Duncan Trussell Family Hour - LANCE BANGS!

Episode Date: January 8, 2014

The great director and artist Lance Bangs joins the DTFH.

Hello, friends. It's me, Duggar Trussell, and you are listening to the Duggar Trussell Family Hour podcast, Hare Krishna. Happy 2014. For the last couple of days, I've been trying to record an intro to this podcast, and I keep coming up short every time. This is one of the frustrating things about making this podcast is I don't feel right just releasing them if I can't say the thing that I'm trying to say and say it honestly, and it's really frustrating because I guess I could, you know, just do, okay, here's the commercials and here's the guests, but I don't want to do this right now because it's the first podcast of 2014, and I feel really superstitious about that or something, which is ridiculous. But

here's the problem. I have cognitive dissonance right now. My mind is going crazy because this week, I have to go and get chest x-rays, and I have to get a blood test, which I have to do every four months for the next two years as part of the program that happens after you get testicular cancer. And that, every time I have to do this, it freaks me the fuck out. And I really am forced to try to implement some of the stuff that I've been learning, and it's really hard for me to do because the idea is that everything that comes to you in the universe is a teaching and no matter what it is, you know, and sometimes the teaching is like, oh my God, I just had a beautiful baby with this woman that I'm completely in

love with, and the teaching is like, is deepening your love with another human being. And those are the divine, beautiful, sweet forms of the teachings. But a lot of the times the teaching is not that. A lot of the times the teaching is not the beginning of a relationship. It's not falling in love. It's realizing that you're at your wits' end and that you don't have an easy solution to a problem, or that the solution to the problem is not the solution that you would like it to be. I don't know. In this situation, there's nothing I could do. I have to go get these chest x-rays. I have to get the blood tests. I could ignore them and just hope for the best, but I've got to go and do it, and my body reacts to

it, and I just freak out, and everything gets colored by this weird anxiety. In the first probably 17 versions of the intro that I've been trying to record, I didn't even mention that this was bothering me, and then I realized, like, oh, the reason that you can't get this intro out is because all you're thinking about is the fact that in a few days, you've got to go get chest x-rays. Oh, P.S. I've also been hanging out with my ex-girlfriend again. So I'm all scrambled up right now, friends, and I don't have a good... I wanted to have some nice inspirational New Year's Eve message for all of you, but really, I'm just going to ask for your help, which is that if anybody out there has something that they're afraid

of, that they're putting off, can you email me? You can go to dunkintrustle.com, go through the contact form. Those messages go directly to me, but I want to hear what you're afraid of that's coming up, and also, if you're somebody who's had to deal with similar medical stuff like this, like having to go for tests, can you email me if you have any tricks for dealing with this stuff? And then on the next podcast, maybe I could combine the emails that I get from people who are afraid of an upcoming thing with the emails from people who figured out the best way to deal with impending things of this nature, and there's some kind of solution that we can find. Also, has anyone out there ever successfully gotten back together with

their ex-girlfriend and it's actually worked? I'd like to hear those stories too. So that's where I'm at. You know what? I'm going to leave you with a quote that I found in this Jack Cornfield book I'm reading on Buddhist psychology. I don't know how it relates to what I just said, but here's an amazing quote. Maybe this will apply to somebody out there. The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. I'm going to read it one more time. The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. I love that. It's Simone Whale,

a French philosopher, and that's in Jack Cornfield's book on Buddhist psychology, which I have on my Kindle. It's really good. But man, see that's the thing. It's, even now just talking about how I'm just admitting that I'm afraid of this upcoming chest x-ray and exam and admitting that I still have feelings for my ex-girlfriend. It makes me feel so much better than pretending that that's not the case. And maybe that's the answer is just and feel what you're feeling. I think that's what Jack Cornfield would say, but I want to hear what you guys have to say. And I also want to hear what are you afraid of that's coming in the future? Let me know. Maybe we could figure this stuff out together because

I do think for a lot of people that's got to be a big problem is anxiety about what's coming up, medical tests, surgeries, dates, exams in school, whatever it is. Just let me know. Stuff at your job. I want to hear these stories. And for those of you who have found successful ways of dealing with this stuff that don't involve tequila, let me know. I want to hear that too. DuncanTrustle.com. Go to the contact section. Those go straight to me. Woohoo! We have a new sponsor and I'm very excited about this sponsor because they're a badass company called Warby Parker who have upset the vice grip hold that greedy glasses companies have had on the eye glass industry for a long time. Eye glasses are

too expensive. They just are. I'm on a website right now. It's a very popular glasses website. I'm not going to say the name of the company. I'm going through their glasses. These glasses are minimum, minimum, minimum $329 for glasses. Are you fucking kidding me? Oh, here's some for $300. $300. That's their cheapest pair of glasses. It's like what exactly are your glasses made out of that you can rationalize charging $300 for these things because it's just cheap, lightweight, metal, and plastic. These aren't assembled using discarded spaceship parts. You didn't go on to a meteor to mine the materials for your overpriced tacky glasses. This is everywhere. I have two qualities that aren't getting any better in my life.

