Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 563: Emil Amos

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Emil Amos, one of Duncan's best friends and an amazing musician (Grails, Holy Sons, Om), re-joins the DTFH! You can find Emil's music wherever you like to listen, including Spotify and Apple Music! You can also follow him on Instagram and Twitter. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.

Hello to you. I'm Duncan and this is the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. Today we're going to take a break from talking about golf and we are going to have a conversation with one of my best friends, Emil Amos. You might know him from his many incredible bands, The Grails, Holy Sons, he's the drummer for Olm and he's an all-around brilliant whipper-do, as I call all my friends. This is going to be a quick intro. I'm on the road. I'm in Raleigh right now. I got to go do shows in just a little bit. Might I remind you, I'm going to be in Portland next weekend at Helium. Come see me with William Montgomery. And also, if you want commercial free episodes of this podcast, you can subscribe to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and you will no longer be encumbered by

commercials. Plus, you can hang out with us every week at our weekly meditation and family gathering. That's patreon.com forward slash DTFH. And now everybody, welcome back to the DTFH. Emil Amos. Welcome back to the DTFH. It's so good to see you. How are you doing? Oh, yeah, yeah. You're going to be able to function like that? It's great to see you, man. How close do you live to Raleigh? Fifty minutes or something. Thanks for driving out here to the show. Duncan was doing show three nights, actually. Yeah. This is the last night. Two more shows than back home. But this isn't part of a bigger like trip. This is just like an experimental

little. Well, no, this is like a club weekend. So it's usually how they work. You just fly into someplace, do a few shows, fly out. It's really quite wonderful. But they know listeners know more than me. They know that you're kind of working on material for a special. Yeah, I haven't said anything about that yet. So now it's too late. You already fucking whistle blew me. He whistled blew me. It was amazing. I didn't reveal much. No, you didn't reveal anything. It's high time, man. So it's really intense being back here, man. It's like really it's so beautiful here. It's all green. This is the best time to be in North Carolina. It is. It's like it's like winter here or whatever you want to call it in general is kind of one of the best

places to be because I was living in Portland for 13 years. Then New York winter year. Well, compared to like living in New York, winter year is soul crushing. Yeah. Maybe that's up in the mountains, though. Maybe that's an Asheville thing. Okay. Yeah. It leaves fall off the trees here, though. Well, I guess we're not in we're not in winter, right? So you kind of came into the tail end and you got this perfect day. We're walking down the sidewalk here. And you know, we're older whatever you want to call it. And but we're like super we appear to be super happy. We're like walking down the street in North Carolina again. So we've had so many different chapters of our lives. We're almost like postscript at this point, we're just in this kind of later stage

free for all. Yeah. And then you were walking down the street and I'm asking you, isn't this amazing? Isn't this just great? And you said, you know, you have a lot of fun feelings for North Carolina still that it almost hurt or something. Yeah, almost. Well, because you know, we were talking about it at lunch. When you're pro process blind, you this is like this. So you go to okay, go to Hawaii, leave your hotel and go to the grocery store and why and what you will see. And again, maybe I just caught it on a bad day. But in my fantasy, as I'm looking around at all these people in the grocery store and one of the most beautiful places on earth, looking at all these people, they're not tourists anymore. They moved there. They went

there for a great trip and they just uprooted themselves and moved to fucking Hawaii. They just are so sad. They're stuck. It's a small town. They don't want to be there. The local locals don't want them there. They don't they're in the middle of they don't want tourists to be there even though they started out as one. But when you go to a place and you forget like, yeah, this is great this week. This is great this month or whatever. But eventually it's just going to become another place I live at. So yeah, that's to me what we're nostalgia springs from is like, instead of seeing the big picture, you frame out this one little chunk of it and then you start missing that chunk and you forget all the other bullshit that you didn't like about it.

Yeah, I know it's it's amazing to me that we lived in New York at the same time. Like that was just a little bonus chapter. Yeah. And now we're in another bonus chapter. Crazy. But I mean, there's been so many of them. I just feel like time ceases to exist at this age. You just sort of like in this other segment, you know, I've like gotten to this little physics kick for no reason at all. I just started sort of looking up like theories of time and how time goes faster when you're higher and slower when you're closer to sea level, how time is completely relative and how time is really like the measure of change. So you're measuring cycles basically, oscillations, the atomic clocks have some kind of weird atomic gas that is like perfect for

measuring the fluctuations within which you can create the what they call the atomic clock, whatever. But in all these essays, the thing they kept kind of going back to is like, but time, it's as a thing is some real thing. It's probably not real, like there probably isn't necessarily time, at least in the way I think of it as like a river flowing that you're caught in or something like that, where really more than likely, everything just is sort of happening simultaneously. But because of the way our brains frame things out, it gives this illusion, which is why people get really freaked out when they get to be our age. Because you've been around long enough to start realizing, oh, I don't think there's I don't

think time is like what I thought it was. Yeah, yeah, you were asking me on the sidewalk, do I still talk to my Boston guru? How do I do I still have him on a pedestal? Do I still have and there's so many different answers I could give to that. But but what I said to you was sort of just like, well, that that chapter that was written with that person and all the things you went through are totally still 100% real, resonating in a dimension I could in theory visit. But I'm not in it right now. But I've lost no respect for that dimension. Right. I like that would seem kind of petty and weird to start judging the past like as though you're above it somehow. I would never do that. It's a little cynical. Yeah, like, like, even some headline yesterday,

