Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 436: Emil Amos

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Emil Amos, musician, writer, and philosopher, re-joins the DTFH! You can follow Emil on twitter, and hear his music on the Holy Sons site. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Upstart - Visit upstart.com/duncan and see how Upstart can help you with your debt. Hello Fresh - Visit hellofresh.com/duncan90 and use code DUNCAN90 at checkout for $90 off, including free shipping!

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. It's my dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Greetings, my dear loves. What you are about to hear is a super deluxe, hyper-zingered, double-quadrophonic,

ear-blasting joy beetle launched out of the horn of plenty right into those sweet, waxy ear holes that have been one of the main receptacles for wisdom in your life. Oh, you are about to get a swarm of joy. Shotgun right into that trembling little brain of yours. That gelatinous, creepy, gooey blob of consciousness is about to get rained upon by the sweet,

delightful, honey-flavored, linguistic storm, which used to be one of my favorite New Age albums of this conversation. Yeah, am I tooting my own horn? It's the only horn I got. This is a great podcast. Emil, my best friend, we went to college together. He has never stopped blowing my mind.

We traveled to India together. We have been the streets of Varanasi. We have thrown Frisbees in Dharamsala. I think we threw Frisbees there, probably not. To be honest, I never liked Emil's Frisbee skills. I went there with my, David McClain, who's also been on the podcast. They're just more athletic than me,

which isn't saying much, but God damn it, I just always felt super insecure trying to catch a Frisbee. I'm not gonna unload on you here. I'm not gonna have some weird breakdown here in front of you about my terrible dexterity when it comes to catching, flying discs, the weird ego trembling that happens every time. Somebody right next to my studio is incredibly unhealthy.

I like to imagine that the almost constant stream of ambulances is always going to the same place and then sort of taking them to the hospital and then bringing them back. The point is, this is a great episode, and, oh geez, hey, waving at the firetruck. Good luck. This is a great episode, and is there fucking more coming?

You don't wanna be annoyed by ambulances or firetrucks, you know, because anytime you hear a firetruck or you're hearing like, it's the worst day of somebody's life, probably, but that instantaneous like thing that happens when you hear it, the wailing of it, the beeping, you gotta ask yourself, is that necessary? Cause you know, if I were zipping by in an ambulance

or police car, I would honk as much as possible whether there was someone in my way or not, just out of a combination of boredom and a sort of like Freudian ejaculatory desire, the beeping of the horn is like me coming, the great phallic symbol of the firetruck with its long ladder slowly rising up, that I'm climbing up and down,

essentially making love to the fire with my hose. I would just honk all the time. Anyway, the point is I don't wanna be annoyed by firetrucks or ambulances. I wanna be the kind of person that spontaneously erupts with some kind of like compassionate heart trembling. They actually did a study that I read about where they were sort of examining

the brains of meditators. By the way, anytime this happens, it's like one of the strangest ways that Western thinking interacts with spirituality, which is like, let's study your brain to see what happens when you meditate. But they did that. They got some Tibetan monk and MRI machine,

played like the sounds of, I don't know, cats getting attacked, children crying, to see like what part of their brain is activated by sounds of horror, essentially like they did the clockwork orange thing, but to a Tibetan monk. And they found that the part of the brain that was activated is the same part of the brain that's activated in mothers

when they hear their babies crying. Only there wasn't any kind of specificity to this activation. Just any sort of anything that indicated something was in trouble would activate this compassion center. I don't have that. When I hear a fire truck go by or an ambulance go by, I just feel like my ass tightens a little bit

and I just think, fuck, somebody's probably clumsy. Isn't that rotten? I can't help it. It's like, what are you gonna do? It's the first thing that bubbles up out of the deep oozing swamp of my subconscious. I haven't gone down in there yet to dredge out whatever rotting corpse,

whatever sad thing is sort of decomposing down there and belching out these swampy bubbles of selfishness. But I'm sure one day I will. One day I'll send a team in there and do that awful thing they do in lakes when they're looking for a body and dredge it up, vomit it out maybe in some ayahuasca session. It's pretty interesting, isn't it?

I'm gonna get to this podcast, but it's pretty interesting that like there's apparently a difference in puking when you've had ayahuasca versus puking when you've had too much booze. Like when I've had too much booze and I'm vomiting, I'm not thinking like I'm getting my darkness out symbolically via this puke.

I'm just, I've poisoned myself, but people who take ayahuasca and vomit, they claim some kind of like relief that goes way beyond getting the sticky goo of ayahuasca, which I've heard just tastes like absolute shit. And once after a show, somebody gave me a jar of something they claimed was ayahuasca, like a liquid in Tupperware.

And I couldn't say no, what are you gonna deny ayahuasca? You should deny ayahuasca from, if someone just offers it to you in Tupperware, but I took it back to the hotel. I'm just curious, opened it up and smelled it. And it was truly the vilest stink, like probably the way like it smells underneath Gollum's balls.

Just like you've found some spindly power-addicted cave goblin, pulled them out of the cave and just lifted up their balls and stuck your nose right underneath into the fungal mat that of like greasy goblin pubic hair and Gollum's sweat. It smelled terrible, I flushed it down the toilet. If you're listening, I'm sorry, but what was I gonna do? I had to fly, am I gonna try to go through the TSA

with a Tupperware of ayahuasca? You can't even get water through there. What was I gonna do, take it that night? Buy myself in the hotel room, watch forensic files while communing with ayahuasca goddess? I flushed it and I did feel guilty flushing it down the toilet, I did. But then also I thought, why?

Who do you think I am? I'm not a freak, I'm not just, I don't just slurp back ayahuasca. I'm not that free with my life. I'm not like the Hunter S. Thompson of ayahuasca. I won't even eat chocolate after five. We've got a great podcast for you, friends. Emil is such a genius.

And in past episodes with Emil, we've talked about music and we've talked about our friendship, but I think this is the first time we ever really took a deep dive into a specific topic which is Camus and his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. You should order the book if you haven't read it yet. Camus is a really interesting person who didn't identify as a philosopher.

Apparently didn't identify as an existentialist. I found this out after this conversation that you're about to hear, because I was like just doing a little research on who Camus was, but he did write a really brilliant essay which is considered one of the great works of existentialism. He was friends with Jean-Paul Sainte

for a little bit in Paris, I believe. And they had a, I think they probably had a pretty intense effect on each other. And so he wrote this brilliant essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, which I've been reading. And I haven't read it since I was in college and I believe Emil and I were in a class on existentialism together where we studied this book.

And so this is a conversation about The Myth of Sisyphus, suffering, what I've heard called the great sad. I found that, I think on a subreddit with people writing about this thing that Camus called absurdity. And I love it, it's really wonderful. And especially as someone who enjoys studying Buddhism, finding these interesting places where the two connect,

I love it. And that's what this conversation is about, but it's about much more than that. So I really hope that you will take the journey with us because if you stop listening to this halfway through, you will leave with a sense that your fire truck hasn't been jerked off to completion. We're gonna jump right into it, but first this.

A big thank you to Upstart for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. If you're like me, then when you were in college and got your first credit card application, you thought it was hilarious that they were crazy enough to offer you a line of credit for whatever it was, maybe $4,000 if you were me. And then you thought it'd be funny to use that money

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I hope you'll become one if you haven't yet. I don't blame you for not wanting to or just hearing it. Maybe you're like, fuck you. Maybe that's just the first thing that pops out of your swamp. Fuck you. Stop mentioning your Patreon, you capitalist fuck.

But I really hope you'll join the Patreon. We just had our family gather and we have them every Friday. We have these wonderful conversations that sort of zigzag around a lot of different things. Heartbreak today. Why someone wondered why I seemed to be so butt hurt over J. Krishnamurti and it's fun talking about that.

We talk about mysticism. We talk about shitting ourselves a lot. Most importantly, we recite the seven verses of Examexarax, the great Lord of the Southern Keep who will return one day and when he does, oh, there will be much birthing blood as history is vanquished eternally. Head over to Patreon.com slash DTFH and subscribe.

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into some infinite forest, flying towards the beautiful sound of the Godhead's flute as it plays near some babbling brook. Patreon.com slash DTFH. Okay, pals, here we go. Emol Amos is a musician. He's a writer and once you listen to this, you'll realize he's a philosopher

and a dear soul who I feel so lucky to be friends with. All the links you need to find Emol are gonna be at dunkatrustle.com or just go, just Google Holy Sons or even better, just go to Twitter and follow Emol underscore Amos, A-M-O-S. Let's dive in. ["Welcome to the Dunkin' Trustle"]

["Welcome to the Dunkin' Trustle"] ["Welcome to the Dunkin' Trustle"] Emol, welcome back to the DTFH. Hello. Yeah, boy, good to see you. Good to see you. This is sort of, I think this is gonna be different than our other conversations in the sense

that we've got kind of a plan. And let me just introduce the listeners too. So I've been reading, I'm done with it now, but I spent, I don't know why I'm even doing this to myself, but I've been trying to get up at like 5 a.m. Cause my brain seems to be work, that's like whatever like brain damage I've inflicted from a lifetime of taking psychedelics.

