Duncan Trussell Family Hour - DAN HARMON!!!!!

Episode Date: November 12, 2013

Dan Harmon (Community, Harmontown) returns to the DTFH for a late night chat.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Feral audio. Hello everybody. You're listening to the Dunkin' Trussell Family, our podcast with the great Dan Harmon.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.com. I hope you're not one of those people out there who has decided to hire a cheap web designer. It's one of the worst things that a person can do. In fact, the Presidential Council of America put it number three on the list of the 10 worst things you could do in America. Number three is to hire a cheap web designer.

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I don't know, but you could probably sell plutonium rods through Squarespace. Get into the internet, man. What are you doing? You hermit sitting in your Alaskan cabin roasting squirrel corpses that you found frozen in the snow on top of your fire that's rapidly going out. Why are you living in that kind of world

when you could be in a nice, cozy, comfortable mansion looking out over the ocean, watching whales that you have named being fed barrels of kelp thrown out of your helicopter by your bodyguards? You could get there today just by going to squarespace.com. If you don't wanna commit to becoming one of the most powerful and wealthy entrepreneurs that ever lived in the history of America, then you can sign up

for a trial 14-day membership and see if it works for you. If you put my code in Duncan 11, you'll get 10% off the service if you decide to sign up. Squarespace.com, want proof that Squarespace works? Squarespace was built using Squarespace. So it's a highly successful business and they use the service to build the service. It's pretty intense.

Russian doll stuff happening there, man. Russian doll. This is, we're talking matter assimilators making more matter assimilators and Squarespace is the beginning of that. Squarespace.com will be the conduit through which someone invents a self-replicating matter assimilator

that causes the entire planet to eventually be covered in matter assimilators. So get on that train squarespace.com, put my name in Duncan 11, that's the code, you get 10% off and also it helps support the podcast. So go do that. We're also brought to you by amazon.com. Guys, come on.

Christmas is right around the corner. It is right around the corner and it is time to become locusts and just buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy as much stuff as you can and give that stuff to your family and friends and don't even think about how fucking weird it is that you're feeling stressed out about that or doing it. Just please get sucked into the cyclone

of consumerism, materialism and start buying stuff. It's fun, I like it. I've bought all kinds of things. I just bought a Razer Hydra through amazon.com. The Razer Hydra is this controller that I'm going to use with my Oculus Rift that will make it so that I don't have to use my keyboard anymore.

I can just hold these two weird wand things and wander through virtual space without being troubled by having to pull the Rift up to fuck around with my keyboard. Got it on amazon.com. You can buy everything on amazon.com. The only thing that you can't find on there is organs but it's getting close to that point. If you go through the portal at DuncanTrussell.com,

I mean like human organs. I'm sure they have pipe organs or something there. If you go through DuncanTrussell.com and go through our web or Amazon portal, they for some reason still mysterious to me. I know that this isn't kind of advertising for them but it seems like advertising for amazon.com is very similar to advertising for food

as in generic food. Everyone knows about amazon.com. I don't know. Maybe you haven't realized yet that you don't have to leave your house anymore. Maybe that hasn't occurred to you. This glorious truth that the only time you need to leave your house is when it's on fire.

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And for that, we thank you amazon.com. Oh great lord and master of our lives. Go through the portal, buy whatever it is you need to buy. Japanese bondage ropes, they've got them. They've got them. You name it and it's there. Music, everything. Even the bonus episode of the last bonus episode

I did is on amazon.com. How do you like that? This is a goddamn sandwich commercial. I'm selling shit within shit. Sorry, but guys, come on. You're hearing the song of capitalism here and we've all got to sing it from time to time. Why not go to amazon.com,

buy some great stuff for your family and friends, go through our portal and we get a small percentage. It's a way for you to support the podcast while getting the things you need. You could even order toilet paper through amazon.com. And I don't know if you guys have seen World's Ultimate Cheapskates on Lifetime Network, but I just learned that there are people

who will take two-ply toilet paper and pull the two-ply toilet paper in half so that they have half the depth of toilet paper, which they then use to wipe their asses. So think about that. It's always buy one, get one free when you're a cheapskate and you're not afraid to poke through your toilet paper into your disgusting asshole.

That's one of the great things you can do through amazon.com. Go through the portal, please, and watch that show Cheapskates. They don't sponsor me. It's pretty funny. It gives you the heebie-jeebies to watch that stuff. Finally, as always,

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For those of you who have been donated to the Duncan Trestle Family Hour, thank you. As always, thank you so much. And thank you to those of you who have been buying stuff from our shop. We've got t-shirts, posters, one weird satanic bonus episode of the podcast and lots of other great stuff there.

But the most important thing that you could do is go to DuncanTrestle.com and join the forum. And if you don't wanna do that, just keep listening. Thank you for listening. I hope you guys are having a wonderful pre-Thanksgiving and are getting ready to have a blast with your wonderful family. And go back to that sweet country home

and sit on the bear skin rug with your Tolkien-esque family, just bathing in all that sweet love and happiness that comes when we all get together with our precious families. All that wonderful joy and acceptance of each other and pure forgiveness that is what every single family experiences in America during Thanksgiving. Today's guest for the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast

is the creator of Community. And he also has got an incredible podcast called Harmentown, which has a live show every Sunday at Meltdown Comics here in Los Angeles. So if you're in Los Angeles, you should come, you should listen to his podcast, but you should also come see the live show. This guy blows my mind every single time.

And he's creating a TV show, which is not an easy thing to do. And he came to do my podcast after having been at work all day long. And I think that's pretty fucking cool because if I spend more than a few hours doing anything, I have to rest for a couple of days. So it's awesome that Harman came over.

He's an amazing person. Everybody, please welcome to the Duncan Trestle Family Hour the beautiful Dan Harman. The crown of happiness. Welcome, welcome on you, As you are with us. Shake it, don't be blue, Welcome to you.

Welcome. Welcome, Dan Harmon. Thank you so much for having me back. Thanks for coming back. I, it's, for those of you, it's nine, it's ten or eleven. What time is it? It's later than that. It's eleven forty-seven.

Late at night. You've been working all day and thanks for taking the time to come and do the podcast. Super cool. It's late at night. You're listening to Duncan Tressel. Up next is boring man. Boring man, hello boring man.

He's going to bore the fuck out of you. Hope you like listening to things that you can't resonate with. At all. Guaranteed, we did the studies. Just about time for a story about his gardener. After that, there'll be three complaints about being rich. Yeah, right. Do you, do you find yourself overcome by

that kind of stuff really? Like, does it, do you get weirded out by being rich? I've been, I haven't had time to, I had the year where I was doing almost nothing. It was freaking out. My, workaholism and alcoholism like take care of the in-between spots. Right. Wait, let me try to make that make sense.

If I have something to do, I don't even notice what's going on with my life. And then, so that every once in a while I stop having something to do and my, I have like, I have money and I don't have time to react to it. And I haven't had time yet. But I think my reaction will be that I will blow it all out my ass and ruin my life. Ruth, isn't that a, that's a weird component of having, like I'm sure you've been through periods of abject poverty.

But then when you have a ton of money, you then realize. Just wipe your ass with it. And you're, there's a terrifying aspect of having a lot of money too. It's like the, almost similar to when you were broke outside of the itching, horrific, paranoia and the desperation. There's this, there's this feeling that you have like this great capacity to really destroy yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I could definitely say without a shadow of a doubt that the, if you charted my financial ups and downs and my emotional spiritual ups and downs, they would be totally unrelated curves. I don't know that they would be inversely proportionate. I'm not that crazy that I'm going to say, oh yeah, the richer you get, the unhappier you are. I don't think that's true. I don't.

But I know that they're unrelated. I know that I've been the most miserable at my, you know, at the point where materialistically I should not have anything to be miserable about. But you're not a materialist at all. You don't, you don't seem like a materialist. I could be wrong. I don't know. You don't seem like, I've met materialists.

It seems like it'd be pretty hard to, to get you into like typical material shit. Am I wrong about that? I, I guess I, I, I, I'm definitely not a mountain man. I'm, I'm like, I like. No, you got a nice place. But I'm, I'm saying like you're, you like the idea of like the, a lot of people have this kind of insane attraction to matter. Like they really want really nice cars and like, you know,

fancy, they actually want, I'm talking about like Jay-Z or something. You know, where you see images of him and he's wearing, I just saw this picture of him and he's wearing a, it looks like a bicycle chain, but bigger, but it's made of gold. It's clearly just pure, pure, probably really heavy, probably very uncomfortable. It's like he's, any other metal and it would suck to have it around your neck, but because it's gold, he like, he likes it. Right, he loves them again.

Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I'm fascinated by those guys like Corolla and Mikhail and Ryan Styles and the car guys. Yes. They love the cars. Yes. That's, that's, that's gotta be a really easy way to blow through a lot of money. Like, like, and then Jeff Davis loves his suits. Suits.

And he, but he doesn't spend anything on anything else. He's got a lot of money, I bet, squirreled away. Yeah. My friend Jeff Davis, I don't, I don't, I'm acting like he's on the cover of Us Weekly and I'm referencing him. I think people know he is. But if, and he's, he lives in this little, little hobbit hole, like this little unassuming little, little one bedroom apartment and, but he, by his own confession, he just wants

a specific car. He wants his suits. I don't, I've been driving the same shoe since whenever I got it and I'll keep driving until it breaks down. I don't, I don't look at a car as anything other than like a sock that you wear to keep from stepping on weird shit when you drive to work. And it's, it's something that you can wreck, you know, and, and why would you want it to be fancy?

Right. But my house, I would, I would, I'm like, you know, when you play Grand Theft Auto and your house gets bigger and bigger. Yes. I'm into that. Yeah. I mean, you've got it. I've seen your house.

Very nice house, but I mean, it's still like, it doesn't have that sense of a, you know, it's a nice place, but it doesn't have that garish, like, palatial sense that you get sometimes when you go to someone who's a materialist house, like where they've got like pillars and you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My dreams have been so small for so long.

Yeah. I like, like, um, I couldn't, I could never get past fireplace. Right. And, uh, because whenever my parents weren't fighting, they had a fire going and, uh, whenever we felt rich and comfortable and like we had earned happiness that, that was always when a fire was going in the basement and my parents were happy and the, the tinkle in his glass of the ice cubes, the, you know, having a nice glass of whatever the hell he drank and like I have like preset sort of like, this is what I need to buy with my money.

I need to buy happiness. I need a fireplace. I need, I need to be allowed to be drinking and, uh, I need kind of like music coming from wherever. Even though I have horrible taste in music, I have like this obsession about the speaker system in the house has to be like, I have to be able to turn on and I, if you saw how much I used it, it would be, it would, everyone would be like, you don't, you don't, you don't even know, you're still listening to Tori Amos, like from when you were 20, like you,

you, you just, you've just, I'm obsessed with making sure that I can hear a song in the toilet. My brother loves Tori Amos. Uh, that, yeah. So, so Tori Amos, do you think that's bad taste in music? No, well, no, I don't, I, God, Jesus, if you're listening to Tori, no, heavens no. Um, no, no, I, I, I don't think that that's bad taste in music. I think for me to be 40 years old and still rattling that off when I think about music

because that's what I, that's what I was into when I was 25. That's, I have a sedentary taste in music. I don't think you need to feel, yes, I have a sedentary taste too. And I don't think this whole goddamn music guilt thing, it's so weird. Like people feel guilty for, or even worse, like somebody judges you because of the type of music you listen to. Like I got that, I got like walloped when Lou Barlow did the podcast that I was the lavender out in Natasha.

We are getting all, we are ready to get really snotty. I think about, fuck, what's her name? Uh, God damn it. Uh, she dated Russell Brand. Fireworks. Uh, Katy Perry. Katy Perry. And like one of us fired off something about how awful Katy Perry must be.

And this is like Lou Barlow, Dinosaur Junior, Sebado. A god in my mind, like the ultimate taste maker of music. And he was like, I don't know, I've heard songs by Katy Perry that move me. And if a song moves me, then I just think it's good. And it was just such a crushing blow to that, you know, that part of you, the part that wants there to be, you know, shitty music or the part of you that wants to be able to like create this hierarchy of taste. Yeah.

Well, nobody can convince you that Led Zeppelin is bad, better than Jeff Davis. And then one day I was driving in his car and Jack Black was in the back seat. And somehow Led Zeppelin came up and Jeff started in on his very convincing, very valid, like, Led Zeppelin is bad, Ty right. And partway into it, Jack Black in the back goes, Zeppelin's cool. And it was kind of, it was sort of like, you can't really argue with it. Like, um, but anyways, that's why I don't go into those waters. That's why when music, race, or alcohol comes up, I just go, I'm an alcoholic, I'm racist,

I have bad taste in music. Maybe I believe it, maybe I don't, but one thing's for sure, you can only get in trouble by thinking otherwise. If you think you're not racist, you're probably going to end up being racist. If you think you're not an alcoholic, you're going to drink more. If you think that you have great taste in music, you might have accidentally fucking diss Katy Perry at the wrong time, at the wrong place. So if you have bad taste in music, I get into an elevator and there's something playing.

Like, what's that Lord song, the Royals, whatever? Like, I fucking, I click the number one thing. I'm like, oh, what are the kids listening to? It's like, holy shit, I'm having an emotional experience. I'm allowed to. I have bad taste in music. I don't care. I don't care who comes into my home and catches me listening to Phil Collins or whatever is

at the top of the charts. Like, I will, if I say I have bad taste in music, then I'm covered. Well, you know that the, I don't remember, it's been so long since they taught me this. I guess it also works with solar panels, but with plants, when it gets dark, they, they, they, even though they're still apparently energy in the air or something, they, they don't process it anymore. Maybe they do. I can't remember.

Solar panels, when it's dark, they can't process energy. So, so people who've decided that this thing is good or this thing is bad, they're no longer able to process the energy of a huge amount of stuff out there. So like, they're the people who close off immediately when they hear anything that has to do with Christianity, for example. If you bring that up around the wrong person, they shut down or anytime like, like the Lord's song comes on, which by the way, I'm so sick of that song. Everywhere you go, it's playing.

I got, I got, I'm now sick of it too, because I played it five times on the way here. It's, it plays everywhere, but this is like a, I, in some, I think it's in this book, Gris for the Mill by Ram Dass. He talks about how he's meditating with all these people and apparently they're next to a fire station. And there's sirens that keep happening and people are getting annoyed because sirens keep happening that are getting in the way of their meditation. And his thing is like, no, that's just, that's as much of a vibration as anything else.

And it's all, it's all something that can be used to sort of expand your consciousness. So that's good to have bad taste. In fact, having bad taste in music is actually kind of the same as saying you have good taste in music, isn't it? Or no taste in music. Yeah, it certainly is. It's just taking your hands off of a wheel that you have no stake in. Like that's what's nice is that if something goes wrong with my toilet, I can grab a plunger

and just go at it. I have no investment in whether I do a good job or a bad job of keeping my toilet from overflowing. Right. And, and, but, but when I go to work and write a sitcom, like it's such misplaced ego to like think that that's somehow different. When, when all, all I really should be doing is like, I got to get this done, but we all have that.

Right. We all, we all have identities and our identities are, they, they're focused on the shit that we think we've decided this is my shit. This is my, this is what makes me different. Yeah. Like, like I, and then you let, you let, because some of us are really, really cool about music and some of us are really uptight because some people have decided that that's their thing. Right.

And I don't, I don't, I would never be able to, I think I've talked to people for whom music is their thing that are delightful to talk to. And of course I think if you're not, if music isn't your thing and you're not like a music snob, you can't even really like diss music snobbery because if I have a decent CD in my house in 1998, it's because I cross paths with someone who left it there, who does care about that shit. Right. And those people like they, you know, they're, they drive everything because they care about

music. And some of them are like, thank God they're snobby about it. So that you should also shouldn't feel bad about being a snob. I'd be about having an opinion about Katy Perry in front of Lou Barlow, but that's an example of like, like if you're regretting anything, it's like you all of a sudden thought, oh, did I even really think what I just said? Yeah. I didn't think it.

I barely listened to Katy Perry. Barely listened to Katy Perry. I was sassin' off because I thought it was cool. Right. I got slapped for it. And I liked that. And I'm glad I said it. And that's, yeah, like you're talking about with Christianity is like that Bill Maher

reflex. Yes. Fuck it. It's theology therefore. It's crippling everybody. And I know exactly what to say and how to say it and when to say it. Whenever anyone brings up anything, I'm going to bra, bra, bra, bra, because this is my area and I've got my little canal that comes into my, like my warehouse district and it feeds

and it exports and it's got walls and it's got structure. This is my gimmick. I'm Venice. My house is on stilts. This is where you eat breakfast and it's like, yeah, and who's to say if that's good or bad architecture because Venice is sinking. Yeah, that's right. And the Pentagon isn't.

So, so I don't know. Maybe being a prick is the way to, you know, maybe being stubborn is like better than. No way, man. I got it. I just. Ram Dass saying that sirens sound good. Yeah. Sirens sound great.

