeah, we'll just start the podcast. Please watch the Midnight Gospel coming to Netflix.

April 20th now, everybody. Please, welcome. family podcast. Dan Dan. Welcome. Welcome on you. That you are with us. Shake hands.

No need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's been Duncan to try it for free. It's been Duncan to try it for free. It's been Duncan to try it for free. It's been Duncan to try it for free. Wow. Wow. Dan.

It's so nice to see you. Thank you. But this way that I'm seeing you is the more that I do this, it becomes increasingly sad. Yeah. I keep thinking about you know how like what became called the living room

used to be called the parlor and it was big and then they invented funeral parlors. And then they changed the name of the parlor to the living room because the funeral industry wanted to, I guess, supposedly. You know, they wanted, they wanted to discourage people from having their dead relatives in their house for memorial services and stuff because they wanted. So that so that so culturally there was this shift that we don't

even know or care about, which is that all of a sudden this thing called the living room became a totally normal part of even the tiniest department. And I keep thinking during this pandemic about like what it's this is a big enough cultural shift that there could be a permanent thing added to like homes that's like has to do with like a little video station. Like everyone will have a little corner with a green screen or just

good lighting and you know it'll be like the equivalent of like a vanity for a woman's bedroom or like every home will come kind of equipped with a little video station. Because if not after this time then definitely after the next pandemic and what are we learning this time around except we can do this like in I'm curious to talk to you because you you and your family have a lot more roots in like the conspiracy world and I haven't I haven't had the heart or the savvy to learn about any pandemic

conspiracy theories yet. Okay, well, I'll get to the conspiracy thing but just what just happened to me during what you just said was deja vu. But it wasn't deja vu like normal deja vu. It was deja vu in the sense that I knew we are going to have this conversation. I've been looking forward to it. But I've also had this uneasy feeling because I knew that you were

going to present an angle that I hadn't thought of. It's going to be really, really, really horrible. But I didn't know what it would be. I was I'm like I'm going to talk to Harmon and I know he's going to have a take on this. It's going to like pull the rug out from under me. And you just did that. So now I have to like for a moment sit with this horrific dystopian

creature where instead of zombies, it's invisible, tiny death things in weird mists outside of our homes. And where within you, people are like instead of huddling in front of the fireplace, they're going to their communication corner to talk to people they will never see in person again, because the outside becomes increasingly virulent to the point that going outside becomes impossible. And now I just want to throw up.

Well, we'll just have like zones or something like, like, like, it will be sort of like, like everyone will belong to a gated community in the sense that like, or there will be like different colored wristbands for immunities. Yeah. And so though, and then the, and then maybe bars will, you know, when you go to a bar, maybe it's like a yellow bar and that means everyone with a yellow bracelet, which is like latched on in this

like hackproof way, which means you've been immunized. You have antibodies against like the yellow section of diseases. And then everyone just goes to these yellow bars and they just fuck like it's just like Roman, like people are just fucking right there in the bar. Well, because talking to people closer to six feet will become lumped in with like sex. Right.

So you may as well fuck as talk to your mailman. That's it. You're fucking your mailman right now. That's the that's the I'm so glad that you have underlined the sexual element to this pandemic, which is that if you go outside right now with no mask on, that is barebacking your barebacking reality. And when you run, when you like, you know, I was, I went, I went to

my car, I had to get something out of my car, which is surreal. I don't know. When was the last time you went to your car? I don't know. It's it's sitting 20 feet from here. But every day I look at it and a humble brag, I have a Tesla and and it's got the charging cable plugged into it now for a month and a half or something.

And I keep going, I should unplug that car. How do I plug it? Because maybe the battery will swell or something. And then I, and then I always think I'm going to unplug it and then I'm going to forget I unplugged it. And then the fucking renegades from sector seven are going to start raiding Valley Village. And I'm going to run to the car with Cody and there's going to be

10 miles on the battery. Yeah. But number one, I have just moved to the valley. Number two, when some white flash of light explodes into the sky, I'll be like, that's a Harman's Tesla. He should have unplugged it. Fuck. It exploded.

It's just been gathering energy. You gotta unplug that Tesla man, please. For all of us in the valley, please unplug it. But yeah, you know, a jogger jogged by my car when I went to my car and I wasn't wearing a face mask. He wasn't wearing a face mask. I don't know he was, but in that moment I thought, wow, one of us could have just killed the other in this moment and not even ever

know it. And it was the most surreal and fucked up experience, you know, that to me, this situation is filled with so many of those moments that I used to think of as my favorite moments, which is what you thought the thing would look like. Turns out to be the not at all what it would look like. You know what I mean? Usually this is in relation to like, you know, the first time you

come, you know, do you remember your first orgasm? You hear about that? There's the possibility. Have you ever come? I'm sorry, Dan. I'm still looking forward to it. It's not a myth. But you know, like your first orgasm, you hear about it, you hear

about it, you hear there's a thing that can happen. You get some sense that there's this thing and then your first orgasm, it's like, that is not what I thought it would be. Wow, it's better than I thought it would be. Or maybe if you have what's called a theophany, you know, or some kind of psychedelic connection with the divine, it's like, that is nothing like what I thought that was going to be like. It's how could I have this is this a similar thing, but in the

negative in the sense that this apocalypse, who the fuck could have predicted this one? You know, this is this nobody like in my assessment of apocalypse, the genre itself. Where where is this in there? You know, it's, it's. Because it's such a baby step. Yeah, the thing that's I mean, if this was it, I would be like,

