Duncan Trussell Family Hour - DRIFTING SYMPATHY with EMIL AMOS

Episode Date: January 20, 2016

A rambling and probably incorrect interpretation of some of Chogyam Trungpa's writing followed by a mattress commercial disguised as an episode of Forensic Files.  Duncan is joined by Emil Amos (Holy Sons, Grails, OM) and they talk about impermanence, David Bowie, and the dangers of reflecting the true self.   THIS EPISODE BROUGHT TO YOU BY CASPER.COM  go to CASPER.COM/familyhour and use offer code family hour to get $50 off of your brand new mattress.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Casper.com. Go to casper.com forward slash family hour and use offer code family hour to get $50 off

your brand new, beautiful, sparkling, white, virginal mattress. Hello, Omote of Divine Consciousness, temporarily trapped in a super advanced bio computer. It's me, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. Hello. What do you say we go really deep right away

with a reading from Chogyam Trumper? The basic problem we seem to be facing is that we are too involved with trying to prove something which is connected with paranoia and the feeling of poverty. When you are trying to prove or get something, you are not open anymore. You have to check everything. You have to arrange it correctly.

It is such a paranoid way to live and it really does not prove anything. One might set records in terms of numbers and quantities that we have built the greatest, the biggest, we've collected the most, the longest, the most gigantic. But who is going to remember the record when you are dead or in 100 years or in 10 years or in 10 minutes?

The records that count are those of the given moment of now, whether or not communication and openness are actually taking place now. This is the open way, the Bodhisattva path. A Bodhisattva would not care even if he received a medal from all the Buddhas proclaiming him the bravest Bodhisattva in the entire universe. He would not care at all.

He never read stories of the Bodhisattvas receiving medals and the sacred writings and quite rightly so because there is no need for them to prove anything. The Bodhisattvas action is spontaneous. It is the open life, open communication which does not involve struggle or speed at all. That's from the book cutting through spiritual materialism and it seems to be pointing in the direction

of some insane state of consciousness that you could develop where you're no longer concerned in any way at all with anything other than the exact moment that is happening and that's where you live. Crazy idea. Whereas most of us are spending every single second completely worried over what this person

is going to think about us, whether or not we are going to get the accolades we deserve, do our friends respect us? I remember hearing a comedian once say, the most important thing to me was the respect of my peers. Imagine that, that's the most important thing for a lot of people, naturally. The part of your brain that processes rejection

is the same part of your brain that processes physical pain. The implication being that there's nothing worse if you're in a tribe than to get excommunicated from the tribe, to get kicked out. I mean, shit, have you seen that show on prairie dogs? I think it's prairie dogs, the cute little guys, the guys who sit in their strange burrows

and look out and man, this documentary is so dramatic because one of these prairie dogs got kicked out. He didn't do the right thing, he wasn't being a good enough prairie dog. He failed as a prairie dog and was outcast and sort of sent into the wilderness without the protection of his friends, doomed to wander alone in the great wilderness

and where a prairie dog is a sandwich on the legs. So for this prairie dog, it was a very dangerous situation he got in by being a failed prairie dog or maybe being too much of an individual. And I think that's why everybody secretly feels mortified at the concept of people you know talking about you behind your back

or the negative opinions of people that you know. And many people struggle under this invisible and terrible gravity, the constant, never ending consideration of how you are perceived by your friends and your family. And if that's where you're at, you can't be in the present moment. You're existing in some kind of other strata of experience.

You're existing in a strata of experience where it sort of sits above the present moment like a callus, that's where you're living. It's a more controllable place. It's terrifying to dabble in the present moment because the present moment is not the washed out, boring, yawn-inducing, mundane kind of peaceful bullshit that you might imagine it is based on contact

you've come into with certain spiritual writings. It's easy to think the present moment is where you go when you get old. You sit and watch the birds and a little rivulet of drool runs down the side of your mouth and that's the present moment, a kind of numb, bored, yawning state. But the real present moment is something so catastrophic

and terrifying and creative all at the same time that most people spend all of their energy desperately trying to avoid even the vaguest contact with it. We're dealing with the part of the universe that is in a constant state of destruction and creation, which is the present moment. Every single moment in time is instantaneously being evaporated, erased, wiped clean.

Whatever happened to you two minutes ago is gone devoured by some unknown thing we call time. And the present moment is that point on the conveyor belt where that which is not becomes that which is and that which is becomes that which is not. It's that place where those two places meet. It's the transcendent place, Kali, Shiva, Vishnu, Brahmin, the creator and the destroyer hanging out together

at a wonderful picnic and it's amazing, but it's really terrifying, it really is. When teachers like Jesus Christ are saying things like, you must die to this world to come to know me. Or when you hear the stories of your friends who had an ayahuasca trip and how they were tortured until the moment they allowed themselves to die, those are scary stories.

If you're somebody who is clinging to the delusion that there's any kind of permanence, stability or non-changing aspect of the universe. If you've tricked yourself into thinking that whatever state that you're in right now is going to stay that way, then the concept of the state changing in the most dramatic way possible, which is death,

is absolutely horrifying. I know, because I'm one of those people, I hate the idea of dying. It just doesn't appeal to me. It's something that I would like to not have happen. And I think that the movement into the present moment is a form of death. It's the death of all your preconceived notions.

It's the death of all of your expectations. It's the death of every single way you thought things were going to be. You give it all up. There's nothing except the thing itself, which if you're something that's been existing outside the thing itself, pretending that you aren't some eternal,

non-embodied singularity, a unitive consciousness that expresses itself temporarily in the form of all known phenomena, then it can be a little, it can be fucking spooky. So it's fun to live outside of that and to build a little nest and to pretend that you're a person with a social security number and a name and a job and a family

and that this thing, this dance that you're doing in the physical material universe will go on forever, which it won't. So that's, I think, why teachers like Chogium Trumpa, and we talk about this idea a little later in the podcast, will say, if you don't have an already started down the path of what is known as awakening or whatever you wanna call it, don't go down it.

It's better not. Enjoy the dream. It's a fine dream and there's nothing wrong with just being in that dream of permanence. Nothing wrong with it. It's beautiful and maybe that's why we're here. But if you're somebody who started waking up to the reality of the situation,

which is that everything is a constant state of kaleidoscopic flux, then well, that's where people like Chogium Trumpa come in handy because they can sort of guide you through the process or at least give you something to read when you've eaten too much marijuana. Either way, I'm glad that he exists. Check out his documentary on Netflix.

I think it's called Crazy Wisdom and I, you'll love it. Sorry for the sermon. Why did I do that? Too stoned. All right, we're gonna dive right into this episode with Emil Amos, but first, some quick business. In 1978, Wilmer Pettingham was discovered dead in his apartment.

No one knew what had happened to Wilbur and it was a mystery that would last several weeks until Detective Courtney Ray of the Miami Police Department upon revisiting the scene of Wilbur's unexpected demise, discovered something terrible. Scanning the mattress, he realized that there were small footprints leading up the side of the mattress.

A forensic examination later determined that these footprints were made of semen. What had happened to Wilbur that night shocked detectives and forensic psychologists and redefined crime history for years to come. This was the first time in the history of Miami that a man had been murdered by his own semen. As it turned out, Wilbur had not changed his mattress

for over 11 years and as a habitual love maker and master-beater, his mattress had gathered so much residual semen that the bedbugs living in the mattress were taken over by the genetic information inside the semen and formed what is known as a cum baby. A cum baby is a dangerous and extremely rare being that can emerge from the congealed, crusty leavings of your love-making and orgasming throughout the years.

A cum baby is angry. Its mind is driven by one thing and one thing alone to seek revenge on that which sprayed it into the void. And so Wilbur, in the dead of the night, after a furious session of masturbation, fell asleep. His stomach covered with a congealed, waxy ooze, a sock laying next to his mattress. He never knew what happened to him.

But after much unraveling of the crime scene, it was determined that a cum baby had emerged. It risen from the mattress like a thing from a quicksand pit made of jizz and climbed up Wilbur's chest and covered his mouth and nose with a thick mucusy sheet of old reincarnated jizz. Wilbur died within a few minutes

of having his main oxygen flow cut off by the quivering hand of the cum baby. Wilbur's cum baby was found in a nearby bar drinking my ties and watching the UFC. He was taken into custody and following is an audio excerpt of his interrogation. Um, where were you on the night of July 15th? Oh, I believe I was suffocating

some bitch ass motherfucker with my hands. Okay, so you admit cum baby that you killed Wilbur petting him? Yes, and I would do it again. I want a butt! BOOM! The cum baby detonated over 17 pounds of plastic explosives that it had hidden

in its tiny trench coat, destroying the Miami-Dade police department and killing Detective Loretta Lanue. If only Wilbur had changed his mattress, everything might have been different. This episode is brought to you by Casper.com. Go to casper.com forward slash family hour and use offer code family hour

to get $50 off a cum baby free mattress. My grandfather used to say to me every night before I go to bed, may you be safe from the cum baby, my boy. And I still remember wondering and worrying if one day I would be destroyed by a cum baby. And it might have happened, if not for casper.com. Casper sent me a brand new cum baby free mattress

and allowed me to replace my old, semen encrusted, disgusting sponge of past orgasms into a brand new pristine, virginal semen baby free environment, which I now sleep on to this very day. It's a fantastic mattress. I wouldn't lead you in the wrong direction. I sleep on a Casper.