Yeah. Right. Maybe Ram Dass should have treated himself that morning. They're going like, you know what? Fuck sirens. Like with just one little cookie, one little chicken McNugget, Ram Dass, just eat it. You activated fucker. You activated fucker, son of a bitch.

Well, that's what's cool about Ram Dass is because he doesn't pretend to be great because in the midst of those stories of the sirens or the stories of him standing in line, you know, at a porno theater after he'd come back from India, have you heard that story? No, no. It's a great story because he's like in line, you know, he's this is like after people know that this is Ram Dass, the, you know, post psychedelic spiritual teacher of the world and he's, I guess, decided to get in line back in the day. You couldn't go on the internet to jerk off, you know, you had to like go to a porno theater

if you're really horny, if you wanted to jerk off to porn and he's in line at this porno theater to jerk off, I guess. And this is in his mystical period and then somebody walks by him as he's like standing by this theater to go and he's like Ram Dass, oh Ram Dass, you mean so much to me and he's talking to him and he's like in line to jerk off at this theater and he realizes he has this decision he has to make at this point, which is he can act like he wasn't in line and he'll jerk off to porn and go with this guy to have coffee or something and like be a spiritual advisor.

Or he can make porn a spiritual inclusive thing. Exactly. He can incorporate porn into his spiritual life. That's it and that's what he did. He said, you know, nice to meet you but I'm going in here now. And you know, I'm sure that that guy was like, what the fuck? But really, you know, that's like that sort of all-encompassing idea, exactly what you're saying really, which is the idea is that if you can just land on yourself, you're doing

great. How can keep the truth on your side so that because in this world you're going to end up in so many conversations where you have no idea whether you're full of shit or not. So the fallback has to be that you tend your own garden, speak from experience and be honest about how you really feel, including not being afraid to not know how you feel about the eight billion things you don't know how to feel about. And that way anyone that argues with you, they're arguing with how you feel. And so you could say like, I think that chair over there is ugly.

I mean, really, like who thinks a chair is ugly? But you go, yeah, I think it's ugly. And then someone go, well, that's a Pierre-Cardaud-Jean-Babadou chair. He's the chair genius and he's half autistic and, you know, all the money that he makes chairs with goes to the breast maximization of the African children. And at the end of it all, you still can go like if you go like, well, I, that, that, is fantastic, but I, I'm going to stick with the fact that I think it's ugly. I, I now think it's ugly and that it's awesome that the guy made the chair.

When did you figure all this out? You had, you didn't go, you had to have gone through a shitty phony period. Like how did you, or did you step this? Now I have to, I mean, you're implying that I'm somehow authentic now. So I got, instead of getting derailed by that, I'll answer your question and say, I figured out that one big trick about keep the truth on your side, like in my late 20s. I think I grew up arguing with people on the internet and that was a, that was a big thing. Like it was something that I think Rob Schraub and I walked into was like, you know what,

like if you, like, if you start from the end point of a successful experience between two people who don't like each other, what's the best case scenario for an encounter between you and someone that you are never going to get along with because it happens. Yes. So let's write backwards from the result. You would like to happen whenever you run into somebody who doesn't like you and who you're, you're not going to like the best case scenario is you saying, well, that's how I feel and not, not feeling like you've been, you know, pounded down or,

or that you've pounded anyone down. Like actually the best result is you walking away like a blackjack dealer, just clap the hands and you just walk away with the, and, and, you know, if you're a little vindictive and you want to actually be a victorious ninja in that thing, the better result is that you're doing that. And the other person is going, yeah, but I just think it's full of shit. The best result is walking away peacefully from a person who is pro-conflict. Right.

And, and, and if you think that strawberries taste good and you think that doors are brown and you think that Tom Hanks is a good actor and you really think those things and you really stick to what you actually think, then you'll never be in an argument that you'll lose because you won't be, you won't be trying to convince someone else that Tom Hanks is a bad actor. You'll be saying, I think he's good. In fact, you probably won't even be saying that. What you should be saying is I remember I was 15 years old and I saw Philadelphia and it was about AIDS and I started crying.

I saw Doc Hollywood and I started crying. I was, you don't try to convince someone that Michael J. Fox was a good actor. That Francis Ford Coppola does this and doesn't do that and is worth this. You say, I liked Robocop. I, I felt this when I saw it, which by the way is like to use movies as an example. Roger Ebert, before he died, wrote this brilliant, thinly veiled indictment of, what was his name? Ben Lyons.

Ben Lyons? The critic that sort of like, I think that was the name of the guy, I don't know, but Roger Ebert was the last. I don't know, that is. Roger Ebert like wrote this. Before this conversation, I might have said, yeah, Ben Lyons. Yeah, I don't, he's, he's, he's, Ben Lyons is a, he's a new school critic. He would just go like, I love this movie.

I don't like that movie. Like that it was steeped in like weird, like people that invited him to the set or whatever. Roger Ebert was this old Chicago SunTimes movie reviewer from an age when a movie reviewer could save you $8 and two hours of your life by telling you whether or not a movie was good. Roger Ebert wrote a treatise about what, what good review is and it all amounted to, doesn't matter where you went to college. It doesn't matter what, what you know and how much you've seen. An honest review, a helpful review is you saying whether or not you like the fucking thing and why?

Right. From your own perspective. Yeah. The moment you cross a line into analysis and trying to aggregate and pronouncing things, you are, you are off in the fucking area of Verdun where everyone gets mowed down eventually by machine gun fire. Wow. You're not, you're not yourself.

You're charging something. You're expanding something. Yeah. So you're at, you're playing God. You're not perceiving and expressing anymore. Right. Yeah. And you're implying that there's some kind of universal compass that judges all things.

You're going to prove that, that Daft Punk is good today. And you're the mouthpiece of the thing. Right. Like you're somehow channeling this like universe. That's, that's what, but what about people? So, you know, a lot of people might hear what you're saying and, and. And go, this is really boring. No, I don't think so.

He's back for a third time and he's, again, he's the fucking boringest. I don't think so, man. This does not seem boring to me. This podcast is always so funny when I'm not on it. I love it so much. This podcast has been funny in so many episodes. I think that, I think that people hear it and they think, fuck, fuck for like, for years. I've just been lying to try to seem as though I'm sophisticated.

When people hear what? When people hear the idea like, listen, just like honestly reflect where you're at. A lot of times someone hears that and they think, I have no idea where the fuck I am. Well, yeah. Welcome to the fucking Spiritual Species Club. Yeah, for sure. Good news. Like, yeah, I have no idea who the fuck I am.

So if you have no idea who the fuck you are, then you get to this point of like, well, what, what am I reflecting then? It's like, if I really don't, like, if you really get to the bottom of the thing, you're like, I don't even know what I like fucking God, baby. Because what is, what is the Dao according to the Dao Di Jing? Like, it is this, it's 81 poems about like, like this thing that is because it isn't is and it's like a joke. It's like, it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't exist.

It's, if you try to know it, you can't know it. If you call it something and can't call it like, the fact that we exist doesn't make sense. It doesn't hold up to subjective understanding of meaning. Because your nerve endings say that if the chicken's hot, it tastes good. And when something tastes good, your human body like goes, what a great Wednesday. Holy shit, one seventh of the week. What an important experience.

Oh, Daphne's mad at me. Oh, what a cataclysmic event. Because you're living life, but the truth is when you learn it, when you take a class in it and you've pulled back and you learn any facts, everything that is scientific fact leads inevitably to the realization that you, nothing matters. It doesn't matter. You can't make that argument scientifically. I beg any scientist to come in here and without reverting to their theology,

prove scientifically that we should give a shit about anything. So the human experience is a schizophrenic one. Pardon me to any schizophrenics that are tired of that phrase being used improperly. But I really mean it actually as not like, oh, I'm two people. I mean it in the sense of like, there's a schism. There's a, you're spinning and you hear voices in your head as a species. Foxes and squirrels don't care that living means they have to kill and they don't care that they're going to die.

They don't want fire in their eye, same as us. Yes. We, and we alone as far as we understand it, are the first mammal to go, to be cursed as in all these creation origin stories. They all involve us being cursed, blessed, gifted extrinsically with the realization that this is a cyclical tragedy that we're going to die and that we're killing by living and that we're only alive because someone else died. Yeah, what's that Edgar Allen Poe poem?