this is great as far as apocalypses go chiefly because well, we're going to live through this. And even I will say, I'm immuno compromised. So unless anybody listening thinks that I'm being insensitive, like I truly do have reason as per my doctor to like, I'm kind of like one of the people you're washing your hands for. And it is a game of hot lava for me. But I kind of when it comes to the one for one, like, this is

your apocalypse negotiation. I'm like, thank you, God, this is actually really cool. Like in all of the different ways that Dan Harmon could have found out at 47 years old that he might be about to die. This is the easiest, like laziest, like, like I have been being given the most amount of control. Like I can make decisions if I really want to like stay in my closet with a bucket over my head and an oxygen tube coming

in. And so if I do get it from an Amazon box, I get to know that I did have options. I could have put a bag over my head. And then also on top of that, if I do get it, and even if I do die, probably two weeks or at least a couple of days to say goodbye, to put my house in order, to sign my will, to like, if all of that was just it, I'd be like, this is the best.

Like this is the best we ever could have hoped for. The problem is what I've always anticipated being the actual apocalypse, like where you and I aren't able to have a podcast and make jokes and have anxieties about things because shit just goes from zero to fight or flight as a way of life is I always figure the odds are it's going to be an economic collapse that brings that on. It's going to be good old fashioned poor people being hungry

and having crowbars that and not trusting each other and all of the telecommunications going out so nobody has any recourse to shame or social moors. And everyone's just kind of hungry and hearing rumors that the people down the street have already begun looting or cannibalizing. And so you're a dummy if you don't and it can go so bad so quickly. If all that happens is the dollar goes from being worth one

dollar to being worth two cents. I mean, so let alone if the police aren't going to show up if you call them, I mean, everything is based on money. And this every time they talk about how this is economically, you know, irreversible. That's my panic. I'd rather I think I kind of worship a God that would make this happen if I set it out loud.

But I think I would rather burn alive in an inferno that just burnt us all to a crisp then die by home invasion. While being unable to protect my dogs and Cody. Oh, yeah. Yeah, right. Like what was that? What was the name of? What was that terrible murderer that Patton Oswald's late wife was

studying the Golden State killer? Yeah, that's all of our nightmares is that Jesus. Yeah, I mean, those people exist right now. They existed in non pandemic times. That's what freaks me out. Like how many sociopaths have you met last couple of years? Like some of them are your friends and you're like, yeah, that's kind of a psychopath though.

Like he's held in line by like, it's more profitable to, you know, not let people know that he has no empathy and like that's fucking like actually maybe a sadistic streak to him. And like, it's about one out of a hundred people that we know. And then there's, and then there's everybody that we don't know. And then there's, and then it's like, oh boy, you know, we are held by like dental floss, thick, like thread to, you know,

just what we think of as rule of law. Yeah, you know, there was a celebration of sociopathy. I don't know if you know, remember when that was started generating like, well, you know, certain sociopaths, they do have like the question is, why do we have sociopaths? And from an evolutionary bio evolutionary perspective, well because if you're living in some situation where everyone's hyper compassionate and empathetic, that's not going to be a

trait that gives you long term survivability, right? You need someone who is able to kill the cute animals that you eat. Like there's just that you got to have somebody who can shoot down something with a face so we can boil its flesh and eat it. Yeah, you see how selection would, you know, gradually that could move past just the animals to people. And then eventually you have human robots among us.

And then you realize that in a situation like this, yeah, just what you're saying, this like invisible threat of just agreement, essentially the same thing that makes the dollar work is the same thing that keeps people from invading your house. It's, it's like, you know, they, there's an imagine, imagine of process that goes into the creation of the illusion of safety.

And for me, this is why the other day I'm like washing my dishes and looking out the window. And it's like the best. I feel like a Zen master washing my dishes, not because I'm a Zen master, but because I'm literally thinking like, I don't know, man, tomorrow I might start coughing. The next day I might kind of, you know, come to and I'm like, where are what's going and then try to pull the thing out of

my mouth. And then that's it, you know, because that's how you die. You know, it's a slow disintegration. I don't mean to shit all over your fantasy or your two week thing or whatever. But it could just be you wash your dishes. Then you're like, what the fuck? I can get this out of my, why are you killing?

And then you die. So you know what I mean? So that, that makes the dishwashing experience particularly like romantic, you know, the home invasion. We disagree in this sense. It's just like, I mean, I don't want anyone in my family to ever get hurt, but Jesus Christ, man, that, that just that flickering in and out of consciousness as you have some

vague, vague sense that you're something's not just quite right. And then blink out of existence forever. That, that one eats me alive. Well, that's an interesting point because that's another on the positive side. That's one of many good things about this shared experience we're all having. One of them is, well, what about the 99% of us that are learning

in a very concrete way that we, that we don't need police and that we don't need money and that we, you know, there's a very cynical way of looking at that, which is to say everyone's a sheep except for sociopaths. And oh my God, this whole jingles could tower could come down because it's only held together by, by people's assumptions and naivete, but there's also a positive way of looking at that. That was just like, well, that's not naivete.

That's compassion. It's an altruistic polite agreement that most people, a vast majority of human beings come out of the womb able to snap into and, and, and, you know, you walk your dog around the block and every neighbor you see, you know, there's a shared experience. And it's not so much the niceties which are engaged in like, oh, how are you guys doing? Do you need any help?

