Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 616: Ethan Nichtern

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

Ethan Nichtern, incredible, scholarly author and Buddhist teacher, joins the DTFH! You can pre-order Ethan’s new book right now! Click here to find Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds. Check out Ethan's books, including The Dharma of the Princess Bride, available wherever you buy your books! You should also subscribe to his podcast, The Road Home. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: VB Health - Visit LoadBoost.com and use code DUNCAN for 10% off of your first order! Rocket Money - Visit RocketMoney.com/Duncan to cancel your unwanted subscriptions and start saving! 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.

Hi there, it's me Duncan and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast or if you're on YouTube, you're watching it and listening to it. For my YouTube friends, I want to address something and I'd feel kind of dishonest if I didn't address it. Some of you sent me messages saying, how come you don't have any wrinkles? Why does your skin look like that? And I felt really good when you sent me those messages and I thought well I do use lotion. It could be the lotion. But then I realized there was a setting

on my camera that was getting rid of my wrinkles. They used to call it putting gel on the lens. So I turned that off I think. But I just want you to know like I tried to turn it off. See that? Yeah I definitely turned it off. Look at these bags! It could still be on. The point is I might be accidentally deceiving you because I don't know how to use this camera yet and you know adding video has been like an it's as they're saying these days it's been a real journey. I'm on a real journey and I like this journey a lot but also it's just the weirdest technology. And I went to a camera store, I bought a bunch of like camera stuff,

and I just felt so... What's funny about what just happened is my camera just turned off on me. This is the kind of shit I'm contending with, it just turned off. Why did it turn off? It turned off because me. This is the kind of shit I'm contending with. It just turned off. Why did it turn off? It turned off because I live in Austin and the air conditioner in my studio broke.

And so just so you get an understanding of the boiling cauldron I'm broadcasting from, now you know. Regardless, YouTube people, I love you. I'm so glad you guys liked the video version of the DTFH. I'm still figuring it out as you could see, which is why the video quality probably sucks and the angle's different.

And now, if you could see this on YouTube, guys, if you weren't just doing audio, you would be able to see my studio and not to brag but right back there is a broom you would see a green broom see that gang that's a green fucking broom because I sweep my studio sometimes this if you're wondering what this is I don't know where it came from it just showed up in my studio one day but this is. I don't know where it came from. It just showed up in my studio one day, but this is what I use to turn my air conditioner on. Just so you understand where I'm at technologically. I don't have a remote control air conditioner. My air conditioner is fucking loud, and the reason

it's messing up is because I changed the filter. Now, to put it in perspective, I've lived in this house for a little over a year and I have never changed the filter on the air conditioner in that year and I'm pretty sure the people who used to live here didn't change the filter. So and it didn't change the filter. So crusted onto the filter was just this thick, black, resinous goop, like just years of burps and farts and exhalations and like the dogs shitting in my studio. I mean, I can name all the things it absorbed.

Like I've pissed in bottles, like the waft of old piss bottle piss, I mean, I can name all the things that absorbed. Like I've pissed in bottles, like, you know, the waft of old piss bottle piss, which is not a great smell. All of it just sucked in to this almost living surface, like a fungal in nature. It could have been mold, it could have been black. I don't know what it was.

It was disgusting. I took it outside and it took a long time to hose it off. The area where I hosed it off, this is where it gets really fucking weird, it grew all of these very strange pulsating mushrooms. They glow in the dark and at night they moan. It's a moaning sound. I didn't even know mushrooms could make sounds, but that should give you an idea of how absolutely toxic my AC was. It's also a great way to jump in to the subject of today's podcast, which is Confidence written by David for the Midnight Gospel, David Nickturn's kid, Ethan Nickturn. He's written

many books. He's been on my podcast a few times. He wrote The Road Home, The Dharma of the Princess Bride, and now most recently, Confidence, Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Winds. Now, you know something I'm becoming increasingly aware of? I don't think it's all of you, but I think some of you are immediately turned off by Buddhism. And I know this because I have people in my life who just don't like it. They don't want to hear it. I think I heard Jack Kornfield say, in Buddhism, God is lists. There's a lot of lists. In Buddhism, it can get very technical, it can be very dry. And unless you're like really interested in it, it can seem like completely inaccessible and dull. Now not to say that this book is dull. This is the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, its fundamentals in history. And just to give you an example of why I think,

why I think some people are turned off by Buddhism, I'm just gonna read, just open up to a random part of the book. According to such passages, the arrangement of only three vehicles is not exclusively observed. Vajrayana, in this tradition of ours, there is a precise enumeration of four, namely the vehicles of the pious attendants, self-centered Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Mantras, the last of which is classified into the three lower classes of Tantra and

the three aspects of creation and perfection belonging to the unsurpassed tantra, therefore there is no room for contradiction in this orderly succession of the vehicle." Now, I think if someone was interested in Buddhism and made their tremendous mistake of choosing this as their first Buddhist text, they might read that and be like, this isn't for me. So if you're one of those people and you've been burnt by getting some super fucking advanced technical Buddhist text, I want to invite you to start over with confidence because Ethan's got this really wonderful buttery writing style that is incredibly accessible and which I think is one of his talents, aside from writing, is that he knows how to... He's a Buddhist scholar. Listen to the last episode. He knows so much about Buddhism. And so then to take all that technical, dry, ethereal, enigmatic, mystical stuff and convert

it into something accessible for the rest of us is like a true talent. Like something that Ram Dass was very good at. So I hope you'll check this book out because even if you are the most confident person on the planet right now and you're like, I don't need to read about that. I'm so freaking confident. What's also cool about this book is that mixed into it is a great, just general Buddhist teaching about meditation, practice, emptiness. So even if maybe confidence isn't exactly what you are interested in exploring, it certainly

appeals to me, I think you'll still love the book because it's filled with a lot of really intimate moments in Ethan's life and a lot of just really simple, very profound Buddhist teachings that point is it's not all about confidence. It's not like this is like the 15 laws of power or some shit. It's like a wonderful addition to the Buddhist library of texts that I love. So I hope you'll check it out. Dates coming up. I hope you guys will see me and I hope you don't mind that I'm always reading what shows I have coming up. I imagine that for folks who don't go to comedy shows or don't live anywhere near where I'm performing, it could seem pretty fucking dull and annoying, but I have to do it. So I'm sorry. You can always skip past this part, but I'd love for you to come to my shows.

But I'd love for you to come to my shows. Let me open it up on my website. I'm going to be headed out to one of my favorite comedy clubs on the planet. That's Helium in Portland, May 30th through June 1st. Then after that, I'm going to be at the Orange Peel in Asheville, June 11th and 12th. One of those shows sold out. The other one is half sold out. So get tickets to that Asheville if you want to come. Then I'm gonna be at Good Nights Comedy Club in Raleigh, June 13th through the 15th.

And this is far from sold out. What's going on Raleigh? Come on. What the fuck? Get some tickets please. from sold out. What's going on, Raleigh? Come on! What the fuck? Get some tickets, please. It makes me feel so good. In the most probably not healthy way,

but boy, it feels good when you sell a bunch of tickets. Then after that, I'm going to be at Helium Comedy Club August 8th through the 10th. And then SideSplitters Comedy Club August 15th through the 10th, and then side, Splitters Comedy Club, August 15th through the 17th. That's in Tampa, August 9th is Buffalo, and then finally, November 1st, you can find me at the Wilbur in Boston. Very excited about that show, but it's far away.