It ends, the play is the tragedy man and the hero and it's hero, the conquering one. Haha, you was depressed, but no, I know what you're saying. So you're talking about this like, kind of Camus level realization of the absurdity of everything and that sense of like, you know, he talks about in particular, that sense of not being able to fulfill yourself or that sense of just confusion as that is what it is to be a human. Right, the Tao De Jing says like, the master is like a baby. It's got a big eyes, it's like looking around, doesn't know what the fuck is going on.

Like there's certain translations of the Tao De Jing where it says, I am like an idiot and saying it like it's a good thing. I don't know what the fuck is going on. Right, yeah, what are you trying to do? Like you're wearing this kind of like infinite cyclone and we're getting this 70 year period to assemble logic from this spray of matter and any kind of logic that we assemble and this brief flicker of time is obviously, it's absurd. And then to fight over it, it's ridiculous too.

So because when we look at babies, there's a bassinet next to my desk at that community because my assistant had a baby and she's, you know, taking care of it at work. So every, I walk through my office and there's this little turkey in there, there's a little peanut and everybody just gathers by it and they look in there and they do what they do with babies, which is they marvel at it and they, like no one's, no one's disgusted by that thing's stupidity. No one, nobody's mad that it likes Tori Amos. If it smiles when you play Tori Amos, we're not holding that thing. Your baby has shitty taste in music, man.

Your baby likes that mobile? What a jagoff. But babies are racist. We all have the, we look at that baby and we go, like, it's perfect. It's perfect because it hasn't started doing that yet. It has nothing but potential. And when we have this myth in our head that, oh, maybe the reason we feel that way is because every baby has a chance to go off and be like, what?

What is, who's the guy? Barack Obama? Who's named the guy that represents the ideal? There isn't such a thing, that's not a thing. A human life is a lightning streak through failure. It's just like a marble pattern. It's just a beautiful little pattern. It does it, there is nobody that we all look at and go,

nailed it. We have a couple of martyr characters. We go like, oh, Gandhi, this person gives so much. But we don't, we're not emulating them, we're not putting them in cereal boxes. No. There is no, those people are heroes because they didn't give a shit about themselves. They had no self, they gave it to something higher than them. And we envy them and wish that we were like that and feel guilty about not being like that.

But that's different from saying that we think that there's this perfect person and that that's the goal. When we look at a baby in a crib, we're not thinking, I love that baby because that baby might not fuck up. We're not really feeling that way. Right. Like, I don't care if that baby's going to be a truck driver. No, no, no.

I want it to be a really good truck driver. What you're saying isn't really happy. I think what you're saying is an immense relief because it's, there's this sense of like, you know, accomplish this, you should be accomplished. Like, you know, one of the happiest time of my life. I'm happy now. But the happiest time of my life was when I was a dishwasher at Chili's. And I was in North Carolina.

It was the, is the undocumented acid boom of the 90s. I was on LSD all the time and I had no sense of any feeling that washing dishes was even, was bad or something to be that ashamed of. It was hypnotic and like, you made money and I could, I had an apartment with a roommate. No ambition, no sense of anything other than like, I'm just living. And that was a really great time. And then you get this seed inside of you. You get this sense of like, I've got to like, do something.

Right. I've got to do something. And then, and then that leads to a midlife crisis because it's like, inevitably you'll get to like, some certain age, like, man, I didn't do it. And then you're, then that makes you feel depressed for, I guess, the last part of your life or something, which is the cycle of Western man. You could be sitting there washing dishes and you could be thinking about, are you thinking about what if I'm still washing dishes 10 years from now?

Am I going to be miserable then? The crazy tricks the devil plays on you to get you out of the moment. The big, the important question to answer is, do I want to be washing dishes right now? And in each day that, you know, you have to balance that with the need to tell your boss your schedule. Yeah. I was a dishwasher and I like, I had the same kind of, you know, there was comfort there, but I was really fucking bad at it.

And I kept trying to be really good at it and I kept feeling like, I actually, when I would show up at work, I, if everybody would greet me with applause, and they're like, oh, thank God, Dan's here. And there was a guy named Ruben who was that guy. He was like this God, he, of the dishwashers. Yes. The boss would sit there and he'd try to work out the schedule and then he'd go, okay, Dan, well, I guess you can have Tuesdays through Friday and then,

because Ruben's out of town, it's just like the love of Ruben. This like 48 year old guy that he would sing gospel tunes as he loaded the dishes into the things. And I would do, I would watch Ruben, I was jealous of Ruben and I just wanted that adoration. Now, did Ruben like adoration or did Ruben like washing dishes or even beyond that, Ruben was probably so old in his soul and like so satisfied with other shit in his life that he probably left his soul at the door by the time clock and like became like a weird piece of meat that just like sang gospel songs and threw dishes to the washer.

I won't speculate about Ruben. I, here's my experience. I sat there for a year trying to be as fast as Ruben at washing dishes until I realized the reason I wanted to do that is because I wanted people to like me. Yeah. And then I walked out the back door because there had to be better ways of making people like me. Right.

That didn't involve washing dishes. Right. I don't know what my point was. It's weird how washing dishes is kind of like considered to be like the universal like, ah, you're going to be a dishwasher. Is that why you want to spend your life? It's an important facet of- Which is great because if you showed an ancient Roman like,

like, okay, here's the- Yeah, right. This is a plebeian's job. And they're like, you put magical items in another magical item and beautiful steam comes out and- Instant heat of water? Instant heat. Like, you used to have to- It was an hour to heat enough water at least to take a bath.

How long would that take to heat and to gather it up? You have a special compartment provided for you with a combination lock on it? No one can take your things? It doesn't matter, man. We're a primarily- We're dissatisfied. This is the- I can't remember the name.

I- There's a name for this. It's like a- It's in Buddhism. There's this idea of this innate dissatisfaction that exists in human beings. And the dissatisfaction has its roots in the delusion that if we change the external world, we're going to be happy. Right.

When the reality is that until you shift what's inside of you, you're going to be miserable no matter what happens to you. Yeah. It's a very simple thing, but it seems like it's a- It's a thing that a great many people haven't figured out. Well, it's hard to figure it out when the actual light that is hitting us right now and the power we're using to record our voices and connect with the people listening, all of that is translated into capitalism.

It's not just here because mankind invented that technology. Right. It is a product. The entire, all of it is, we have that tendency to think, I'm going to change the outside world and make myself happy. Yeah. And five seconds after we think that, someone is agreeing with us and telling us, I know how you feel.

And you know, if you actually bring this coupon to this thing, you can have a new- Yes. Keyboard or a new recording device. This is the, so in the enlightenment, when Buddha's getting enlightenment, he's sitting under the Bodhi tree, faced, you know about this, you know, the stories faced with all these different- He hung out. He hung out.

People tried to get him to stop hanging out. I mean, it's no Jesus. It's no Jesus. It's actually very similar to Jesus. It's very similar to Jesus, except no nails in the hands just hung out. You're right. Yeah, right. He doesn't get cre-

He died. I heard he died of food poisoning, actually. Yeah, he died of like bad meat or something. But the story is the first temptation of Buddha is death rises up. Mara, death, and starts throwing fireballs at him or something. It's supposed to represent the human fear of death as the first thing that gets in the way of self-realization. And then the second temptation were the daughters of Mara.

And these are like hot, beautiful, like literally, if you take it literally, it's just like the temptation to fuck or to get married and have children or live a domestic life. But the deeper translation is it's the part of the self that the moment you start thinking you're gaining realization is like you're doing it. Yeah, you're nailing it. Now you can jump over that wall, Bionic Man. Yeah, yeah, that thing, that thing.

And the moment you fall prey to that, then you get lost in another endless vortex of like, I guess I'm amazing. Because once things become beautiful, other things become ugly. Which is that, yeah, the Dada Jinn keeps warning you along the way that following the way is going to be beset with this. It's duality is the enemy to the ascetic. Like it's not, also what I love about Buddhism, as far as I understood it, is that it gives you the keys to, it tells you that the world is like that, does that to us.