If that, I don't know if that's real or not, has, doesn't seem to like happen in the morning. Like I can really think clearly in the morning. So I've been reading Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. And you are someone who has a better grasp of existentialism than anyone I've ever met. And so as I've been reading it, I've had all these like moments of wanting to call you,

but it's like five fucking a.m. You know, only absolutely do that, I would seem insane. But yeah, so I, this is a, I just wanted to sort of talk with you about it. And I know we just talked about it, but do you want to introduce like the main idea in that essay by Camus, or do you want me to? I'd like you two because I want to know why you are reading it.

Well, honestly, I have no, no real reason, probably the best reason to read it is for no reason at all. But you know, it was just on my shelf. I remember like getting off on it in college and then wanting to see like, why did I let, why is this stuck in my head? Cause I really don't remember too much of it. And so then I jumped into it and you know, it's amazing

because basically the premise of the thing is that we live in a world of absurdity, meaninglessness, like just a kind of like, what does he describe it? He describes it as a thing that maybe you don't notice it at first, but then when you see it, you can't unsee it. So, you know, he kind of like mentions like the foreground background problem.

You know what I mean? Like we're constantly on stage. We don't get to blend in like some nice placid shrub or something. And then also he talks about, and you know, again, this is Camus, French, no doubt on a shit ton of speed. And he talks about those moments of just feeling completely alienated from your home,

your life, your universe, just that general sense of like, I don't fucking belong here. This, whatever this place is, is not for me. And so this is the confrontation with what he calls absurdity. And the essay is examining why you wouldn't just kill yourself if you experience that. And he breaks like the possible suicides

into two types, physical and philosophical. And then it kind of wraps up with this beautiful idea that we live for rebellion. You know, like in the midst of the absurdity, you know, we're still, we're pushing against it. That's what we've got. We smile at the curse of the gods. And thus the symbol of Sisyphus,

pushing the fucking boulder up the hill and letting it roll down forever. It's like, yeah, the gods cursed him to do that, but where he fucks the gods is he's still happy. That's just crazy. So do you remember it? Does that ring a bell with you? Yeah, I'm actually having like,

I just had like a some sort of midlife crisis while you were talking. That was really weird. I just remembered, yeah, I just retrieved my entire memory of eighth grade. Like it's one of the great mysteries of my entire life and it disturbs the fuck out of me because I think I became who I am now in eighth grade.

And every day I drive by my junior high school on the left. It's called Phillips in Chapel Hill. And every time I look at it, I can remember little bits of, okay, that's where that kid lived. That's where I would walk after school, blah, blah, blah. But I can't retrieve eighth grade. I can remember seventh grade.

And as you were talking, I remembered like how I became myself. Really? What was it? You just fucking freaked me out. I don't know. That's wild. It's so strange. God, that was disturbing.

So in eighth grade, I came back to school and I met this kid named Bear. And Bear was like sort of like my bodyguard innocence cause he was bigger and he had a Mohawk and huge boots and a bomber. And if anybody fucked with me, he would literally like stomp their face into a curb, you know?

Wow. So we had this kind of like weird outside underdog bond. We never talked about it necessarily, but as I got into like hanging out with him more and more, he, I guess my life was changing. I became who I am now. And I, God, it just all came back to me. But so I'm gonna tell you why it is involved

with this whole thing. So he was the first person that played me like the cure, you know? He was sitting in his bedroom and the whole universe is accessible to you through this friend's bedroom. Right. And so we got into, dude, it felt like that.

And I know, I wanna hear if you had a friend like this, I'm talking about, we all had like certain best friends every couple of years and for the rest of our life, until we die. You mean like the friend that introduces you to new stuff? Yeah, but also the kid that like might've been like way more mainstreamy than you, but like still stayed up late with you

and wanted to talk to you about your life and your mind. And like the deepest shit ever, right? Sure. God, it's like emotional, sorry. But so, so Bear was like my best friend and he tried to kill himself, actually. I had just gotten into Nick Drake because of Sebado. So, so Sebado covered Nick Drake

and I went into the record store downtown and I said, who is it? Who is Nick Drake? It was so crazy. I mean, that was the beginning of a, the very beginning of ninth grade when that happened. And this guy, the guy across the desk, you have to understand like nobody had ever even heard of Nick Drake.

So the guy across the desk said, Nick Drake was a songwriter from the UK in 1973. He, you know, blah, blah, blah, he killed himself, all this shit. And I just happened to ask the right guy. I just actually asked like a scholar just randomly. I still remember the guy's face. He ended up marrying one of my friends.

Like that guy changed my life in two seconds and he'll never know, right? Yeah. And so I went home and I, and I ordered, or I like, I figured out how to get the Nick Drake box set and I opened it up and it said that when he killed himself, he had the mythosophist next to him, right? Oh, shit.

Yeah. I didn't know that. That's crazy. So my little brain, my little eighth, ninth grade brain was just like, I don't know where I'm going in life, but this is like meant to be, you know, like I'm absorbing all this information that's way above my head.

I have no idea what any of this is about. And so then it's like so funny, but when Bear tried to kill himself, I didn't know what to do because I wasn't deep enough to deal with it. Like I just didn't even know how to react. I didn't know how to like what to say. I didn't know why you tried to kill yourself.

I had no idea. He never told me why he did that. And I, I was a shallow little kid. You know, I was, I was just like confused by it all. It was above my head. And so. But not shallow. You just like, how do you even deal with that?

I don't think shallow is the right word. It's just, how the fuck do you deal with your friend trying to kill himself at any age? I don't know. I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't feel it. I had no reference point for it. And I was such a little idiot. This is, this is crazy.

My mom or somebody drove me to the hospital, see him in his hospital bed. Yeah. And I brought him the myth of Sisyphus. Oh, God damn it. And I don't know why. I didn't know what the book was about. Do you think he tried to read it?

How embarrassing. And I mean, it's just so funny, dude. I'm not sure if it had his the best gift to give someone who just tried to commit suicide or the worst gift. I just, that's when you were reading, or no, when you were describing the opening of the myth of Sisyphus, that's what came to me.

I was like, oh my God, I retrieved all this information. It just fucking blew my mind. But it wouldn't be, you know, I would go all the way through high school, which was very difficult. And then I took a year off. And then I got to college. But even at the beginning, I didn't know I could learn anything that was even applicable

at that fucking school. I was just so down on it and so checked out and wanting to just smoke my troubles away or whatever. And so my first teacher was John Casey. He was basically my mentor, whatever you call it. You get like a counselor. Yeah. And so I got lucky again, right?

I got this guy who changed all of our lives. But he was not just my teacher. He was actually like a sign to counsel me. So if I had trouble, I had to go to him. I actually had to go to him. And at first, he just didn't like me very much. I remember his eyes. I remember his tone.

He did not like me. Why? And I don't know. Again, I felt shallow. I felt like a stupid little kid that was kind of wasting time. He'd asked the class a question, you know, a philosophical question. I had no idea what kind of answer he was looking for.

I just felt out of my element. We're talking about the first week I got to school. He was intimidating, that guy. Like he was very intimidating, very intense. Didn't he have long hair, mustache? He was like he had the like, you felt like you were around like part shaman, part like Taoist sage or something. And like he was just a genius.

So there was that too. Yeah, there was like this, it's like he's part Schopenhauer. He's like got this grizzled, heavy fucking vibe. But then he's a Taoist sort of thinking master, you know, who had won the US debate championship three years in a row and then quit because nobody could touch him, you know? Yeah. So there was like this sense of like, fuck,

he's like that dad, I'll never please. You know what I mean? Yep. And then somewhere in there, he decided to teach a class called existentialism. And you know, this is starting to be so long ago that I can't tell you the breakdown, the frame by frame situation where I discovered this and then it led to that.

And I don't remember where Hermann Hess came in. I don't remember where Buddhism came in, but somewhere in those books, I saw that there was like a solution to everything I've been going through. So anyway, when I met you, that was when we were like trying to solve all this shit, you know? Yeah. So that was when things started to like look up, you know?

Yeah, for me too. Yeah. So anyway, that's the story of how that shit got put in my brain and it was sitting there on the shelf kind of like the way you walked over and just pulled it off the fucking shelf, you know? Yeah. It's just sitting there and you're like, oh, on this day,

as I experience the worst pain that you can feel, maybe this book on the shelf has something about that for me or something. Yeah. So here comes Kimu, right? And he is now your, he's like your older brother or something and he's gone through this thing too. And he's gone through it and he's kind of worked it out

on paper. So you're like, holy shit, you can do this stuff. You can actually like apply your mind and like maybe potentially solve the fucking pain, you know? Yeah. And so when meeting you, we were both in a sort of race to get there, you know? We were like, dude, I need to fix this situation.