All right, everybody, let's jump into this episode. Oh wait, I'm sorry to tease you. As I've mentioned maybe a million times, I am moving the DTFH to video. I love that you're listening to the audio episodes and if you're not into video, I get it, but if you are interested in seeing my sweaty ass ramble in my overheated studio then you can find that on YouTube. My YouTube account is Duncan Trussell. So it's there. Subscribe. I'm trying to get the algorithm to fall in love with me. I'm not going to go into detail here but on YouTube I am articulating a plan to unseat dethrone Mr. Beast, the most popular YouTube celebrity.

I'm going to exceed him and I'm getting close. I'm getting close already. The episode I did with Ari already has 21,000 downloads, which is all I have to do is get I think like 10,000 times that and I'm the new Mr. Beast. So I need your help. Head over to YouTube, subscribe, like, leave comments, make the algorithm love me. Because once I get to Mr. Beast's level, I'm going to destroy the Great Pyramid of Giza. And if you want to know the details, go to my YouTube because there's a visual description of what I'm gonna do, how I'm gonna get the Coca-Cola into the pyramid, how we will get the

Altoids in there, and how we will waterproof the exterior that I think you're gonna want to watch. And also a plan for how you can help, how you can become part of this ever-growing community, which has as its central goal, one, we dethrone Mr. Beast, two, we start destroying the great wonders of the world in really creative, hilarious ways that are gonna be family-friendly. So that's Duncan Trussell on YouTube.

Also, if you want commercial free episodes of this you can find it at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Okay let's jump into this wonderful conversation with Ethan Nickturn, author of Confidence Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Winds. This is available right now on Amazon. It's the Duncan Trial Family. Ethan, welcome back to the DTFH. How you doing? You just did a class?

Yeah, I just led a little mini online retreat and yeah, Duncan, it's great to be back with you. Thanks for having me back. Anytime. Anytime. And you know, this episode, we have to talk about your new book, not just because I want to help you plug the book, but also because it's so good. It's so good.

You know, like when you're people, you know, when your friends write a book, but also because it's so good. It's so good. You know, like when you're, people you know when your friends write a book, there's a little feeling of like, God Jesus, let it be good. Please let it be good. You want it to be good, you know, because if it's not good, what are you gonna say? You know, what are you gonna say?

Exactly. And then they ask you to like share the word about it. And you're like, oh, this is uncomfortable. And you're like, yeah, what's more important here? My friendship or some sense of like ethics and those two clash and then you just don't text them back ever again, you never talk to them again because you're a coward and you don't wanna deal

with the problem. Which is one of the things you recommend in your book, confidence, stop texting people back if it feels uncomfortable. That would be amazing if I recommend in your book, confidence. Stop texting people back if it feels uncomfortable. That would be amazing if that was in this book. Just the essence of this, I understand this book is, if you feel insecure in a relationship, uncertain, cut that person off forever rather than directly deal

with the issue. Am I reading it correctly? Well, this is my book, Confidence. My next book is going to be called mindful ghosting. You'll be a billionaire. Just spiritualized ghosting. You'll be a billionaire. This is I want to know before I do any commentary on it, why did you pick this as the topic for your next book? Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great question. I'm not gonna write a book on ghosting. I don't recommend that, although we all have done it.

But yeah, so this is my fourth book that I've written about Buddhism in modern life. And one time I got from a literary agent, it wasn't my literary agent, but they basically said, when you're a spiritual writer, one way to do it is you find your niche. And then you kind of write the same book every time. Yeah. And in just differently, slightly different ways. And I never wanted to do that. I kind of, you know, wanted to always have wait till I had something that I actually wanted to talk about or felt relevant and felt different enough from what I had talked about before. So confidence, you know, it's it's a big part, I think, of Buddhist teachings when you dig in there. It's not obviously part of the Buddhist teachings,

but I work with a lot of people in group environments and privately. And whenever we dig one level deeper in the conversation, just below the initial attraction to mindfulness or meditation or Buddhist principles, we end up talking about how to show up to life and how to trust that you can show up to life and it Almost always turns into some version of a conversation on how we struggle with confidence So I wanted to kind of dig in to my own experience dig into the places in classic Buddhist thought and modern psychology and things like that, where a conversation about

the struggle with confidence or the practice of confidence could come from. So, you know, it's something I've struggled with. I think it's something everybody struggles with. I think some people pretend not to struggle with it, but I think they're probably lying and or at least lying to themselves or they should have written the book. They're not. And yeah, so that's that's how it came about. And you know, I know it's a good topic because usually when I talk, you know, like I meet somebody for coffee or I meet a friend of a friend and they're like, oh, Ethan, he teaches

Buddhism and he writes about Buddhism. And they ask, what's your book about? I usually have to explain it for a little while before they're like, oh, yeah, I get that that's interesting This one I literally just have to say the title and people are like I need to read that he had yeah Well, how do you define confidence? Yeah, I mean if you if you look in the dictionary that the the definition that you find most often is trust or firm trust. Firm trust.

Right? And so, trusting oneself, I think, would be self-confidence. And I think more than that, trusting that we can show up to the present moment and figure out how to be, you know, fucking up, making mistakes, being in a constant learning process, but trusting I can actually be here and I can figure out how to be here and it's going to be okay fundamentally. And I can maybe pursue the things I want to pursue in life with making a lot of mistakes, but I can actually ride the energy

of not knowing how it's going to go and trust myself through the process and do hard things. What, so, you know, I guess to me, I've always thought of the opposite of confidence as insecurity. Would you agree? Insecurity? Yeah. I think another word that comes up in modern parlance, fragility, but I like the word insecurity. Yeah. I think I'd have to think about the fragility one a little bit. But insecurity,

that's a word I'm very familiar with. In fact, that should be the topic of my book. I'm an expert at the feelings of insecurity. And I think a lot of people I know are plagued by a general sense of the world being a very dangerous place, not just dangerous for the obvious reasons that we all know about, but dangerous in the sense that they can't trust people. I mean, forget trusting yourself. They can't trust people. When they do trust people, they often are betrayed, which makes them not trust their instincts about other people.

And then a general sort of muddy feeling regarding one's role in life. They call it imposter syndrome. You hear it all the time, regardless of external success factors, some inner insecurity regarding their profession, or instead of saying, I got this because of hard work, they will say, I got this because of good luck. Or I don't know why this happened to me. Or connections.

Yeah, or connections. I got this because of my connections. Or my parents, or whatever it is. But very rarely do you hear someone confidently say how they achieved whatever they achieved. And when you do hear it, it's actually a breath of fresh air. It's really nice when you hear that. But usually what I hear are varying degrees of expressions of insecurity regarding one's

place in the universe. And in fact, the idea of living confidently in the world, like you write about in your book, it sounds like a dream or something. I think for a lot of us neurotics, that sounds like the Garden of Eden or heaven. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, so I think that's, you know, the same way we could idealize a spiritual concept

like enlightenment or awakening, we could idealize confidence, right? So I'm not, you know, I'm not that interested or I haven't yet discovered how to completely be at ease with who I am in the world, how I'm regarded. So I view it more as a practice. That's one things I say in the introduction

and the conclusion. Confidence is not an endpoint, it's a practice. And I think when we look at it that way, we don't have to be secure all the time. It's just saying like, when I'm feeling insecure, how can I actually work with that? How can I train? How can I open my heart?