Here's what I have to read. It's an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price. Just the right sink, just the right bounce. Two technologies, latex foam and memory foam come together for better nights and brighter days. Risk-free trial and return policy. You can sleep on it for a hundred blissful days

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All you gotta do is go to casper.com, forward slash family hour and use offer code family hour and you'll get a brand new mattress. I sleep on one of these things. We're also brought to you by amazon.com. There's no need for you to go out in the world unless you're going to go into a nudist park. You shouldn't, you should only be going to nudist parks.

If you're not on the way to a nudist park or coming back from one, something's wrong. You definitely shouldn't be spending your time driving to warehouses to buy pieces of plastic that are not gonna take away the innate suffering that comes from the terrible delusion that you exist in a universe of permanence. So the next time you're about to go out to buy

some silverware, rice steamer, an espresso machine, or a pocket knife, remember, you go to amazon.com and go through our portal located in the comment section of any of these episodes. And rather than getting trapped in hell traffic dealing with the undeniable fact that you are some kind of sentient filament sucked into the irresistible magnetic forces of modern day capitalism,

you can spend your time making love to a beehive in a park, drinking wine out of a goblet and dancing with a hoofed being that has a thousand eyes. Doesn't that sound more fun? Go through the Amazon portal. It's in the comment section of any of these episodes. They will give us a very small percentage of anything that you buy and it costs you nothing.

We've also got t-shirts, stickers, and brand new posters are on the way. And finally, I've got a big tour of the East Coast coming up. If you wanna come see me, do stand up. All those dates are gonna be located dunkintrustle.com and the tour starts in March. So I hope you'll come to a live show. All right, that's enough rambling on my part.

You know, these are pot chocolates I have. They're, they will trick you. These seemingly innocent, sweet little squares are crafted in hell by professional demons. But they're my kind of demons. All right, we're gonna jump right into this episode. Today's guest is one of my best and longest friends. He's in a lot of great bands, including Grails,

Holy Sons, and Ohm. And he's gonna be going on a tour of Europe soon. And all those dates will be located at dunkintrustle.com in the comment section. Now everybody, please open your hearts and send as much love as you can. In the direction of this super transcendent, never ending ultra identity

that is temporarily manifesting as Emil Amos. Lap Cage. Welcome upon you, that you are with us. Shaken, going to be blue, welcome to you. It's the Dunkintrustle współ kilk It's been so long, how long's it been

since we did a podcast together? I am not good with time, but I think maybe maybe a year. It's been too long. Where have you been? You've been, have you been gone? It was hard to get in touch with you for a while. I was, I traveled around the world a few times

because I'm kind of doing this thing where experiment where I just say yes to everything. And I, and I do any, you know, I travel and promote myself as much as possible because I never did that before. So I'm trying to do that as much as possible. Maybe because my brain is telling me that, you know, I guess with David Bowie dying and my body getting older, it's just sort of like, I can see the next horizon

where things start to slow down in, you know, 10, 15 years. So I'm just going for it now. You're doing sort of the same thing right now. Yeah. Well, I mean, I try not to think about the next horizon thing, you know, I mean, I don't want to like, you know, that thing, you know, I don't want to be fueled by some diminishing time. I don't want to be fueled by that idea of like, God damn it,

I better fucking do something now or else because well, then not that you're doing that or anything. I mean, you've already, you're like one of the most prolific people I know on planet Earth. And you're out. I think it's like a, I think it's a, I don't know if the healthy is the right word, but it is a very, you know, like when someone dies,

like for me, David Bowie, I would like realize in a good way, it makes you realize some really deep shit. Like when you were telling me the story about when you were coming back from the doctor and you'd gotten like a prognosis and you were like looking at the world and you were kind of happy to know that the world would just keep going on without you

if you did die. That's one like positive kind of elating feeling of realizing mortality, but then it's just another constructive, optimistic, potentially realization that you come away and you're like now is all I've got and I've got to like harness this and you seize it and it's an exciting realization. It's not like necessarily morbid.

No, no, I know. That's a, yeah, it doesn't have to be morbid. That was, I still remember that, you know, like your brain takes flash bulb moments. Yeah. And I still remember that, man. I remember this, there, I think there was a plane going through the sky.

I was on La Brea and Sunset Boulevard, I think. I know it was, wait, no, it was Beverly and La Brea. Now that it matters, somewhere around there, somewhere in West Hollywood and yeah, I'm looking around at all the insane gears of the world and you realize, yeah, they just keep going. This thing just keeps going no matter what. And it is, there was something in it

that was shockingly relaxing and that concept of like shit, man, I, you know, it's like depressing and exillating when you realize that really you don't have any impact in the world at all, no matter what you do. You'll just be forgotten. Classic example, Genghis Khan. I mean, people remember who he is, but barely. Nobody recognizes what that guy did

and no one realizes he conquered more land mass than anybody else existing. A tribes person, a basically a wandering beggar at one point in his life conquered the fucking world. But these days, you don't hear people talking about Genghis Khan, you know, and if they do, it's very briefly and probably people are glad when they stop talking about him.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's like Genghis Khan is now just like some nickname for like a Cleveland steamer or something. Give me that Genghis Khan, baby. Give me another Khan, honey. Oh, I love it when you do that, baby. Genghis Khan all over my face. You're sort of, it's so sweet when you have these touching

sort of zen realizations. And then the most terrifying thing is that, you know, it's just a matter of time, maybe five minutes before you like just slide back into the kind of like, you know, what's the word disengaged kind of malaise, not to be totally depressing, but you know that it's just a matter of like hours or days before you sort of normalize and go back

to your basic practical minded bullshit, you know? Yeah, well, yeah, your attention is habituated on that whatever that specific modality is. So you just, yeah, you always end up looking at the same thing again. Like a cat can't not look at a bird. Like it's always gonna get attracted to a bird and certain minds, certain minds,

it's certain that people's attention is attracted to one very specific outlook. Is it, and it's a, God damn it. I mean, the more the older I get, the more I realize my outlook, even though I don't find it depressing at all, there are very few people I can talk with about it who aren't gonna be like, wow, man, that is just so dark.

Oh my God, that's how you think, really? And I think, to me, it doesn't seem, it's like you are not in North Korea, you are not allowed to talk shit about Kim Jong-il. In Thailand, you cannot talk shit about the monarchy. You'll get arrested. In the United States, if you start talking about the truth, which is everybody's, you know, is gonna die

and you're gonna die and you're gonna have to bury your mom and your dad and all your dogs are gonna die and nothing that you do long term is gonna be remembered. And there are many proofs, as just mentioned, Genghis Khan being the top, unless you think you're gonna top Genghis Khan, in which case you're gonna get some centuries of people talking about you,

but more than likely you're not. So no one's really gonna remember anything you do. You have a very minimum impact on this world of so many people and not only is everyone you know gonna die and nothing you do ultimately really makes any impact at all. In the long term, most people don't remember you three minutes after you pass by

and more than likely some of your dearest friends think about you maybe twice a week. So you're invisible and I find that to be one of the most, it's a kind of relief to really let yourself release that awful, awful problem of constantly performing for people in the future or for people in the present who you imagine are thinking about you. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it takes you full circle though somehow and routes you right back into the same sort of temporal petty concerns as you, the more you think about it, you're like, you come to these grand realizations, like I get it now that like being happy is the only thing that matters and it's all I have.

It's my only chance to harness right now. And then so you're like, then you follow to the next thought and you're like, well, the way to be happy is to like, you know, do all the things that I want to do in life. And then you just go down the same old road, like you create a bunch of work for yourself to do and temporal chores and you start to get inundated and immersed within those things.

And you're like, oh, the guy's gotta be here at three and then I've gotta go to this guy's house, you know, and you just become, it's just what life is, is that kind of, not necessarily the pendulum swinging, but it's what life is, is wrestling with these kind of temporal concerns, no matter how petty and stupid they are, nobody escapes the bullshit, you know?

And this is definitely, if you wanna disparage modern life, it stinks, because like in the old days, they would say enlightenment, then chop wood, carry water. You know, because that's what people mostly did back then. You'd have to get water down by the river, there'd be a hike somewhere through a well, or you'd have to fucking chop your own goddamn firewood if you didn't wanna freeze.

Those were the temporal concerns. These days, it's like send invoices, enlightenment, then send invoices. Stand in line for coffee. Yeah, yeah, try to reconcile, it's like there's something instantaneously embarrassing, or it's like, you know, like imagine Buddha sitting somewhere achieving the great awakening,

descending from the Bodhi tree and walking to the nearest Starbucks to get a latte. You know, it's like the universe perfected itself to make it even more difficult to be that being, at least in the classic view, all this shit about caves, you know, like that's something I realized when it comes to meditation teachers, spiritual teachers, they all need it, you need a kind of story,

and many of them have a story that involves some form of cave, right? So, and they make sure that you know they were in a cave. Like, you can't know, if a spiritual person has been in a fucking cave, they're gonna tell you about it, and it's important that you know, I spent three years in a cave, dude, so.