We have an extra turkey or whatever the fuck. I don't quite mean that. It's just sort of like, like just the connection that you now have with a bunch of people. And you kind of get the sense that when the shit hits the fan, there is an overwhelming tendency for humankind to kind of school like fish, but in a, but in a healthy way that they wouldn't turn each other away, that they would help each other out, that

they, we have an almost like panic response. But I got, I digress there, but the other positive thing about it is the positive way of looking at what I said was just like, oh, supposedly, oh, we're all experiencing how close we are to death, maybe it, but we're not. As you point out, this is actually a great way to realize that like God, this is like the furthest from death you usually are. It's just that you're kind of statistically very unlikely to

have a catastrophic stroke while you're washing your dishes. But my friend, Mike Mandela was healthier than me. And, you know, he just, he went to a Dodgers game with the Rick and Morty staff and he, he went home and he apparently just, just collapsed. He just went out like a light, which is what you're describing, which is so much scarier than having a dry cough and a fever and going, this is it.

And yet technically speaking, we are all so much closer to that fate, no matter how statistically unlikely it is. Statistics aren't the comfort. The truth is your brain is a big bowl of pudding held together with like weird, like fluid dynamics. Like why, why not that one part of it just and like you fall over like a sack of flour. That the idea that there's a molecule living up the street,

not living even they're not even alive is fucking things that are smaller than the breadth of a human hair by orders of magnitude that it's just, it's not even alive and it's sitting there and it's waiting for me. And, and if it could get into my lung tissue, it would, it wouldn't even, it's, it's wouldn't even have an orgasm. It wouldn't even be like, I finally got Dan Armand. It doesn't know who I am.

It doesn't even give a fuck. It's not, it's not batting for any team. It's just like, it's just part of this emergent molecular behavior. And it's out there and it's like hunting for me. That is like, that is such a far away death. It's such a manageable death compared to the death that we have been engaging in in the game of Russian roulette that is life. Yeah.

You know, remember like when that guy climbed up that tower and just started shooting people. You know, you'll have to be more specific. What the fuck, man? I think the guy, the guy in Texas, they're like the original. God, the original. Oh, Dan, what? God, Dan, I knew you were going to be.

Wow. Yeah. I don't know how many tower shooters there have been. Jesus Christ. Yeah, the original back in the old days, the vintage tower shooter. He like knew he had a brain to he left a note saying, look, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's something's wrong with me. But that situation of suddenly like there's a sniper taking people out and we look at that, you know, in all the depictions and reenactments of it and it's like, Oh God, what a nightmare. And the reason it's people have such an intense reaction to it is because that is the situation, which is that there is some sniper who is launching phenomena out of the rifle of time into our particular lives and at any given moment that thing could just

decide it's time to like take you out of the simulation. And this is a very uncomfortable predicament to be in and to combat it. We weave together all these safety illusions. One of the primary ones being, do you remember that song came out about 911 being a scam? Remember that song? But we all had this idea you could call 911 and like in seconds

police are going to be at your house saving you when the reality is, well, it depends on what neighborhood you're in. And even if you are in a nice neighborhood, it just depends on what's going on, man, there's only a certain number of cops. And it depends on how close they are. You know how it is with Uber, you know, it's the same with cops. It's like maybe there's a fire or maybe the cops are like the cops using the bathroom and then there's another cop over there

who's like technology got weird for a second or maybe the GPS coordinates got weird on their way to the house. And during that time you're being strangled by somebody and you just barely managed to call 911, but there's an illusion in your mind. Oh, no, no, no, there's this button I can press where the state will inject itself into my life and protect me. And it produces this sort of beautiful numbness, right?

That we all build our lives inside of so that we get to procrastinate. That's the game, isn't it? It's like, I don't need to really tell my wife how much I love her and how much she means to me and that if she were to die, then I wouldn't want to be alive and that I'm so grateful for her strength and I'm amazed at the way she is with the baby. And I wish I were even 190th as strong as her.

I'm clearly not. I don't need to say that now because, you know, there's two weeks. Right. And in that, that, that, which, which is the, so somehow I guess it, the, the connection between the reality of there being the sniper and our lives, when that really solidifies, what is that? Is that enlightenment? Is that what enlightenment is?

Is not just some glorious sanctimonious epiphanous eternal halo? It's just you realize for real. Oh, shit. Yeah. I have 10 seconds left to live. And then you just start acting like that in every moment. I guess, I mean, but I always think like, like the metaphor I

come back to is if, if I'm hammering a nail into wood, there's like a, there's this sort of like inevitable event that's going to happen where I'm going to hit my thumb with the hammer. And the reason I'm going to hit my thumb with the hammer is because I'm going to increase the rate at which I'm pounding and I'm going to get more and more confident and I'm going to, I'm going to swing harder in the course of getting the job done. And I, I don't want to say it's impossible to drive a nail into

wood by making the carefulest 0% chance of hitting your own thumb kind of strokes. Maybe, maybe, maybe there is a way to like tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap a nail all the way into a two by four. I don't actually think there is. I think sooner or later, if you want to get the thing done, if you want to live your life, for example, you need to get into a rhythm.

You need to take your girlfriend's life for granted. You need to wake up in the morning and actually have a baseline of, yeah, this is the new happy. Now it's called normal. Now happy has to trump that. And that's human nature. And we have accomplished a great deal. We invented pudding and lasers.

I mean, things that a caveman would be like, are you out of your fucking mind? You're trying to come up with a way to make chocolate and do it gel. Do you not see the saber tooth tiger sniffing around the camp? I need more wood. But step by step, we do this beautiful thing where we build, we go out on a limb. And I think it's part of what we're supposed to do.