Yeah. So that is basically all I was going to say. But it brought me to this point with you where like we wanted to, I guess you could say it was almost competitive, but yet you're like in the same arena together. So as hard as- Well, I was jealous of you. I mean, like you're like this like genius, like kid, younger than me, not by much, younger.

You're like, you know, recording incredible music. But then on top of that, you're like, you were just digesting some of this stuff that all, I would say only now am I like kind of like able to wrap my mind around it. Because I don't, I think that if, if I was talking about it back then, I think I might have been a little like phony in pretending to understand it more than I did, you know?

I don't, like, but you were like, you were like a sponge soaking it up. That was the craziest thing to watch. Because, you know, it's easy to read that shit. You could just skim it or whatever and pretend you know what it's saying. But there's a big difference. That's like swishing some medicine and then like secretly

spitting it out. But there's a big difference in like actually absorbing it, you know, all the way through. And you, I saw you go through that. I've never seen anything like it in my life. Yeah. Much thanks to HelloFresh, not just for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH, but over the years that I've been

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Well, other night we went to dinner and you were like telling me the story of us standing in the woods and the snow or something. Yeah, when you were the first person to introduce me to Buddhism and I'm sure I may have heard of it or whatever, but the way we were on acid and you, and it was snowing and so you just said, life is suffering. That's called, that's called dukkha.

And I'm hearing it because this is how dumb my brain is. It's snowing. So I'm like thinking to myself, what the fuck is it? I was trying to think of the classes you were taking. And I'm like, and then you go, the cause of suffering is attachment. And I'm thinking like, is this some kind of Eskimo tribal religion?

Because I'm so fucking cold. But because you didn't call it Buddhism, I started, I took it in as in a much more pure way, like I didn't know what it was that you were talking about. And because of that, it was like you dropped this thing into my soul. It just went whoop in. And it's to this day, it's still rippling in there.

Because it was a huge moment for me. But wait, before we keep going, what happened to Bear? I saw him in a Target parking lot once. And he was like, he kind of looked like a shell of his former self. I got the sense he was on some sort of heavy meds. And he had sort of abandoned all those sort of idealistic, ambitious, rebellious things we had been playing around with.

He was such an important person because he never showed me anything. He never explained anything to me. But he had the cassettes of he had a guar cassette. He had a youth of the day cassette. He had a GBH cassette. It was like he was a walking black and white photo of an English punk with the makeup and the Mohawk

and the safety pins. And you got to understand back in the late 80s, that was a pretty heavy fucking thing to front on people visually when you walk down the street. And I mean, I saw him break other skateboarders' noses in front of me and shit. Because he really was living. It wasn't a pose.

It was like he actually felt that volatile. And I was a good kid that was scared of everything when I was really little. You know, like the idea of sex or the idea of alcohol when you're fucking seven years old or something. It's terrifying. You see your drunk uncle stumble in the room and turn on Playboy.

The whole thing is like, you're just like, dude, not only is this stuff not intended for me, I don't even want it yet. I don't understand it. And so when meeting him, I guess, was interesting because I had to think more about who I was and like my behavior and what it said about me and my vanity and my kind of like,

I don't know, my protective shell that I had. It's like he didn't really have that as much. And it went to some logical conclusion where he imploded. And I still don't know anything about that, why that happened with him. There was some darkness in his family. You could definitely sense from his father.

I don't know if it was just a genetic history of depression, but that's all I can really tell you. I don't know where he is at, but I feel like he was in Asheville because that's where the target was that I saw in the parking lot. Isn't that weird? Trying to make sense.

Maybe, yeah. So anyway, it's so entertaining for me to see you want to go back to that stuff. You don't think there's any unconscious divining rod that's led you back to that book? You think it really is arbitrary? Oh, no. I mean, no, I don't think it's necessarily arbitrary.

I think it's like a nice sort of, like approaching it after having spent a long time doing as deep a dive as I have been able to into Buddhism. It's this nice kind of like, it's a balance or something. It's cool to see the Western mind seemingly discovering some of these ideas without maybe even coming into contact with them.

I mean, I'm sure Camus must have heard something of Buddhism, but that's like, so I guess, not to like get too like annoyingly technical here, like in, this is like the main thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is, so in Buddhism, you have this, the first noble truth, which is generally translated life is suffering, but actually the real translation is there is suffering,

not life, there is suffering. So it's a general sort of, acknowledgement of this kind of sense that humans have that things just aren't great here. And the word, as I've heard, it translates into, one of the ways it translates is wobbly wheel. It's like riding a cart with a wobbly wheel here. So this is a place where we are constantly thwarted

in our attempts to basically, in the most dire sort of articulation of it, there's no pleasure here. And if you do find even the smallest bit of pleasure, then that pleasure is not going to last. And thus is really just a kind of pain. And whereas in existentialism and Camus, sort of articulation of this problem, he calls it absurdity.

And the confrontation with absurdity, but that's what I wanted to ask you about. Do you think it's the same place that they've both sort of tuned into and given it different names? Yeah, I remember being really frustrated that the existentialist, the French ones especially, just didn't talk about Buddhism much.

They just never mentioned it. So I remember reading book after book after book in, I guess it was freshman year or something. And just always kind of waiting for somebody to draw the parallel and explain the parallel. And they never really got around to it much. There are isolated circumstances, but one thing you have to remember about those books

and about those guys in the 40s is that there's a lot of like dated sort of detritus from that time. And when you try to get into a book by Sartre, especially compared to Kimu, there's like a pretty heavy sort of chip on his shoulder. He feels like he's coming into a cultural situation and he's like, I'm not asking you guys, I'm telling you guys, there's no God, right?

Yeah. And you can feel there's this hardcore agenda. And you have to think that at the time to sell a book, there was a certain sense of marketability that they were addressing, but they also had a war to fight against traditionalists. Right? Right. So Kimu and Sartre coming into the battle

the way they did and kind of wanting to put their name down, put their flag down when you're young and you're reading those books, it's a little weird, because you're reading books from the 40s and shit and you're like in the 90s. And so our life is just completely has a different pace to it, the debates of the day are completely different

when the Clinton was in office. Yeah, we're downstream. We also were downstream from if you want to call it work or whatever that they did. And because of folks like them, for better or for worse, it did change where we're at right now because of their philosophy sort of making its way into just about everything.

Right. And you sort of as you're reading it in college as we were and as you are now picking up the book, you're kind of thinking about all the background and the context of the situation because you're like, Jesus, these people were rock stars, like straight up rock stars. And like nobody's like that now in philosophy, you know?

I mean, honestly, if they were, I wouldn't know about it because I'm still reading the classics. Like, I don't know, I wouldn't know. There might be someone out there frothing at the bit or something, but I mean, that's what's so cool. That's what's so fun. You know, I never could get into Sartre, but somehow I just love Camus because like there,

you know, Sartre seemed more like, I don't know, like a cudgel. You know what I mean? He was brutal. Whereas Camus, there's a similar brutality, but he's got like this nice poetic sort of like, it's, you know, velvet glove thing happening. You know, it's like really pretty and it's like,

but also, you know, really intense to read. And there is that exertion, that extra exertion in there as he like pushes back against cultural forces that we don't have to push back against so much these days. Exactly, you know, yeah, like everybody sort of has always thought of Camus as like the softer, almost like more like some sort of Leonard Cohen figure, you know, in the trench coat or something poetic

and romantic somehow. And then Sartre is more like Johnny Rotten or something. He's just gonna spit in your face, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't want Sartre's weird toad spit in my face. But Camus, it's like, you know, he's like giving you, he's like, he's put some, you know, he's got some sugar around the medicine, but not much.

And, but again, I want to get into it. So I want to know what you think. Like, do you think it's just too much of a generalization to say that the first, the duke is synonymous with Camus' absurd absurdity? Is it the same thing? Did they both like pick up on the identical problem and or not?

Am I just trying to like make two things meet that don't belong together at all? No, I think in the end, one would have to admit that they're almost, almost identical in a way. And there's certain reasons why I think I could say that with confidence, but the differences between them, I think you could immediately somewhat write off as semantic, like lost in translation things, right?

So even if some of it's written in French or Nietzsche's in German or, you know, the Buddhism is like completely not, like you said, I mean, it's not life is suffering. Like those are, those are insane connotations that a lot of hardliners get wrong, almost like somebody who watches too much Trinity Broadcasting Network and takes Jim Baker

at his word or Pat Robinson or something. It's like some of those people really need it to be self-flagellating. Some of those people need it to be, you know, they need to hate themselves or whatever. So they'll like take the connotations and they'll twist the knife into them and they'll make it a really negative kind of thing.