Dude, it's exactly like hip-hop. If you're a new rapper, you get interviewed, and the first question they ask the rapper is, have you been in jail? Like, you have to prove that you've done something horrible if you're gonna get let through the gates. It's the same thing with anything, with spiritual, I mean, it's the same concept as a spiritual teacher

or whatever, is like, Sid Barrett, you know, you have to, you have to be super damaged to make the story good, you know? What if he had just been at line at Starbucks, he wouldn't have been Sid Barrett, but there's this sense of those like commodifiable, like, you know, the guru has to have gone through some Hollywood tragedy or something, right? Right, he needs a story,

and even though the story is irrelevant, and even though when you get around people who, some of the people I've been around, regardless of what fucking cave they went in, if somebody manages to hit that pitch, you really aren't thinking about the cave when you're around them, you're just thinking like, oh my God, wait, what, you can be like this?

Are you really like that? You really are like that. Wait, what the fuck, you had a stroke, and you're like this? Yeah. Like Ram Dass, man, you realize like, whoa, that guy's just firing from the hip, there's no-

There are so many lifetimes removed from be here now by now. Yeah, so many lifetimes, and yet still, I mean, again, I don't know, I guess when I see him, I'm seeing him in a performance aspect, so to speak, because he's surrounded by people who are his students, but I don't, he seems, that's not to say that Ram Dass doesn't like have shit days,

as I'm sure he must, but like, you know what I mean? Like you do realize like, okay, this does work, but the cave, I don't care so much about Neem Karoli Baba, or his story, or his awakening, or the Alpert, or the acid, or the mushroom, or the whole thing. To me, it's just like, whoa, you did this, you're having a good day.

I mean, like you're making, you're making, this day, you are the prism transforming all phenomena into something a little better than it was before it came through your sensory apparatus, whereas I, when things come through my sensory apparatus, I'm lucky if I keep it just the same level of shit, but more than likely, when I think of him zinging through me, it's gonna come out the other side a little less good.

You know what I mean? Like I'm gonna, I'm going to habitually degrade experience instead of habitually transform every moment into something sweet, whereas, or even attempt to. I'm gonna diminish it, I'm gonna bitch in traffic, I'm gonna complain about TV, and I'm gonna fucking get unhappy about video games, and feel bad about not getting enough podcasts up habitually.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, nobody's gonna escape that cycle of, of samsara, or whatever, whatever you wanna call it. Just seems like, I guess you just keep getting drawn back to the point that, you know, these phrases like now is all you have. Yeah. You can hear them like every day,

and they're extremely boring and watered down after a while, but when someone like, sort of, someone like Bowie leaves that for everybody in sort of like a message in a bottle or something, it does, it hits you in these moments where you're like, it's so hard to really, really grasp that in a completely like fully aware way. And I don't think, I just feel so stupid a lot of the time,

because, you know, you, in a weird way, there's like an old Townsend song called Waiting Around to Die, that was like on in the coffee shop today, and you know, when you hear a country song, it's like Waiting Around to Die, it just sounds like this depressing thing, but in a strange way, that's what makes me feel so stupid, is that no matter how busy I am,

there's a part of myself kind of looking out the window of the plane, just in a weird way, feeling like I am actually just biding my time, just waiting, you know? Yes. Well, I mean, that is a good way to put it, man. Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's like, you know, man, I'll tell you this, dude,

we are waiting in an incredible interdimensional train station, and there is a train that is a coming, and it comes for everybody, and as we're in the train station, we do tricks for some of us, or we'll try to control the train station. It's very funny, like humans come into the train station, they look around, and they think,

oh, man, I wanna have the nicest bench in this fucking train station. I'm gonna have a beautiful bench, and I'm gonna have everything, everything, in this train station that you can have, I'm gonna have it. And then, you know, in the train station, you get these, it's just no different, you get buskers, you know?

Buskers, like people like Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift, who have like managed to gather around them this temporary vortex of other people in the train station, who are getting to play the part of being inspired and filled with awe, and Justin Bieber is getting to experience what it's like to have a good day at the train station, but that's all it is.

It's just a day at the train station, and at the end of the day, everybody gets picked up at different times, that's the problem, unless there's an apocalypse, in which case the train comes from all of us at once, but in general, everyone's getting picked up at different times, and it's really funny, because when the train picks up David Bowie,

everyone's like, oh no, oh wait, what, oh fuck, oh fuck, wait, oh fuck, the train, wait, trains come here, like we've picked up like fucking trains, you know? And everyone remembers for a second, you know? Oh yeah, right, right, right, right, right, right, he got picked, he was not here forever, and then you feel like, oh shit, it's, well, I didn't do, God damn it, I took him for granted,

I took for granted a person like this existed, and it's tragic in that level, I guess, but that is all it is, a train station, Bowie, oh my God, I mean, shit, that last, did you see that last video he left? Yeah. And what are your thoughts on that video? Well, I mean, I don't,

If you guys haven't seen this press pause, go and watch David Bowie's last video, he knew he was dying, he knew that he would die some very soon after the release of the thing, and it's intense, what do you think about it? I just, I think he was so, in a weird way, I think like, he was a picture of what it means to be supremely intelligent, because first of all,

he was a super, super kind person, like everybody who's ever met him felt like he was paying complete attention to them, it was entirely like gracious and fair as just a human being on the sidewalk, you know, he has a reputation that is like totally unscathed, you know, he practiced Buddhism and shit, but he basically, he's always,

always understood his place in the world, and I don't think that he, you know, suffered from much ego inflation, I think he really did his job, and he felt that he was drawn naturally to create art, and I don't think he thought that was a higher position at all, I think that was just his daily need to do it, and when he was a kid, his brother got locked away,

became schizophrenic, and he was super afraid it was happening to him, and his family was pretty fucked up, and he felt like he was like this hardcore outsider, and he ended up flipping the outsider in the feeling of affliction of being an outsider, he flipped the outsider into a character that he could explain art through, and that was a massive contribution to all sorts of people,

and the dialectic of art and expression over the past century in a way that a lot of people don't ever come close to contributing, I mean, there's like, you know, the Rolling Stones, I don't think ever liberated people in that way, that it's just such a profound level of creating art that he was able to get to out of just hard work and elbow grease, it's not something he was just born with,

he failed for over a decade before he even really became the thing he became, so I just think that no matter if it's the new video or whatever, it's really kind of a beautiful testament to what intelligence can bring human life, in terms of you being a kind person and you actually living a good life where you're helpful to other people,

and I really think he embodied a benevolent spirit like that. Wow, yeah, that's beautiful, that's so well said. Yeah, man, I mean, that is the, if you wanna talk about impact, if that's what your brain is telling you is important, it really is that thing, which is maybe that's why everyone's mind got so blown by him is because the intention behind it was

that he wanted to save people from feeling like an outsider, show people that you really don't have to confine yourself to the whatever the fuck the societal norm happens to be at the time, and that's maybe why he gets described all the time is like alien, he gets described, because when, god damn man, I was just thinking about one of his songs today, I love David Bowie, but I've never considered myself

like a huge David Bowie fan, but I gotta tell you, ever since he died, man, I've been thinking about him every single day, and today I was thinking about, what's it called, so we are ground-controlled, a major Tom, so I was thinking about the lyrics, and I was thinking, that just seems like something I would say if I was a kid, you know, like this sounds like a game of make-believe or something

that I would be playing as a kid, and why is it so incredibly powerful and special, because it means a lot more than that, I know that, but it seems like these great artists, they've reduced themselves to a level of childish make-believe, and then whereas most of us, that little thing that wants to come out, when that thing wants to come out, we try to refine it and sophisticated,

people like Bowie, they just let it come out just like that, and when that, it's beautiful when that happens, and it seems so simple, like Daniel Johnston, outrageously simple, yet somehow insanely powerful. That was his legacy, I mean, you have to remember that David Bowie's ultimate jumping off point was Sid Barrett, and he wanted, as a young boy, I mean, he basically wanted to be Sid Barrett,

and so he learned from the outset that imagination is king, skill and all the other various like perfect pitch or whatever, all those things can get you so far, but the imagination rules the entire game, and so Sid Barrett taught that to a young British kid like Bowie, and so he already understood, he already had this really great value system when he was going into the game,

and so his legacy always is identified by people as art being first, that commerce came later, but that he always preached that you should make yourself feel uncomfortable as an artist by trying things that made you feel uneasy and then go in that direction further, you know? Wow, yeah, right, wow. So he left a trail, you know, that kind of,

you know, whether or not we're talking about David Bowie or not, this is just as a footprint, a really, really unique footprint because how many people in the history of humanity are known primarily for constantly looking to challenge themselves in ways that abandon their entire template that they've just found? You know, that modality is totally insanely rare

where someone is brave enough to risk their audience or whatever their economic wellbeing to just pursue something that they alone are feeling in their gut. The engineer in the studio and the guitarist, they don't know where they're going, only he knows where this is gonna end up in theory when he comes in there and he's like,

okay, this is what I'm feeling like we should do, this is where we should go, I've never heard it before. How many people do that? Well, not everybody wants to pay the ticket, man. You know what I mean? Like, not everybody wants to pay for that ticket because it is, you know, this is the classic archetype, this is the gate between you and heaven, isn't it?