We are living in a fantasy world. And you and I are just lamenting right now and kind of stretching about how that fantasy world is so far out on such a limb that, oh, look at the funny situation that happens. Look how much, look how much bowing in the wind this two by four has. Like we're hanging above New York. Whoa, what are we thinking? Why did we make this building so tall?

Oh my God. But it's not really, it would be one thing if every time that happened, some kind learned that their venturing was folly and counterproductive. But in fact, what humankind has learned is the opposite because the one time that for centuries we were, we both had culture and almost when extinct basically was the Dark Ages. It was that period of time where the church got its way that they're always going to get and they were like, no, we're in charge now.

When I know more of this bullshit, it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve and whatever the medieval equivalent of that shit was. And it was just like, that was called the Dark Ages. And it just didn't work. And the late motif was if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And don't aspire to anything. Always be grateful, always be humble. That is, as far as our species goes historically,

that's actually how we fuck ourselves. And when we are, yeah, we act like fucking lazy, weird, how could you not have any self-awareness and perspective? How did you become this weird fucking cuckoo bird that only understands the world through their PlayStation and blah, blah, blah. And how could you not see this Pompeii coming? But there's always like, that's just 85% of people. And that's not even like, oh, that's the fat.

And then there's the meat of the Einstein's. It's like, the Einstein's come from that fat. You can't tell the difference between them. That is what we are. We're this species whose emergent behavior that made us better suited for survival than chimpanzees was that we were terrible gamblers. We were compulsive. We're constantly like betting our birthday on the roulette table

with every bit of our life savings. We're just always like, well, I got a good feeling. I warmed this table up, but we kind of like keep winning. This thing that you're talking about now, this is where like if I've had, if it's like put the baby to bed and then we've had enough wine and I'll feel myself being like drunk, I'll think, what a fucking luxury this is to be drunk. Because there could come a time and there certainly was a time

where I hand coordination meant you survived. And that if you were in a space where there was even the luxury of getting so high that you didn't have those things, you must be doing great. Like congratulations. Wow. You're in some kind of, you know, societal blister within which you get to like float around all drunk and fucked up

because the way the way it appears to be is that that is not necessarily a trait that is going to increase your survivability. But that being said, and all the death shit aside, to me, one of the peculiarly disturbing qualities of the experience is the reminder that things as they are do not continue. That expectations do not, on the global level, our expectations of what this summer was going to be like have not been met.

I was going to be a burning man. I was going to go to Burning Man this summer and that sounds trite and stupid or whatever but I was really looking forward to it, man. That's not happening. All the things we have, all our plans, everything we thought we were going to do as a planet, those are now out the window.

Now that being said, another thing we all share on a planetary level is this conceptualization of death itself. And to me, one of the more disturbing things about this is if we take this far enough, the dreamy quality of the experience that we're having, there's something in it that almost is sneakily saying, are you really sure you're going to die? Are you really sure that's even going to happen? You think that the time stream continuum and history and society

and all of the things that you consider to be what is keep going, you think the metric of the quantification methods of science empiricism, you think that's going to keep going? Do you think that's going to stay the same way? Because look, this didn't stay the same way. And I know you can't say because this didn't say the same way. Therefore, the entirety of all physics falls apart. That's what's interesting when they talk about black holes.

They say, we don't know what's going on in that motherfucker. Because inside the black hole, physics falls apart. We can't get in there to look at the data set. Black holes are a representation on the massive scale of the fact that sometimes it just doesn't work out for physics itself. Well, certainly, like when we're talking about viruses, which is it's just a strand of self-replicating RNA. It doesn't even meet our definitions of life in a world where Moss does

and Amoeba do. And yet, it's kind of, I mean, I'm straying outside my wheelhouse, but I'm pretty sure that's how we began. Life started as something that wasn't quite alive but was self-replicating. And so, to your point, it's like, even though a worse friend of yours than I am might say to you, well, that's silly. Just because there's an epidemic doesn't mean that gravity might stop working tomorrow or we might find out gravity never existed.

But I'm your very good friend who is able to yes and you and go, yeah, no, because there is a fundamental unknown about virology. Even though we're 60 years into people spending their entire lives looking at these things under microscopes and studying them and understanding them, obviously no one understands viruses enough that this didn't happen. Like, no one understands them so well that trillions and trillions of dollars aren't currently hanging on the whim of a fucking virus. Believe me, we've had a lot of incentive to be able to predict and control

what we thought we understood in a textbook sense, which is how a virus works. And there is a pinhole that shows that we always just don't quite get it all. And so you may as well contemplate a version of tomorrow where you wake up and your bed is in the middle of a white void and Captain Crunch is standing there at the foot of it and going like, you didn't know you were a serial promotion? And you wouldn't really have a right to be incredulous given all the parts of regular non-Captain Crunch simulation life that you experienced that kept telling you over and over again there is so many things in the universe, so many more things that are dreamt of in your philosophy.

You would play it cool, Dan. I would play it cool. That's what I would do. That is the way that you should at least like, you don't have to like wake up every morning and roll over and kind of almost ruin your girlfriend's day by giving her a big lecture about how grateful you are and how it's so great that you both can walk and then go wash dishes. You can continue to take that for granted and get into the rhythm that will drive the nail into the wood as long as you are always in a state of mind where you're like, but don't forget, when shit takes a left turn, if I go from washing dishes to Captain Crunch like greeting me at the foot of my bed, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to go, what? And blow his mind. I'm going to be like, yeah. You, now that what you just did is this is the perfect description of karma and reincarnation. And that is the idea. The idea is at some point you're going to wake up and Captain Crunch is going to be sitting at the foot of your bed. You're going to be in a Captain Crunch promo. You're not going to have much of a memory of this at all. There might be some dim recollection. You'll more than likely remember, God damn it. I got to cut down on the anhexadrine. I've been snorting in the bathroom when I'm doing my commercial promos for Captain Crunch, because it's giving me all these past life hallucination memory things, but I got to do this commercial.