I was reading Donna Summer saying she was a she was stupid and an idiot when she was young. And it's like, well, anybody can say that. And we know what you mean, right? You know what I mean? We, we, we all can say that. But but there's always there's always two different minds to those things. When I moved back to North Carolina, I would be driving to the grocery store, and then back to my house, and I'd come around the same curve that I would have been driving around when I was first getting my license. Yeah. And first getting stoned. I had my big toke master in the car, my 18 inch rattling underneath my seat with my, my fifths of gin and things. Oh, yeah. You know, and, and I would come around the

curve and I would see as though I'm in a daydream, but very real, I would see myself 17 in the car. I was in coming around the curve towards me. Wow. As though I would like have to watch out for like that driver, you know, and I would just think to myself kind of like Donna Summer, like, God, that kid looks like dangerous. Yeah. That kid is, is quintessentially stupid in that 17 year old way. Right. I would have that sense realization that like if I saw myself, then now I would judge the person I'd be like, Jesus, what a mess. Like what a what a what a low brow little idiot. So I understand what she means. I understand what when she said that. But being the same person, I have to also admit the their potential of in that person wasn't totally very it wasn't very obvious. You

know what I mean? You didn't really couldn't really see the person's potential. The person the person is in touch with it. Yeah, somewhat narcissistically, the person knows they could make a masterpiece. But from the outside, they look like a little piece of shit, right, which is ostensibly what people called me. And then and then you have those feelings for someone now, you know, when you maybe look at us, a specific kid driving by you now, but you don't know their potentiality. But they're in touch with it. And then yet, there's this entire fabric of people out there that are in touch with their the masterpiece they're going to make. Yeah, which they will never make. And then there's those people too. They're the the narcissist that

actually don't have like, don't have the thing that actually vouches for it in the future. Right. There's the people like Twitter is just full of this massive orgasm of like this this this this like beast that's just riling, you know what I mean? Yeah. And and so to just look at it, to just observe it is a is a scary proposition because you're seeing a little bit of yourself and a little bit of yourself that that had the masterpiece inside of you. And thus the part of it, I don't mean to get all Disney channel on your Disney channel, but I think everybody has more in peace inside of it. Yeah, I do. I know it's so naive. I know it's so I do believe that because I think I think the other thing that starts happening when you get older, you know,

you're getting worn down, not in a bad way, but you're getting you're getting worn down by time like all of the all the you're losing in the best way possible, you're losing that desire to instantiate whatever the thing you the zeitgeist was saying, this is what cool looks like you're that's starting to fade away. And so as that starts fading, where you're getting in touch with like sedimentary layers of your identity that are underneath that, they're just more simple. You're not embarrassed about your love of grilling that you would see like some old dude grilling like that is so boring. What's wrong with you grilling? Do you have grill pride? You remember I don't know if you remember this, but you'd see like dads with grill pride and you'd

feel sorry for them, you would just be like Jesus help you. And then suddenly you that starts happening. And you're like, well, I just like being outside in this really dumb, elemental way, you're just like, I like the way the wind feels. And I'm guessing based on that, it's going to keep getting worn down and worn down until at some point, birding will make sense. You know, because like, I would always see old people into birds and be like, Jesus, is there anything more boring than a fucking blue jay? You're seeing they're staring at it with your binoculars. But, you know, so I feel like the more that wears down somewhere in there, that's where the masterpiece is somewhere in there is that simple, basic, good idea that you put some clothes on.

I agree with you. I want to use a different like visual in my mind, but but but but the masterpieces is such a cool idea. Yeah, to me, the word is such a cool idea. And I think about the word all the time, because I think that we came up in a time when the masterpiece was sort of like the end point, the logical conclusion of all sort of toiling and research and development like everything pointed towards making the Star Wars when we were growing up. Right. And then at some point, during the internet, the masterpiece culture started to sort of die and like, like sort of sideways, arbitrary culture, right, started to become just as relevant, like a tweet, you know, getting as much attention as Star Wars. Yeah, it became just sort of like normal. Yeah.

Right. And that was a little weird to navigate. But now that we're post that, and now that I'm kind of used to that, I look back at masterpiece culture is what I call it when I'm talking to myself because nobody wants to hear about this. Like when I when I think back about masterpiece culture, I kind of I'm like, well, that's a thing. I'm not eulogizing it. I'm not saying we need to go back. Right. You can never ever say we need to go back. That's like folly, you know. But and it's also relative, you know, it's like, whatever, there is a kind of masterpiece thought happening. But like my favorite rap group, sometimes, Ray Stremmer is what they're called, it's ear drummers backwards, that I wouldn't call them my favorite. But like they they sound really

good. They don't even release their records physically anymore. Like they did the first like three or something. What do I do with them? They're just like in the ether, they're just like on YouTube. So it's like, we're getting to this point where it's like, the idea of even investing in your idea to put money into it is like a waste to them, you know, because they're coming from post masterpiece culture, right? Like culture, you know, so that's an interesting curveball. I was like, okay, like, they're just like, well, I'll just save money by not making the record. You know, but they're number one on the charts, right? Right. So like, you're kind of the nature of viewing the masterpiece as morphed, you know, like someone out there is going to get all tripped

up and like bothered by the fact that I'm even calling it masterpiece culture. And someone else is going to really like that because they're going to remember how much we put into masterpiece culture as when we were younger. You know what I mean? We put everything into it. And in a way, the Bible is like masterpiece culture or or karate kid or whatever you want to call it, which I think have an interesting relationship, those two things. But that like, since we're post that, and we're sort of in a world where like the commodity is not necessarily the thing you made. It's kind of more of the river itself that you're stepping into and like in the exchange. Right. And I'm not like an expert anthropologically. I can't break that down for you right now. But

essentially, you guys know, you know what I'm talking about. The masterpiece is like, for artists, it's like, it's enlightenment for people who meditate. This episode of the DTFH was brought to you by the Wizards of HTML. It's Squarespace.com. Squarespace has everything you need if you want to create a home for your company or your podcast or whatever it is that you might be creating on the web. It's a toolkit. Not only will it allow you to create beautiful websites like the incredible website, you'll find at DuncanTrussell.com, which is probably a Squarespace website, but it will also let you send out emails to your clients. They've got members only areas if you want to monetize your podcast or whatever your particular stream is that you're