And it tells you that the cure to that is pulling the plug, not caring about those asavas, these ups and downs, these things. Asavas, what is... Isn't that what the, I'm going back to high school like... I don't know, man. I've never heard that term before. I love it though, the wave form, the sine wave or whatever. The ups and downs where the asavas, according to Buddhism, that was like sort of saying like,

well, the things that tempt you from the middle line are things like, for instance, a Twinkie, which is a great thing, or your girlfriend hating you, which is a bad thing. Both of those things have an equal value. They're pulling you away from that sort of center point in an Eastern religion. They're triggering, the thing, what happens is, so it's like the idea is, there is inside of you already, this sort of calcified karmic structure, which is all of your anger, and these external events happen, whatever it is. Someone cuts you off in traffic, your girlfriend says something awful to you, or somebody says

something awful to you about your girlfriend, or the, who knows what it is, the triggers. And so what happens is the trigger hits, and then the anger arises, and so when the anger arises, the asava, I guess, triggers this thing inside of you, the parasite emerges. And then instead of recognizing that you have the parasite inside of you, you try to change that external thing. Right, exactly, because you're this perfect person, you're not perfect, you know you're not perfect, you know you're just awesome, and you got this apartment, and you picked it because for all these wonderful reasons, and oh, that siren goes off at the fire station,

and it's like, oh, do they have this world out there? Do they even understand, I've read all these Ram Dass books, and I'm so close to achieving something here, and they've got their siren clamoring, I'm just going to go over there and ask them to turn it off, and I'm going to, you know, you meet that personality so often in LA, it's like the evolved spiritual person who has veins shooting out of their neck, because they are under so much stress, because of all of the toxicity around them, all of the words that they've learned for how to hate everything that's going on around them, because the rest of us are so unenlightened.

This is the thing about the Asavas, as I said, you'll get the emails from the, that word I'm trying to remember from when I was 17 years old, there was a word that I think Buddhists or Hindus had for the ups and downs. Now the thing was that there was a solution to, I liked about Eastern religion, or thought interesting about it, was that your Eastern religion says to you, fact number one, life goes up and down, it's fucked up, like this too shall pass, which is both good news and bad news, you're walking around, like even if you're having the best day of all, guess what, that means tomorrow's going to suck, that's a fact about life, it goes wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

You know the story about the horses, the guy, just before you continue, just to illustrate what you're saying, there's a famous story, I can't remember which Eastern religion it's from, a guy has, as the story goes, oh yeah, a guy lives with a son, he's a farmer, he's got a horse, the horse jumps over the fence, runs off into the forest, it's their only horse, and his neighbor says, oh, you're fucked man, your horse is gone, you're never going to be able to buy another horse, what are you going to do, you're fucked, and the guy's like, well we'll see, and then two days later the horse comes back, it's a mare, and she's brought with her five other stallions, I guess you want to fuck her or something, so now the guy has like six horses,

that he's gotten into his neighbors like, you're rich, you have all these horses, you're set, and he's like, well we'll see, then his son is like trying to tame one of the horses, falls and breaks his arm, and his neighbor's like, well your son's, now you're done, but this, how are you going to hire? His neighbor is a cocksucker, like a sportscaster, you got anything going on Carl, Jesus Christ, the ticker tape and the fucking spit, just calm down, have you eaten, or do you just sit in your window and watch my life, this is honestly the horse thing, the kid breaking his arm, I'm not allowed to say these things are

good or bad, but I will tell you without fear of being wrong, it's discomforting that you, you're scrutiny Carl, you're watching me and commenting on all this stuff, you're creepy, I'm starting to feel like I got to do right by you, creepy neighbor, that's the real motto, you can easily, before the punchline, the spiritual punchline to this story, it's identical so far to a horror story, the only changes the third act, because in the urban legend sorority girl horror story, the next thing that happens is the guy's in bed, and he wakes up and then his neighbor's over his face with night vision goggles and a knife, and he says, I told you to appreciate things when they were good, and he starts stabbing him,

it's fucking creepy, you're right, you're right, that's a creepy spiritual punchline, but think about that for a second, I don't mean to get too deep, but or the opposite of it, but urban legends, these mythologies, because whatever the end of that story is, life goes up and down, that's a story about a guy who got it and the other guy calling it out, urban legends say they always challenge you, they go, you think you figured shit out, you think you know, you think you know you should throw that bottle away, did you hear about the guy that threw the bottle away? Through the bottle away, yeah, the bottle like a guy was out in the street, and he goes through your garbage, I guess this guy,

and he plays this game, he's called The Bottle Man, and he opens each garbage can, and if the bottle doesn't have a cap on it, he'll fucking kill you. It happened three times in San Francisco, and his girl, she didn't do it, she heard about it, she put the bottle on, she put the cabin, she woke up the next morning and lipstick on the mirror, it said, I appreciate the effort. All this kind of stuff, it challenges you, it's like urban legends are written by your neighbor Carl in that story. Okay, so just to bring it back around to, so Eastern religion says once upon a time we all live in this world, it goes wow, wow, wow, up and down, your mare goes away, comes back with six

stallions, whatever, and then as far as I have understood it, Eastern religion says here's how you can escape all that, but you don't have to. Awareness of the fact that that's how it is empowers you with the decision, if you really want to not deal with that, that's called the life of a holy man, that's not for everybody. There's a version of being enlightened without having to be holy, you can actually just hang out and go up and down, and we pay top dollar for literal incarnations of those at theme parks, you just like, there's the calm and the serenity and the terror and the whole time, we just laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and we voluntarily, it's possible I should say, we do that at a theme park, we say here's ten dollars, I would like to

have the living shit scared out of me, I would like to actively participate in the remote but palpable statistical probability of my death for the sensation of conquering it in a controlled environment, so we spend all day doing that, but we go back to the meta formation of that, which is our life, and we don't throw our hands up in the air when we get a flat tire, the other thing, you're late for work and your career is ruined, the enlightened version of you actually goes, you know what, I guess today was the day my career got ruined, and I'm definitely not, that people hear that shit and then they go, oh yeah, so that's what you do, so that's what you, oh yeah, that's easy to say, when you talk about philosophy like that, when you talk about how

you should be, because there's no other way to phrase it, did you notice that on the internet, and sometimes if you're at a bad party, I've been that guy that you just said that, so what, so what bro, if I'm stepping on a baby's head, you're not gonna react to that? Yes, I had a friend, that's called a Pharisee, it's called a person, I'm the Pharisee, I've been the Pharisee, my friend, I had this brilliant friend, and I remember at one point, you know, he was like, he was really depressed and he got really happy, he'd been reading all the time, very disciplined, but he was like, I thought he's a cocky asshole, and I loved him though, he's a friend, but I still was like, he's a cocky asshole, and then I remember he started

saying like, man, I love everyone, and I think he was pondering like, am I, maybe I'm a saint, am I a saint? And he's like, I love everyone, and I remember saying to him like, absolutely not, you're not, I can tell you for certain that you're not, and like, you love everyone, you're full of shit, no one loves everyone, and I remember he said to me, okay man, what do you think a saint is supposed to be like? And it was a really intense moment for me, because it undercut that huffiness to be like, oh. But it was, it was a perfect intro to your rap video, he said that, and then it cut to a close-up of your finger snapping, and then a close-up of your lips, and you go, I'm glad you asked.

He wears dark robe, he dances on mountain. When he goes to the east side, he always takes fountain, because he knows the traffic in LA. He's the perfect man, he's a saint. He's got three dogs on a chain, bling bling in his eye. A saint. That is a hilarious term, man. Let me, let me ask you a question, MC Trussell. What do you, what do you think a saint is? A saint, I ain't, but I, but a picture I'll paint, what I think, I don't know, I'm not. He's got a gleam in his eye, and a hat on his head. He always says seven when you gotta say bread. Just a litany of, anyway, sorry. He walks two walls, 17 balls. I, I derailed you, I'm sorry. No, please,

I'm so glad, I'm so glad you derailed me. But that is, I mean, I mean, I would honestly say, like, first of all, forgive yourself for being in that zone ever, but also easiest thing in the world to never do that. Like, and I get, I get so irritated with people. I don't know. It's like, there's just some fundamental rule. I don't know if it's like, like improv workshops or something that kind of, where you, once you start taking that in the outside world, you go, okay, so this person in this kitchen at this party is telling me that all hippopotamia are purple. Yeah. Um, I, I, you can definitely argue with it, but like, do you have a horse in that race? Like, like, is it okay to agree with that person? The answer is absolutely yes. It's,

there's no harm will come to going like, okay, all right, I guess I should, it's the, the, the, the stake in the argument is what makes people uncharismatic, I think. Wow. Man, that's really good. The stake in the argument. Yes, for sure. Oh man, anytime you start getting your tail feathers up over something, it's, you're, you're losing your, because yeah, what does everybody do that, that, that tries to high road you in an argument when it's not successful and equally charismatic? You, it's because you can tell they don't really mean it, but the tack they choose is they try to get to the highest ground. They go, oh, well, I think it's interesting that you're, you're saying that as soon as, as soon as two people get in the fucking tizzy on the internet, yes, it's a