And then you're going to do your commercial and then you're going to forget this life all together. And that's the idea of reincarnation. There isn't like this death. And then you go to the eternal infinite spa where you hang out in the hot tub and you talk to Jesus and you say, you know, next life, I want to be a Dan Harmon. I'm going to make some awesome comedy shows. I'm going to learn a lot about what it means to be an artist and I'm going to suffer and I'm going to have these basic conditions. I'm going to have an immune. I want to be immunocompromised. So throw me in the pan. None of that shit. It's just what by bam, there you are Captain Crunch commercial. You rationalize why you're there and you keep dreaming forever.

This to me is on one level. If you're someone who's terrified of death might sound like a relief on another level. It's one of the more terrifying qualities of existing as a sentient being because damn it, man. We can all count on death. We can all count on the abyss. We can all count on oblivion. We can all count on the extermination of our nervous system and some beautiful sedation that goes on for infinity. Right? That's what Dawkins says. But what if we don't even get that? Fuck. That's terrifying. That's terrifying. But who are you if you're, if one minute you're Napoleon and then you're Duncan Trussell when Napoleon dies? And I mean, why is that terrifying if it's not even and why is that you? Well, that's that's the thing. There's just a trace residue.

It's the put, you know, like right before you say something, you've got that momentum behind the whatever the thing that's going to come out of your mouth is. You're not sitting there like putting letters together or like try to, you know, like when you're like in VR trying to type into a keyboard to make words form. There's just this instantaneous expulsion of words that comes out of your mouth. And if you have to exert too much energy doing that, well, that's when you're eating shit when you're on stage as a comic. That's when you know it's time when you're writing to stop for a second or get more high or less high. That's when it's time to take a nap when there's that weird like period in between what's inside of you coming out of you. So that that's the karmic atomic sort of quality of being as the individuality. If there is any this kind of like weird with wave that is producing a repetitive form of behavior that you identify.

It's like, that's what I'm like, but you've got a Dan Harmon body around it and all in your house and you're the sum total of the stuff that you've created. You know what I mean? But that's the thing. That's the shell that you keep building into time, so to speak. I know. So they can't like the scary thing about it to you is the idea kind of like is the is the thing that I'm saying is the not scary thing about it, which is the lack of identity. It's the fact that you might be part of a co-op that you that you're like that you're that it's not your consciousness that defines who you are. It's this string of like cosmically unremarkable, like throbbing meta tissue that has a sort of fundamental awareness of how it's been twitching and pulsing through through all these lifetimes. And that you the idea that you you might have been Napoleon and are now you and might then be Jeff Foxworthy after you have a stroke tomorrow. The thing that's upsetting about that to you is is that is that there is a Duncan Trussell through all of those things, but it's like the it's like this base wriggling spasming pathetic kind of thing.

How dare you and I will take wriggling and maybe spasmodic but pathetic Dan, please. No, I know. To me, the terror is irrelevant. I mean, that's the other aspect of the apocalypse. It doesn't give a fuck. You want to be afraid. Great. You want to bow down to it.

Great. You want to take babies on top of a pyramid and like, you know, cut their hearts out and present it to the apocalypse. Who gives no one gives a fuck. That's the book of Job. It's like, who are you? You tiny little fleck of a thing. You know, it doesn't matter. And to me, if you want that to be terrifying.

Great. If you want it to be a sink into absurdism, go ahead. If you want to try to find some Buddhist middle way. Good luck. Enjoy your time. It doesn't matter. What we're talking about is that we have somehow you and I become sentient. And we, when I say become, it implies that you were a non sentient and then decided, I want to start thinking you didn't even do that.

Just suddenly bloop. You're a Harman and now you're here and I'm a Duncan and now I'm here. And this entire life that we had, this series of events each cycle of a year has at this moment, at least temporarily completely changed. And that is a reminder, I guess, that it just don't go like we think it's going to go. And I don't know. To me, that sometimes is terrifying, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, sometimes obvious. I knew a lance. I knew this would happen, by the way.

I just figured if I start doing this podcast with you, someone would mow my grass outside. Wait, oh, is that you? Is it on your side? Or you don't, you didn't know if that was on your side or not. I shouldn't have said anything. I could have blamed it on you. You don't have, you don't have 70 a week gardeners. I do.

Look, forget the whole terrifying thing. I want to know this. How are you? How's your relationship right now? If that's not too intimate a question, how are you dealing with being in a relationship and being in quarantine simultaneously? It's going objectively by my subjective definition of objectively, like, I think it's going objectively well.

I think that from a bird's eye view, like Cody and I are two writers. We were also like homebodies. Like we, we really were not like thriving on extraversion as a couple or as individuals. We, if anything, we were sort of the threat of our relationship is that we shared a sort of shame that we relieved each other of about how much we like just staying in bed and watching Netflix and playing video games and cuddling and whatever. And the pandemic then takes that takes the shame part away because we're not even supposed to be wanting to go out.