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it's some idea that you have that at some point, all of it is going to culminate in some thing that is so undeniable, so special, potentially as far as like, well, it's both go really, it's going to rip all the culture. Exactly. And so yeah, that's what is that's masterpiece culture. Yeah, it's like David in, you know, the statue, right, you can't just have like part of David, or like I'm working on like an idea for the fingers of David, you've got to have back then, you had to have David done, right, finished, yeah, and you put it in front of people and they're like, that is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. You know, and then that starts a relationship with everyone and David and the all the various analysis and then the lineage of like

style from that. It's an affirmation to the world. When it happens, it is defiant and it flies in the face of doom culture, which is prevalent right now, which is probably antithetical to masterpiece culture where doom culture is this new form of nihilism based on climate change, globalism, the world as a train off the tracks. And so that that has produced an entire way of being an entire style of music, an entire way of communicating with other people, a kind of desperation mixed in with a messianic thing, like somewhere mixed into that culture is this idea like, we turn off the machines, everything will recover. But it's all going downhill. What are you doing? You're working on a masterpiece? Well, I'm trying to save the planet. You're

working on a masterpiece? No, the water is rising. To me, that almost reminds me more of like, protection culture versus like risk housekeeping. Oh, housekeeping's here. We'll be right back. Yeah, like the okay, so like just to traditional masterpiece, you're not making that shit in a day. You know, maybe that's where it's sort of, well, I guess it could be possible, like, you know, the, and all the crazy stories of enlightenment, the most annoying ones are like, he saw the reflection of the moon and a puddle of water and gainful realization or whatever. So, or you know, the, I guess some like modern art or something like that, where it's like a flick of paint upon the canvas and yet somehow a masterpiece is born. But in general, the idea is

this is going to take you a long time, a long, long time to make a masterpiece. You don't just make one man, it's your life, your complete obsession, your dedication, your madness, all of it just the wins and the sales of whatever the thing is, that whatever it's going to be. And then finally, there it is, as opposed to, you know, just kind of trying to get like short-term dopamine hits for making things that you wouldn't even say they're good, but resonant or something, they resonate with whatever the weekly zeitgeist is in the perfect way, where people are like, wow, that is, you said it just right. Right, like, it's a meme. The lie of the, of the, of that kind of thinking is that

that's just how easy it's going to be for you because you're just that, you were the chosen one, you know, you're, you're profound to such an extent that you, you've, you, you tossed the paint sideways, they hit the canvas and everyone for the rest of time, it's just like, it couldn't be done better. I, how did you do it? And it was like, I don't know. Look at that splatter. Look at that incredible splatter. But then the truth of it, though, at the same time is that all art is kind of a snapshot of a dimension or a snapshot of you in a window of time. Yeah. And then you yourself can't really return to that time so easily. And you may off the cuff say something that resonates. And then you're sort of stuck in the world as a

real person, whether you're Bjork or Beck or any of these people. And they're like, I contributed this thing that people think is perfect. I made David. And then you live in the world and it's kind of hard for you to get back to that exact arrangement of molecules. Yeah. And so there's a truth and an ally in that kind of, in the kind of immediacy of the thought being perfect. Right. You, the, what you're talking about, this pops up in Buddhism a lot, talk about it with David all the time. But it's this idea of continuity of self. So it really, there isn't real continuity of self. You have to assemble it based on your mind. You, you, you pick the phenomena out that is your past from all the other shit you encountered that you can't remember anymore.

You pick out some grouping of people, events, stories, you then modify the stories over time to sort of be cooler than you forget you modified them. And then you remember the modification as though we're true. And so this thing that you're talking about, you know, getting back to that person who made the thing that the torture for so many people who God forbid they do make a masterpiece, but like in their twenties. And now, oh my God, you've got to surpass that. You have to surpass it. And then you're desperate because you're like, what the fuck was I then? Some people try to assemble the same drugs. They try to assemble the same whatever in this desperate attempt to replicate that part of the time space continuum that was the womb of their

creation. And it's very sad because you can't, you can't do that because it's gone now. That's not there. And you, you, you think you are that person. Have you ever felt that the competition with your older self, your earlier self? I wouldn't call it competition, but I've certainly like, it's why I believe in reincarnation. Like I, I just, this is how I understand reincarnation is just by looking at past versions of myself and realizing like, I know that I underneath all of that was whatever this particular consciousness that I call myself, but the person is dead, like the person is gone, the person, the surroundings, everything. This is to me, I'm sure there's, it feels like there should be a German word for this. Like the Germans have like

the best words for like swaths of experience in the wet, like in America and stuff we experience, we don't have words for, but the word for going back to that curve, your curve, your curve you're talking about going back to your town you grew up in, going back to the mall and looking around. And not only do you realize it's so small, it seems so big, but then you're looking around and it's atrophied, it's disintegrating, time has taken hold, the economy has taken hold, you were there when it was brand new, the movie theater had a fresh coat of paint on it, holy shit, we got a new movie theater, look it's new, you come back and it's just like you, it's sagging, the paint is great, the stores that it used to be in there are all gone, everything gone, it's like you've

you've gone into a dream, you've managed to go back into a dream you were having, but the dream is now faded, shadowy, that is a really interesting feeling man, it really hits home the idea of if you're looking for a home in the world, you're not gonna find it, sure you can go home after 20 years, but that's not your home anymore, it doesn't look like your home, it's filled with new people who like all are having their own experience of teenager years or whatever, you know what I'm talking about, oh totally, it must be the way ghosts feel, well it must raise such essential questions for some people, some artists who are not ready to tackle such central questions, because I think a lot of people get on the track because they're like, you know, they're young,