How can I show up anyway? And maybe learn something through not feeling so settled. And maybe through that process, slowly develop more ease and more familiarity with the things that knock me around or the things that make me feel insecure. Okay, so in your book, you describe confidence as like your seat.

like your seat, like, and that, there's the worldly winds that blow us, that, you know, once you get attached to these things or to one or the other, this knocks you off your ass, basically. You don't say that, but essentially, you describe the things that tend to knock. I should have, yeah. Yeah, you can't in a book. You can't in a book like

this. So it is literally like Cita is a nice way to say ass. But it doesn't matter. I don't want to get lost in semantics here. Tell me about the winds. What are these winds? So yeah, so first of all, to just build out the metaphor. So there's the when we're talking about arriving in your meditation posture in meditation in the traditions that I learned, the first step is always called and you know, I know David, my father talks about this and this is the way his teacher talked about it, taking your seat, right? And taking your seat has a real practical aspect, which is just arranging your posture in a way that you're grounded, but you're not going to sleep. You're also uplifted. So we sometimes say upright, but not uptight. So there's an arriving, but there's also kind of a metaphor for meditation being the way

we approach showing up to the present moment in every part of our life. Meditation is kind of like a flight simulator for the rest of life that way. And in every part of our life. Our meditation is kind of like a flight simulator for the rest of life that way. And in that way of looking at things, taking your seat is like claiming your spot on the earth and saying, I'm here, I can be here, I belong here. You know? Like, and that's not always what people think of

when they think of meditation. They often think of like transcending the mundane, transcending the earth. But this is really saying, right, that the beginning of meditation practices, when you decide, I'm gonna be here, right? So that's taking your seat. And then there's this notion that once we take our seat in meditation, it's mostly mental events. But in life, it's all of these different forces that come along.

And they're really forces based on what we hope for in life, especially when we try to show up and achieve something and what we're afraid of in life when we try to show up and be somebody in the world and achieve something. And so these forces of hope and fear can be thought of as wins. And there's a classic Buddhist teaching that's actually one of my favorite of all the many,

many lists in Buddhism that I think doesn't get talked about enough. So I spent the first 60% of this book talking about it called the eight worldly wins. And the eight worldly wins are these four pairs or four couples. In each couple, there's a feared experience when we try to show up to the present moment and there's a hoped for or desired experience when we try out. So the most visceral one is just the simplest, the most human is pleasure and pain. We show up to the moment, I hope it feels good, it's gonna suck if it hurt, you know?

And I got a root canal on Thursday, so my first ever root canal, so I know the experience of like, whoa, is this... I gotta get a colonoscopy, and that's exactly how I feel about it. I'm supposed to too. I turned 45 this year, and I'm like, nah, I'm waiting a year.

I'm waiting, but I hope it's gonna... And all my friends are like, you can't wait, but I'm like, I'm, I'm, are you afraid it's gonna hurt? Your friends say, oh, your friends say you can't wait. They don't say I can't wait. Oh, they haven't mentioned Duncan Trussell. No, I'm saying no one, when they have a,

no one's like, I can't wait for my colonoscopy. Like there's never in the history, I'm sure there's people who have actually said that. I'm sure there's people who get them every week. But that's not the point. I get it. Like there's some future event, your mind simulates the very worst thing

that could happen at that event in a very real way. If you're me, and then what you do as in the moments approaching that event is you feel horrible all the way up till the moment of the event and then quite often whatever you are afraid of it's either not as bad as you thought it would be or actually it turns out to be pleasurable and you look back and realize my god I just spent two weeks or longer in a kind of low level anxiety over nothing. Or disappointment, I guess, is the opposite where you're like, this is going to be incredible. And then something goes wrong and you are now disappointed. You know, God, that was horrible. What's wrong with me?

Yeah. Or it is incredible and then it ends. Oh, God. Yeah, that one sends a lot of people to the mental hospital, man. They can't handle that. That's a real dark one. Yeah. And it's even worse when a meditation session is incredible,

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my cum. I'm sure that's something you want to know and I want to know if this transforms your cum. So let me know. Share your load boost stories with me. Thank you, Load Boost. You know, disappointment, I guess, is the opposite where you're like, this is going to be incredible. And then something goes wrong and you are now disappointed. God, that was horrible. What's wrong with me? Yeah. Or it is incredible and then it ends. Oh, God. Yeah, that one sends a lot of people

to the mental hospital, man. They can't handle that. That's a real dark one. Yeah. And it's even worse when a meditation session is incredible, but then it ends and you can't get back there. Right? What do you do with that? Yeah. So, so pleasure and pain are the kind of most visceral pair. Then praise and criticism, which is the beginning of, you know, how we receive feedback about

how we're doing in the world. And then sort of our larger sense of being known in the world, what's traditionally called fame and insignificance, but in the book I talked a lot about influence versus insignificance. Great. And then the most general one, just about our identity, about pursuing anything in the human path,

success and failure. Sometimes that one is called gain and loss, but I like to view it as we set out to do a project and we hope it succeeds and we fear it fails. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So these winds, they blow together.

It's not like you just get one wind. Generally, all of the wins are going to appear in any given endeavor. The wins. And what I really love, and I didn't finish your book. It came a few days ago. And actually, let me just say this. Your writing is so good, man.

I am jealous of your. You are such a skillful writer. And I think it's really easy to understand this stuff and then write about it in a very dry, non-compelling way that people can't really relate to. And I do like books like that, like in the sense you have to really like, you have to really sort of break your brain

trying to understand it. But I prefer Ram Dass style books where you in the midst of describing these things are so honest about your own life and parenting in general. And talk about- Yeah, we could talk about like a thing that if confidence is a practice, then parenting, I mean, truly, you have to practice confidence all the time. And I like how you mentioned in this book, you talk about moments where you have,

you say something to your child, and then the first thing that pops into your head is like, well, that's therapy. That's their entire 20s of therapy, right? Yeah, you know, and you wanna like sit, you wanna, like we've created email accounts for our kids so we can send the messages as they grow up and they can go back and look at it if they want to.

And you almost wanna send an email, like for their therapist. Like you can just share this with your therapist. This is what I did. I was, I shouldn't have, I don't know, you're five, so I don't know how to explain to you about the snowball, the boulder of trauma and horror that rolls down generationally and occasionally like comes out of anyone. And I just gave you a little taste of that. Regardless, these wins, I mean, as a parent, my god, they kick up all the time.

Because it's such a tumultuous, chaotic sometimes experience. And no, you can't train someone to be a parent, I don't think. Yeah, yeah. And hope and fear are arising constantly, right? I mean, I've had multiple days where I was on the same day called the best dad in the world and a bad dad. So what do you do with that? How do you like, talk about hope and fear? I talk about praise and blame. I mean, because once you become a dad, all you wanna do is be a great dad.

And when someone critiques your parenting, a partner, the kid, whoever, you just read some like fucking TikTok where somebody is like up at 4 a.m. making their kids like some insane buffet style, beautiful breakfast. And you're just like, whoa, what the fuck am I doing, man? What the fuck am I doing?