Right. So in the general sense, we're nailing it and we're, we're having a great like honeymoon kind of thing. And, and we're, and we're also like, because there's no housekeepers and things, there's like, we're having an awakening to the joy of sweeping and mopping and doing laundry and cooking on a micro level. There's just the fucking fact that there's cabin fever that you know, I don't even, I didn't know I was getting it.

I think that's part of the part of the problem of it is like, well, everything objectively is going our way. So I have no right to be annoyed. I have no right to be frustrated. I have no right to be claustrophobic. And then, you know, we've had a couple of little rows me and me and Cody about like that. It's the age old. If you're 25 years old, this is your life.

Someone has to take out the garbage. Someone's doing dishes like, and everyone has a different philosophy about who's keeping track of when they do it. And so that is happening to us. Like, you know, we're not 25. Like, we don't have like, we just don't have our housekeeper coming over anymore. So there's been a couple of like, you know, don't you dare, I mean, there was a woman in my house when I was 10 years old, who's whose name I will protect.

It rhymes with mom, who my experience with someone in my house that lives with me doing laundry would be that then, oh, great, my clothes is clean, but I never asked for anyone else to do this. And now someone might remind me later, well, I did all the laundry dot, dot, dot. The implication is that you're not pulling your weight around here. And I'm a very shame driven guy. So me too. Truthfully, I've been the cause of any of the spat.

I'm coming to the, to the plate loaded with shame. So, so Cody might be saying something like she honestly might just be like at face value being like, well, I, I made breakfast and then I fed the dogs and then I did this and did that and like, she might just really mean, hey, you didn't notice that not you're taking advantage of me and you should do more. But I will interpret it that way, for instance. And then, you know, I just had that fight last night with my wife in reverse that fight where like, you know, she's taking care of our baby while I work and podcast and do the promos

for the show. And like, she's like, you know, kicking ass. I can't believe it was just amazing. And so she last night said to me, you know, I don't, she said like something like, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm tired after the baby goes down. I don't know about cooking. And I'm in my mind and thinking, oh, we've got this like lamb. And I'm like, oh, there's lamb we should cook.

She took that as me saying you better cook that lamb. It's the apocalypse. And you know, and from that perspective, if that was that what I was saying, it's horrific to imagine taking care of a baby all day long while you're like stone or husband's job is like making a podcast and music or whatever. And then like, it seems like he said, cook my lamb. We don't just see my Mogue fingers are tired from spinning my synthesizer dials. When really what I mean is I like cook.

I will cook the lamb. I like cooking. I enjoy it right now. But fuck that to me is the like retreat nature of being stuck in a house with somebody is you really do have to start checking your projections, you know, and you realize how powerful that ruins your life. Those projections because, you know, yeah, a lot of Cody just wants you to know she cleaned because it feels good when someone you're with is like, good job.

Yeah, taking that as her saying you you slab. Why don't you do anything? Yeah, that's the worst, man. That's like part of it. Not the worst, but yeah. And also the other thing is like Jesus Christ. And I hate, you know, I don't mean to be all like woke or whatever, but this is a real teaching and privilege.

Isn't it? Right? Fucking nanny, man. We have people clean our house. And now we're having to do all the shit that like from a lot of people, that's just what it's like to live. Yeah, that's day to day life. Yeah, it is making me like I'll like, well, I never it's been a six or seven years since

I noticed the floors that I walk on. Yeah, because if they're always clean, then you don't pay attention to the floor in a video game that you're playing because the amount of dirt will never change the game play. And that's the life of a rich person is your floors are video game floors because some other person has to think about dirt accruing on them and keep them free of an amount of dirt. But now it's like, oh, I'll be like, oh, there's 20% more dirt on this bathroom tile.

And if someone doesn't mop it, it's going to continue to get dirtier and dirtier. It sounds like the dumbest thing to characterize as a new experience for 98% of your listeners. But it is like a component that actually for me is going really well. Now, I mean, to go back to me self loathing a little bit because something I thought was really funny is like, remember how I was just saying like, oh, I hate it when people keep the tally of the chores they do. And then all of a sudden they remind you of how much they've done. And I was in my most recent and hopefully final like flare up with Cody where chores came

up. It was so ridiculous. And I'm so grateful that she didn't skewer me more on the hypocrisy of this. Like I was like railing against her about I was really against that phenomenon. I was like, I don't understand when people are like, oh, I did the laundry and I kept track of all this. I don't then I don't want you to do the laundry. I don't, you know, it's like, and then I ran down this list of shit that I do and put

up with as if to demonstrate that I'm not like that. But I had a fucking list. It was like, that was my proof. It was like, I, I don't, I'm not like that. I just live in the moment. So last Tuesday at 115, you were thinking about the fucking hand bones and the freezer. I didn't do nothing because I'm fucking awesome. Don't you see that?

Yes. It was really humiliating and she didn't even fucking. I don't want to generalize, but I do think that women are superior to men in arguments because even though our perception of them is that they, I don't know, we tend to, it's like the autonomic responses are different. And so women through the eyes of men in a couple fight, they, it tends to be like, oh, the women won't drop it. You know what I mean?

And men are like more prepared to like shut down and like, but women never get credit for the fact that they don't, they, they, they play the bigger game. Like they don't actually spike a football that you hand them because they'd rather be happy. Like they see no profit in fucking like, like going like, aha. Yeah. Like when a man like makes an ass of himself at the, at the end of a teta-teta, like the woman has a capability of saying like, okay, good.