they're enthusiastic, they see a magazine and Ozzy Osbourne's doing like the sign of the devil in the front, and they're just like, fuck yeah, I'm fucking 12 bro, you know, and then you know fast forward 30 years later and they're like in some weird bar in Hamburg and they're shlubby and they're still riffing it out, but they really don't know why, you know what I mean, so like for some fan to walk up and say like that one record in 88 when you were in Venom was absolutely perfect and you're just kind of like uh that's what everybody says to me every day and it hasn't been 1988 for a really long time, you know, so you got to ask yourself then why am I doing this and why did I start, but why am I really still here and what do I have to contribute, truly

give to people and I think there was this one time, I don't remember if we ever talked about it, but but there was this one time where I was having a lot of trouble with that, I think I maybe had just moved back to North Carolina and I called you from inside a grocery store and I was just pacing the aisles in Asheville, North Carolina because it was like the first time I'd been back and we were playing a show that night, Grails was playing at this club called the Moth Light and I was I was just in a really not a very good mood and I was like, I called you and I was like, dude, I don't feel, I feel strange, like I don't feel like myself or something and you were like, I've been talking to this monk about this and they told me that when that happens to you,

when the thing you had a revelation, you had a discovery, you found a way of life, it all made sense, it worked for you, but at one point in your life, it stops working and on that day, you have to fucking put that stuff down and go find a whole new way to go figure out your, you know, a whole new therapeutic space and I was like, man, I just never really thought about it like that, it felt very nice, like it was like an option was given to me and I went off to the show and I think I had a good night and I always remember because you had the right answer at the right time, you know, I don't know if it was something you were dealing with though because you seemed happier that day on the phone, but I needed to hear that, you know,

yeah, and so that kind of goes back to us on the sidewalk earlier, this kind of idea of like, well, I could travel back to a time when I had a revelation, but I have no interest in having that revelation again, my in some dimension, I'm there 17 with the bong under my seat and my guru is beside me and I respect it fully, like I don't, but I don't even really pay tribute to it much anymore, it's just there in space and time, but now my job, you know, is something else, I'm in a different phase of research and development. Yeah, you know, what you, I think if you want one thing that people get confused about is like terrain you know, you start thinking like, oh, it was the mountains, oh, it was my young body, it was the

smell of the pine trees, it was my girlfriend, all these things, but my belief is that what's really happening when you're having those peak experiences that get associated generally with youth is that you are fully present, you're fully in the moment, and you don't have the extra data set that we have of all these memories, because the memories you cocoon yourself in the memories, they become this like, what's the shit on boats? What's the shit of barnacles? Barnacles, these things that you're cherishing so much, they're really just these sort of temporal barnacles that have formed around your ability to experience the present moment, because you have such a complex story that you don't want to give up,

and so now what happens is if you get lucky, something will happen where a barnacle breaks off, and usually it's something awful, or you know, a tragedy, or you just find yourself in a completely novel situation, and you like, you have this feeling, oh my god, there's that feeling that I thought you could only have when you were young, what the fuck, but then the barnacle grows back so quickly for most people that they just think it was like a passing gas or something, and so yeah, that to me is what that monk was talking about was disown it, whatever the fucking thing is that you, your big ass trophy, or your big ass shame trophy, whatever it is you've been hauling around, disown it, let it go, what happens if you do that? It's incredible, the name for

in Tibetan Buddhism, or one of the descriptions of it is the reunification of the mother and the child, it's really fucking cool, it's like this idea of the mother and child coming back together again, and the way a child runs to the mom, and the mom embraces the child, versus the prodigal son situation, the abyss where you're just like, I've lost my youth, it's gone, I'll never be there again, well no, you'll never be there again, but the only reason there mattered was because you were so in the moment, you were so fully connected to the now, you didn't know, you didn't recognize that was what was happening, you associated it with all these other things you were doing, and now it's just like you were right there, fully in the flow in the moment,

that can happen anytime. Totally, you can probably turn that off now if it's, if it's, he turned on the air conditioner to, he felt bad for me, but I think it'll make the audio better. Yeah, I never really put down my, put down my musical, you know, lab, and went off and started working in film, because of that conversation, I didn't ever think, oh, I have to move on, you know, past this system of record making necessarily, but within record making, I am always trying to do exactly what you're talking about, and I think people know, like I'm always trying to shed something and re-assert something that is nothing to do with equipment or anything, you know, I'm always trying to play

no guitar or, you know, you know what I mean? Because there was an experience I had in like 97 when we were messing around my four track all the time, and I would go talk to other kids that had four tracks and like have a beer, and we'd be talking about what it means to like make a song by yourself in your dorm room. And I was like, we were trading songs, and I was like, can you hear how this song you liked, you're asking me about, is like, the music doesn't even matter, you know, that has nothing to do with the actual music, it's like the personality that's completely transcending it, hovering above it, coming over the music is what I'm really interested in, and the kid was like, yeah, no, no, I hear that part, and I don't understand that, I don't know what

that is or how it's happening. Because most people have the equipment all lined up, and they're like, you know, first you do this, then you do this, then you do this, and like, it does seem like an obligation to me to always be shattering the assembly line and also just breaking it, you know, so that all that's left is just this, at the end, in theory, this voice of like, you know, the Wizard of Oz just like booming into your brain and like controlling like how you think of what art is, and it's just outrageous. It's outrageous. Yeah, that's what I want out of art, but of course, by the time it's done and handed in, mastered and put on a record, it just like sounds like music or whatever, which is kind of disappointing. But you know, you want people to