It's the gate of paradise and standing at the gate of paradise is a guy selling tickets and the price of the ticket is everything. He's just says, well, you gotta pay everything. Well, what's in there? Well, I can't say until you pay everything. Well, what do you mean everything?

My money? Well, yeah, your money, not just your money, your security, your identity, your thought process, you have to come through this thing. It's like, you know the Star Trek teleportation machines, theoretically disassemble you at an atomic level and then reassemble you and you're the exact same on the other end?

Well, this thing that you're talking about is a very similar thing that you do to yourself, a pure disassembly or I guess alchemically, you're reducing yourself to some form of, some liquid form or some less condensed state and then re-cooling yourself and at the other end, you aren't gonna be yourself anymore. You might be a little bit like what you were,

but you won't and that's why they call it conversion because you're converting to another substance and to do that, you have to give up everything and to give up everything, fuck that. That's, because you know why, man? It's not just what David Bowie people do, it's what crazy people do, right? It's what-

Yeah, I love this concept. It's what insane people, an insane person will do that. It's called a nervous fucking breakdown, you know? You freak the fuck out. You suddenly are now your name's Gabriel Lightwing. You start going to fucking outdoor music festivals, wearing no shirt with a tattoo of an angel on your chest and you sell oils and everyone feels like weird

when you tell them how while you're on an acid trip, you recognize that you are the true messenger of the light and these oils are infused with the light of God and you used to be an accountant. People are like, what the fuck? You've lost your fucking shit, man. But, and so it's like the people like Bowie, they made it work and there's this kind of like

economic societal embrace after the fact, but not everyone makes it work. Not everyone, it turns out okay when you decide to fully disassemble and reassemble. There's no promise, that's the problem. There's no promise of this. Like when you take this leap, when you're like, you know what, this is not my life.

This is not my life. This is some other person's life that I used to be and this is what would happen if that other person got on autopilot long enough and here's what it would look like. You know, wow, look, this is definitely not my life though. The shell I've constructed around me is not the right shape for who I truly am.

But I got a fucking life. I got a job. I've got a wife or a husband. I've got dogs, cats, a baby. I've got a fucking shell, thick, thick shell that I've gotta maintain. And even though I know that this isn't me, I cannot do the conversion.

I cannot give it all up. And that is why when the rich man came to Jesus and said, I wanna be your follower, Jesus said, okay, just give everything that you have to the poor and then come follow me. And the rich guy was like, no, I can't. That's the one thing I can't do.

And it always will want the one thing you can't give, right? That's the thing. It will want the one thing you can't give. The one thing where you're like, no fucking way, take it all. You sure my money, who fucking cares? Take my money, take my hair, take my car, take my clothes.

Take it all, take it all. Fuck me if you want, take my dignity. But there'll always be some thing, some little fucking thing that you're like, no, that's the thing I'm not giving up. And that's the price right there, that thing. The moment you give up that thing, it's very similar to an elephant

giving up the thorn in its paw. It's very, you know what I mean? The moment you're like, here, just take it. Fine, fuck it, you can have it. Freedom, you're no longer defined by that pain. It's scary though, man. I mean, shit, it's scary. What do you, do you find yourself,

your music evolves every time I listen to it. It's gotten so much deeper and better and more astounding to me. Do you find yourself, do you think that you've reinvented yourself? Do you think that the emul in college who is playing that beautiful music versus the emul now who continues to play mind blowing beautiful music,

has there been that death and resurrection for you? Or has that happened multiple times or at all? Well, I think that, I think that to answer two different things at once, like I think the beauty of Bowie hearing Sid Barrett early is he hears it and he gets it into his bloodstream so early that he becomes addicted to self-examination, transforming the self-examination into art

and flipping it into a form of therapy so that as time goes on, his value system is already set. But then he just gets, so the opening game is about courage in the Faustian trade and going deeper and deeper into himself. That's already established at the beginning. So then from there, he just gets better at it. So I think that if you've already got your direction

pretty much fully formed as a young kid, like if you're talking about the recordings I was doing in college with you, I think the whole thing was already done and set up. There were things about maybe myself that I was embarrassed of or scared to go further into maybe or maybe I was still burning off the impurities, maybe I was still burning off the constructs

in myself of learned behavior and maybe a lot of those recordings were the attempt to get down to the true base, like you're saying, melting yourself down. Maybe that was the active process of it. And so then now I feel like my job is slightly more to kind of show what I've learned as I see new, more complex versions of the same problems.

So I mean, the issue that we started talking about in the beginning of basic mortality as you get to be a little older, new things are kind of coming into sight. Like I can definitely confirm as you're saying that this whole idea of realizing that you'll never mean anything to anyone ever in the bigger picture as your mortality comes towards me.

It's definitely something that's been occurring to me at this point, I'm kind of meditating on it as I'm hurrying somewhere to go do something that I'm going through so much physical stress just because I might be late to one thing and I've got all these other things in my mind. But at the same time underneath all of it, I'm just like, this is fucking ridiculous.

Like what will this really bring me in the God's eye view? Nothing, it'll bring me absolutely nothing. So how can I not be intelligent enough to just sit back and relax and watch all this stuff just go by? So I've definitely been grappling with those newer versions of the same old problem. Isn't that fun when the mind,

so the mind number one creates this temporal crucifixion device where one arm is based on where you are now, the other arm is based on where you're supposed to be. And you're just hanging there feeling like shit because you're always rushing thinking that once I get to this other point, I'm gonna feel better.

So there you are rushing. Like, and then if you have any kind of intelligence, you realize like, why am I rushing? Right now I'm in a deep state of anxiety over the illusion that when I get to this point or that point, the anxiety will resolve. When now after my entire life, I seem to never have any true resolution of this anxiety.

And when I do, I don't even notice it. So I know that when I get to this place, it's not the cure to this problem. So then you realize, oh yeah, okay, well now I see what I'm doing here. I'm running for a cure at the wrong pharmacy because I keep going back to this pharmacy and it doesn't really seem to do much to cure the problem.

So then your mind recognizing the futility of the situation adds another level of complication. So now you're not only feeling bad because you're in a hurry, you're feeling bad because you realize that it's retarded to be in a hurry. So now the mind's, you know what I mean? It just keeps scooping on new dimensions of like, yes. And here's another reason you're wrong.

And here, let me show you why. And here's another reason. And so it's just all the same, it's all little pieces of the same fractal. So when you imagine, okay, do you ever do this? Do you ever imagine what your life would be like minus the anxiety, minus the rushing, minus the stress?

Do you ever imagine what you would be like? In ways, do you actually picture your waking reality as a stressless entity? Yeah, just as a thought experiment. It's a fun thought experiment. Just imagine what you would be like. So whatever the aching, gnawing anxiety is inside of you. The thing where you know you have 9,000 things to do

this week, you got a show to do tonight, you got a show to do in two days, you got this other shit you got to do, you got to do this podcast, some other thing, and this thing, whatever's going on in your relationship and all this stuff. So that thing, okay, imagine if that was all gone. So you wake up in the morning

and you just feel the bed and you take a deep breath. Alive. And that's it. Do you ever do that? Like imagine that life. Like there's all this shit you still do, you still do all this stuff that you're doing right now, but no more of that shitty anxiety.

Yeah. I feel like I feel like I feel like that today. And I don't know why and I feel like I almost don't deserve it, because it's almost like so irregular, but it's like, I think the valley kind of opens up and you're sort of, all the things that you had on your plate seem like they're basically caught up. It's like this moment where you're proud

of what you've been doing and you feel fulfilled, but I mean, all that stuff is pretty arbitrary, but I think it does contribute to the feeling of like a deep breath and being like, I actually like my life, you know? Well, you're right. And this is the, my dog jumps up on the bed and does this hilarious six minute ritual

where it runs in like circle, circle, circle, dig, dig, dig, circle, circle, dig, dig, circle, dig. And I, you know, you watch the sheets to see like, what is the thing you're going for here, man? You know, like, it's just sheets. Like you're not get, you never, it's not the same form you're making around you. But then finally, after doing this,

the dog falls down and is like, oh, we did it. Now I can relax. You know? And like when I'm doing that, I know what you're talking about, man, that moment where like, for me, it's like, okay, I've done, I've got, you know, I've got my spots lined up for the week

or it's usually like Sunday after I've done, I've had good sets in night, good standup. I've gotten a podcast recorded, gotten a podcast uploaded, taking care of all the minutiae of daily life, been exercising, planning the tour, writing, you know, been having good days every day, very productive days.