He just made a complete ass of himself. That means that maybe there's a resolution here. Like maybe he'll finally fucking like his tantrum will conclude and he'll realize that we're both in this together. Whereas the man was like, I don't know. I mean, I know I'm making these sweeping generalizations, but not it. I, I, I, I, I'm not pretending to believe that there aren't a billion different kinds of people and spectrums of.

Yeah, of course. Gender roles and things. I'm just making Jeff Fox worthy and generalizations, but. Jeff Fox worthies on your mind a lot. I know. What's going on with that? That's what Megatha used to call it. My eye cloud.

She's like, you have six references a week and you just bend them to whatever conversation you're in. Man, you know, that thing, thank God for that thing for sure. And yeah, anytime the bank teller in my mind or the accountant in my mind or the auditor in my mind decides to take over my body and remind the person I'm with of like how much they owe or how much I've invested into this thing or that. It's always an embarrassment and it's hard to stop. You know, your mom probably did that to you.

You know, that's a, that's, that's a generational thing. You know, it's the, it's like the beat. It's, it's how you keep the story going. You know, and. Yeah, but now I'm realizing because of that humiliating experience where I was like, Oh God, it's, it's, yeah, my mom did that, but it might be even more accurate to say everyone does it. And my bookmark in my head is that's a mom thing.

And I do it too, but like I live in some weird twisted lie where when I'm doing it, it's not doing it. And like everyone else is my mom when they do it, but I'm my fucking mom. If when you do it, you're your mom and like, cause I clearly do it. Right. Like it's, it's, and my therapist has been talking to me about trust and I've been able to understand trust as like the foundation of a relationship, but now we're moving into like trust just in general of like, like trust between me and you and this conversation trust

between me and, and employees and employers when we're trying to tackle a creative issue. Like lack of trust is a thing that I will let that I am engaging in when for instance, I say to a writer, you know what, you did fine. Let me just give me the draft and I'll work on it this weekend. Like I'm what I'm whether I'm thinking that that person deserves a break from my tyranny or thinking that they're a hack that can't handle the work that needs to be done. They're both the same thing. It's just me having a, an inability to interface with another human being because I don't, I

just don't have it like a trust like that, that we'll be able to work it out together. Right. And how do you get trust back? How do you do that? I mean, my therapist is just go belongs to the school that is like all you can do and all you have to do is put a road flare on these things and be aware of them and then over time they will change because you'll slow down your cognitive time in those moments instead of them being habit and reflexive.

You will. Yeah. So if you want to putting smoking is the easy example to use. If the problem is that you're smoking before you're even thinking about it and it almost seems therefore to you like you can't do anything about it. But the real problem is that you've, you've, you've achieved a bridge between behaviors like I'm sitting on the couch and now I'm smoking. Like you've eliminated every fucking nanosecond of possible thought about the process.

And supposedly all you really have to do, you don't have to like use all these techniques and like I'm going to chew a toothpick. I'm going to have these things like the best way to do it is just to, you know, systematically increase your awareness of those moments. You don't take it upon yourself to quit smoking. Just start by going, I am a smoker. And every, every time you're having a cigarette, you just go, I am smoking a cigarette. And it's like, that's just, you just need to get those fingers pride into those elevator doors.

And then you, it will just naturally start to widen. Because think about the dilemmas that you have if somebody says I'm pregnant or should we go to the Bee Gees reunion tonight. Like you can stretch a fucking decision into hours and hours of contemplation during which you could feel a million different ways about the Bee Gees. Because it's not, it's not a thing that you've woven into the root system of your treat. Whereas having a beer, having a cigarette, you, you're at risk of patterned behaviors that are just like, boom, this is a freeway. It's a pneumatic tube that just goes, oh, that's great. You know, this is what I love about that.

The implication is that awareness is fundamentally good. That awareness is a fundamentally good. It's like a, it's like, God, do you remember which Star Trek it was where they shot the Genesis seed on the planet and re-grew it and you get like a baby Spock or whatever? You know what I'm talking about? You switch to the Royal U for the last part and you get like a baby Spock as one does. I believe that would be your, I believe you're referring technically to two. Is that two? Well, the two, two, I think at the end of two, two is Wrath of Con.

Yes, it's Wrath of Con, for sure. And at the end of it, Spock dies, I think. Yes. And then three is the search for Spock, I believe. Okay, got it. Right. You get a baby. Watch the seed.

It's the best way to kill off a character and bring the fucking character back. Brilliant. Also Wrath of Con. It's got those ear things. That was, I still remember pulling them out of the aquarium. Those ear mites. It's the guy from Fantasy Island. What's that actor's name?

Ah, the best. But regardless, awareness is like that bomb or the reverse of a bomb. You put awareness on anything and suddenly that thing begins to improve. Even though it might not seem as though it's improving over time, time plus awareness with any behavior, there seems to be a gradual decrease in the negative qualities of the behavior. And eventually either you stop doing the thing or you get better at it. You, you know what I'm saying?

Awareness. It's proof of God's existence. Yes. Well, it's, it's proof of chaos in a really like uplifting way. It's like, oh, there's an order to habitual thought and, but sometimes to our chagrin, like we look at this like it's a bad thing, but it's like Murphy's law. It's like, whenever anything's actually important, there's this weird increase in the odds that something's going to go wrong.