I need to sleep. You know, praise and blame hit hard. And I, you know, there's so much to talk about in your book. But I really would like to focus on praise and blame. I'll tell you why. Yeah. And this thought occurred to me reading praise and blame. I was thinking like, preinternet, pre-internet, how many times would an average person get criticized per day? And I think that number is substantially,

infinitely lower than it is now if you have some kind of online life. Like we, like any given human hanging out on the internet, which is our new town square or whatever you want to call it, is experiencing a shotgun blast of praise and blame with any given post, no matter what it may be. This, I think, is causing some low-level psychosis in our culture because we haven't, we're not, this is not supposed to happen to people unless you're a comedian and then it's even worse, you know, which is for me the personal, the way I connected this personally is as a comedian, if I go on stage wanting to do good, laughter being praised, you know,

as a comedian, then now I'm vampirizing the audience. I'm not going out there to give, I'm going out there to take. But if I go on stage scared that they're not going to like me, then that is another form of a kind of vampirism. But even worse, they can sense it as an audience. They can feel your lack of confidence. And so I really want to focus on these two, on this wind and its opposite, and hear your thoughts on mitigating it, finding balance within it, and your own personal experience with dealing with praise and blame.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there's different words we could use. I think for now, like talking about blame, maybe also talking about criticism, I think might be. And so, you know, this is the second pairing. And in the book, you know, the first of these four pairings are eight wins a pleasure and pain I think it's important. So the main Insight is we're actually not gonna escape these wins, right?

so the idea that you're gonna attain some spiritual reality where these things don't happen to you anymore and they don't affect you is Is a dream world, you know, It's kind of like some transcendent fantasy. Now, definitely they might not affect us and cause us to suffer quite the same way. Maybe eventually they won't cause us to suffer at all. But I think it's important to look at criticism the same way we look at a painful physical sensation to some degree. And so one of the insights, given that both are the feared, you know, in the couple or the feared element is something that, you know, different modern psychologists and evolutionary biologists have talked about.

And Rick Hanson, who wrote a really lovely endorsement for the book, who wrote one of my favorite books called Buddha's Brain, talks about in that book is a phrase you may have heard of before, the negativity bias. And the negativity bias is basically our evolutionary response where we are more likely, way more likely to become conscious of negative information than we are of positive information for the basic reason that our system is geared towards survival. Yes.

Right? So what that means is that we're looking much more closely at things that might threaten our survival. Right. Now, we could say, okay, criticism. That's not a threat to my survival You know if somebody if somebody dunks on your stand-up set if somebody leaves me a one-star review for this book on goodreads Doesn't like my body is still safe. You know, nobody actually touched us, right?

But there's we also have a social self, right? We have a relational self, you know? And we don't just have a physical body. We have an identity that's built in relationship to other people, right? And so the critic is so important because there's a pain to our identity in relationship to others, right? That we have to learn to hold our seat with or work with. And it's not quite as primal as physical pain, but it is fairly primal, you know?

The other aspect of this, I think, you know, when we meditate, when we do therapy or something like that, we're primarily working with inner criticism. You know, I think that's really important is to get more aware of our inner critic. And I think it's actually really helpful, and I do this in the introduction and later in the book,

to kind of give our inner critic some names. You know? Yes. So like the voice that's hovering over how you're doing as a father, like that could have a name. Okay, that's good. Sharon Salzberg, my friend and teacher, talks about naming her inner critic Lucy from Peanuts,

because she always saw this, she teaches about this a lot, but she always saw this Peanut Comics strip where Lucy, who was a real jerk to Charlie Brown, said to him at one point, the thing about you, Charlie Brown, or the problem with you, Charlie Brown, is that you're you. And he goes, well, I don't know what I can do about that.

So Sharon, whenever she had a very critical thought come up, inner critic thought, she called that voice Lucy. that you know so Sharon whenever she had a very critical thought come up in her critic thought she called that voice Lucy also Lucifer she said hey Lucy not a bad name kind of welcomed it a little bit or at least Lucifer I like then right I was Satan to me I think as an all-encompassing name for an in for that voice I just I'll go straight to Satan. Like get thee behind me, and box it all up, Satan the accuser. But yes, so, and I agree with you.

Like at least the criticism that one will gain from posting anything on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, whatever, is weirdly consensual, right? Like you have to read the comments to get the criticism. You don't have to read the comments. But the inner critic, the inner critic, it's not consensual. It's just whatever name you want to give it.

It's just something inside of you bellowing or hissing out what you're doing wrong at any given moment. And yes, I agree with you. If we're going to address one of these, it should be that thing that dwells inside of us and just is constantly heckling. Right. But this is the thing, right? So the inner critic and the outer critic, when you try to show up in the world They're both talking to you, you know And I think and I think that I think the first step is when you put something out there You know, like let's say because you're talking about our internet. Let's say you put a post on social media Yeah, you know, let's say we you know, I put out this book you put out your podcast

Or you send somebody an email It doesn't have to be so big in public. It could it could just be more relational You know, like you send somebody somebody sends you a harsh text message and you're like, what the fuck like why why? Why are you dissing me? You're supposed to love me, you know, yeah So I think the the first thing is to realize that that is, there's a wind there. In other words, there's a force, there's an impact. It's actually gonna strike us and that's okay.

And we could pretend to be impenetrable. We could pretend like, I reference, cause in every book I write, I have to reference at least one Radiohead song. So I reference the Radiohead track off of Kid A, maybe their second best album behind OK Computer. Some people would say it's their best. Kid A fucked me up, man.

But that's a different podcast. Kid A was so good. Yeah, yeah, we could do a Dharma of Radiohead podcast anytime, I will show up for that podcast. But, how to disappear completely, right? And Tom York says again and again through this almost like a mantra, I'm not here, this isn't happening. You know? Yeah. Like we could do this all we want. But like, actually, I am here. And this is happening. And somebody is going to

say something that hurts my feelings. And I can pretend it doesn't, but it has an impact. The wind strikes, right? And I was afraid. I put something out there with this book, let's say, that I wanted people to like, and I'm afraid somebody's not gonna like it. Right, yeah.

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I am here and this is happening and somebody's going to say something that hurts my feelings. And I can pretend it doesn't, but it has an impact. The wind strikes, right? And I was afraid. I put something out there with this book, let's say, that I wanted people to like, and I'm afraid somebody's not gonna like it. Right, yeah, yeah. I mean, go ahead, sorry.

I think first is acknowledging that, just acknowledging that, just being honest and kind enough to ourselves to acknowledge, I was hoping people liked me and this person said a thing that now I'm like, I think I might be disliked for this moment at least, right? Right, yeah. That hurts.

And it hurts even more when they're right. You know, like if you realize, you know, at least if they're wrong, you're insane. That is, but when they're right, when, and it's a blind spot, you didn't even know it was there and they found it and then they identify it. Holy shit, that hurts.

And, but no matter what, even if they're wrong, and especially if it's someone you know personally, there's there's a sense of like you feel like someone is being violent with you or aggressive or doesn't love you or doesn't care about you or secretly doesn't like you. Like these are all of the thoughts that pop up. And and sometimes you talk about this in your book, if these happen to you when you're a kid, it can shape your whole life.

If it happens in the years where you don't remember, but you do somewhere in there, then it can really create a cycle in your life where you don't even realize that a long time ago, someone probably older, bigger, who made you with eggs and come says a thing to you. You know what I mean? Like, and then maybe they... And especially, I think mixed in with this praise and blame is a generalized lack of understanding of the process of getting better at stuff.

God help you if you had parents who didn't understand that you have to fail to get good at something. If you had parents who wanted you to succeed from day one, and people have parents like that. And so we're constantly beating you down because yeah, I'm gonna suck at what singing, writing, drawing, sports, whatever it may be, because I just started. But if someone emphasizes that enough to you as a kid, then you will have the inner critic suddenly just start

saying like, don't even try that. You're terrible at sports. You have no dexterity. You can't catch anything. We don't do sports. Trussells don't do sports. You're not an athlete. Whatever.