just get shattered and be like, well, how did this even fucking get on here? You know what I mean? So is that the mistake? Is that the mistake we make? It's like, it's not enough that you're shattered in the creation of the thing. It's not enough that in the creation of the thing, you get to have the transcendent experience where you're mounted by something, you don't even know what it is. It's familiar to you. You're so happy it's back. It comes through you. There it is, again, you're watching your hands do shit, and your accidents are happening. We're like, God, that's exactly what I needed. But on top of that, there's some desire within you to blow minds, to you know what I mean? You want people, I mean, like an extra ego push. This is one of my big

problems is I'll say you or I'll say like, people think instead of like, I think. Yeah. So I have noticed sometimes that I would love to make like, don't write like Terrence McKinnon, or to, you know, I would love to like, just, I want to melt faces, man. This is good. You know, it's not enough. Right. You know, it's not enough to go into the temple, into the Holy of Holies, and have communion with the divine intelligence. You also want people to just like there that you just want their eyes to dilate. You want that you want to explode a new culture you want to transform. I'm not I want you know, the that part of me I want to like shift global consciousness, world peace. I don't know what it is you I want. You know, and the more that I get caught up in that,

then I trade that thing that comes over the creation for a completely different thing. This is the Demiurge. Now, instead of it being that spontaneous giver of gifts, it's a replica of some fraction of humanity and what I think their reaction to the thing I'm making will be. You know, it's a completely different God, is all I'm saying. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Right. I've thought about that. Like some of these people you see winning like the the number one book award, Oprah award or whatever the hell, you know, I don't think Oprah does awards currently, but she should. It's like culture has gotten to this point or human like cleverness is probably always been at that point when someone was, you know, scribing, you know, the Bible or

anything. But like now we've gotten to this point where we know what the voice should sound like to win the award. Yeah. So we can write in that voice. The AI will do it for you now. The AI will just do it. The AI will just like take it and do it. That's that's the glory of AI, is that it's going to make such works. Dude, the AI Bible is going to be so sick. So sick. The ability to just tell the tell the computer to like rewrite the Bible and and include you this fucking time, make rewrite the Bible, but I want to be Moses. It the the the benefit of all this is that that once it gets through its intermediary phases and starts making true masterpieces is that maybe it will help people tune back into the to the

that other voice instead of the voice of the algorithm, the voice of the machine, the voice that other voice is so special. And it has no guarantees for you other than it's there with you at that moment. And and it it doesn't want anything. It doesn't demand anything. It's purely progenitive. It's so beautiful. And it but you know, we want, you know, you have to live in the world, you need to make money. So you want to make something that's like, I guess, you know, you see, you won't starve there. So with it wrapped up within the reasons for communing with that thing, inevitably, you know, all kinds of dense aspects get mixed up in there, whether you want to or not. I don't think there's any perfect fucking artist out there just purely as in communion

with a creative force and has no thought of result. This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by better help. You know, there's a thing that always pops up in Eastern traditions, the idea that a human life is like somebody living in a house where a diamond is buried underneath that house, you might be walking around all depressed, sad, fuzzed out, freaked out, low down, blasted by the zeitgeist and not even realize that hidden deep inside of you is a diamond. Therapy is like digging down into the mind of your subconscious and also to be completely honest, you're not just going to find diamonds down there. You're going to find skeletons, hissing, screaming, weird things that once they see the light, they just

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off your first month. That's better help. H-E-L-P.com slash Duncan. Thank you, Better Help. I don't think there's any perfect fucking artist out there. Just purely as in communion with the creative force and as no thought of result. Yeah, it seems like back in our kind of whatever 80s youth, the Masterpiece era youth, there was this sort of idea that the artist was always a rebel. Like they detached from the current algorithm. They went off into a cave and then they kind of came back around the side, defied the rules, broke the assembly line, broke the machines and they came back and they offered this whole new space on how you could talk about life or reflect the very human side. It might have just been so beautifully sad or it might have been

really powerful and optimistic. But at some point, if we do lose Masterpiece culture, it seems like we sort of start to get into just people who are kind of famous because they met with a form of success and we're like, oh, they've got a space where they exist. Andrew Tate, a lot of people don't like him, but more power to him is doing good out there in jail. But it's just sort of like the people have this kind of 15 minutes of fame thing has gotten so relativized. And the infinite field of the internet is so relativized that, of course, we'll never lose the original impulse or thread. But the field of vision is just snow blind with just noise, right? So I don't mean that in any fatalistic sense, but it does seem like you have to like something, these mutations

kind of come out of the noise and sort of, they act as a new form of that detacher rebel or something. Originally, we had like the Brian Eno or something like the one guy, the Ian McKay, you know, like the one person that detaches and the Buddha or whatever, and it's just like drops out, you know, the Terence McKenna or whatever, just the dropout entity that's like, you don't need to do any of this. Yeah, you know, just like you were saying earlier, one of our professors sort of break the spell. Yeah, finds the way to break the spell. And so then people who didn't feel as comfortable in that noise as seemingly other people do, they tune into this person and suddenly it's this liberating experience because they found in that moment a way to articulate not just like the reality

of the noise, Maya, Mara, whatever the name you want to give it, but also like a way, a potential path out that it's exciting and it gives you a sense of like it. Oh, shit, right, there is, there's always noise. There's always the chaos of the world and the worldlings and the people who then they're part of their life, they're just fully connected to the card. I always use them as an example, like the Kardashians are fully connected to some 90 day fiance, like they're spending their time all day, like really kind of emotionally thinking about the show. Did that person make the right decision? And in those people, if you start tuning into them too much, you feel like all is lost. You're like, this is, this is the collapse of society. This is the