And at the end of that, there is this temporary moment of like, yes. Yeah. Oh yeah. We are doing it, man. Oh, we are doing it. But then those moments are very few and far between. And they are, of course,

just you've concocted a specific amount of dopamine, a specific amount of, I don't know, whatever the neurochemicals are responsible for giving you the sense of like, yes, you're doing something. And the dream, which I subscribe to, is that you can have that feeling all the time, no matter what.

And that if you have that feeling all the time, no matter what, it will not diminish your productivity, but actually increase it, amplify it and make it better. And that you, not only do you deserve that feeling all the time, but you are that feeling all the time. And that thing you were saying,

I feel like I don't really deserve it. That thing, that's the, right there, that's the number one reaction that people have to the guru. That's the number one reaction that people have to love. That's the number one reaction that people have to the really good stuff, is they always think, I don't deserve this.

I don't deserve it. Me, filthy me, disgusting me and pure mind, you know? But man, I'm telling you, brother, I don't think you, I think you, I don't know though. I mean, fuck, who am I to say? But I really think it's accessible all the fucking time. I don't think there needs to be the goddamn shit feeling to go along with all the stuff that we're doing

in this ridiculous train station. I think we can just do the stuff minus the shit feeling, but maybe not. I think there, maybe there's a side effect to growing and learning. It's like a form of growing and learning where you're in the train station or whatever and maybe you feel slightly wiser than you did before.

And you know that it's like a tendency to judge yourself and be like, what was I doing before? This is ridiculous, you know? Like I was an idiot or something. I think there's some haunting sense or annoying feeling that you were previously probably wasting your time because you didn't get it or something. And obviously that's kind of an ego illusion or something

that, oh, well now I see things correctly. That's kind of a ridiculous thing where you're just feeling the elation of being in sync with things. Maybe you felt like that before. There's a lot of times in life where you identify that you're not in sync with things, but I think in that train station,

there's levels of regret and confusion where you're just doubting yourself. You're like, I don't think I got it before, which is a ridiculous state of mind, but I think as you grow, you judge the past in a way. Have you heard the phrase, the diagnosis, I guess, the term imposter syndrome? Yeah, I think, is this kind of the genuine fake

Alan Watts thing a little bit, right? What do you mean? Oh, just the whole thing where he kind of like, and Bowie is very much this thing too, just admitted that he like wasn't the real thing, that he was just like everybody just attempting to feel real or something. Yeah, this is a syndrome identified

that seems to happen more often, according to the Wikipedia entry, more often for women who are in competitive industries than men, but it does happen for men too. Yeah, and it seems to be related to IQ, but basically it's people who regardless of their accomplishments in the past feel that they've done nothing,

and the accomplishments in the past are viewed as a form of accident or luck. Yeah. And ultimately they just think, well, I'm a fraud, and I got lucky, but pretty soon my gigs up because people are gonna catch on that this is all bullshit. That's called imposter syndrome. Isn't that cool?

And it's kind of based on the concept of existence preceding essence, isn't it? Which is that if you get to some certain level of realization, then you know that you aren't any coherent, inherent form. Right. And so once you know that, then you realize that anything you're putting out there

is at the very best a well-crafted and consistent act that you're putting out there. You consistently act like you're nice to people. You consistently act like you're a loving person. You consistently act like you care, yet at the core we're dealing with emptiness, and you're dealing with the problem of realizing that you're just acting

and that you can't stop acting, you know? And so that's imposter syndrome, which is I think what we all have really. Because we, so again, it goes back to whenever our jobs are in the world, it's a thing that we have decided to do repetitively as a form of action to pass the time in the train station of life.

And because of the innate emptiness of all things, whatever the particular repetitive pattern that we're engaging in, that we're calling our life's work may be, whether it's video games, shooting heroin, conquering empires, putting out fucking incredible albums, whatever that thing may be, at the core there's only emptiness.

At the core there's only an undefinable place that we keep adding, we keep putting stuff around it for some reason or another. And this has gotta be why ultimately so many people are like, you know what, I'm just gonna fucking meditate. You know, like the monk goes to the temple and just sits, zazen, just sit. I'm like, oh, I get it, I'm just emptiness,

so I'm just gonna just do this for now. And then you start doing that a little bit at a time. And then all of a sudden that's where you start god damn feeling the thing that isn't based on accomplishment, that isn't based on energy expenditure, that isn't based on getting the fucking bed sheet in the right pattern,

that isn't based on the ant's nest being built in just the right way, you know? Man, I gotta tell you, I had the most disturbing thing happen to me the other day and forgive this rant. I have a fucking hammock. You know that hammock I'm talking about? Yeah, by the pool.

Yes, and I have a fucking pool. I could not balance on that fucking hammock without dropping my phone or my guitar. Well, just try, I mean, it's a, you know, you gotta try laying down on the damn thing. Right, but isn't that kind of an odd metaphor that you couldn't even get comfortable on the comfort device?

Dude, this is what I wanted to say! That's it! Maybe the hammock's cursed, but I'll tell you this. It's broken. It's not broken. I went out there to lay on the fucking hammock, right? Beautiful day. I never lay on that fucking hammock.

I'll look out the window at it, but I'll never lay on the fucking thing. It's just out there pretending to be something I use all the time. The fucking pool, I never get in the pool. The idyllic surrounding that I feel so lucky to be in. Nothing, right? But the other day, I'm like,

you know what, I'm gonna go lay on the hammock. It's a nice day, nothing's going on. I just finished a bunch of stuff in my life. I'm gonna relax today. Old school dad style. So I go out on the hammock, and I lay down on that hammock, and nothing changes. That fucking anxiety, it's there.

There's nothing there. There's no relaxation. There's no moment of fucking goddamn unwinding. Are you kidding me? You're gonna just unwind after you've tortured yourself for decades? Give me a break. There is no fucking balm in this hammock, friend,

until you overcome the ridiculous delusion that there is something you can do in this world that's gonna make you happy. The moment you give that bullshit up is the moment I like to believe that everything becomes the goddamn award ceremony. I've seen the way my cat stares at berries, fully entranced, 100% locked on to some berry,

laying in front of the window, or a bird, or the way my dogs smell grass. I know it's possible to be fully immersed in this beautiful universe, and I know that anything I'm doing that I think is my job is really just a cat. There's no balance around that experience, a desperate maneuver to attempt to avoid unification.

That's what I like to believe, man. So this is the problem, right? This is the fucking problem here. This is the problem of this concept of goddamn achievement. I never want you to stop making albums. Thank God David Bowie makes albums. What a sad world if everybody just stared at fucking berries and didn't make pretty songs.

Yeah, I'm never ever gonna stop. That's why I probably worry about my ears and things like that, but I think one thing, people look at Bowie like it's this shining beacon of courage, and what I think he was doing is that he really just identified the inherent experimentalism of life, like the inherent formlessness of it,

and how you, it is a bit of a sham that you can actually pull away from the basic societal construct and be completely autonomous internally. I think he identified that inherent form of experimentalism as a version of sanity, you know? It's a lot of what you're kind of talking about is that when you see this world that you inhabit

apart from the bullshit of sort of restrictive societal construct, if you see it clearly and you have the whatever courage or leap of faith to grab that and be like, my world exists outside of complete idiocy, of complete, you know, the lies that are bought in soul that we are all kind of propagating, that's what he saw early on and he was just like,

no, there's sanity in this faith, there's sanity in this version of being impossibly loyal to myself and to my gut. That's not insanity, that's where my health will be born of, you know? And so they just fucking stomped the pedal into 100 miles per hour into that direction because that was salvation.

And that's what people I think are really championing. They're like, you know, that's a picture of health. That was a happy fucking man. That was a happy dude. As far as these things go, you know, that's where the great humanity, that's where the great intelligence comes from is not only being like seizing what happiness is

and how to go towards it, but then spreading it to other people and being a fucking gracious, beautiful, you know, kind person to other people. Yeah, I think that the hope is, this is the hope. The, okay, Bowie, when I saw his last video, that's when for the only time in my life, because again, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about him, but he had a huge impact.

I'll never forget Ziggy Stardust. I remember the tape, we'd gotten it from a flea market. I remember hearing it for the first time and then playing it over and over and then losing the tape and not being able to find another one for a long time. Still remember it, man. But when I watched that last video

and I saw what he's doing in that video, because this is a man who's dying of cancer, right? And so in the video, for those of you who haven't seen it, he's laying in bed, almost like in a shroud, like he's already died, buttons on his eyes. And then the video kind of switches to him writing what I imagined to be infrantically attempting to write something.

Yeah, that's a great scene. That's like, that's the best scene that sticks with me. That's the scene. That's it. Because you know, you're seeing like, oh, fuck, I'm gonna die. Shit, shit, shit. I gotta get all this fucking out.

I gotta get out, gotta get out, gotta get out. That's all I saw. I gotta get out. And then the reminiscing moment. It's like a metaphor for like a battlefield. This is a war that you will never win. And it's like the scenes of Mozart and Amadeus when he's basically just trying

to rattle off from his deathbed, you know? It's like, you can't win this, but the brain thinks like, well, I'm just gonna try. And in a strange way, I think even with the video, he did kind of win it because he up to the final moments of his life, he did things that he himself could be proud of, you know? He never stopped trying, you know?