And you think that's coming from you spontaneously. You don't know you've been poisoned by someone who didn't understand progress. Yeah. Yeah. didn't understand progress. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, in terms of, you said pre-internet, and I think that's really important because, you know, if we're talking about how to give and receive feedback, that's something in the teachings on right speech that Buddhism and, you know,

a lot of different traditions talk a lot about, I'm thinking of like, you know, nonviolent communication You know if we're talking about that like when Buddhism is talking about like right speech It's talking about like having a few human relationships, you know, and it's coming from an era Where they didn't even have the written word yet So like the words you said to another person it probably only happened a few times a day And they were probably incredibly important, you know, and you probably thought about them for a few hours before saying it.

And that was a practice, right? And that was a practice amongst people who are all trying to practice mindfulness. So now you bring that into this arena where, you know, we are we're trying to manage. I mean, even if you don't have a large following, but you have a social media profile, like managing 500 relationships at once, and that's 500 people who could tell you you suck at something and don't know you or do know you. That's a lot to hold.

That's a lot of wins. That's a lot of force to hold. And we have no training in how to do that. None. None. Other than just either, you know, I think the training, I guess is it's a training in ignorance, like from the Buddhist perspective, like you learn to actively ignore, you know, which I think flies in the face of what you're talking about in your book, which is that isn't the answer. Maybe the answer isn't to not read the comments. Maybe the answer is to read the comments,

but find a way to not let those comments destabilize you permanently, throw you off your track to continue on regardless of some temporary assessment of wherever you are at in your process. Yeah, well, I think everything is sort of just like training physically. We have to know what we can take on at any given moment, you know, so it might sometimes like being like, I can't stand reading

the comments today. You know, I think it's also really important to, you know, because we're talking about unsolicited feedback. So I think it's also really important when you're trying to show up when you have a spiritual path or you're working on yourself in some way, when you're putting your work out there in the world. I think it's important to have people whose feedback you trust, right? And it's important, you know, I'm thinking about this.

I mentioned like, you know, very confident, like hip hop artists have hype men, right? And comedians also have this too, right? I think there's a difference between if you're headlining and you have somebody you trust to come out and warm up the crowd. Right. So that, you know, once you take the stage, they're like, oh yeah, Duncan's here, right? But so there's some use to having people who actually tell you you're great, you know? Well, I think in parenting... Well, let me stop you there. The feature act's job

or great, you know? Well, let me stop you there. The feature acts job definitely isn't to tell you you're great. It's just, they need to be funny before you go on stage as the headliner. That's their job. My God, I think that's a great idea though. My God, replace the feature with someone who for 10 minutes

just has to talk about how great you are. Then they bring you up. But they bring you up and they're not supposed to say, well, I was much better than the guy you all came here to see, right? Oh, I got you. You're talking about when you bring the next person up, the person you've been waiting for.

I got you, okay, you're right. That is a hype man. And they warm up the crowd, right? So there's a general environment of like, Yes, yes. Like there's a general environment of support. Absolutely. That's the idea, right? Gotcha, gotcha. That a general environment of support. That's that's the idea. Gotcha. That's the idea of having the hype man. Right.

Yeah. And we all need a little bit of that, you know, and, and, and we need to know when we're doing some work in the world or we're working on ourself, like who can tell it to me straight, but also in a supportive way. Right. You know, who loves me. So I tell the story of my friend who's a Dharma teacher, writer, and entrepreneur, Susan Piver, who talked about, she works on projects, and she had this friend,

I thought this was really insightful. So whenever she was working on a long-term project, she had this one friend who, if she asked him very early in the process like what do you think of this? He would point out all the potential obstacles, you know, and his feedback was good but what she needed at that phase was just like go create, you know, like be free, go try things, you know, build. And so what she realized was not to not ask him what he thought, but to be a

little bit more skillful and ask for his feedback later in the process when she needed edits, you know, when the project was far enough along to sort of survive his razor a little bit more. So I think kind of knowing what we need, you know, and we all need support, you know, we do. We do need people telling us where we are basically good. We're doing great, you know, it's, I think the best feedback usually comes when somebody's like, you're doing awesome.

You're really doing awesome. Here's one thing to look at, you know, just focus on this one obstacle or this one thing that's not connecting or working. And don't make the assumption that everyone you're talking to or getting feedback from went to college, went to a writing class where the first thing they teach you is how to give feedback.

Like in a good class, any good class, there's an instruction usually about here's what good feedback looks like, here's what shitty feedback looks like. And I love understanding that some people, they're going to like, if you, God help you, if you Some people are essentially like abortion doctors for early embryonic ideas. You need to know, you know what I mean? You bring the embryo to the abortion doctor, it's gonna get aborted.

They will not understand the way your process works and that maybe this thing is gonna grow into something wonderful. They're just gonna look at it and be like, you gotta kill it, kill it now. So I love that understanding. Yes, that's that kind of person. And then you're so lucky if you have the other kind

of person in your life, who I don't know if a lot of people even have that. He was just like, yeah, great, maybe try this. So that's a wonderful thing. And also maybe learning how to give criticism yourself, like having the ability to understand where a project is and what kind of criticism is gonna benefit the person who's bringing it to you the most.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's also, there's a contemplative slogan in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition from this set of I don't know if you're familiar with it 59 contemplative slogans about basically how to be a bodhisattva compassion being and wake up. It's called the low Jong or my training slogans. And the slogan goes of the two witnesses, observe the principal witness. And basically what this is saying is, you do always have what other people think

and you have what you think, you know? And I do think it's really important that when we receive feedback from others to listen, you know, as you were saying, like maybe do read the comments, you know? Cause I think as we gain good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Yeah. And you can especially read that if you have a trusted, you know, if you have a mentor in a certain area. Like I don't know, you know, if you, for your comedy work, like if you are working with mentors that you run stuff by, we have that dharmically, we have that therapeutically, you know, I have, I have my literary agent, I have my, you know, two editors, you know, for this book. So there's a sense of like running this by people who you trust in the process.

["The Last Supper"] This episode of the DTFH has been sponsored by BetterHelp. Have you ever had the experience of having something that you needed to talk about but you don't have anybody to talk about it with? You know that certain people if you talk about it with, they're going to get offended. You know other people if you talk about it with, they're probably going to hold it against you. And so you end up shoving it down into your heart. Just, you don't say anything. The idea, the dream would be if we can shove it deep enough down, like really deep, like really deep down and just forget about it, then it's gone. But the reality is that's just

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And maybe not like an actual explosion, like you're not going to spontaneously combust, but you're going to have a couple of vodkasodas and suddenly say some shit that is horrible for no reason. Or you're just going to have those moments where like, what was that? What just came out of me? Your friends are going to look at you like, what just happened to you? Who was that? And that was that was the dark, creepy monstrosity that you're desperately trying to hide in the sub-basement of your life. This is why therapy is fantastic. Not only are therapists trained to listen, they also meet with freaked out people all day long. They're not everyone's freaked out. I'm not implying you have to be necessarily freaked out

to go to therapy. My point is the best thing that happens in therapy is when your therapist, after you have confessed to them whatever this thing may be, tells you, yeah that happens to a lot of people. Suddenly you realize you're not alone. Whatever it is, whatever the thing is, whatever your experience may be, you're not alone. Lots of other people have felt, thought, or experienced a similar thing and that alone is incredibly cathartic. I have had a lot of great experiences in therapy and to be honest, I've had a few bad ones, which is why BetterHelp is fantastic. BetterHelp is an online service where they will match you with a therapist and if you don't like that therapist, you can find a new one. Now,