call you go like you to turn on the wrong channel, you probably shouldn't be watching TV, you turn on the wrong channel and you're just like, remember that time we were on acid, watching TV at your house a long time ago, we were watching cops, cops MTV. And I remember just that we both were so like the acid just seemed to be turning the volume up on the synthetic nature of it, the manipulative nature of it, the way it was parading as though this is normal life, the way people are talking. This is real. Yeah. And the acid, the true great truth teller was like hissing at it like a snake. Like that's not real. Look at that. It's clownish. It's like watching the bozo show when you're a grown up, like when you're a kid, it was like, oh my god,

this fucking clown is incredible. But you know, so anyway, my point is, yeah, the masterpiece, it like is a kind of like a pebble against the windshield of that stuff. It flies in the face of it. It produces like possibility just by its very existence. Humans can do this. There's more that could be done than just the fuzz, adding to the static, replicating the static, simulating the static, which is a simulation of previous static forms, which goes all the way back to like an entropic disintegration of some former zeitgeist that was pure. It just devolves and devolves through imitation. That's the static, right? It's like trying to not just replicate, this is cool, but then add your own touch to this is cool, but that this is cool was a replication of the

that this is cool, which is a replication of this is cool. But somewhere back there, it was really cool. Like somewhere back there, someone naturally spontaneously blew something out of their mind into the world and it was real. And then it got imitated all the way through over and over again. Anyway, well, I mean, you think about children viewing this, the rushing river of capitalism, they're like walking up to it in their early lives, you know, and they're looking at it and they're like, you know, they're seeing all the activity, they're seeing all the money, they're seeing all the power, everything that comes from joining that river, right? And that river is so fierce. And there's so much, that's where connection lies, essentially, is like within the human

river, which is ostensibly a capitalist rushing machine. And so the Kardashians, whoever, you know, they, they find a frequency, they find something that speaks that connects to people, and that river is fucking lightning fast in it. And it, we all understand shallow takes on human life, and we all can connect with them. But the more difficult takes the things or the things that require more, more thought and more, you know, difficult truths are not going to be able to, you know, give you the same benefits when you're showing a child. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, that's a great masterpiece across the river over there, off to the side, you know, that we all reference, you know what I mean? David is over there. He's

not really like in the vape pool, you know what I mean? Yeah. But, but so the child's got to start to differentiate like what's important, you know, like, like the everything's pulling them into that. Yeah, that energy field, that river, you know, but like, you're sort of showing them like, if you work really hard, you can join the rebel forces, and you can fight against this momentum, you know, and the child then has to be like, God, why would I do that? Like, that sounds really difficult. Yeah. But you have to like, keep always displaying, you know, that like society, and it won't even work without critical thinking and the things that does, you know, deconstruct this machine, you know? Yeah. I mean, it'll work. I think it'll work. It's like,

it works the way like diarrhea works, like is when diarrhea comes spraying out of your ass. I mean, is it working? Yeah. It's harmonizing with gravity. It's like, is it failure on one level? Yeah. I guess I don't want to like get down on diarrhea, but I would call it some form of failure of the digestive system or your decisions, whatever you put in your body. So the, the, now I don't mean to say it's all diarrhea. I don't mean to say it's a river of diarrhea or whatever, because I don't think it is. I think, and I don't think it's even real. It just seems real. It's not only lives in the TV, it only lives in boxes. You go out in the world and, you know, you might run into some people who are imitating this meme or that beam or whatever, but generally most people

you run into seem pretty cool, authentic, maybe a little confused or something. And, but then underneath all of that, this is the part that, this is to me, the revolutionary part that will never go away. And this is how the whole game works. Like the reason you get to be the rebel is because so many people are putting such hard work into being like into the static. God, they're working so hard to push back. They're working so hard to try to freeze the culture. This is the way things are forever. They're working so hard to like, don't you do that with your hair? Are you really putting on a dress? What are you doing? And then, and, and it, without that, you got nothing. What you have no, you've got, it's like having a pushup. It's like having a bench press with no weights.

You need them for the game to function. You need the omnipresent sense of some massive cabal of mediocre people. So you could rage. They're doing the work. And then when you realize without them, there's no me if I'm to be the rebel archetype. In fact, I'm connected to them. And now you're really in trouble because you realize your roots. They're getting water from there, man. You can't even, you can't really separate yourself from it. You're part of it. You're part of that biome. You're part of the ecosystem. Whether, yeah, the cloud might judge the fucking land or something. Look down there. Can't fly like me or the land might judge the cloud. Look at you. You fucking changing, constantly changing vapors piece of shit.

Like the tree, whatever is judging every point is all it's come all, all depends on all of it. The masterpiece depends on all the shitty pieces. The shit pieces are the fucking fertile soil of the masterpiece. Masterpieces grow in fields of shit. Someone's got to do the shitting. Yeah, it's funny you say that I when I think back to whatever it was like 98 99 when I when I was the happiest I've ever been, that was a hallmark casual thought I had at the time. Every day I remember thinking instead of being like my normal sort of like earlier angry, sort of bitter, maybe competitive self or something in that particular frame of mind, a central thought that I always had was, I need this to be this way. Yeah, like this is perfect. That's it. You

know, and I would come and talk to you. I'd be like, I've got this feeling, you know, and it's basically that like nothing should change. You know, but it's I can say that to you now, but I can't like seduce myself into thinking that way every day or feeling that way. But that was a hallmark of my thinking. And I remember thinking exactly what you just said that that whole relationship was a was a very affirming, you know, it was a necessity. It was great. It was great that it was it was this organism that worked together so harmoniously from above. That's why you know, I'd always write songs or talk about the the unity from from overhead because if you can get high enough enough up, you know, you would see that it's all it's doing great doing great.