But I think that John Casey, our sort of our mentor in this department, he would often say, you know, you can be black hat, but there is a white hat option at all times. And that's part of the nature of absurdity is like, you can see this in a more optimistic light, any of these tenants, right? Yeah.

So, but I think to understand what those guys were trying to bring to sort of the, literally those French coffee shops or like young people, they were trying to, like the Beatles, they were like the Beatles were trying to say all you need is love or whatever. Yeah. They were trying to bring a certain paradigm shift, right?

And so where Sartre and Camus meet in the middle is, I think that they wanted to develop a world in which you can judge people by and or talk to them about the sphere of their personal responsibility, right? Yeah. And this goes back to what you were saying about, they had to establish a talking sphere in which heaven didn't exist because traditionalists

and religious people could weasel out backwards of any philosophical conversation with them because they had heaven and things like these devices, right? And that's what Camus called philosophical suicide, which is the act of weaseling out of the problem of suffering by doing this weird extra math to produce some potential relief

in a fantasy realm was just the same thing as killing yourself because you've essentially, I guess, anesthetized yourself or diluted yourself or produced some kind of like obvious, sad, silly, lazy mechanism where you could imagine that you're, I guess, procrastinating you just think that you could like, you're playing this like wild pretend game

that, oh, well, I am suffering because this is what God wishes for me here on earth. But when I die, there will be some great reward. Or he, his critique of Kierkegaard was Kierkegaard. And again, I would have to go back and read Kierkegaard to really understand his critique. And I really enjoyed the part when he's like just smacking around various like existentialists.

It was really, it's really funny. It's like a diss track. You know what I mean? It's like a form of diss. But it's like with Kierkegaard, the Kierkegaard is saying something about the confusion is the sign of God's omnipotence or something. Forgive me, Kierkegaard experts out there.

Like, you know, Kierkegaard is saying, and thus faith is the only way to connect. It's like, are you confused? Great, you've witnessed the power of the divine. And so now all you need to do is have faith. That's it, the leap of faith. And Camus was like, that's suicide. That's sad suicide.

And then he talked about who's Cyril. And that was where I went and looked up who's Cyril and tried to understand it and couldn't at all and couldn't understand the critique. But it was a similar identification of there being some sort of imaginary mechanism that you could use to sort of, I don't know, numb this problem of suffering.

Yeah, so yeah, and clearly any sort of religion that created a reason for your suffering that involves something you can't see in a fantasy realm was just a sad way to avoid the problem. Right. I think when you read Sartre, so partially I'm trying to tell you in a way, like Sartre's not as far away from the things

you like about Camus, you might think they're like, they're kind of joined at the hip in this war that they're trying to sort of put down their defense line and say like, listen, you can't really make this, you can't budge us back. This world in which it looks like we're trying to rip away your God. We're trying to say there is no God.

They were sort of the harbingers of the God is dead thing because they were standing on the shoulders of Nietzsche, but they were like, they really made it a cultural war to destroy the notion of God. And it looked really punk and it looked really a cervic and it looked really offensive. Yeah. But what they were trying to do was establish a world

in which we can have integrity. Yes. So they were working very, very hard to try to explain how an individual in the modern world can have integrity. Integrity, which is something that Shakespeare and a lot of people worked on, tried to put forth, but you can't really have integrity or strength of character when you're just a subordinate pawn

in this massive story that you're referencing that's called the Bible or something. If you're standing on the street corner, we did many, many times and had arguments with pastors and Hare Krishnas. I mean, that was one of our fucking favorite things to do on a Saturday, essentially. Yeah, well, either argue with each other over it

or find someone else to argue with about it. Well, because it's a really fun argument to have. And I think it's especially fun to have when you're like, not that like, I think now that I'm like 47, my experience with suffering is double what it was when we were hanging out. Not that the content or the form of suffering might change, but the content kind of stays the same.

So I have a different feeling about it now than I did back then. And I think it's so important for people to really like stop ignoring the reality. If you're suffering, I mean, isn't that kind of what Camus was saying is like, all the, forget the God stuff. It's just like, why are you ignoring this?

It's not making it go away. You're still suffering. Whatever method you wanna use to ignore it is not working. The only way to like, and please correct me if my interpretation is wrong here, the only way to really be alive is to look this thing right in the eye and stop thinking that tomorrow

all of a sudden it's gonna change. Cause it's not, at least it's not by ignoring it. You don't- Well, what you're talking about is to get to the point you're even talking about, like you said, we're sort of downstream from these things, these frontiers they had to argue, but to get to that point,

they had to first establish that you're alone. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they had a lot of trouble doing that because back then, you know, popular culture was still, I mean, I've heard still, somebody's tried to tell me like America's still something like 85% Christian or something the other day. I'm like, that can't be, is that possible?

Well, I mean, I don't know. I, you know, I love, I listen to Christian radio, I learn a lot from it. I love a lot of it, you know, but then every, you know, every once in a while, you just realized like, usually it's like the person, or like the preacher is like, you know, it's all, you're anytime you're like hearing anyone talk about

Christianity from a pulpit, you know, usually it's like the personality of that person is warping these wild ideas in a way that fits there, what they think is cool. You know, there's something I love when you hear like Billy Graham or the hardcore preachers, who are just like, it's not what you want it to be. I mean, it's like you want it to be all like,

this is that and sweet. It's not like that at all. You're doomed and there's only one way out. Whether or not I agree with that, it doesn't matter. But something about, I think that is where it's kind of adjacent to what these people are addressing, which is like, it's just not, here's the bottom line. It's not the way you want it to be.

And, oh God, I'm listening to this Chogium Trumper Rinpoche audio book called, I think it's called Smiling at Fear. And it's like, it's exactly what we're talking about. Like what he's saying is, he said, many of us feel like we've been very bad girls and boys and that feeling is resulting from our inability to face the true landscape

of what we are and look into all the dark corners. Because you know what I mean? Like, there's like the reality of what we're like, we're imperfect beings. I think that's what gets translated in Christianity's original sin. And, but people do a lot of work

to try to ignore those parts of themselves. You know, and not, there's a lot of like, especially these days, it's popular to be a kind of exhibitionist, confessionalist or something. But that's not what he's talking about, you know, the cool stuff like, you know, yeah, you know, I was a sex addict or whatever, you know, but like, no, the real shit

that you don't even want to admit to yourself about yourself. And, you know, the reason that you're so, that many people are constantly terrified is because they haven't done that work. They don't know what they are. You know what? You remember one thing you used to talk about that I loved and maybe you could talk about it now

is the thing that happens when you're standing at the edge of a cliff. Do you remember that? I do, yeah. Can you talk about it? Well, you gotta tell me, finish the anecdote the way you remember it. The anecdote is I remember it as you would talk about it.

Yeah, this cool way of talking about how you're standing at the edge of the cliff and because you don't really know yourself, there's a type of fear that appears inside of you. Some inkling of dread where you think, am I about to throw myself off this cliff? And, you know, the reason you think that is because you don't know yourself that well.

You don't fully understand who you are and that blind spot produces within it the possibility that you really might jump. Am I wrong? Is that? No, it sounds familiar, but I have absolutely no memory of that. God, you were so good at talking. I remember the first time you were saying,

I was like, oh my fucking God, it's so true. That extra sense when you're standing at the edge of a cliff, it's not, people say, I'm afraid of heights. It's like, you're not really afraid of heights. You're afraid of yourself. Wow. Because, you know, because you don't know that if right at that moment,

that thing that in the past has made you do the things that you regret will appear and you just jump. And so it's, so in Buddhism, that's what I love, especially love like Chogyam and Trumpa, because it's this invitation to, and I feel like that's in Camus too, to like look it in the eye, stop running, stop running.

It's time to look at it. Oh, well there, you just hit it on the head, didn't you? You just basically, the two most similar things about existentialism and Buddhism would have to be that, right? It's all about literally like, it's anti-escapism. Yes. Like if there's another way to the synonym for those things, it's anti-escapism.

That's it, yeah, yeah. And I do think that's where like, people get really confused about Buddhism is because they, I don't know how many times I've been criticized for even talking about it. Like, what are you gonna just sit on the sidelines and not do anything in the world and meditate your life away?

Like, you know, people who've never spent any amount of time with it. And, you know, like they, first of all, they're like, oh yeah, cause it's super fun to fucking meditate. You know what I mean? Like, oh boy, it's like getting a massage every time I sit still, it's so great.