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My camera died on me. I don't understand. Speaking of death, I know we're kind of getting off track here, but I want to get to something a little deeper regarding confidence. And I want to talk about absurdity a little bit or sort of the, you know, there's like a lack of confidence in one's skills, lack of confidence in one's safety. But at some point in the deconstruction of culture and reality itself, a new kind of insecurity springs up, which is a general sense that the entirety of everything is bullshit, like the whole thing itself, complete bullshit, and that to have confidence in any regard is to delude oneself into believing this incredible movie that is ultimately pointless. So you know which is like somewhere in here

the I think at least gen X definition of cool emerges Right the nihilist like in the Breakfast Club This is all people references, but in the Breakfast Club you have that dude in the trench coat who's basically like the whole System itself is a fraud man. The whole thing itself is a ridiculous game of make believe that people are taking so seriously. And at this point, confidence would actually just be having confidence in presenting oneself to the world. But that just alone is a fraud. Because whatever you think you are, just some constructed, like somewhat self-constructed

amalgam of various experiences that have all just smushed together in your life. And from that perspective, confidence becomes a delusion. Yeah, yeah. I love the question of absurdity. I mean, this is so, what we've been talking about is more personal.

Last time I was here, last time I was here, we did talk about the TSA and butt plugs. We'll get there. This time you're on colonoscopies. So you definitely, there's a region of the body that you go towards, I've noticed, but anyway.

Everyone noticed. You should see, you should hang out with me sometime. You'll really notice. Maybe I'd enjoy that, who knows? But anyway, so we talked about relative and ultimate truth, right? And we've been talking about kind of the relative truth of my life in the world, which is super important.

Yeah. It's super important. But now you're talking when we get into a conversation of absurdity. We're talking about ultimate truth, right? We're talking about What Buddhism calls emptiness, right? That would be the the relationship to absurdity and emptiness sounds like a term for nihilism Yeah, I believe I'm tail end of Gen X 1978. So Judd Nelson is in the trench coat, I believe. Yeah, that's right. Judd Nelson, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So don't you forget about me.

But there's a quality of, yeah, this is all a hologram, right? This is all a construct, you know? And I noticed that. We're living in very nihilistic times too. You know, I noticed that a lot about our, you know, political debate right now, like the sort of, fuck this, it's all bullshit. You know, I noticed that quite a lot.

And I think that's how we ended up with the reality dv president Uh as people are just like fuck this construct. Let's go with let's go with a guy who knows how to make shit up Yeah, you know I get it. I get it too because it's sort of like uh, it you know the the what when you were like in high school at my age You sounded edgy when you would say something like, the president is just a mascot. The president doesn't really do anything.

The president, they're just actors that are being puppeteered by forces that you will never see. And you would say a thing like that and you would feel so edgy and smart. But then gradually that idea, I think, spread into the public consciousness to the point that nobody, it was just like,

let's just fuck this whole thing up. Like, you know, instead of having a president that pretends to be nice, but it's killing countless fucking people and making decisions that directly like blow babies up. Let's have a president who doesn't pretend to be fucking nice and doesn't pretend to be sane. And you know, and is just a maniac and see what happens because at least then there's some honesty there,

you know, as opposed to like, you know, it'd be like all the other presidents who like try to act like they're fucking Aslan or like some like good messenger of peace and they're just killing babies left and right. It's like what happened? You know, let's just get to the point. And so yes, so in that what you're talking about, my God, I watched the new documentary on Timothy McVeigh. It's an amazing analysis of exactly what you're talking about and how that sense of nihilism when it comes to the United States leads to Oklahoma City, leads to bombings, leads to violence, leads to like, look, this whole thing's a scam, so let's blow the whole fucking

thing up and start over. That is a scary way of thinking, but a lot of people right now feel like that. I get it, yeah. I mean, and then you end up with this kind of absurdity where like, I totally get it. The guy who we're talking about, where like, I totally get it. That guy, the guy who we're talking about,

you know, objectively lied over 30,000 times the four years he was in office, but he sounds authentic because he sounds authentic about how it's all bullshit anyway. And that gets us to like absurdity, right? This kind of burn it all down approach. And I do think when we touch the breakfast club, we can bring that back to sort of that adolescent nihilism.

Because the breakfast club, you bring it back to this sort of like, my high school is a construct, the world they want me to live in after this is a construct. What is the point? It's all suffering, everybody's holding on to these fantasies, it all ends in death anyway, right? And that is, I think, that sort of nihilistic approach is, in a sense, the first kind of adolescent touch of seeing the truth of emptiness, right?

Seeing the truth of emptiness. But it's kind of an amoral, not immoral, not like evil, but it's like an amoral approach to, to seeing the truth that everything on the relative level is a construct, you know, I mean, you want to succeed as a comedian, right? The most famous comedian, it's a construct, you know? It's like, what does that even mean, the most famous comedian? And we're sitting here arguing,

like somebody says a thing and you go and you laugh a little bit, you know? What would it mean to be a best-selling Buddhist author? Like who fucking cares? And the real question is in a hundred years, who gives a fuck? Like think back to all the most famous comedians a hundred years ago.

Think about all the, you know, in general, a hundred years ago, no one gives a shit about you. Like it doesn't really matter. And even if you, even the people who did great things, you're just like, they're fun to talk about, like Tesla or Einstein or something like that. But in general, like this foggy, or people that you loved who've passed on.

You know, like- Yeah, and I- Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I talk about that in the chapter of the book on influence and insignificance, that idea of whatever we achieve, whatever we're known for,

we have to accustom ourselves to the idea that that's going, like we will not be known someday. So if we aim our life just towards being known in the world, we will not be known. And the few people who have been known for thousands of years are almost certainly misremembered. Right, yeah, sure. So there is a sense of letting go of solidity.

And the first direction that does take us into, especially when we see the suffering of the world, is the fuck it, burn it all down, you know, rage against the machine, you know, wear my trench coat, pump my fist in the air, kind of vibe. But there's another side to emptiness, which is a care for sentient beings, right? And also a realization that it's not that nothing is happening, right? That's not what emptiness means. That's what nihilism means,

but it actually means nothing solid is happening, right? That's not what emptiness means. That's what nihilism means. But it actually means nothing solid is happening. And what is actually happening is a bunch of minds, a bunch of like almost film projectors, right? Who are meeting each other and are sharing our film projections about who we believe ourselves to be. And then that's bouncing off of other people's film project. Yeah. And then there's the question of, like,

do I care about the sentient beings who are those film projectors? Because it's not nothing at that point. There is a level of reality through the whole thing. And then there's a real level of compassion. I talk about that in the second section of the book, why compassion is related to true confidence. And then there's almost this rebound from nihilism that happens. There's almost this return from ultimate truth into relative truth where you're like, okay,

we are stuck in this projection. Or, you know, a lot of people talk about the matrix when they talk about Buddhist movies. But you're like, yeah, the Matrix is constructed. That doesn't mean it's not real. Right. Because as long as there are beings in the Matrix, and this is the way classic Buddhism puts it, those beings matter. Right. And so we have to figure out a way to work within the construct with each other. And then you don't arrive at this, like. Burn it all down approach to your own life or your family's life or your community or society's life. You, you arrive at this. Let's actually transform the mutual projection if we can.