scramble for high ground. Yes. That's the funniest thing about it is like the opposite of a Heathcliff fight, like they, instead of the tornado of claws, it's a, it's a, whatever the opposite of a tornado is, it's two nerds racing for higher ground and they're, and they're, it's like a dog fight to try to act like they didn't just get in a fucking nerdy fight about something. Oh my god. No, I, I actually never, and everything devolves into, well, when you, you seem to be very upset. I only asserted an opinion and it's certainly my right to have and, and you watch these card games happen over 25 years and you go, okay, what's the ace that you carry around up your sleeve? How do all of these things end? What's the, what's the atom bomb? It's, it is the fact that the other person

is having a fight and you're not. So instead of having to fake that at the end of a fight because you want to win it, instead of having to try to pull that maneuver, what if you actually walked around with that ace taped to your head, which is actually I don't, if you, in case you haven't noticed, I have never said anything about what you should do. I have never tried to tell you that John Denver was racist. I only told you what I felt when I was listening to his album. I, you can't argue with that. I, you can't prove me wrong. I said, I remember feeling like John Denver was racist when I listened to his album. I think the answer is, if you can, for me, I know the feeling well when someone incites something in me that makes me angry. That's the, that feeling is always

followed by error. The feeling, if I go from the feeling, it's always followed by error. The angry, huffy feeling always results, even if there's a temporary win, if you make someone submit to you, to, to your level of rage or your cleverly concealed rage, you still lose. So the idea is, if you can eliminate that huffiness altogether, so that when someone explodes in front of you, you're not even feeling it. You don't feel it anymore than when a dog starts barking in the backyard. You're not suddenly offended or upset. It's just like a moment that in nature, if someone's doing that, if you can get to that place and I think you would be victorious no matter what, exactly like what you're saying. But like you mentioned earlier, you get halfway to that place

and you have a good Wednesday and then on Thursday you go to a party and there's a guy in the kitchen and he doesn't get it and he keeps talking about Harrison Ford, like Harrison Ford's full of shit. He doesn't even know he's talking about it. And he's like, he doesn't get that you're not supposed to fight and then you step, like I will, I will rise to this place in my hotter balloon of relaxation and objectivity and then I will meet somebody who doesn't understand life the way I do and then I will politely say to them, yeah, but you know what, better not, better not, better not have an opinion about it, better to rise up here and then they'll say, yeah, well that's some bullshit. And then I go, you fucking insignificant parasite, you piece of shit. You're a fucking agent of entropy?

That's the side you're on? Who side do you think you're on when you side against openness? Are you out of your mind? Do you realize you're pouring diarrhea into a river and complaining that you're getting sick from it? You're part of the problem. You have the fucking balls to imply that being a better person and caring about people is worse and less effective. Yes, Spock. Good job. Congratulations. You're on the side of insects. They had their chance. We evolved from them. Love me. Listen to me. I'm sweating. I'm crying. I'm telling you the truth. I don't care if it's pragmatic. You're a piece of shit. I wish I could kill you. And all of a sudden you're yelling at someone in the name of love.

Oh, God. But man, that feels so good. And even just what you just did, that feels so good. And that is why this book I'm reading by Chogyam Trumpa is talking about one of the main founders of Tibetan Buddhism and how he would beat the shit out of people and how that was fine because that's what he was like. It feels good to lean on a lever and move something. I think the Baptist preachers who when they can pace and go like, I'm not a fucking sellout talking about Jesus. I want to level with you. I want to explain something to you. And it feels good for the sender and good for the receiver because they can believe the message.

Yeah. But what is the... Mitch Hurwitz and I, humble brag, we're just talking about this over a drink. Just talking about this, he called it, he's 10 years older than me or so. He reminded me so much of Dino, like this kind of like just like older and... Dino Stanatopoulos for those of you who don't know, the great writer. Like get shit more. And we're just, he, I was talking, I was confessing to him about how good it feels to lose your shit and be mean and just take a sharp stick and strategically skewer someone who is being completely dishonest about how much they respect you and where they are in accordance to you and just doing something to them, affecting them on a level that makes them admit that this entire time, this is how it was,

and we're talking about this, our tendencies to go dark sometimes. And we started talking about how what we were really doing in those moments is an impression of our fathers. And how good that feels because that is what a man does. And my dad is awesome. And I don't know if that means that the definition of a man is awesome. And that I don't know what that means. I know facts about my dad. I know feelings about my dad. Like I just know like the good thing about him, as far as I understand it, in the lizard part of my brain, despite 40 years of growth around it, the thing that I understand about my dad and therefore about the ideal man is that he has the power to boom like thunder and humble people around him. That, you know, he tries, tries to get by without

having to do it, but has to let it go. Yeah, he's got a stinger. It's in there. He can, yeah, I know what you mean, man. And I think that's something that like I, you know, I think that it seems great on paper, but what's, and it's, and it is good. It is good, but what's a million times more interesting is the idea of somebody who is that baby that you're talking about, that Taoist baby, but they're a grown, they're a grown adult, but everything around them is just being reacted to in this very natural way. And I think that way tends to be, and this, God forgive me for saying this, but I think that at the deepest core of things, that tends to be more of a loving relationship with things or. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Mitch's, Mitch's thing was like, I know

what you're talking about and I, and I had it and I let it go. Like it's possible to let it go. And because it's so, I mean, like getting, listen, you can walk down the street and, you know, pass five or six people or really let you have it if you do the wrong thing. It's not like a unique situation to be around people who are good at hissing at you or really letting you fucking know that you're a piece of shit. That's like the, it's common to stand on a beach, but what's really rare is when you get around that person who you're, you are an asshole to that person, or you don't call them back seven times in a row, or you, who knows what the fucking great crime is you do in front of them, or you reveal some part of yourself or whatever it is, and they,

in an honest way, like you just as much as before that happened. Yeah. That's crazy. And when you meet that person, you go, I want to be like that person. Yes. I love Duncan Trestle so much. I've only met him three times. I think about him in my head when I'm in line at the bank. Like if Duncan Trestle saw what I was doing, based on the three times I've met him, whether it's a figment or not, I don't think Duncan Trestle would be nodding his head and like give me a thumbs up right now. I'm going to act a little cooler in line at the bank today. We spread good behavior, good, good. Yes. Like you never know when you're doing it because if somebody could yell at you, like you said, you get a chance to do it every day. And I stand before you confessing like

I've been failing to do that for years. I constantly fail. I'm getting, I'm, man, I'm the fucking count of money, Chris. I'm always trying to get revenge on every fucking thing I can't because I got to work and the people that are telling me that I'm doing something wrong, they're enemies of fucking good TV. So I get drawn into this Joan of Arc complex, but the problem with the, yeah, those people don't give a shit about TV. And that's how they think like, I'm gonna fucking save the show. I'm yelling at this person or you like like defending against them or feeling this way. Maybe you got to do that too, man. I mean, like you don't want, I don't, there's no, I don't want to know the answer, but I do, I would much rather

you be there fighting people like that than not, than not. I mean, it's, I don't know how you, I don't know how, I honestly don't know how you, how, how you, that seems like a very stressful job. But. Well, it hasn't been this year because they, they brought me back. So there's nobody, there's nobody fighting me, which has allowed me to sort of realize what that guy in that story about the horses realizes. It is, you know what, seasons one through three, it didn't, they want to have a conference call about the tone of the show and it feels like it's every minute there's an invitation for you to lose your shit to defending or trying to preserve and all this stuff. I don't know. It is weird because I look back at it and I, yeah, I, I think

like, well, wait a minute, the show wouldn't exist if I didn't get mad. But, but, but, I don't know how I slid into that, but. But you know, it's bad. That's the point is, it's like, again, it's like getting mad is not the problem. It's, it's, it, the problem is, is getting out of the moment. And the other problem is if someone gets mad. Yeah. Cause then you're going to suck as a writer. That's the thing. Okay. That's it. Yes. You can get mad about the fact that people aren't letting you be happy. Yes. It's, it's gotta be an honest, like, like, yeah. Cause the person complaining about the fire house is siren. That person is really saying, you know what, I couldn't help but notice your siren and I can't help but think that if your siren went away, I could achieve

serenity. Yeah. And this, that means that the siren was an invitation to them in the first place to deal with something that has nothing to do with the siren. And that's what Ram Dass is saying. It's like, sounds like that siren belongs in your world. Yeah. So, and so it's like, you can, you can tell people that tell you not to have fun to go fuck themselves. And as long as you're having fun while you're doing it, that's the key. You got to always be the funny one. Always be smiling while you're telling people to go fuck off. Yeah, man. And, and, and, and yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's like the moment you decide I'm not going to be mad because I'm like, don't do that anymore. That's the moment you're doing something 50 times worse than being mad.