That's why everyone loves to sit still. That's why the whole world is so slow. You know, but yeah, it's, to me, it's like these two things are this, you know, it's an invitation to at the very least spend a second turning around and looking at the thing you've been attempting to evade. And like, I don't know, have you ever had that thing happen

where you're like, I don't know, maybe you get in a fight with your girlfriend or like you, you do some particularly, like the wretched side of you comes out and there isn't reconciliation and you go off somewhere and you sit down and you're looking, you know, at whatever sad, lonely landscape you're sitting in

and you're realizing that, yeah, again, you've fucked up your life. And instead of trying to like make it better, you just think, yeah, this is me. And then in that moment, there's this sad, like, I don't want to call it redemption. You know what I mean? But in that moment, it's like you make contact

with yourself again, you know? And it isn't, as I say, it's not a good self. It's not the self that you would want painted in your oil painting that someone did of you. But it's like, oh, right, this is just where I'm at. Whether I like it or not, do you know what I'm talking about? Like, they're almost just that. There's a kind of liberation that happens in that moment.

Oh, I totally agree. I totally agree. I mean, I think once in India, me and David were having breakfast and I don't know, it was one of those times where for some reason you were somewhere else and I don't remember where you were, but we were sitting across from each other

and I had one of those moments where I realized we were talking about writing and music and how nobody was ever gonna pay attention to us and we were screwed and I realized in this moment, like, well, we could always just be terrible writers and terrible musicians. I mean, like, there's nothing stopping us from being a shitty version of that.

And it was like this breakthrough. I remember thinking like, well, I'm just gonna do what I'm gonna do, either way, you know? But I think maybe for the people who are listening, who have never, ever looked up existentialism and never, ever, or always found it too obtuse or unnecessary or something, it does seem like you've hit on a kind of bullseye

in that there's two issues we're talking about. One is anti-escapism and the other is the nature of absurdity, right? So those are two subtly different dynamics that you could definitely find in early Buddhism, easy, right? Sure. I mean, for me, the easiest way that I like to talk about it, kind of in my mind to myself is the Twilight Zone episode

where they're all trapped in a box, which is based on no exit. It was kind of the greatest Twilight Zone episode of all time in my mind. Will you remind me of it? Cause I can only vaguely remember that one. Yeah, it starts in a black box and a ballerina, a drunk hobo, a soldier.

And I think it's like a sort of like a band, like marching band player are all, they all wake up, oh, and a clown. And they all try to philosophically approach where they are. Is this the one where they all fuck the ballerina? That's Edward Peanussan's four, but. I can't go ahead, sir. No, it's just, it's awesome because Rod Serling basically

took no exit and he just kind of filed it down into like a 26 minute long existential essay on TV. And part of my point here is like, these were the first times that popular thought had to wrestle with these things. Yeah. Because it wasn't a basic open part of the everyday dialogue for people.

And that wasn't an amazing thing that Rod Serling did, obviously, is he would insert pretty complicated philosophical aspects of the greatest thinkers of all time into like a digestible little piece of television that anyone, a kid or a wine mom or anybody could just immediately start grappling with. Yes, yes. I mean, change the world in a way, you know?

And so anyway, the reason why he did that, the reason why he put those characters in that room is because he, like Camus, was trying to bring us all to a common scenario that we can all address about absurdity and aloneness, right? Yeah. So you have to kind of use like a little bit of a thinking exercise to sort of draw this out.

And I guess that's why you and I, when we were arguing, we would always draw a scenario for each other. Like, not literally on a piece of paper, but we would always say, okay, you're standing on a hill. Do you remember how we would always do that? Yeah. So hilarious. You would be like, okay, you're falling from a building.

You're just telling me, don't think about the fact that I'm gonna hit the pavement in a second. Yeah. Do you remember that one you did in the house? I don't remember that one, but it definitely seems like it's in my wheelhouse because I do like the falling from the airplane. Honestly, man, I think that I was just, oh God.

I feel like I was just in my journal writing something about falling out of an airplane. Well, I mean, there's nothing embarrassing about it because what you're trying to do, you're speaking to another person just like Socrates was trying to talk, do you know, to Heracles or something? You know, whatever. And one person was saying,

like actually everything's made of water and you have to fucking come to the motherfucker toe to toe and be like, dude, that's ridiculous. And this is why. You can't just say no. You've got to break him down, you know? Yeah. And so the beauty of you that day in existentialism,

like you kind of like yelled out, you know, like it was almost you versed the class that day, I feel like. And this is one of the only things I can remember from that class, but like Casey was sitting back just fucking laughing, you know, he was loving it because you were emotionally moved and cornered like and you kind of you are only saying something that represented something you were going through.

It's it was an abstract to you. Do you know what I mean? And everybody else in the class was like, they just didn't see that it's this is about real life, dude. This isn't about what people wrote in a book and the tests coming up and all that shit. And so when you said, I'm falling from a building and my body is turning and I see the pavement

and the fear is so profound. And you all you fucking assholes in this class are trying to tell me just forget about it. Just like meditate in midair, right? Yeah. And I just think that that is at the base of it. The beginning of the birth of a great thinker or the birth of a great artist is somebody

who's emotionally cornered or put in a situation that they have to grapple with. They have no fucking choice. Yeah. Yeah. This is not an academic thing. You know, I wasn't picking up these books because I was like, I want to be a rich writer or some bullshit. You know, it's like I'm picking up these books

because I've got a problem, you know, and I want to try to figure it out. And these people had it too, or they addressed it, you know, or maybe you had always had some kind of, you know, you'd always had this this problem, but you didn't even have words for it. You know, maybe you didn't. And so some I think maybe that's why sometimes when people

meet Camus or meet Buddhism, certain types of Buddhism anyway, they get mad. They get defensive. They withdraw. They're not interested. I just don't want to talk about it because because it's too. It's like suddenly there's like a kind of a spotlight appears.

And it's showing you this this thing that you all already knew was there. But maybe you thought it was just your thing. You know, you didn't you didn't think it was literally like the what it is to be a human, you know, and maybe that's too much or something. I don't know. I mean, I do think that's like the it's a lot.

It's a heavy thing to hear some of this stuff for the first time or for just yesterday. I'm always getting I'm always getting like sort of spun by it, you know, like the you know, what it's show him. Trumpa says is related to the falling thing. He says the bad news is you're falling. The good news is there is no ground, you know, so it's like even worse in a weird way, you know,

that's that's the angle that he's taking is like you don't really have a self. That's the problem, you know, like you don't have the thing you think is so solid and real. If you spend time really looking at it, it becomes at the very least sort of like foggly see-through, certainly not consistent or continuous and definitely like, you know, changing all the time.

You know, if you're you know what I mean, not not not the maybe not some like the way he puts it is just like and somewhere in there, you find you find the strength to confront that reality and then somewhere in that confrontation, I think that's where. Trumpa and Camus maybe meet, which is that where there is something good here that's not that's real, not fake, real, real, real, fundamentally good.

It's just good. I don't know if that's what Camus rebellion was. No, you're definitely, you know, you're definitely right. It one thing that people don't like about existentialism is that all of the words they chose to use at that time all had negative connotations just semantically, right? So everything was like your forlorn or everything's like you're abandoned or you know what I mean?

And yes, we'll have a really bad reaction to that. And I think that's just almost you can just consider that a translation issue, you know, is it? Is it a translation issue? I mean, it's like, fuck, I'm going to look this poem up right now. Let me see if I find it. While you're looking it up, I would say that it's partially a style thing.

And we know this now because, you know, Camus said that he wore that trench coat to imitate Humphrey Bogart. So the style of that time was film noir, right? And what is what's the revelation that film noir brought to the history of cinema is that there's no way out and the hero dies. Yeah. So there's no like there's no Hollywood victory in film noir.

That was what was so special about it. So like the the hero maybe kills the villain and gets the girl at the end, but he's already drank and poisoned. You know, it's like it always ends like a Dostoevsky novel. So I think some of that was the style of the time was like the frontier of of literature and and and the sort of maybe like where World War Two was at, you know, like. You know, I'm not an expert on World War Two, but obviously

a lot of existentialism was just taking from the slang of the era, you know. Well, this is OK. So this reminds me of it and I don't think I mean, maybe it is slang, but this is a spiritual, I'm sure you know it, because it's been covered a trillion times. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Do you know this one? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I feel this will make me países. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child a long way from home a long way from home. Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done. Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done in a long, long way from home,

a long way from home. True believer, true believer, a long, long way from home. I'm so sad. You know, like that because that's the that's, you know, this is to me like the this is the reality where you might have a mother. But like humanity, where is our mother? You know, I mean, you can say, well, it's the earth or whatever. But like if you and I love that, I don't mean whatever.

But, you know, there you must at some point face and you will or your dad, literally, the the the the literal reality of not having a mom anymore. You know, not having a dad and then what and then what? You know, like and you have to and then you're in that place. I think Camus talking about it's unrelenting, unfixable. What are you going to fix this? What's your plan? You're going to bring your mom back to life.