Yeah, it's not divisive. Yeah, we need them. You know, and the the the there's a story like chokin Trumpa. He goes to India. He's going to go meditate in the cave at Padma Sambhava. It's great that insane meditated in. He writes about it. Very grim. Assessment of everything like this monastery that's built there is kind of run down in the I think his attendant that he had was getting hammered or something. And there was just all these problems at the monastery. And finally he goes down into the cave to meditate. He's built himself up to this moment like this is where I will get the great transmission. This is where I will find the the Turton, the treasures, the hidden Dharma teachings that are supposedly locked in different

places. This is goes into the cave. I think he complains because there's like soda bottles scattered everywhere in this cave where Papa Sambhava meditated. And he's, you know, facing the reality of of like your version of what the romanticized version of things and what they're really like. And I think he's filled with some kind of like crazy despair or this just sense of like what the fuck this cave has used condoms in it. And so then I think he goes back into the monastery and just gets hammered. And in that state of being completely drunk, he produces, it just pops out of him this thing called a treasure teaching like it explodes out of him a recognized addition to Buddhism pours out of his mind. And in that in it was a masterpiece. It was a culmination, especially of his lineage

of Buddhism, which is saying what you just were talking about skymind everything's perfect when you get far enough away. And that he needed not just his ability to like, have mindfulness, but if not for the filthy cave, if not for the problems, not for the gift shop in the monastery, then that thing wouldn't have come out of his mind. It was completely a fundamental dharmic teaching in its own right. The voice of the Buddha was emanating not from some celestial realm from a shit cave in a rundown monastery. And that was what was true. That was what was really happening. And in that it's perfect in that just the way it is. That's where you hit that that's where you can knock those barnacles off when you start realizing that or even more so you

just realize the barnacles are just as perfect as the rest of me. And that's possible, man. In any moment you can do that. That's possible. Should we take a whip at break, whip at break. Yeah. There you go, man. Do it again. I just you squeeze that bottom part carefully. It's been a while. It's been a while. Kind of blast out. Blast it. Yeah, do it. It's out. Let me load her back up. We're going to load up this whipped cream thing here, folks, and then we're going to talk about the book a job. We're going to do some nitrous hits and jump in a little bit. Speaking of the rushing river of well, and the rushing river of idiocy and capitalism. Man, lately my Twitter algorithm is I just look at it just like for morbid curiosity.

And it's like my Twitter algorithm is like, it's just it's literally like the fucking beast just laughing and puking. Yeah, it's fucking amazing. It's just it's only okay. Do that. Record yourself doing it. Dude, you fucking rigged this thing way too powerful. Do you usually feature the urination on the show? Do you usually feature the urination sound on the show? Do I? Jesus, bro. How was it? How was your experience? It blew you down. I feel kind of, I feel a little foggy. You taste the flavor in it.

You got a special flavor. I did. It's lemonade flavor. Here we go. In the book of Job, one of the central tenants, if you ask me, this surrender. What did God make a deal with the devil? Are you going to leave in all the audio of the urination? Yeah. Oh, cool. Um, no, it's telling you stories that it on Twitter, there's this, there's, you know, so many great, horrible, horrible videos. I mean, but you can't keep your eye off. Like, what are you seeing? Give me some updates. Let me look at the time. We're doing pretty good. Yeah, no, no. There's one of my favorites. Do you know this one? It's like a kind of maybe a lower middle class British bloke. He's walking. He's kind of stomping through the morning

neighborhoods in the UK. Yeah. I'm sure someone out there has seen this one and he's just yelling into the, into the world. He's just going. I haven't seen this. He's going. Who wants some? Who wants some? Who wants some? Why? He's just kind of going along. I mean, he's like, he's looking for a fight. Yeah. And eventually the guy filming it, I think, is just like kind of sticks his head out the window. He's like, I'll have some. Anyway, it's just, it's, it's amazing to peer into the B size or whatever, this insane thing, you know, but also just to look down in the river and just watch it glimmering and just like rushing by and just, yeah, I mean, just all the energy of it. It's so

nonsensical and it's just howling and crazy. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's an amazing thing, kind of like you're saying, being on acid and watching cops and stuff. I mean, it's just, it's so wild. It'll suck you in. You could see why the child might just want to join that and be like, fuck a masterpiece. You know, that shit sounds hard, you know, or whatever. But yeah, or maybe the way masterpieces, you know, emanate from the, from, from humanity, it was going, it's going to change. I mean, this is the real kick in the balls. Because you, no matter what, you're born into some particular time period, you're taught about the rules of the game. This is what you need to do. We were born into a time where it's like, you're going to go to college. After you

go to college, you'll have, you'll be an expert in something. You're going to take that expertise. You're going to help the world. You're going to get a great job. Start your own business from that expertise. Retire. Have a great retirement and then die. This is your map of life. And then nowhere in there, do they say, but it's going to get interrupted because there's going to be a pandemic and the whole society is going to get shut down. Then after that, they're going to start seeing a lot of UFOs and super intelligence is going to be created that they call AI, but it's really channeling the aliens or whatever. And that will make all of human innovation seem obsolete because it's going to spit out David's every 14 seconds using matter assimilators that

are a million times better than David, but also alive. They can walk around and then you're going to be consumed into a kind of singularity thing. You don't, you know what I'm saying? It's like the kick in the balls is if it's this, this is like the best Jesus story. It goes something on the lines of a man hires some workers. They work all day. He needs more workers to get the job done. He goes out and he finds two more workers and gets them to work for the last hour of the day. And then he pays all the workers the same amount of money and the workers who worked all day are like, what the fuck? We worked all day. They worked for one hour. You're really going to give them the same amount of money. Shouldn't you give them less? That's the parable. And this is where,