Now you're just not like that. I'm sorry to keep going back to Ram Dass, but really into him right now. Right now. I'm constantly in there for years. For years. For those, for those of you that just tuned in, we've caught Duncan Tressel in a, in a bit of a Ram Dass stage. For the last like 15 years. Do you know that? Like when you, when you, you, you said that name the first time I heard you say it on your podcast, I was like, I know that name. I, when I was a little kid, I went through this, you know, weird Asperger-y like phase of like, I don't know what the fuck is going on. And I, I, my mom would take me to the library all the time and I gravitated towards these like, uh, slowly, but surely cause I was like, I saw altered states with, uh,

that like, I was, I was sort of, I was like, everyone's a robot and I don't know what's going on. You know, it's got existential, like 10 years old. And, uh, I, there was this book and it was, I remember the name Ram Dass for sure. And I remember his little, little drawing of him as like a little fat Buddha, like, like inside cover. And it was like some simple book about just chilling and meditating and stuff. But it was a big part of my, uh, my, my turning when I was letting. He infiltrated a lot of people early on, which is really fascinating about him. Also, Alistair Crowley too, like that's another figure that got into a lot of people's heads and people don't even know that he got in there. I'm fascinated by that with people who get into the,

you know, how like, you know, I just watched this, uh, uh, documentary on Prageria and it was sort of breaking down how, how Prageria happens, which is there's a protein that gets in the, first of all, like, you know, showing like the DNA helix and chromosomes and this Prageria is a malfunction in one, one letter. I don't know how the shit works, but like one letter is off. It goes by letters. It's letters. It's like R, R is off. And the, the, the, uh, the, the thing starts making, uh, the, the, just this one malfunction, the stuff called Prageron starts getting inserted into these protein strands. And then the chain reaction of it is that you get a kid who's like 80 years old when they're 12. And so that one malfunction causes the thing to

fuck up so much in the same way. It's interesting how like people in the protein strand of society will insert certain bits of information into the thing in one way or the other. It's going, it makes society either grow into this mutant Nazi party thing or, you know, the other side of it, which is like the dream of the hippie, which is like the age of Aquarius, the putting down of weapons or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Like some of the most influential people, they don't, they don't necessarily have, you can't like, like, like, how much did Abby Hoffman do and how, how, how large is that name versus, and let's call that a large name. And let's say that he represented like, like a movement of people who actually had this like sort of

incredibly potent effect whose names are not, they're not stories. You're not Paul Bunyan. He didn't cut down a big giant tree. I was fascinated with that. Like, what did Steve Jobs, like, is there, is there a timeline where Steve Jobs isn't born and therefore are things that different? I know a cynic would say absolutely not because Henry Ford invented the car at the same time as like four other guys. So there's this philosophy that says like, well, we're a species and we just invent shit. Like, and what did Steve Jobs invent? But he's like this weird guy, this passion and the things in our pockets are fucking shaped by this. Yeah, man. That's it. That's the one little fucking chromosome, that one little chromosome in human society, the Steve Jobs

chromosome has like a couple of great experiences. And the next thing you know, we're all we're carrying around these weird glowing infinity rectangles in our pockets that can connect with every bit of information on the planet instantaneously. That's fascinating. That's a fascinating thing. And yeah, I know what you mean. Like, yeah, if there was no Steve Jobs, then maybe I like that idea, you know, even more than that. I mean, like, like, well, because what you're describing is just technology, which is something that a bunch of dumb ass, yeah, who's like contribute to. But like, jobs kind of, I don't even know how to articulate it. But like, he, he had this, apparently had this like weird dual brain thing where he wanted, he wanted it to be sexy and wanted it to be what

it is, which is ubiquitous. That's the thing, like he had a passion for this thing being a parasite. And if it was up to Samsung, like I remember a pre iPhone world, I remember when all our gadgets were sort of like, this guy had this like dream of like, no, you have like Howard Hughes is like, no, you have to look, I understand how this is supposed to work. Okay. Yeah. And I know this is going to sound weird. But if you just give me control over everything, I will show you how it should work. And to the extent that that meshed with capitalism, he's right. I don't know how much of it is patent bullying, but like these fucking phones or they work differently. Anyways, my in an age past fire the wheel and the Model T, I find myself wondering like,

how much innovation is happening now and how, how, how many different timelines are sprouting off of this one. Man, I'll tell you, I'm sorry, do you have to go by the way? No, there's a, um, your listeners have to go. They don't. They have to go kill themselves. They know, I don't think they think that there's a, I did you see this, uh, this blew my fucking mind, man. Can everybody hit on that podcast? The enhancer, this blew my mind. Did you see the new goddamn 3d printer that this guy built apparently said in the in Reddit that he used household materials, which I really don't understand how that's possible. But this guy created a 3d printer that is apparently what to create costs less than a thousand bucks. And what it does is it uses,

it takes three, three, you know, uh, CAD or whatever, whatever format they use, uh, that it takes three dimensional digital objects, translates those digital objects into sound waves, and then uses those sound waves to somehow vibrate a liquid, um, it's a, it's a resin, a liquid resin is vibrated by the sound waves created from this three dimensional object, which then makes these highly detailed, uh, 3d print out. So he's using sound. He's translating instead of lasers or whatever they're using sound like somehow vibrating liquid to make this an object. That is fucking nuts, man. That blows my mind to think that like this, that that's happening right, that's happening right now. That's, that's, you know, when you hear conspiracy

theorists yapping about how the pyramids were made, they'll, or Stonehenge or whatever, like they used sound, they used sound to vibrate the thing or whatever. And in, uh, I think the Upanishads, it talks about how, uh, sound was the, uh, uh, the, like that's the original creative matrix of things started in sound. And then in the book of John, it's like, in the beginning was the word, and the word was, it's like that idea of like sound being the original thing. And then someone figuring out how to turn digital space into sound and then that back into three dimensional space. Don't know how I'm connecting this with Steve Jobs, I guess innovation or whatever, but you have to, this is, here it is. This is my, this is the fantasy. The fantasy is this. The fantasy

is you have humanity, society, all the famous people, all the Steve Jobs, all the people hungry for wealth or fame or the people who are materialists in the marketplace. And then the fantasy is this, surrounding them in the same way, like if you were going camping, people would stand around a fire blowing on the fire and lighting it or the really smart people. And they're the ones who are just sort of influencing society to sort of grow these innovations out of it to move us in the direction of, you know, a utopia or the next phase of human evolution, which is to no longer be terrestrial, you know, to spread out into space. That's the next phase. And the idea is like there's, the fantasy is it's not just some instinctual, impulsive thing, like what you were talking about

or what some people say, you know, like when Tesla came, or the theory of evolution, it was Darwin simultaneous to Darwin. There was, I can't remember the name of the other person who came up with the same idea. Toby. Toby Keith. Toby, I don't know. Big, big ideas. There's all these other people who are coming up with them at the same time. So the idea is like, is this something emerging through the strata of flesh surrounding the planet, like some kind of like subjective vegetation, or maybe there's people in the perimeter, in the periphery, whispering these things into the like the show people's ears. Those people have to be the most patient, low stakes, like alien life forms ever. Yeah. Are they

ready for, are they ready for a double stick tape? Yes, commander. I believe, what about this thing I'm hearing about Malaysia? I don't know. There's an energy crisis there. Oh, sir, please look at the big picture. These are a double stick tape ready people. Come on. Well, yeah, I'm just saying what happened in Alpha Centuri. You're going to blame that on double stick tape. Look, I've been assigned to this job for about six centons. In that time, I have watched three planets collapse after with the introduction of double stick tape. I know they don't regard it as a threshold, the sudden ability to stick something on a wall instead of looping masking tape around. I know they look at it as a natural progression, but we all, among the reptelia,

we know that this is a big deal. It's a Rubicon. In all the times that we've progressed with this schedule, have we ever tried holding back double stick tape to see what happens? All right, sir, if you say so. Three months later, sir, they've invented their own double stick tape. Abandon Earth. Leave it. We shall never visit it again. You're right, man. You're right. That is the dumbest idea ever. Well, just like they've been watching us. I mean, we are nothing if not an unsupervised species. We are nothing. That's hilarious. Well, you know, then there's the other ideas that technology. How many kingdoms of life are there? There were seven when I was in high school. So technology is considered the eighth kingdom of life, and it's growing through us in