To me, when I saw that, right, he was perfectly reflecting what he was going through. That's what I saw there, man. He was perfectly reflecting what he was going through. And that, so that thing, that, when you start doing that, perfectly reflecting what you're going through, just saying it like it is. This is how it is.

This is what I'm feeling. Here's where I'm at. True honesty, pure honesty through whatever your art is. And even if what your art is, is the opposite, if it's fueled by that honesty, the idea is, yeah, it's gonna be perfect. It has to be perfect. Because when I look at the sky, that's honesty, right?

No one looks at the sky and says, that's the sky is lying today. The sky is not being itself today. Have you looked up there today at that old fraudulent sky? That's the fucking worst version of a sky I've seen. What a poser. No one looks at nature and thinks that. It's only the human that becomes the fraud.

So, and why the fraud? Well, the fraudulence is really just when your articulation of your experience gets muddied by your desire to be something else, or your confusion, or your fear. And then it comes out of some malformed, little mutant thing that used to be a you. And you start letting the thing out just the way it is,

then the dream is, everyone's gonna be like, God, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my fucking life. Like when I see my nephew do anything, it's always the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. He doesn't fake smile yet, you know? That kid doesn't fake smile. He doesn't fake cry.

He cries on purpose, smiles on purpose, loves on purpose. So that's, to me, when I saw Bowie, it's like, oh, this is what I guess he's been doing all along. Is that in the, he knows this reality that we're in, and all the stuff surrounding us, and all the tidal forces of society are constantly changing, making him part of a kaleidoscope of ever mutating ideas and forms.

And instead of clinging to the way the kaleidoscope used to be in a few moments before, years before, he's just changing with it and reflecting that change. And that's beautiful. It has to be, it has to be. You don't have to be an artist to do that. You just do that any time you just say I actually feel, you know what I'm talking about, man?

That relief that comes when you just completely tell the truth. Oh my God, I think the problem is that because of the, the dynamic of the absence makes the heart grow fonder because we go through these long lengths of complete bullshit where we're inundated with shit we don't care about. Once we finally get to see a piece of art that is pure, whatever, you just like break down. You're like, holy shit, but yeah,

what's stopping you from going to that place every single day? Nothing, in every single moment. I agree. What is stopping you is because that, see that moment, like, okay, you look at the baby and the baby is, I don't know, you know, going is like frenetically moving from one state of consciousness to the next.

It's not resisting these changes. It's happy, then it's sobbing, then it's hugging you, then it's laughing, then it's poking the dog, then the dog is like growling at it, then it's crying again. It's not resisting this, the sort of magnetic flow of its essential self, the way that it's just a flowing river

of experience and emotion, but you look at the adult and the adult is always fighting against the, oh God, damn it, a day I feel like fucking shit, I can't believe the world. I don't want to cry today, man, I just want to fucking cry, I'm going to start, this traffic, this fucking traffic! A baby will do that and no one will call the cops, right?

No one's calling 911 because the baby's screaming about how awful the fucking traffic is, but a man, if you passed a man in traffic, bawling and screaming, they would call the cops, you'd get arrested, it's illegal, and yet that man is fully just allowing the flow of himself to emerge, so the great North Korean conspiracy here, man, is that we aren't allowed

to be our true and essential self, which is why there always seems to be something criminal attached to an artist who starts doing that. I mean, it's never an artist who starts really being themselves that doesn't garner some kind of negative criticism about being blasphemous, you know, or like, look at him, dressing like a lady and prancing around up there.

How many people probably said that about Bowie? Fucking faggots. This is just what we need, another fucking faggot on this thing. You know? Like, guaranteed, people will say that, which, and you know that, see, this is the problem, this is, again, we get to the gatekeeper,

because the gatekeeper says to you, listen, you know how you're supposed to be, you know what this is, but you've been lying so long, haven't you, and you've been lying so long that you're surrounded by liars, and not only that, you've been lying so long about who you are and every little action that you do where you haven't been authentically reflecting

the inner truth that is you, if you've been putting on this show that is distant from the way you actually feel that all these people around you think you're completely different than what you are, and you know what I mean? Like, that's the other problem, is the moment you start acting like yourself, if you're surrounded yourself with fellow liars,

they're all gonna be like, wait, I thought we were playing make-believe till the end. You're supposed to pretend to be this other thing, why are you being this thing now? It doesn't make any sense. Stop it, you're losing your mind. Are you all right? How about this classic one?

You just hadn't really been acting like yourself lately. That's the funniest thing someone could say to you. You haven't really been acting like the character you've been playing in this incarnation lately. Could you just go back to acting like that character again, please, because it makes us all comfortable, because the character I'm playing is friends with the character you're playing,

but the character I'm playing can't be friends with the new character you're playing. That's not how it works in the script. You know? It's really fucking annoying, man. It really is. There's a grand conspiracy to keep human beings from fully articulating their essential nature

into this dimension, and that's why people like David Bowie are heroes, man. I guess you're right, and to bring it all around, you really can do something in the world, actually, you know? Yeah, that's the disturbing truth of it, is that when you're like 10 years old and you got your first Jimi Hendrix cassette in your little Walkman and you're bopping around town,

and you, you know, to you, the word music, you know, to this naive soul, music is this super profound, beautiful thing, you know, that is embodied by Neil Young, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, you know, whatever. Bob Marley, you know, whatever. It's this, you know, unfortunately, rebellious, you know, wildly rare, beautiful thing,

but to your 10-year-old mind, you're just like, oh, there's this thing. It's like a spiritual field, right? Fast forward to like 20 years later when you're just like inundated with billions and billions of songs and bands and things that are just like crowding your vision. You're like, what the fuck is all this shit?

Why is there only one Neil Young? Why is there only one John Lennon? They embody the thing that you're talking about, this like, this transparent honesty that radicalizes people. Why is there only like fucking five of those people? You know, like, why is the field of music made up of so much time-wasting shit?

Because it's not being identified as a spiritual field. It's not being identified for, I mean, and that's just a metaphor for life. You got people, billions of people fucking walking around the sidewalk, not identifying the spiritual field that it is, you know? That's it. So it's a, in a way, in a weird way,

it is an accurate reflection of the general confused miasma that is popular culture, just a general sense of like, hey, let's just not get too deep. We're going to keep it out here. What's going on with sports or the new Deadpool movie? It's just kind of like, you know, you either talk about the train station or you don't. A lot of people in the train station,

they're singing about, you know, a whole different place. They are singing about a whole different place. And it's not a real place. But it's a place that most people in the train station would prefer to be, which is heaven, eternity, a place where there is no death, doom, despair, demise, and all the awful other D words I could think of, a place where there's just a kind of,

it's not going to happen, not this, we're going to get the, there's some pill, I guess, we're all going to take or whatever this thing that is coming, what's the point? Let's not think about that. Let's start to distract ourselves with these beautiful, phantasmal images that are created in these vapid songs about money or whatever transient bullshit

that so many people are singing about. So, and I, you know, I get it, man, I get it. Like, how can you, like if somebody's in a concentration camp singing about sunset, or not sunset, but you know what I mean? If someone's in some kind of like, some kind of like prison colony singing about like, you know, a boat, a nice boat and other people

for a little while feel like they've got a nice boat, I guess that's okay. You know, why not? Fuck it. If you were want to like dress like a goddamn, well, you know, if you want to dress like in whatever you want to dress in, in this fucking train station wherein you get to do it, and I get it.

It's not fair to like, you know, it's just you and I are more drawn to like different types of shit, but I get it. I understand why so many people wouldn't be. I get it. You know, fuck. These things are like, these are the unspeakable things. Cholgyum Trump has said, if you can avoid going down

this path, don't go down it. Just don't. It's better not to stay out. It'll be better for you. Cause if you start going down this path, you can't stop. You can't stop waking up, man. It's too late. It's too late.

You're gonna, you're gonna wake up. So if you somehow can stay asleep in there, there's no, people who attach derogatory, like you make sleep a derogatory, you're asleep. Wake up, Shapo. How about you let us fucking sleep, asshole? How about that? Instead of, yeah.

Okay, fine. We'll wake up. So what? Let's sleep. If you can sleep, sleep. Sleep. Enjoy it. Enjoy it.

That's nice. It's nice. It's just when you get in that in-between period phase of sleeping and waking, that's where the torture is. A little fucking the insomnia of the human spirit. Tossing and turning in the bed of your life, going in and out of delusion, going from delusion to despair.

That sucks. Delusion or despair. I think that's where, I think that's where Bowie like woke up as the, he woke up as the outsider and he was sort of, apologies to anybody who is not a Bowie fan, but this isn't really about Bowie, it's about all of us. So it's just like waking up as the outsider

and then realizing that, not only is that a righteous path, but that there's a happiness and there's a sanity in acknowledging your true calling or your true feelings, that you're not betraying anybody or anything that you are actually, it's sort of doing what you're called to do, your actual job by being your fucking self.