Number one, I'm blind as a bat at night. And number two, I lose everything. I leave things behind like a toddler, just a trail of shoes and socks and credit cards and bars and everything. I have sweaters and jackets. I just leave stuff behind and glasses. For me, my glasses will last maybe, I don't know, three months if I'm lucky and then I'll chew them to pieces or I'll sit on them or my dog will carry them away or they go away. So there's no fucking way I can pay $300 for a pair of goddamn glasses. It's a rip off. Warby Parker is badass because this is a company that sells glasses that start at $95 and they're really cool glasses. They look awesome and this is actually, I heard a great story. I think it was on NPR,

an interview with one of the founders of the companies and they were talking about how this is like a kind of representation of these new products that are disrupting industries because the eyeglass industry is an industry where everybody just decided to start selling their glasses for way too much money and that didn't have to happen. Warby Parker is disrupting that. And you know, there's not just like these new glasses stores. I've gone into like these used boutique, used eyeglass boutiques like in Echo Park and holy fucking God, you look at the price tag on some of these glasses and it will make you urinate. You'll just piss your pants in stunned horror when you realize that this pair of glasses that still

has the chew marks on them from whatever trucker used to wear them in the 50s are now being sold for $900. I've seen glasses that cost that much to the point where I actually honestly thought about going at my first impulse was to ask the guy if there was a mistake like an extra zero on there, but I didn't because the guy was like a dominant super hipster type person like wearing seven scarfs and suspenders and circus boots. So I just left frustrated. I've been driving around blind as a bat and now that I'm in this partnership with Warby Parker, I have the impetus to finally get a new pair of glasses because my last pair of glasses literally disintegrated on my head. They just fell off of my head when I was in

a photo booth with my ex-girlfriend. So Warby Parker, here's how it works. It is an online company. You go to warbyparker.com and you pick out five pairs of glasses and they will ship these glasses directly to you. You can try these glasses on in the comfort and safety of your own home instead of under the scathing glare of some pseudo sophisticate who's been selling cheap plastic to morons for years capitalizing off of the fact that their optic nerves are disintegrating with age. What a pig. You can try these on in front of your dog. You can try these on in front of the mirror. You can try these on in front of your girlfriend, but you don't have to compete for the one mirror in whatever store at the mall you've

happened to stumble into. You can actually pose. How are you going to pose in the mall? How are you going to do your faces? How are you going to do your secret faces at the mall? You can try these glasses on in your bathroom and do as many of your secret faces that you want, the various angles, whatever you want. You could vogue for a while. They'll send you five pairs of these things. If you go to warbyparker.com forward slash family hour, they will send you these three day shipping for free. That's a great deal. If you've been putting off getting glasses, what are you doing? Are you going to wait until you finally run over that trigger-treater? That's a little dated. Whoever, I don't know, some treater,

someone running across the street. Are you going to like, you don't want to be the grim reaper in the life of a family just because you didn't take the time to buy glasses because you couldn't afford them because these unscrupulous, evil, eyeglass vendors are selling overpriced glasses that the world can't afford. Here's what else is cool about warbyparker. Every time you buy a pair of glasses from them, they donate a pair of glasses to someone who can't afford glasses. So that's badass too. This is a great company. This is the exact type of company that I want to be working with, not just because they're going to give me a free pair of glasses. I guess I fall into the category of, I guess I'm one of their

donations. Prescription glasses, they start at $95. This includes the lens. They also have sunglasses and reading glasses too. So support this company, please, because I want to work with them for a long time. I have a feeling that a lot of my listeners are equally night blind. Go to warbyparker.com, floor slash family hour. Order some of these glasses. I'm going to be ordering a pair tonight. We are also brought to you by amazon.com. Amazon.com has an affiliate program. What that means is if you go to dunkintrustle.com and go through the Amazon portal, you will get, they will give us a very small percentage of whatever it is that you buy. And this is a way for you to support the podcast while shopping

and not having to go out into the stores. Guys, it's flu season out there. Not only that, but there's a fucking polar vortex over the east coast. These are not safe conditions. Are you going to go wandering through the pre-ice age slush to go to Target to buy toilet paper when you could go to amazon.com and have that toilet paper delivered to your house? Come on. You don't want to deal with that shit. This is flu season. People are coughing up their lungs. There's swine flu, bird flu. There's pig flu. Everyone's sick. And if you want to get really sick during a polar vortex, go to Target and fight over milk with somebody who's been coughing up bits of their lungs for the last few days because they have some