the same way plants grow through dirt. Technology is growing through the human mind, and it's the eighth kingdom that we're creating. I mean, we'd like to think that, but technically, if we're going to play by our own rules, life already has fundamental definitions that include reproduction, which technology can handle, but also other antiquated shit that we decided a long time ago. That's the weird thing is, do we say, okay, now there's eight kingdoms? Or do we go, okay, there's these seven kingdoms, and then there's this other thing? Are these things gods? Well, the thing's going to be, the idea is it's going to be life. It isn't yet, but it eventually will be indistinguishable. And then that, and then the idea is that it's like, oh, it's not that it's

the eighth kingdom of life. It's that we are approaching this moment at the end of time, and the closer we get to it, the more these objects emerge from it. Let me ask you something as a thought experiment. Okay. Like when you think about the idea of a robot killing you, or like sassing you off. Yes. When you think about the idea of a robot deciding that it doesn't want to put up with your shit anymore. Agree or disagree with me about this. The emotional reaction that you have first and foremost is not one of outrage. Don't you first, don't do the first thing that fires off in you? Cool. When you think about the idea of a robot rising up, don't you think that sounds cool? Somehow I would rather be killed by a robot than insulted by a robot or South. Something

about being, I've thought about robot, I've thought about being murdered by some DARPA invention or some evolution of a DARPA invention, but this is the first time I've ever considered a robot just kind of vaguely insulting me. Well, I mean, they're starting to all the time. I mean, they're certainly the person that doesn't allow me to get my money out of the bank, but I'm saying just. Yes, it's cool. We call it, it's a whole branch of, we're into it. We're making it happen. We want it to happen so bad. We want them to look like us. We want them to replace us. We have a fetish. We keep intellectually talking about how bad it's going to be when these fucking things make us obsolete, but our heart, our spirit, something inside of us

keeps going. Yeah, man, we're made. No, I want to add to this by talking about, I went to this conference in New York called the Juggalooz. GF 2045, which is this convention put on by this Russian billionaire, Dmitry Ichkov, who is trying to gain immortal life by downloading his brain into a computer. And so he's gathered together all these geneticists and roboticists and weirdly all of these spiritualists. So there's like, you know, there's a guy walking around with a robot. There's a guy walking around with a thought-controlled cyborg arm and mixed in with him are like people in saffron robes and like people who are. I heard about the first cyborg hate crime. Yeah. I googled it. It was like two years old. Oh, it was? Yeah, there's this guy

who's got like he bolted a camera to his head. Yeah, he was drilled into his fucking skull. But he chose to bolt it there. He could have put that thing on a piece of masking tape. Yeah, he didn't have to burrow it into his head. He didn't have to take that. He just chose to wear a hat that was taped to his scalp. Those are transhumanists. You know, that's what they want to do is they want to merge with matter. And, but it was what it made me think of was, I don't remember which Conan the Barbarian it is, but do you remember like they were in one of the Conans, they're trying to like create this demon. They're trying to summon this. All the priests are trying to summon a demon. But not Conan, right? Conan. No, he's the one who got the horn off the fucking

thing. You break the horn off and it dies or whatever. He doesn't want demons. But the priests are always trying to summon up the demon. And Conan's fucking got a deal with it. He always fucks it up. But this conference, when you see these robed people mixing in with these geneticists, mixing in with these roboticists who are all weirdly working together in different ways to summon up from nothingness, this encyclone of intelligence that's made up of the most high tech things that exist, it reminds you of a demon summoning ritual, especially when people in robes are swirling through the crowd of people who are weirdly frenzied. You know what I mean? They're not just like, yes, we're working to expand the human lifespan. Many of them are like that,

but some of them are, they have a frenzy in their eye, which is like, we are awakening the child of the Aeon. Which is a magnification of what we're all doing when we get on a plane. Because we know we're getting on an airplane that is not supposed to be up in the air. Oh yes, right. Everything that we do, our alpha-better eyeglasses, our dental fillings, the airplanes we get on, that sometimes go down. I'm not saying they go down so often that we should stop flying. I'm just saying that every once in a while, you look over at the news and there's a big brown streak in a field with a couple of fires dappling the helicopter view. And there's a news anchor in a tie that's

doing his 450th newscast. And now he's telling you about the 10th time this has happened since he's been on duty. And he's just saying, here's what happened. 350 people. Let's go on South by Southwest. We're still waiting for the thing. And we kind of, it plays in the background in a bar while you're getting your martini or you're going to work. We continue. The airlines don't stop. We long ago made that deal as a species with ourselves and with if this thing is God or if it's the devil, we made an agreement with it that we said, you're more important than us. We're going to pay lip service to the importance of us. But we are going to step over each other in the street to get to work. I'm not getting

high-handed about that. We do that willy-nilly because we're not animals. And animals might go, well, they're very vicious too, but they might say, oh man, a bunch of hyenas got on that big metal tube that transports hyenas and did you hear one of them crashed into a mountain and all the hyenas aboard it died? Yeah. All right. Well, let's have another hyena meeting. So what's going on with airplanes? Hyena number nine votes for no more airplanes until we figure out why they can kill 350 hyenas. Maybe hyenas would do that. I don't know. The way they act around a gazelle carcass, it would indicate that probably if they were given sanctions, they would probably be all in favor of all kinds of 9-11s and things. But what we don't do as naked monkeys that have

alphabets and things, we never say stop the press, holy shit, we've been being died today. We have a hard on for something that has absolutely nothing to do. We know that at this point, the wizard's curtain has come down. There is no more lying to ourselves about it. We are definitely playing an A game that has nothing to do with our preservation. No matter what side of it you're on now, we all view ourselves as the earth's problem. And the only division now is some people are saying, yeah, well, it doesn't matter. Earth's supposed to die. It ain't good to do. And then the other half of the people are going, we're going to fucking save this planet. We're fucking dying. Man, you don't know when the earth's supposed to die. No one's saying the

earth ain't dying. There was a little flirtation with that a little while ago by some idiots. We are saying to each other, looking at each other in the mirror every morning, looking at each other, and we're going like, so we got some kind of higher calling, right? We're doing something. You're going to have a baby tomorrow? Yeah, I'm going to have a baby. I'm going to try. I'd like to have a baby. We're running out of food. Yeah, but I've got to have a baby. Hey, man, are you learning Excel? Yeah, I learned Excel. I'm going to get on this plane. I'm going to learn more Excel. And I'm going to try to build a bigger building. I'm going to build this biggest building in the spaceships. And I'm going to fly every winter to make laces. We are

compelled, like a spider is compelled to make a web. We are compelled not to farm. We are not compelled to... Yeah, we love eating. We love breathing. We love drinking water. We are compelled having gotten all the water, all the food, everything within our domain. We are compelled to rip our own faces off our skulls, trying to get into outer space, trying to make a computer that is smarter than us, trying to make a Japanese mannequin that feels like she's smiling. We are compelled to self-destruct or to evolve. Same thing. We're atoning with some kind of God. We've got to be Jehovah. We have to be this thing that makes life. We're killing ourselves doing it, killing ourselves. I love it. I agree with us. I agree. I think that the

foremost priority has to be, like, what do we do next? I don't think that if we all stopped and said, let's sing Kumbaya. I don't know. I think that then poop would be everywhere. We've got to get out of the goddamn gravity well, man. That's the idea. We're in a gravity well. We're stuck on this planet. We've got to populate other planets. That's what the great Timothy Leary talked about. But who knows if that's possible. But then we're going to colonize and there's going to be a... I can tell by the Tony version you're trying to wrap it up. But it'll be like a moon base and then that'll fucking collapse. Yeah. 400,000 people will be the new 3,000 people.

This is so funny. We're having the same conversation might have on a dog that's dying in the streets of India if they could... Gotta get on another dog, man. Well, I don't know. I don't want to wrap it up, but I feel... I don't want to keep you trapped. I feel like we've covered it all. We've covered so much. I honestly don't want to wrap it up. But I guess we should. We should do... Maybe you should do the podcast more, man. This is... Well, you should come by Harmon Town more. Anytime. All right, Dan. You guys, I'll have all of his information at dunkintrustle.com. What's your Twitter? Dan Harmon, at Dan Harmon. And he's got a great podcast, Harmon Town, and a show. He's got his own show.

And I'm sure you guys know about. And I hate vaccination. And don't get vaccinated. You know what? Right at the end. Very deleted. And say that to say it's for Dan Harmon. But thanks, man. Thanks for doing the show. Thank you. Thanks for listening, you guys. That was Dan Harmon. Check out Harmon Town. I'm recording on a crap microphone right now, which is why it sounds like this. But regardless, check out Harmon Town and Community. And if you like the Dunkin' Trustle Family Hour, give us a nice rating on iTunes, won't you? Have a great week. See you guys later.