Yeah, and such a sweet thing really. That's such a sweet, it's such a sweet thing that the universe is saying, look, just be yourself. That's all I want you to do. Yeah, exactly. I'm not asking you to conquer the planet. I don't expect you to put out 1,000 incredible books

or even one good book or even one good sentence, but just be yourself. Let's fucking hang out together, me, the universe and you, yourself and see what happens. And the other thing is you don't have to, like the other thing is like when you start thinking like, I'm gonna permanently be myself.

No, you don't even have to think like that. You can do these, if you allow yourself the beautiful and ridiculous idea, just for a time being as a thought experiment of this dimension that we're in and this society that we're in being as repressive as North Korea, as repressive, only the way that it's repressive is far more insidious and that instead of there being this overt repression,

telling you not to be yourself, it's a kind of subliminal secret repression that is demanding you to act a certain way, but the way they're demanding you to act a certain way is by making you pretend that you've just decided to be that way. And this is something that is so beautifully summed up by Zizak or how do you sell the fucking weirdo's name,

Zizak, who says, if a father says to you, you know, whenever I start talking about him, I always start rubbing my nose because that's what he does whenever he's talking. He's got this weird twitch, but he says, if a father asks a son, there tells a son, you're going to your grandmother's house and you're gonna act nice when we get there.

And that's just the way it is. That that form of oppression is way better than the form of oppression that comes from the father who's like, tomorrow we are going to your grandmother's house and I want you to decide whether or not you want to come. She would really like to see you, but it's up to you to decide whether or not you will come to your grandmother's house.

And when we're there, it's up to you to decide if you're going to be a good, sweet grandson to someone who has not been feeling well lately, but I want you to decide. It's the same form of totalitarianism. The difference is the poor little bastard with the second dad, he's got to lie. Whereas at least the first one can be like, yeah, fine,

dad, I'll fucking go and act like I fucking love my grandmother, even though I'd rather do a million other things, but if I resist, you're gonna fucking kill me, right? Because at least that one, there's a place for rebellion, you know? Whereas, so you lie yourself to fantasy that we are in this incredible totalitarian regime where you are being given the illusion of choice.

You're being given the illusion of how to act. It just happens to be that all the decisions that you make about how you should be, have to coincide with all of reality. And if they don't, there's a massive amount of punishment that will instantaneously come to you in the form of every single person you know, thinking you're losing your goddamn mind.

So you allow yourself this fantasy of like, oh shit, I'm in an internment camp, but no one knows they're in an internment camp. And then you can start doing these many rebellions, many thought crimes, where you just in the privacy of your own isolation away from anyone else, you just start being yourself there, whatever that may be.

You know what I mean? You create these little bubbles of like, okay, okay, I'm gonna just admit the way I'm really been thinking, the way I really been feeling for the last however long. Oh wow, wow, wow, I'm miserable. I'm fucking miserable, wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay, okay, okay, we're miserable, we're miserable. I'm not really happy, I've just been pretending that way.

And then you start doing that, and that's when I start getting the butterflies, you know? That's where you start getting that like bouncy feeling of like, oh, fuck this, I'm gonna get the fuck out of here. And maybe there's where you find the liberation that you're talking about, you know? That's where you find the fucking goddamn stuff of life. Finally, there's something to fight against,

something to rebel against, and something big and real. And the moment you fucking really, if you really pull off being yourself, you've given a true gift to the world. Everyone will be so happy after they've made fun of you for a few years. Yeah, maybe misery is really just a notification on the Facebook of your brain.

It's just a notification that you need to change something just like your point of vision. Maybe as a constructive notification, instead of it being a state that you just have to wallow in, it's really just a signifier, your body saying, change your diet, just change something, and you'll be okay, you'll be happy. Yeah, or you can start engaging in this incredible project

that is a project that transcends all projects, which is the rebellion, the rebellion, revolution. That's what it is. You become a little mini-revolutionary. You start just by allowing yourself to pretend for a second that you are being constricted or held back, guaranteed you are, guaranteed you are. If you exist in any kind of community,

you're more than likely the way that you're acting doesn't fully reflect who you truly are. And the reason that you're not reflecting who you truly are is the fear of what will happen, the repercussions that will come from your friends, family, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, cops, the government. So many things don't want you to act the way you are. It's for real, man.

Wake up, sheeple! You are being fucking repressed, man. But the problem is, the thing has evolved so much to the point where we don't even recognize the repression. That's where it gets weird. Most of us, I mean, God damn it, that's not fair to say. I certainly don't, I'm a white dude.

You know what, I mean, God forgive me, like I'm thinking like so many other people listening are like, what the fuck are you talking about? I got pulled over three times last week because I'm black. I know I'm being repressed, bitch. Shut the fuck up, go have another scoop of rice out of your rice cooker, a repressed one. But it's true, even us poor white dudes,

we're getting repressed too, we all are, man. We're repressing each other in every single fucking moment. Every time you have any expectation of the way someone around you should act. And when they don't act like that, if you're a dick, boom. Congratulations, you're the tyrant emperor of whatever fucking awful little city state

you've decided to rule in your social structure. So it's like we're repressing and we're repressed. And people like David Bowie, they make it over the fence. And then once they get over the fence, they start putting on shows. And everyone's like, wow, he's amazing. That's cool, I'm glad we talked about David Bowie, Emil. Yeah, I was actually missing, I was actually,

I'd never like cried about my dad dying, but I cried like freaking three times about David Bowie. So that was kind of a mile marker. I don't think I'd ever experienced, you know, if that's cheesy or not. Like I'd never experienced a JFK or a John Lennon dying when I was like old enough to realize that it really was kind of a loss for the world.

I mean, usually I'm exist in such a cold state, you know? I'm just like, oh, great, death isn't even fucking real. So I was actually glad that I was able to absorb it and feel sad, you know? I felt good to feel sad for once, but anyways. I think you felt his spirit. This is what I think. It's so hip, this is so, so like woo woo.

But this is really what I think. You know that concept of how it's like everything, there's a limited supply of it. It's a really ridiculous idea, but like, there's only a certain amount of intelligence in the world. So the more people there are, the dumber we'll get because the intelligence gets diffused through the increased population.

And so in that same way, I was thinking like, oh, David Bowie was a son and death was the release of all that energy into the biosphere. And the reason I've been thinking about him so much and the reason right after he died, I had some great days. Like what you're saying, well, I don't deserve this, but I feel great. And I was thinking that's cause his soul has exploded out

and is surrounding the whole planet. And every single person is getting to experience the residual energy of this great being who is departed from this incarnation. And that's what we're all feeling. So the reason you were crying is cause you really were feeling his soul. And the reason he left that video behind

was because it was his way of saying, yeah, I'm still here a little bit. Don't worry, I'm still here. And I like to believe that, man. I like to believe that like when a person dies, their spirit remains and in fact is more free and able to do more work. And that David Bowie has not stopped his great performance,

but his performance continues in conversations like this and all the myriad of ways people are expressing their feelings of grief or confusion or whatever it may be about his passing. Yeah, I mean, certainly, usually when you see the pictures of black and white pictures of ladies like clutching a baby, crying, hearing about JFK, you don't think of it as like a electric state of love,

but isn't that kind of what it is? You're being touched by how much you really care about something. When the wind blows, the trees sway. When a great being leaves the planet, the way you can see the soul blow through society is the weeping and tears. It's just the way you see the energy

being moving through the biosphere. It's beautiful. It really is beautiful. And yeah, so I, man, but shit, it also sucks. This is why we gotta start downloading our consciousness. You know, if we'd gotten to that place where we could have downloaded David Bowie's consciousness, then every single person could have a little David Bowie

living in their computer. What a lame way to wrap up this show. Yeah, totally. It's like for $9.99. Anyway, there's a couple of things I thought of. One of them is I think I wrote us a new song for our record. Great. And I'm really excited about it,

but I need to shift back to that and we need to plan me coming down there to work with you one more time. Well, it needs to be before March or April or after that because I'm going away for the tour for a few months, so. Sure, yeah. That might be smart to kind of wrap up some of it. And then the other one is you've inspired me

to experiment with starting a podcast, but not like a normal podcast. Nice. A little bit more like a audio book, like a story that's being told in chapters over the course of a year or something. Cool. So I wanna see how that goes.

That's fucking cool. Are you gonna release it weekly or how's that gonna work? Are you releasing it at the end of a year? I was thinking like on the first of every month, it's like I want it to be like different than most podcasts in the sense that it's like each episode is like very, very succinct and kind of like

up chapter of a story. It's not like necessarily that free form, although it breaks away. Well, I mean, my initial idea was I was gonna write this book for Drag City. The label has like, they publish books too. They do like Bill Callahan books and I think maybe Waldo's done something.