kind of unidentified disease that's spreading through whatever metropolis you happen to live in. Don't do it. Go to amazon.com, order your toilet paper there and go through our portal and they'll give us a very small percentage of whatever you buy. They also, if you live in New York or Los Angeles, there's Amazon Fresh. I've already tested them out. It's a grocery delivery service. So guys, it really is getting to a wonderful place where we will never have to leave our homes again. We are also brought to you by Audible. Audible sells great audio books. If you go to audibletrial.com. You can download a free audio book. If you sign up for a trial membership, they give us 15 bucks. So there's lots of ways that you could

support this podcast. You could also go to our shop, order some posters or a t-shirt or a bonus episode. Or if you really feel crazy, you could donate. But honestly, if you're thinking about donating to the podcast, I'd really rather you donate to a good charity that you want to support. And if you want to support this podcast, just go, go buy some glasses from Warby Parker, download an audio book, go through the Amazon portal or buy a poster or something. And if you don't want to do any of that, just keep listening because I love that too. And go to our message board. There's a great form there, which I haven't visited in a while because I've been in a kind of, I've been in a polar vortex of my

own. The combination of getting these chest X-rays and hanging out with my ex-girlfriend has really spun me for a loop. But I'll get better. Everything gets better. It's a pendulum, man. It swings from one side to the next. It's a sine wave, brother. Crests and peaks. Wait, no. Truffs. Peaks and troughs. Yeah. That's the story of everything, I guess. I don't know. Today's guest is an amazing director who has directed and produced some, some of the most famous music videos ever. He's worked with like the greatest bands. He's worked with from Kanye West to Nirvana. He's worked with Spike Jones, who most recently created, put out the movie, Her, with Joaquin Phoenix. And goddamn, it's a great movie. You definitely

should go see it. I loved it. Wonderful film. Much more, you know, I guess previews or something. They've got a dumb previews down so that it appeals to everyone. And so you watch the previews for her and you think that it's like some kind of rom-com where a guy falls in love with a robot. That is not what it is at all. It's much, much deeper than that. And it's an amazingly accurate, or I think it's a very accurate position, prediction of where technology is going to be in the next five years or so. Anyway, Lance Bangs is pals with Spike Jones, who right now is my favorite human on earth. Cause that movie blew my mind. I haven't felt that excited about a movie since I saw it. There will be blood. Great

movie. Go see it and watch some of Lance Bangs incredible documentaries like the Lazarus effect on HBO or just Google search Lance Bangs and go to his Wikipedia page and notice how you have to scroll down through three pages to get through the list of all the music videos and documentaries that he's created. This is a seriously prolific genius. And I'm so happy to have met him. In fact, I'm just going to say it. I think and I apologize. I'm not okay. I'm not going to look. I love all my children, but God damn, this is a great podcast. And if I had to put this in the anyway, why am I trying to shape your opinion about this conversation that I have with this guy? I'm just glad this is the guy who makes me

happy that I started podcasting because it gives me a chance to talk to people like this and hang out with them if only for a couple of hours. So everybody please open your hearts, send out your love energy and embrace the amazing Lance Bangs. It's the Duncan Trussell video. Lance Bangs. Hello, Duncan. Hi. Thanks for doing the show, man. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. You know, when I was, you were coming and I was doing some research and your Wikipedia

page, it's like 7,000 things you've created. Like I started scrolling through and it's music videos for Nirvana, Bell and Sebastian, Kanye West. It goes on and on and on like every famous musician. And then that's mixed in with like badass vice documentaries, but then that's mixed in with you going to Africa to work with or to do a documentary on AIDS. Yeah. And then that gets mixed in with your work on Adult Swim with Lloyder Squad and then also, what is the best TV show event in history? The greatest event in television history.

The greatest event in television history. You have to be the busiest person on earth. Yeah, I make a lot of stuff. I'm kind of always traveling around and making things and overlapping projects at the same time and then shooting during the day and then watching edits and then usually at night there's something I'm interested in going out and seeing or exploring in the morning. Man, that is amazing. You know what I did today? I played Hearthstone, an online video card game for probably five hours. Wow.

I think five hours. Like I am badly, deeply, embarrassingly hooked to a online fantasy role playing card game. I didn't know there was a card game version of that. I remember talking to you about the StarCraft and other things that you've been into in the past, but I didn't know that there was a 52-card deck of card-based game. No, you only get 30 cards in Hearthstone. You see it. If you looked at it, you would think, oh, that's a baby game. That's a game that you see the kids on the airplanes playing or something.