What are you going to do? Well, you can't introduce your your child to your mom. Well, no, that's not going to change. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I can and I and I believe that there's some possibility of like, you know, connecting and I do have a form of spiritual suicide in that regard. But if you peel that story back and don't let yourself do it for a second, which is something another thing Trump says, which I love, which is disown that

for a second, disown it. And just deal with that motherless child feeling as it is. Somehow, somehow you find this drink in just it, which I don't really understand. Yeah, no, I believe in that. I mean, I've experienced it for sure. Sometimes I think that's actually analogous to Peter Kropotkin in the birth of anarchism, too. Really?

Because yeah, because he wrote that book, Mutual Aid and what he's basically saying. I mean, this is so shooting from the hip. But the reason why it's important is because it's not only, I mean, a similar similar time period, a similar movement, in a sense. But it's he's saying you can make laws and rules for people. But the spirit of human beings is good and will win in the end. And is what actually drives our behavior. Right. Yeah.

So he's making this huge wager that like you can tell people what to do. But they're going to do it, you know, they're going to help their fellow man because people are actually just built that way. They're good. Yeah. So in a sense, he's he's got some sort of spiritual understanding there, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's the same. It's the same brotherhood of Kimu and saying, you know, put away your fantasies.

Put away your escapism. You're going to make it through this. It's OK to love life on earth, you know. Yes. That's what I like about it. Just that. And it's also it's the reason it's OK to love life on earth. Isn't because you have like, you know, and again, I'm not trying to to disintegrate or demean theism because I am theistic and I love it. I pray every day I pray I love it.

But also I practice this kind of disowning of that for a second. And in that, you know, again, you know, in Buddhism, it's called the poisoned era, which is like you tell a story, you there's some, you know, pain. And then you tell this long protracted story about why all this must be happening to you. But if you just deal with the initial as it isness of the thing, instead of telling yourself some crazy story about it, it's like you get a first second, you get to live in a new place, you know, like it's it's it's like, you know, in that moment, you aren't a long way from home.

It's just, you know, you didn't realize that you were running away from your runaway. You know, you are a runaway running away from home because the home is that thing when you just hit it as it is. It's pretty cool, man. It's a really it's a really interesting way of living, you know, and in it, I don't think it necessarily has to like disintegrate the possibility of God. It's just saying, well, OK, but here's this is what's happening now. You know, like, OK, let's do God or have God.

We know that you can have existentialism and God at the same time because of all the great Christian existentialists that actually pioneered the thinking from the very beginning. I mean, Kierkegaard himself. So so in no way do I want anyone ever to feel pushed away by our language. And I and I think most people know that neither of us are anti anything, most likely, you know, they probably already know that we don't have any great grand allegiance necessarily. But Christianity can be used by its practitioner to reveal oneself.

And Christianity can be used to escape depending on what their intention is, right? Right. So it's just like anything. It's it's, you know, it there it can be used for the wrong intention, at least. Shooting from the hip, that's one way to say it. But I think that we both have these this addiction to philosophical scenarios, which maybe just means, you know, we're from some sort of long karmic line of philosophers. But it's just a great way of like these talking points. I can I can give you a model and you can just fucking break it down

and show me why I'm just my thinking error is perverting the way I live. You know what I mean? Yeah, man. I mean, yeah, that's it. And it is that it's like the world. The I think the world deserves. Deserves you and deserves you to be in the world as it is. And that that that place is so wonderful because it's everybody wants low population density. You know, like people like to go out into the wilderness and be alone.

And it's like that aloneness, it's you don't need to go out in the wilderness. You know, it's it's right there for you. And there's something really, really. Really beautiful in it. But God, it's like. You know, I get why nobody would want to go there. And I get why people are, you know, and I don't mean it in any kind of condos anyway. Why people like fuck that.

I don't want to think about that stuff. I don't want to think about my own the reality that I'm going to die. And I don't want to think about the reality that my parents are going to die. And I don't want to think about the reality that like all the bones under Paris that can move definitely fucked in the catacombs. You know, Camus fucked in the catacombs, right? Like if you had to bet, I would bet a million dollars that he fucked in the catacombs against bones.

But the point is you just have to deal with it, you know, eventually. That's the thing, like you will have to face it eventually. You will have to. Well, that's that's when I got cancer, my mom died and my dad died. All my philosophical rambling, it was just like, what, what was that? I didn't know what I was talking about. You know, suddenly you're like laying in a crater. You're like, oh, right.

This is what they meant. And, you know, my friend was reminding me in man's search for meaning of something that I completely not only forgot, but when he told me for I remembered it and then I realized I'd rewritten it in my own head. But Victor Frankel was talking about these people in Auschwitz who were going around saying, don't worry, we'll be out of here in two months. We'll be out of here in two months. And they had all this hope and joy and then like two months would pass

and they were still there and then they would just die. They would kill themselves or they were like, you know, just get sick. And I guess he was trying to make the point of like they weren't facing it. Head on. They created this idea of a put of an escape right around the corner. You know, that's a pretty good metaphor for like in the beginning, when you were trying to explain Buddhism and you were trying to explain how pleasure is a form of pain, that's that's kind of what they meant, right?

That that yeah, you can have your fantasy, but it will lead the logical conclusion of your fantasy will lead to heartbreak, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, except when you get to that, I mean, that's the problem. It's like, but when you get to the heartbreak, you're going to invent maybe another thing so that you don't. So you're like, OK, OK, but, you know, this next thing is coming. And then you can sort of imagine that you've put that heartbreak off a little bit

instead of just like, all right, fine. This is what it's like, I guess. I'm in a world that's like this and it isn't like the fucking book I read when I was a kid, it isn't like it's this. And, you know, because I'm, you know, having had two kids, I have to confront what I did. You know what I mean? Like I invited these creatures into the world. And from and like, I have to really look at that and think.

Is this a world that you would want to invite two of the most beautiful, sweet things that you've ever witnessed in your life into? Because if you can't say yes to that, what the fuck did you do? You psycho? Like, are you out of your mind? Why would you do that? You know, you can't you have to love the world if you're going to have kids here. But you don't want to love some fantasy of the world.

You have to love the world as it is, you know, and think, OK, I'm introducing my children to this place as it is, you know, and maybe that's why I'm reading Camille. I don't know. But that would make perfect sense because you you are by having children like making one of the strongest statements that a human being can make to them. Yeah, yeah, bringing them in, you know. Yes. And it is a statement for sure, I guess. I mean, it's like, because I have to like, because I know I'm old, I'm old.

I'll be dead and they're going to have to deal with my me not being here anymore. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it here? Do you ever heard like there's actually like people who are proponents of like, do you know, I'm talking about the people who are like, then you shouldn't have had me, you know, or like the there's a whole yeah, yeah, movement around it. I think is it anti-natalists or something?

Anti-natalists, you know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Frederick Brennan, who I just interviewed in that Q documentary, he talked about how he had a lot of like animosity towards his folks for bringing him into the world, knowing that he would have to deal with the body that he's in, you know? And yeah. And but I don't think that you can even before you can decide whether or not, you know, not just you should have kids or whatever it may be.

You really you have to like come face to face with this shit, you know, and decide like, do is it does anything? Does is it worth it? Is it worth it to be here at all? Like, is it worth it? Or is it just like a tremendous, terrible, endless series of never ending complications leading to a kind of confusion and then you're dead.

Well, yeah. And in addition to that, whether or not you decide if it's worth it or not, you still live this life as though it it was just a dream to, you know, like, as much as you make this great grand statement that you love it or anything, it still eludes you, you know, it still kind of pulls away from you and never lets you totally understand it and grasp it, you know? Yeah. Yes. Yes.

It's so intense, man. It's so intense. You just like you're you know, like you're having that wonderful night. Or you're having that, you know, every day I have this with my kids where I'm just like, I can't grab. I cannot grab this. There's no way to hold on to this. You know, there's no way to hold on.

Like the last last night I was talking to Aaron and I was in my in the dumbest way possible trying to comfort her because Dune, the little one is like been keeping her up. She's breastfeeding. And so I said something on the lines of like, well, don't worry. Because he won't be this baby for a long. And she's like crying, like, why did you say that? I was trying to make you feel better.

And then I realized like, oh, God, is there a worst thing you could say to a mother who's like in this beautiful like garden of Eden experience with his brand new soul? You know, but and I heard tears are like holy tears because it's that recognition of like, yeah, you can't hold on to it. It's but also isn't. Emil, isn't that it that you want to hold on to it? Doesn't that say something about its worth or value?