Like, let's realize that it is a construct So let's not let's actually like when somebody starts talking about the absurdity Let's have a sense of humor about that. Sure, you know like you do want somebody with a with a good sense of humor You know, yeah Yeah I think we want leaders with a good sense of humor too because they they can When you have a good sense of humor, you can touch in with emptiness and absurdity But then there's also this sense of care for sentient beings right and now can you this is

my understanding of This compassion is that? Somehow this um Remembrance of emptiness or recognition of emptiness leads to a kind of spontaneous compassion, right? Like, in other words, it's not a self-imposed moral code where you fake compassion, but something about this recognition of emptiness, and also the recognition that within this emptiness there's form, there's sentient beings. From a true recognition of these things, one would become more compassionate. It's not self-imposed, right? It's not like you can't fake it. You can't really fake it. I mean, you could be nice or you could pretend to be a nice person

or follow some, like, I don't know, rules of etiquette or something, or just have a general sense of not being reactive so as not to hurt people. But at the deeper level, this thing just starts popping out of you naturally when you recognize emptiness. Yeah, yeah. So I think, and I talk about, again, compassion and confidence. And yeah, I think one of the reasons we don't like

talking about compassion is it sounds like a moral imperative, right? It sounds like somebody saying, you should be nice. Yes. Right. I think it's much better to look at compassion as a perceptual and personal experience, rather than a more rather than a should it's like when I touch into that space and particularly it's touching into a space where the Construct of self and other softens a little bit yeah

And when you touch into that not as a moral imperative not as I should be nice But as a like what does it feel like to actually feel attuned to somebody? Yeah. What does it feel like to actually care about yourself or care about Duncan? Then and care about their well being. And even if you feel like their whole life is a construct, which it is, still to care about their heart and their mind, then that's an experience that's actually very enlivening. And you also remember, you know, why we're trying to do what we're trying to do.

And I think that's related to confidence. Because a lot of times, when we're very insecure about what we're trying to achieve, we get very myopic, we get very down. Yes, very goal oriented and we get very very failure Averse as I talked about and just to say like oh, I'm doing this to make a connection with sentient beings right Like that's a very different way to be a comedian. Like I want to dissolve the boundary between self and audience Yeah, right. I think that's what great comedians do, by the way. And that is a great Buddhist act of compassion. But it's not a should.

It's not a be nice because mom said so or big brother said so. It's like feel into what it's like to drop that concept of self and other. And it feels good. Oh my god. It feels open hearted. Especially if you have, if like, if you've been professionally selfish, or if you've just been selfish for decades and suddenly you have that experience. It's, you know, for me, those moments far exceed like DMT or any like big psychedelic experience in the sense that see like DMT or any like big psychedelic experience in the sense that you are seeing a completely different dimension, like a completely different way of being in the world that is for a lot

of us very unfamiliar. security underneath it all, is it happening because of the classic imbalance between relative and absolute reality? In other words, to really be, a way you could be transcendentally confident would be to recognize the empty nature of reality without discounting the self that you are in the world around you. That maybe the reason so many people underneath it all are so insecure and so freaked out is they haven't confronted the emptiness.

They haven't confronted their own death. They haven't confronted the emptiness. They haven't confronted their own death. They haven't confronted the basic reality. No matter what you make in the world will inevitably dissolve, erode, vanish in the dusts and winds of time. And how could you feel confident in the world if you hadn't addressed that? Yeah. Yeah, you definitely have to work on both levels. So I think it's really important to look into our own voices of hope and fear, you know, and we've been talking about praise and criticism and how those work for us and where they come from, where we get hit, where we get knocked off our seat, so to speak. But emptiness or ultimate truth is the container for the whole experience and it makes the context a lot bigger, right?

It's the same way like if you're freaking out about what's happening on Earth, right? One great way to deal with that is to like watch like a Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson or somebody like, you know, or watch an episode of Star Trek to be as nerdy as I am and just see the cosmos for a moment. Right. Like my little dilemma on earth or Earthlings little dilemma is positioned in something much larger. Right. Right.

So positioning the self in emptiness and in like non-solidity in what Pem and children and others call sky like mind. Yeah. Right. That gives us like, oh, maybe it's not as important, you know, if this Instagram post lands with a lot of people, you know, or this book, you know, sells more copies than my previous book, whatever it is, you know, like sky like mind, right? We're in a much bigger context of non-solidity. And I think anytime

we go to a larger context, we are touching in with the empty aspect. And that will make whatever relative truth work we need to do on our personal selves more available. And a little more lighthearted too. Right, yeah, right, yes. You won't take, I mean, yes, taking yourself too seriously is the road to insecurity and also is a mistake. But then also not taking yourself seriously. You should, you are important. You are, especially if you're human in the Buddhist cosmological

cosmology. Being human is an incredible thing just to end up human shows that you've done on something great. And so what are your recommendations for people who are habitually insecure? What's just some practical methods? Like, and let me give you like an example. And I feel like I've gotten much better at this. But like when I was just starting comedy or when I was just had started headlining I would be paralyzed with fear in my hotel room bed the whole day before the show I didn't want to think I was so scared because I felt so insecure about being a comedian. And it's gotten much better now, but to the point where like now, like I'm generally excited to perform, you know?

But every once in a while, the specter of insecurity rears its head. Quite often the moments before I walk on stage, you know, this has happened a couple of times where, you know, everything's fine except for like three minutes before I go on stage, some part of a couple of times where everything's fine except for three minutes before I go on stage, some part of my mind spits out, what if you bomb? These people got babysitters. Don't fuck this up. And if I'm not careful, that can ripple into my act.

I don't want to go on stage with the energy of Lucifer, like in that sense. So, in a real world way, what are some methods to deal with that? Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot in confidence, there's a lot of different meditation and contemplative exercises in most of the chapters. But, you know, I think the ground of all this is we have to acknowledge our basic goodness,

that we are fundamentally okay. Yeah. And on that basis, that's how we take our seat to say I can show up. And a lot of times I think people, when they meditate, they come from a basic badness or an original sin perspective, like, I need to do this to fix me or I need to like, mindfulness must be about like putting little bad me back in the box so it doesn't get out, you know, and, and we need to start with like, I'm actually going to experience that I am OK. And then I think really calling on the experiences where

we've had strength and we figured out the situation that we're in before. I talked in the book about the first time I read my poetry. I was at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York. I was like 23. This wasn't the first time I read my poetry. But in front of a large group of people, it was a poetry performance series spoken word,

as we used to call it in the early oddies and yeah, I remember, and music performance series that my friend organized and there were like 200 people there. And I was like, I'm gonna be okay, right. And then I got up on stage and my legs were shaking uncontrollably. Yeah. And there was nothing I could do about it because I couldn't have my logical brain talk to my legs.

It wasn't like my logical brain, my prefrontal cortex was not in charge of my legs. And there was no philosophy of emptiness that was there either. So I just was willing to bomb, you know, but it was OK. Like the words were OK. My friend who organized the thing was very loving and supportive, but he also laughed at me. Yeah.