you know, if you've been like, motherfuck, I learned a code. I learned Ableton. I learned how to draw. I learned how to paint. I learned how to do. I learned how to do doctrine. And all of a sudden, it's this thing is like, yeah, but it's going to do it is not only it was going to do it, it's going to do it better than you. You know, this is this and people who learn to use that technology are going to have the same abilities that you have after all those years and all that money you spent on college. And if you so if you get pissed about that, that's how you see more. It's interesting when you were talking about your, you didn't call your ego, but that part of yourself that wants to almost like identify with with being the one that made the masterpiece

or yes, you know, that's a really cool idea because I think the way it often goes with the, I don't know, the stories of like Malcolm X or the great some of the great thinker leaders is that like you start you start on a selfish frequency and then the selfish frequency leads out into because because it's pure because it's really pure. You really want to know you really want to grow. It leads you towards this bigger impulse that that's just implicated in the original self impulse, right? So I think when you said that, you know, you sort of have this part of yourself that kind of wants ownership or whatever you said it. Yeah. I don't I don't think of that as bad necessarily bad bad energy because it's just it starts that way you identify

with it being you. Yeah. And then as you get older, as you've implied sort of throughout the podcast, as you get older, you sort of you sort of start to see it in perspective as like these are moments of these are sentiments in the air that someone's kind of, you know, part of or they grab and they and they articulate it, but they don't necessarily own it like a fucking copyright. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And then that whole idea is what creates the like washed up metalhead in the Hamburg bar, you know, that's like, I made this thing in 88 and like meant so much to so many people and like, I'll never make the first whatever record again, you know, but but the pure form the person that's still in tune with genuinely being a curious entity

is always going to find their way back to that first impulse because it's kind of right there. You never stop being a child or what? Yeah, you never stop having that that energy. So that but that was an interesting thing that you sort of separated your your internal lust to as as kind of like your selfish push, you know, but that's a real thing that people get lost in for sure. Sure. It's the same thing that makes people fuck. It's it's I mean, it is a primordial desire to push something into the world. And it's great. I don't think there's anything I think anything that gets anybody's making something is wonderful. How lucky you are if it's your whether it's your anger, whether you've had some burst of inspiration, whether you're just grinding away,

making garbage, whether you're whatever it may be, you're still you're still like attempting to get in the flow of of creation and or the ray of creation or whatever you want to call it, yours and you're still part of the creation. No one talks about the Buddha's great grandmother or great grandfather that I'm aware how if the Buddha's great grandfather had failed to fuck on whatever particular night that he decided to fuck, we would have no Buddha. No one talks about like whoever fed the Buddha's grandfather that afternoon, the meal or the day before I don't know how long it takes to make jizz. I don't know like when you eat rice or when you eat hamburgers, how long before some part of that turns into semen? I don't know.

But all I'm saying is the the had you know, what if the Buddha's great great grandfather had decided that he was going to eat like bananas and doll or some shit that day instead of whatever he ate, would we even have a Buddha? So no one talks about that. They only talk about the fucking Buddha, but they don't talk about the entire the way the entire universe got together accidentally through a variety of incredible synchronicities to produce the thing itself. It is ironic that yeah, so much is said about trying to kill the ego and the ego might be one of God's like central seduction devices to get you to come towards the pure. Right? Yeah, we're always everyone's always out there. Well, I have to do this for the son of our

God. Dude, I shattered my ego on ayahuasca. Everybody's shattering and smashing their fucking ego. How about you stop? Give it a break. Leave it alone. It's like that's it. You see this thing on my face? I had this perfect zit deep in my cheek and I just had I knew if I could pop it, it would be the most beautiful explosion, but I couldn't get in deep enough. And so I fucking like scratch my face trying to pop the zit. That's what people are doing with their ego. Everyone's out there trying to do like pimple poppers with their ego. It doesn't inflame their ego. Leave it alone. We love your ego. It's cool. It's funny at the very least. Yeah, as it as it's in a connection with your your own, I mean, isn't there some old idea that

like that it all starts with with a kind of greed that that like Buddha wouldn't have even left the castle if it not for greed? Yeah, you know, Judas, no Jesus, no mud, no lotus, no no fucking no castle, no Buddha, no, you know, like the way we tell the stories, those things get listed as aberrations like a mistake instead of as a fundamental principle part of, you know, no crucifier, no Jesus, like somebody had to like take the hammer and the nails and do the work. No one talks about that person. It's always just, you know what I mean, the dude who had to be like, Oh, fuck, how many, how many crucifixes today? Are you kidding me? Damn, it's a busy, busy Thursday. No one talks about that. It's probably why they start the last

temptation of Christ with the with the whole scene where Jesus is the one making the crosses. Yeah, because they want you to see him in that light first. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like the carpenter, you know, the this is the unspeakable. You're not supposed to talk about this. Like no one's supposed to talk about how like, if not for all of the very, very difficult personalities existing on the planet right now, we would have no masterpieces that in fact, they are accidentally participating in the greatest works of art that ever happened. All right. This is our this is our final blow. Final blow. Oh, there you go. That's some stuff, man. You didn't give me any instructions. How do I listen?

Who teaches the dolphin to swim? Who teaches the turtle baby to run into the sea? You just do it. I'd like to thank Vape 798 for supplying the nitrous oxide for today's episode. I'd like to thank Kitchen Whip and a big, a big thank you to Galaxy Gas for supplying our nitrous oxide for this episode. Night Galaxy Gas, food and beverage additive. Mommy, what are you using to make the whipped cream? Galaxy Gas, honey. Galaxy Gas. That shit destroys you. Do not refill, do not inhale. Watermelon lemonade. Thank you, Galaxy Gas. Emil, thank you so much. Thanks for coming to my hotel room. Thanks for coming to my show. Thanks for being my friend.

That was Emil Amos, everybody. You can find all the links that will connect you with Emil at dunkatrustle.com. A big thank you to our sponsors and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.