Yeah, I mean, maybe. Maybe that's why they made the Twilight Zone just like a black box, because, you know, that's not it wouldn't be philosophically stark enough if it was this beautiful Charlie in the chocolate factory and fields of flowers that they lived in. They had to put them in something that was just kind of bleak, you know, because when you examine consciousness itself,

there's a conundrum there that it's almost never been solved in itself. But but the world as you experience it, this this all the dopamine that you're talking about, that's like flowing into your brain, all those happy feelings. I mean, that's that's another that's another dimension. We we maybe we only start to question our reality when that is gone. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, we're just left alone with no serotonin.

Yeah, oh, God, left it low with no serotonin. Fuck, that's gotta be a song. That's right. When you're when you're in chemo, you know, that like, didn't you sit and think daily? Didn't you think? Why am I going through this? Because there's no serotonin. There's no, you know, you're just you're just blank.

And there's just this sort of when you're nauseous consistently like that, there's you have to wonder, why am I staying alive? Well, yeah, yeah. And, you know, weirdly, that's that stuff. That stuff is so is like such as I would never wish it on anyone. I wouldn't want to experience it again. It was radiation, not chemo. Thank God. But weirdly, that stuff is like

has this mystical quality of novelty to it. And like you are kind of you've been torn completely out of the life that you thought you were going to live. And in that, there's a strange accidental form of liberation or something that's happening. And then you expect that's, you know, that's the cliche thing. And I think there's an actual country song talking about the phenomena of like, I didn't feel like I was

alive until I like started dying, you know. And or another way to put it is, I don't mean to keep quoting Turgenturbo, but he said, you know, generally people will start meditating when the bell rings to stop. You know, in that moment, you're there. Or and or another way to put it is, you know, you get lost. And all of a sudden, you know, my friend and I went on this fucking hike up in Pizca, we got lost.

We turned the wrong way and like right three miles in the wrong direction. And and that the sun was going down. And all of a sudden you're like, fuck, I got to start paying attention here. And then you're there, you know. But it's for me, it's the those moments are more like. When when they come, it's like generally not something extreme is happening. It's just like that. It's a weird moment of like, what is this?

It's my I have a I have a friend. She she's going through a divorce and, you know, all of a sudden, like everything that she thought was permanent is gone. And it it's not fixable, you know, it and she's grappling with that and permanence, you know, I don't know, man. I don't know if that was the cancer. I gave me that no serotonin feeling. But I've had it. I know what you mean.

Like you're you're forced if you're forced to like. Get into the philosophical realm when you don't have ice cream in front of you. And, you know, things aren't working out and you're just like things are flat. That's why Rod Serling has you in that black box. You know, there's no there's nothing else to think about. There's no distractions, right? You know, yeah, now that I think about it, I heard this crazy thing that one exercise they do in this type of Buddhism is they put you in a fucking trunk.

They just put you in a trunk and lock it. If you're just in the darkness for a long time. And yeah, yeah, it's one of the ways that's like forced meditation. All you're just in your mind stuck. Yeah, yeah, you're in your mind. But then you have then you then from that, that maybe the deconstruction of the mind itself starts happening and and in somewhere in there. Who knows that at this point, it's it's mainly hypothetical for me in the sense

like in my meditation, when I'm like, you know, when you start realizing the kind of wavering nature of the self, for me, it comes in like very small moments, you know, generally, I'm just lost in my thoughts. And then I'm done meditating, you know. But yeah, it's a it's a curious it's a curious thing, man. I I really love this conversation. I, you know, but and I think it maybe it's appropriate for it to not have any kind of conclusive ending, you know, to just kind of well, I'll tell you what, like, first of all,

I don't know if if you felt like I even started to answer your question because we're sort of just like getting going. I think we could do another hour on anti escapism as a as a concept between Buddhism and existentialism. But I think we could do another hour after that on just the component of absurdity. But if if you wanted to. There there's something I've always wanted to ask you a little bit about just just if you want to close on it, you know, I'd love to.

OK, well, there's this to illustrate absurdity because we really didn't get quite there. Like if we really if you were reading a book on this, we would be in the introduction still. Yes. So. But but basically to to sort of introduce the concept of absurdity to some degree, there was some kind of Alan Watts style scenario or model that he would draw up for his listeners. And I don't know if Alan Watts said it and I read it or if you said it

to me in a conversation in college, because I know that you said a version of this because we would talk at such length about these different examples like from the Bhagavad Gita or just examples, right? Like, yeah, about the nature of being born into this universe. And so one of them is this kind of cliche, really old cliche. I think it's Hindu about God becoming lonely or bored, which bored is the more existentialist word, maybe, but from Heidegger or something. But but then lonely might be more of a Buddhist word.

And it says that he God smashed himself into the 10,000 pieces or something. Yeah, to to create a universe, this universe in which he would be entertained. Yeah, or have a family or have, you know, create that not one thing, create a thing where kind of like you having children, you know, creating a system like where there would be love reflects reflecting back on him, you know. Yeah. So does that I'm going to say one more model, but does that is that one of the older cliches that you remember hearing from? Yeah, yeah, okay.

Was it was that exactly it? Or was there other aspects of it? Because I know I think it is Alan Watts. I think like Alan Watts's version of it or one version of it. I heard is kind of like this like kind of funny bouncy, like, you know, if you could do anything, then you would, you know, make a planet. And then maybe you'd put life on the planet and then maybe you would make the life evolve and then maybe you'd make a million planets

and you put the planets all over and then maybe you'd make another universe and another eventually, though, you would think to yourself, I wonder what it's like to not remember I'm God. And so at that moment, you would forget your powers and you would find yourself in a kind of limited state. And essentially it's like the programmer going into their simulation and also giving themselves some kind of amnesia so that they could purely experience the simulation that they had created.

And then implicit in that. Articulation by Watts was what could sound delightful, which is that eventually you remember, oh, I'm God. But then also there's something sinister that I don't think people catch on to in it, which is like, I guess I'm God jerking off. Like, you know what I mean? Like I I create this like incredible universe

so that I can then have like some masturbatory experience of interacting with my creation, experience all the ups and downs. But inevitably I return to my same bored self and then I do it again and again and again and again. And again, and that in Buddhism is called samsara, the endless wheel of suffering. And it's a it's a point of contention among people who are really into like magic

because they're like that's such a dismal way of looking at it. You know, like, you know, you're you're that's dismal. That's a depressing way to look at it. What's wrong with matter and interacting with matter? What's wrong with reuniting with the Godhead and remembering your divinity and using that power to sort of multiply your experiences and. Whereas in most and especially

this sort of Buddhism I'm studying, it's like, well, OK, do that. Keep doing it. Just keep doing it as long as you want. Eventually, eventually, you're it's not going to work anymore like any other drug addict. And and then maybe that's where you experience that black box moment. Doesn't matter that you're a person or a god or whatever, you're still you're just there you are again.

You know, now what? Yeah, that that was the example I was leading to essentially. But I think I can't remember if this is Alan Watts. But I mean, of course, everything when you say the word Alan Watts, I mean, the when you say that name, you're just basically saying. A guy translating, you know, Hindu mythology to you is not. It's not like he made any of this up, you know. Yeah. But so he's just he's just reporting to you

something he read in a book and and what he read was something like. God is I picture it almost like maybe this is from the Bhagavad Gita. I can't remember you have to tell me. But like, like, it's almost like God is sitting on a meadow and is just bored and wants to watch a show. So he multiplies himself into two and the other entity sort of performs like a court jester. And at some point, yes, he forgets it's a show

and he starts to get really invested in the story that's being presented and that's the forgetting that he's got, but starts to get, you know, maybe spiteful against this other form of himself or gets too involved. He takes it too seriously, whereas he forgets it was kind of all a game. So that's another form of the story, right? Is that he wants to play a game? The Leela. Yeah, it's yeah, that that is it.

That's definitely I mean, there's all kinds of crazy psychedelic you know, versions of it and specifically in like the Hare Krishna mythology, but all over the place. Yeah, it's like all these cool sort of like the breakdown of it is almost mathematical and it's in here you do run into the a split that happens between I think what's broadly referred to as bhakti yoga and then what gets sometimes referred to as like impersonalism. And so the distinction between these two

is one is eternalism and one is nihilism, essentially. So like one version of it, it's like there's this like you aren't anything at all. You know, maybe what, you know, in other words, like, yeah, well, maybe you think you're God or you're some progenitive force. But if you have any kind of. You know, that force is changing enough that at some point it's like, what is it even the same thing it was before? You know, and then on the other side of it, you get eternalism,

which is which produces this really problematic reality, which maybe I'm just being too like non-nuanced with it. But, you know, the idea is, is like, well, what is a God? I mean, let's really think it out. Like what is a Krishna? Are there atoms in it? Does it age? Can it change?