You know, and and both of those were OK. Right. You know, it wasn't. So I do think we need to. I do really think we need to surround ourselves with supportive people first. And I think that's the function of sangha or community is like friends who actually remind you of your basic goodness. And start there and then really start by contemplating your strengths. When you have that moment where you're about to go on stage and are like, maybe I'm going to bomb. What I would recommend for you is to grow more familiar with the fact that this is just what happens to me every single time I go on stage. So it's like, oh, hello. And if you have a name

for that inner critic, like Lucy, Sharon Salzberg's example, then in three minutes before you go on stage, you can be like, oh, hello, whoever the critic is for you. Hello, Satan. I thought I sold my soul to you for success. Why are you making me scared? Yeah. And it would be from a Buddhist perspective, it would be like, all right, Satan. All right, Lucifer. I guess you're coming on stage with me. Yeah. How about you? I guess we're doing this together. You're now you're going up. I'm not even going to be there.

Yeah, you do the joke. He, he can just come with you. I love that. No, I think like what I what you're reminding me of something. And it's an incredibly obvious thing that seems like the most simple thing, easiest thing to forget. Which is ultimately, you're gonna be fine. You're gonna be fine. Like, or like- Because you already are fine. You're already fine. The only way you're gonna be fine is if you already are fine. Right, right. In those moments that I've had, when I have kept up a regular meditation practice,

where you're just walking around, you're fine. But you know, if you're neurotic, that vent feels spectacularly alien, where you're like, my god, I feel absolutely fine. The world is great. I feel good. Everything's fine, not because something great happened, but just because.

If I could connect to that place on the regs, oh my god. That, to me me would be like true confidence, you know, true the actual real thing, not the con man style confidence that seems like many people have confused with confidence. Yeah. Well, that's that's that's

the false confidence. Right. That's also why I wanted to talk about this book, because I do think we live in this era of false confidence. Especially I think to a certain degree, false male confidence in a lot of times. And that's interesting. The word con man actually is short for confidence man.

Yes. So that's an interesting kind of bizarro flip on the notion of what is true loving confidence. Oh my God. You people, once you get good at faking confidence, if you can fake confidence, you, so many people just are, the more insecure you are, the more attractive confidence is probably going to seem to you, you know, like, oh my God, this person feels okay in the world and they must know what they're doing. And you know, that's how you get your watch stolen. That's how you die in the woods. God help you if you're with someone who's faking being good at hiking or finding, like reading a map or something. And I think this is like, what is that?

If you wanted to do some dummy analysis of why there's problems everywhere, is that politicians recognize, they don't really have to know. The most important thing to know is how to seem confident. You know what I mean? The more confident you seem, no, even if you're saying a lie, the more people will believe it.

And so, yeah, that's good. It's so creepy how probably most people, whatever they think of as confidence is just something they've picked up from con artists who seem confident but inside or recognize they're total frauds. Yeah, and so I think genuine confidence comes with curiosity. It comes with transparency. It comes with vulnerability. So whenever I write about these highfalutin Buddhist concepts,

I always like to talk about my own struggles a little bit, hopefully you know, overly performative, but to kind of show that this is the struggle we're all in. And, you know, anybody who claims, I mean, I do think there are some more awakened people in the world, I'm not saying that, but I think most of them have grown more transparent, more gentle, more open about who they are, and, you know, about having thoughts and feelings that aren't necessarily the, I got this, I got it all figured out, you know, but are

like, oh, I don't know, let's see. You know, I think sometimes, sometimes the most confident person actually says, no, I know this, I have some relevant experience and expertise. Like I can, I can figure this out You know, right if you have like a plumber or a doctor you kind of want that person, right? Yeah knows things you don't know. Yeah, but with somebody who's more a psychological or spiritual voice Working with the heart and mind you want somebody I think I want somebody who's like Here are some of the principles and

practices we can do here's been my experience with those and here's how I've met my struggles you know and my struggles are not different from yours right you know we're human this is what it means to be human right yeah right don't fall for someone who's like who's is conveying they got it all worked out, right? You don't want that. That's usually a bad sign. I would love to meet that person though, because you've either you've met like Jesus

or you've met like a sociopath, either way, very interesting. Yeah. But even when you have somebody who has it all worked out spiritually or psychologically, they're usually like, well, here's a principle that you might wanna look at. Here's how it works for me. They're still, they're looking at, well, here's a principle that you might want to look at. Here's how it works for me. You know, they're still,

they're looking at things from multiple angles. They're not projecting their experience onto yours. They don't have that much to get from you, you know, if they really have it all worked out. They just want you to find your path, you know? Yeah, well, you know, I get that vibe from you, man. I think you're doing great work with this book. I'm confident that it's going to do great, because not just

for the, because of the topic, but because your writing is so good. I mean, I think people listening, that's what I think is so wonderful. It's, you know, there's some books that just, like, are page turners. And that's my favorite kind. Just the sort of writing that is just the right amount of sweet,

but also has built into it, especially when it comes to Buddhism, pretty hardcore ideas that can show up in Buddhism that if they aren't sort of, if there isn't skillful means, so to speak, they can really freak people out. Spin people or just make people go, fuck this. I'm not, I don't want to read about this. Emptiness? No, I'm not. I'm a me. I have 40,000 followers. Obviously I'm real. But this book is the opposite of that to me. It's beautiful, well written, and I can't wait to finish it. I wish I'd gotten it sooner. I should have. I would have finished it.

I need it. Well thank you. Thank you for that praise. That positive wind is hitting me and I'll try not to lose my seat with it. And to give you a little bit of praise, I was just on an online half day retreat with people have been practicing with Dharma Moon for a while and mentioned we were talking about the Tibetan teachings on the bardo is the cycle of life and death because we were using Pema children's latest book, How We Live Is How We Die. And I mentioned midnight gospel

and specifically, you know, as we were talking about life and death and rebirth, the episode of you and your mother. And I encourage everybody to watch that in terms of this life and death. And one of the students said, there's a direct line for me between watching Midnight Gospel and going deep into the Buddhist teachings with Dawn the Moon. So I think you're positively affecting a lot of people and I hope there's like another midnight gospel style project in the works. I would love to, one day there will be. I mean, yeah, thank you for telling me that.

Thank you. I am in the wind of your positivity. More please. Keep blowing that wind. You're a great dad. You're a great dad. No, but you know what? That's the other funny thing about it. You can never say, can you give me more praise? You're not allowed to. You can get one praise unit. That's it. You can't be like, please dispense more praise. Man, this well, again, folks, did when did this comes out next week? Or did it just come out? This

is next week. This comes out on May 21. Next. That's two days. Yeah, great. So by the time you hear this podcast, this book is already gonna be out. Please get it. Confidence. Also, he's written many other books, and if somehow you didn't recognize, this is David from the Midnight Gospel's Kid. So he must be super proud of you. He's by Jewish half, and he's a very Jewish father.

He's my hype man for sure. All right, great, yeah, good. I don't look to him for criticism because he's not reliable that way. I look to other people for healthy criticism. He just tells me I'm doing great and keep going. Lucky you. I know, but it's a little over the top sometimes.

I think you deserve it. This book is fantastic. I hope you guys order this thing. Confidence, Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Wins. Ethan, thank you so much for coming on the show, my friend. Thank you, Duncan. A pleasure.

That was Ethan Nickturn, everybody. Get his book, Confidence, Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Wins. Thank you to our sponsors and thank you for listening or watching, whichever you may be doing. If you aren't watching, why not? Don't you want to watch me sweat? Don't you want to watch a 50-year-old diabetic smoldering in a stinky studio? Who wouldn't want to see that?

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