Like every little aspect of your AV project, your microphone settings and all that stuff. But it's like you're paying attention to all of these things. It's not, you're not doing it by rote. And it, it, when you, when every single decision and every single moment is being experienced in the moment, you're increasing the chances of randomness, which is also how you get creativity. It happens like, like as naturally as gravity, something that people in our line of work know is all too hard to achieve sometimes, which is like lateral thought. So if you're, if you're walking from, from one city to another in, in medieval times,

and there's only like foot travel and carts. And so there's like these worn paths that go between the major cities and things like, you can zone out and stare at your sandals and walk between the two cities and you're going to naturally go along the path that you've traveled before and along the path that other people have traveled before. But if you were to stop on a hill halfway through your journey and get out your compass or your, or even just stop and have lunch, the odds of you taking the exact same path you've always taken, they decrease dramatically. And it's not because you're a good inventive, wonderful person who's brave.

It's because you'll have time while you're chewing your sandwich, you'll just be like, actually come to think of it, my friend lives in Silver Lake, not Los Angeles. So I think I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to go 20 degrees different. And that's almost a mischaracterization because that implies that it's our responsibility to make these good decisions. It's, it's just chaos theory. It's like when Jeff Goldblum is explaining the water drop going down Laura Durant's hand, every, if every time the water drop stops instead of just following a path, then every spot along that path, the direction becomes random from there.

So if you wanted to quit smoking or quit abusing people or quit drinking or, or quit being defensive or learn to trust people, the first step to all of those processes is to like, just like put a Post-it note or a road flare or a piece of gum on those moments that will slowly accrue like, well, geez, this is the fifth time I've smoked a cigarette. And the first time I was really good about going, I'm smoking a cigarette. Then, then there came those three times I forgot to do that. Oh, fuck, I fucked up. But it's like, you thought about it a little bit.

And then over time, now by the same process that got you to be a smoker, you're accruing this like ball of gum on the railroad track that leads from you to smoking. And then, and then increasingly this like mechanism starts like every time you smoke a cigarette, you're like, it becomes part of the path that like, there's this speed bump there. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger because you're depositing more awareness on it. And then, and then you're slowing down time and eventually it's so slowed down that it, and again, it happens gradually, but theoretically, you're about to smoke a cigarette and it's so slowed down that you're able to get distracted by a glass of lemonade

or a nap or a fucking hot dog or just like, and like, that is the supposed like path to changing any of your neurology. You keep describing Buddhism, man. That is the car. That's the idea when you. So what you're describing the it's in the in between place is called the bardo in between place. And another word for it is the gap. People even talk about applying that awareness to the space in between out breath and in breath.

That space in between those things is what you are that space in between the decision to smoke and smoking. That is, that's the like, that's where we are. And the whole thing is being clouded by this infinite tapestry of these little decisions that we make and awareness somehow zooms you in is and, you know, it's a. Convenient way to close up the podcast, but maybe that's what this pandemic is for the entire planet. It's forcing us into a gap into a bardo into the space in between the addictive habituations that we're causing the ice caps to melt. Yeah.

Well, think about the think about the whole generation of high school kids that like, I mean, remember when you were in high school and it was like, your fucking life was about. I mean, literally life and death. I mean, ask any person that went to Columbine like, like life and death were at stake about things like what pants you were going to wear on Monday, let alone if you were prepared for your final exams in biology class, your college entrance exams at all of society in total lockstep about how fucking important Monday morning was for your gym class, your math class.

And and and imagine the psychic jarring that has happened to this generation of kids that like they found out no matter what anybody says, actually, there's always the possibility that it all turns out to be worth nothing. And my principal could be lying to himself when he says up and down, you're never going to if you don't apply yourself in English class, you're never going to have a future because usually how the world works. And it turns out that motherfucker doesn't know how the world works. There's going to be an equal number of people who are destroyed by that experience, but there's going to be so many. There is such a such a healthy thing to draw from that, because it's not a good thing that you and I, when we were 17, felt the way we did about the importance of our schooling.

It was too much. It was too extreme. It was like we're still we're still living with scars of it. It does not fucking matter that we graduated high school. God damn it. We may be exceptions to the rule, but like my high school diploma has not been seen by anybody at DreamWorks. Like no one knows whether I dropped out of high school or not. And it didn't matter that I went to college or that I dropped out.

But anyways, whatever. This is a breath for everybody, including parents of those kids. Like how much grief have you put into your kids' soccer league, their bowling game, their haircut, like whatever parents get out of their kids about these days. Obviously, what we're all learning here is that it's possible for none of that to really matter. And it's interesting that you boil it down to like when you were talking about that, I was like, oh fuck, when's the last time in between inhaling and exhale, I actually stopped and made a decision to exhale and remembered that it's my decision.

I mean, it's kind of not my decision, but it's I can. Yeah, you can like stop and like change timelines entirely by exhaling at a different time than you were gonna. Holy shit, Dan. I love you, man. I cannot wait to see you in the flesh again. Thank you so much for giving me time during the pandemic. It's always mind blowing to talk to you. Thank you for this.

I miss you so much, buddy. I mean, like we were seeing each other less before the pandemic, so I'm still good with the pandemic because if we wait for our schedules to make it work, it doesn't work. But yeah, I've really been looking forward to seeing you again and talking to you and I appreciate you reaching out. Thank you, Dan. Tell Cody I and maybe not you. You're immune to compromise, but maybe you could get her to go unplug your Tesla. Let's keep you think I'm gonna.

Oh man, what if I got Corona from the handle of my give it a couple of weeks. Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it. See you. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. That was Dan Harmon, all of us, you need to find Dan from www.globesonightgospel.com and much thanks to Adelaide for sponsoring this episode of DTFH. That was the episode of Dan from www.globesonightgospel.com

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