Can it decide to truly not be a Krishna or is it stuck? Is it a non-changing thing? If it's a non-changing thing, it's almost a disastrous like a combination. You know what I mean? Because you have this thing that's just like a perpetually and eternally stuck as it is, and it likes to do its thing and it's going to do its thing. But it's always going to do that thing. And then that's just a kind of it's eternalism.

You're stuck, you're trapped. And so that's why I like the idea of like being born as a God as as exciting as it might sound to somebody like living in a limited earth form. You know, it's actually like you don't want that to happen because you're going to live a lot, lot longer and you're going to have all kinds of distractions and you really aren't even going to get to a moment of thinking like, wait, I'm alone because you're so infinitely distracted. You know, basically I look like there's a comic book.

It's the funniest fucking thing. I wish I could the preacher. Do you remember the depiction of God in it was this adult thing that's like, I mean, it was like this, like it was like a love crafty and grotesque thing, you know, and and so yeah, that's that's. So again, it's like I'm not trying to diss the gods or anything like that. I love the gods. I love Krishna.

I love Channing Heart Krishna. I think is a, you know, again, it can be misused, but Bhakti yoga is is at the very least an acknowledgement of relative reality. Right. We can fall in love. That's true. And to fall in love, we need other people. That's true.

I mean, yes, you could fall in love with the world and all that stuff, but come on. You know what I mean? What are you going to do? Like is like the vast infinite universe going to like give you a blow job? Like, can you lick it? Can you lick the butthole of the universe after having delicious wine? You know what I mean? There's like a, it's like relative reality is that it's real.

It's like to dismiss it as like an illusion or whatever is like, well, remember that time where that kid was telling John Casey, there isn't anything and he threw a piece of chalk at him. That's so good. Yeah, I think, yeah. People, they focus so much on God, like what is God? What does he look like? What?

What is his job? What is it like, you know, where that is kind of seems like a unintended side effect or like tangent. What it seems like the story of God, all these stories that we're talking about, it's more an illustration of how to explain your own disconnection from yourself and or the universe. Yeah, right. So inside that disconnection is an early exploration of what is consciousness.

This incredibly complicated thing, you know, like people say that we still don't understand how the cilia works inside of our ear. That the mechanism of the ear is so incredibly, incredibly subtle that we can't really repair your hearing. Right. Isn't that weird? I mean, it's just we can't even understand the mechanics of it, right? Yeah.

Well, that's like consciousness is beyond that. It's we don't understand the mechanics of it. We can't see it yet. We don't know how to draw a model of it. You know, and so these guys were initially just trying to sketch it out. And a lot of these books they wrote that are sometimes maybe vaguely incorrect or, you know, flawed, or we're just early attempts at trying to scientifically get at consciousness.

And, you know, Sartre, many people know said that his father, his philosophical father was Descartes. And Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. Right. And and John Casey told us that it's a little known super obscure fact, but that Descartes was was terrified and extremely disturbed to his core about if he was alive or not. Okay.

So the man who said, I think, therefore I am said that because he wasn't sure. He was insecure, so he was just like trying to like reassure himself. Yeah, he was he was trying to figure out if he lived inside a dream. Yeah. So he's doing it philosophically, academically, right? He's doing it for the king in the court and he's hired. He's the hired thinker, right? To sketch out what is philosophy and integrate some of the church's thinking

for the day and for the time. Right. He was he was hired to do that. But in addition, as he goes down into the nature of consciousness and starts recording what it means to be alive, he finds that privately, he doesn't understand it. And the more he thinks about it, the more it eludes him and the more scared he starts to get, right?

Wow. So at night, he would, this is what John Casey told us, literally drink from a barrel full of water that he filled with tar. Because in his idiotic primitive early mind, he thought that that tar would glue his mind to his body or he would. Holy shit. Yeah, it would close the Fisher, right? It would close the that chasm.

Yeah. So this guy, who's essentially, you know, experiencing a supreme form of mental illness, not necessarily, I'm not saying he was mentally ill, but he's grappling with this thing that we still today in 2021 are just barely beginning to start to understand. He's he's one of the first like scientists that's sitting down with the saying he said, Okay, so where can I start? And every time he starts trying to get into it, he's like, we know nothing.

We know, fucking, am I even here? You know, he's got like this palpable grasp on the dreamlike quality of consciousness itself. So what happened was Sartre tried to take the beginnings of his work and pull it into a very technical breakdown of how consciousness works and the different component components of consciousness. And that's what he called the in itself or the for itself. And he got really technical into it.

So if you actually, if you got into that part as of Sartre's work as a thing that could calm you down and like, like, let you start to understand what your mind is doing in every moment of every day, you could start to see him as a more benevolent character that's trying to help you, actually. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah, I see you're saying the only way the only reason I was telling you about Buddhism is because I was in a corner, I was in a black box and I and I was like, how what am I going to do?

What am I going to do? And I was panicking, right? So I was grabbing these books because I was like, there has to be a hole in the wall, which is essentially what they do in the twilight zone. They keep trying to like get on each other's shoulders so you can climb up climb up to the top. So these books were my were my like, you know, my my hooks in the wall, right? Yeah.

In that sense, the reason why you experienced what I was saying is so such a pure distillation was because on the one hand, I'm not reading the books for any academic pursuit or because it was something outside of me. I was like, essentially trying to write the book myself too, because I was like, I'm recording with music, I'm recording this process of that, that I'm in that's just like Descartes, I'm having a panic attack, I'm losing. I don't know if I'm even real anymore, you know, like Ram Dass disintegrating. And then you're over here in the snow, you know, thinking I'm talking about Eskimos.

And you're on acid too. And you're experiencing this with through the prism of your own struggle to understand just the sheer pain you're in. And so it's it's like when great music is made or or a great, you know, thinker like boils something down into something just so insanely tightly articulated. It's because they were driven there by a situational curse, you know what I mean? It's it's because they are in that position. And the key to absurdity that a lot of people might not.

Talk about is that Camus his mission and start to and I think Martin Luther King to me is in a sense a modern existentialist because they and even Ian McKay and Minor Threat and Fugazi, they all said the same thing is even though this world is a formless entity that I cannot control and I am out of control and I am lost and I am forlorn and taken from my mother. There's only one thing we can do. To a sewage that to to to fix the situation and it's just literally to try just to try. Yeah, that's it.

Right. Yeah, that's the best man. Thank you. That's it. And that's what what's the picture on the front of the mythosophist? Well, I don't remember on my book, honestly, because it's a bunch of essays. It's some dreary gray thing. What's the one on yours?

It's it's the it's the guy carrying the boulder up the hill. That is the universal symbol for trying in the face of absurdity when he knows it's going to roll down the other side, right? Yeah. So what that's the key is like, it's all so dreary, it's all totally connotationally miserable, but the character never stops going back up the mountain. And so that was that's what he's trying to use to sort of convey his it's his black box, right, the mountain in the boulder.

Yeah. He's like, why try? Well, he he just start comes away with it, too. He's like, well, that's why Victor Franco and why start are said that like the French occupation or the German occupation of France was like the greatest time of their life was because they learned that they learned that in the face of certain death, that actually trying was where the dopamine comes. That's where engagement like actually participating in your own life is where

you reignite and you reconnect with God. Yeah. So it can be a completely positive outlook. It's just you have to see it through and the only person that's going to get to the other side of it and see it through as someone that has to. Right. Yeah. You're you're so brilliant, man.

My heart just started soaring as I was here. I first this is why our best friends. It's the best. It's like so cool to like have you as my friend. Thank you, Emil. That was a really beautiful. Thank you so much. Well, it doesn't end like that for everybody.

So we have to I mean, I feel like me and you have to look into this mirror of friendship and just and thank it and say we're just fucking lucky, man. Yeah, that's that's it. It's luck. Just like just crazy luck. Ah, I needed that, man. Thanks, because I think I left Camus like a little more confused than I thought I was. Thank you.

It's like you just did a back adjustment or something. Thank you. Yeah, people find you. We should wrap it up. Where can people find you? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not done with any of the new drifters sympathy. So I'm working on the new Holy Son stuff and and trying to finish Grails

and all my new records. So just they just got to keep in touch with us because me and you have a couple of things planned, too. But yeah, yeah. Oh, God, the thing we have just sitting in that in our heart and our hard drives, like just like vampires and an egg waiting to be released into the night. Thanks, Emil. I really I really love you, man.

Thank you so much. Love you, too. That was Emil Amos, everybody. All the links you need to find him. We'll be at dunkertrustle.com. If you're confused by the conversation, check out the myth of Sisyphus. You can order it anywhere. Probably find it for free somewhere.

Much thanks to our sponsors. All their offer codes are going to be at dunkertrustle.com. It's a great way to support the podcast. If anything that I yapped about appeals to you, try it out. And much thanks to you for listening to this podcast and for letting me have the coolest job of all time. I love you and I will see you next week. Until then,

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