But I was gonna do this thing that was springing off of the story about my dad and Johnny Mitchell and the fake Tim Buckley, this thing that Dangerous Minds posted this really strange family story about the FBI like confronting my dad. Long story. What? Yeah, I was gonna write this book about it and then-

Why did the FBI confront? Oh, right, tell me the book. Well, on his deathbed, I think I told him I was really into the CIA stuff. I was reading a lot about the CIA and I think he said he had told me that he had encountered the FBI or CIA like, I guess it was the FBI three different times

and so he told me the different stories of situations he was in with the FBI, which would have been much more fascinating if we had more time to talk about it than if he found it more interesting. But anyway, so that's springing into this long story that you can read on Dangerous Minds that I wrote about, I'm sure you can Google it.

Cool. It's really, it's a fucked up crazy story but I was talking about- Send me the link and I'll put it in the comments of this. Yeah, yeah, I'll send it over to you. There's a lot about my dad I didn't really know because it's a very, very cloudy time. Whoa, was he smuggling dope or something?

Well, I was talking to a family friend on the phone yesterday that's 77 and was really close friends with him and he was telling me all sorts of shit that my dad was the one that found David Crosby's boat for him and the one of the monkeys lent David Crosby $20,000 to buy it. This is a very famous boat

that's on the cover of those Crosby Stills and Ash records. He was like telling me all this stuff and so I'm thinking that after I start this podcast and really get a lot of the opening chapters out of the way then I'll switch over to more interview based stuff where people can kind of shed light on some of the characters that are involved in it. But the way the podcast will start out

will be largely for the first year if I can make it through a full year of these kind of chapters. It's pretty much just gonna be about being a teenager and so you'll be in probably every chapter in some way because it'll weave in with stuff we went through. I haven't quite got to when we went to Boston on that spring break and we would like took acid in the car, remember that?

Yep. That was so stupid. I mean, there's just like such a hilarious thing. It wasn't like whoever we were with, I remember like they didn't want us to take acid, right? Wasn't there some element of having to sneak the acid? Maybe, that's the only time in my life I've ever just taken acid in a car, like for a car ride.

For some reason, I kind of recall that that trip but also like I recall someone didn't, I remember like more part of what I wanted to do. I remember there was just some element in the car of someone being like, no, did you guys take acid? Something was stupid like that. There's always somebody who's like, not now. I can barely remember that part of it.

That's actually like that trip is gonna be one of the climaxes and it's hard because these stories are really complex. So you have to really think about all the details because if you miss some major detail, it's really unfortunate. Cause you know, say you say somebody told the future and then you went through this experience

and then you tell somebody the story and you forget that your friend told the future. You know, you just, it's like, it's very hard to like keep it all in your mind. But anyway, as we keep going, maybe I could have you like help me iron out like your version of something. You know, I've never really got into,

there's so many different things. Although we've done so many of these things. There's so many different things we never have even talked about. Dude, I would love to help. This sounds incredible. I'm so glad that you're doing this, man. That's so cool.

If you want to like, if you want me to like email Dustin at Farrell Audio, or if you want to do it through like a collective like that, let me know, man. It's such a cool idea. Yeah, that's the next step. I'm on episode three or four. I'm about to do number four. So, and I'm heavily, heavily editing them.

It's taking me hundreds of hours. Oh, sure. Oh God. It's gonna take a long time, but I'd like to get, you know, a bunch. So I really know what I'm looking at before I think about it. Man, editing fucking podcasts. It's so weird how long it can take to edit something.

And it can be so time consuming. Are you putting music in it in any way? Well, then that'll be like maybe then, yeah, I actually am editing a lot of shit into it. But that'll be the next step is that I'd really like to have a sub chapter of it where I can just talk about the records. When I get back from Europe, you know,

talk about the records that I bought. No, I mean, that sounds a little bit academic, but like it would be much more entertaining than that. Like a really kind of colorful style of a radio show. But yeah, I'm like editing in like episode one right now is me moving in with you and LA and getting stocked. Who wait, who is stalking you? Well, we don't say his name.

That's the thing. Oh, oh yeah. That is one of the funniest talkers to have. No, I know, it is pretty funny actually, yeah. Oh my God. That's episode one because what happens is like I'm able, I thought that would be an easy way to start out because I can kind of very casually just start

with you and I and LA and being really pretty naive at the time in our way, you know. We were so naive. I know so many people have been stalked by that dude. Oh wow. So you could actually come on say after like four episodes and actually clear up from your perspective tons of the stories that I've told.

That would be interesting. Well, I mean, that's kind of like, it's so funny because that thing you're talking about who we can't say that it's so funny because that people don't recognize that that's a kind of like sport in LA. That's like falcon hunting. There's a whole group of these dudes who like pray on like young, cute boys who come into Los Angeles

and like they will get you and they have, they will get their claws in you if you don't watch out. It does, it's so spocked when it does happen. I've seen them. I've seen them. I've seen, you know, the guy walk by at the, when you're eating brunch outside dragging along with him like a cat with a broken squirrel carcass.

Some young, doped up, fresh to Hollywood kid who's just accidentally gotten yanked into a quicksand pit composed of Xanax and psychic manipulation at the highest level. It's wild. Well, that's one major aspect of the podcast. It'll just be like sort of a pure storytelling podcast so that if you did have a specific tale

that was composed of like one of the darkest moments of your life meeting up with one of the most like humorous situations you've ever been in, that's kind of gonna be a lot of the heart of it. So it would be awesome if you told, right now I'm really just focusing on when you're like basically 16 and taking acid for the first time.

And of course I'd tell the story about getting kidnapped and all there's like, there's like, there's so many things that happen right when you're being molded that I find scientifically super interesting because you're not really you yet, but you're sort of like, there's a lot of predictions that come out of these situations that mold you, you know?

And so I'm sure you have some hilarious battle stories. Is that good? What's the name of the podcast? Well, I didn't totally decide yet, but I think maybe for now, I'm thinking it'll be Drifter's Sympathy because that's like a Holy Son's concept that really came from, it came from a,

from coming home after school, I used to watch like Unsolved Mysteries and shit like that. You know, when you're like 14 years old, I was like addicted to that stuff. And I think it was like one of those shows like real stories of the highway patrol or something about, it was like, began with this kid, this guy in a creek and he's just throwing stones.

And it's like, Gary Leakley was a Drifter and he was pondering the state of his life one day. And it's like this really sad autumnal scene and he climbs up out of the ditch and an old couple are driving a minivan towards him and he just picks up a rock and throws it at their windshield just out of some sort of Raskolnikov kind of absurd moment

where he just doesn't know why he's alive. And like they pull over at a gas station and they like tell him, this is just my memory of getting home at age 14 and watching the show. And then like they pull over and tell a cop that he's down the street. The cop turns around, goes back

and pulls up to him on the side of the road and the Drifter just like takes out a pocket knife and just starts walking lazily towards the cop, like kind of like Jason and Friday the 13th. And the cop just pulls out his gun and shoots him dead. And then it went to like a Clorox bleach commercial or something. And I just remember that moments like that

where I just couldn't really cope with the reality of what I'd just seen and Drifter's sympathy as a phrase always like stayed with me as I, maybe as I worked in the homeless shelter for 13 years or something. But anyway, so it seems to be some sort of mile marker for my records and my life. So I'm right now, I'm sticking with that.

Man, this sounds so cool. Any way that I can help, just let me know. I can't wait to hear these, it sounds so cool. Awesome, cool. Okay, well, let's do more. And you're going to Europe real quick. You're going to Europe when? Holy suns goes for their first full band European tour

on January 26th. So it's like in like eight days. And we hit every country over there until about mid-February. And then when I get back, I'm actually like totally free for the rest of the year in terms of my physical responsibilities. So I bet we, maybe we should just like,

we should plan something now while we're talking about it. Well, let's just do it in, I don't know, February sometime. I'm around all February. Okay, well, let's wrap this up and let's start planning. And where can people find your tour dates, man? You'd have to go to Holy Sons on Facebook and you'll see it's like, you know, couple shows in Italy, couple in France,

Switzerland, all over the place over there. I'll have links at dunkatrustle.com. Anything else, Emil? Where can people find your music? Can I play one of your songs at the end of this podcast? Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you want to play something like brand new, I'll send it over right now.

I'll follow man on Thrill Jackie. Perfect. Hare Krishna, thanks, Emil. And all the links will be at dunkatrustle.com. Hare Krishna. Thanks for listening, everyone. Big thanks to Casper for supporting this podcast. If you want a $50 off your brand new mattress,

go to casper.com forward slash family hour. Hare Krishna, here is a brand new song off the decline of that, fuck. Here is a cover song off the brand new decline of the West double vinyl reissue. It's called Nature's Way. If you enjoyed it, go to the comment section of this episode and all the links you need

to find more of Emil's music are there. See you soon, Hare Krishna. Something's wrong. This nature's way of telling you and it's song. It's nature's way of retrieving you. It's nature's way of perceiving you. It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong. Something's wrong.

It's nature's way of telling you. Those naive days are done. Mortality sets the snake's sand phase. Lock it all. Lock it all. Tired sand. The courage comes down to take you. If you won't even awake you.

It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong. Something's wrong. Something's wrong. It's nature's way of telling you. It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.