But really what it is is it's Blizzard's ultimate understanding of how to make something addictive because it's this combination of things and just grabs your attention and holds you there. But as I'm sitting there playing this game, because I'm working on this self-love stuff and being in the moment and being comfortable with your attachments and just instead of trying to ... The idea is if you're not going to get rid of your addictions until you deal with what's inside of you and then they'll naturally fall away. Now, that's a great way to be in complete denial about just not ... You're like, oh, no, I'm going to just let it fall away. I'm going to play Hearthstone anyway.

My point being, you, on the other hand, or somebody who is completely immersed in life and creation, don't you get tired? Don't you want to spend time alone and resting and not doing anything or talking to people? Yeah, but there's ... I mean, it's such a world full of interesting people and characters and things going on and it's exciting to be here and talking to you, but at the same time, Perfect Pussy is playing downtown on 7th Street and within driving distance Earl Swetcher is down doing a Christmas show in front of kids in Orange County that is going to be insane and going nuts throughout the night.

There's sort of a compulsion to go see these things and take part in them and watch the people and jump into the crowd and then film it when you can or take photographs or be there to talk to everyone and then drive back to the next thing. You're living the life of somebody who found out that they have three weeks to live. Yeah. That's amazing. Not all of us are doing that, Lance. Not all of us have figured out a way to do that or even want to do that. You have to have this real desire to sort of be out there and engage.

I like going out to the bars with my friends. I think that's a blast, but going to shows, am I blocked? Do you think I'm a little blocked or something? No, because you're generating stuff and unlike a lot of people that have a similar tendency or interest in psychedelics or spiritual culture, you're not a sedentary or just taking things in and sort of like with it. It feels like your mind is sharp and racing and you're able to kind of speak articulately about these ideas and get them out and make podcasts and go do performances. Have you ever gotten depressed?

Yeah, absolutely. And have you ever fallen into a place where you're not being prolific and making stuff? Yeah, definitely. What do you tell yourself when that's happening? You can tell yourself to just force yourself out of it. I mean, it's a depression. It's a real chemical thing that goes on in your brain that you can't talk yourself out of and that's why it's such a serious thing to deal with, that you get kind of swamped or stuck in those feelings

and maybe you're just sort of like laying in bed or reading books or absentmindedly puttering around the house and not getting out or doing things that you know you should be doing. Yeah. And then, you know, fortunately, if you have friends or people around you who are looking out for you or concerned, they can sort of, you know, probe you about it or ask you questions or kind of kick your ass to talk or open up or deal with what you're preoccupied with during that depression.

You know, when I've been depressed, sometimes I can't... It's hard for me to tell what I'm preoccupied with. Like, you don't even know. You're just sort of... Now, I wonder if there's depression and there's the chemical imbalance, but then there's some other thing, I think. Isn't there a thing, the idea of just like actually going out of the world? Yeah.

You can absolutely detach yourself and, you know, there are with the ability to be online or just in front of a computer or screen watching things and just absorbing culture and not making stuff of your own that there's a definite, you know, ability to soften your life by doing that too much. Yeah, right. Just that. Yeah. That is fucked up, getting lost in the goddamn rectangle, the glowing hypnotic rectangle.

You know, I was sitting in front of this game and I'm sitting there watching myself because that's part of this mindfulness practice is you just watch it. You watch yourself as opposed to like playing a game or whatever the addictive behavior is that you might do. A lot of times you get into an addictive behavior, you're just in it. You know what I mean? You're not really thinking...

In fact, you're trying not to think about what you're doing. Whatever it is, you're just trying to... You're just lost in the thing. So the idea of mindfulness is like instead of like stopping whatever you're addicted to, like, I'm going to quit smoking. I'm going to quit this. You just watch the way your body acts and on every level, emotionally, physically, mentally, you just watch this thing and suddenly you see this amazing seizure is happening.

A seizure of habit where you're locked into the thing. You can feel the high. It's giving you a weird high. Like no matter what your addiction is, there's always an associated buzz that you get with it. And you see this beautiful tapestry that is like a spider web just holding you down. It's a fascinating thing to watch, man. It really isn't an amazing thing to watch. Would you say that you're addicted to work?

Yeah, I think that's probably true. And I don't know that I feel... Like it wasn't like when I was younger and working selling electronics or mowing lawns or gardening that I was compulsively fixated on working that way. Endlessly, I didn't enjoy that and would sort of daydream or wander off or hide in the back of the produce section when I was supposed to be stocking shelves or cleaning up spills or whatever. But once I started making stuff and then being able to survive and support myself by doing that, that is so rewarding that I'd almost compulsively keep taking projects on

and doing things on my own that aren't really work or being funded by anybody, but just things I'm fascinated with or want to make or document or things that I just know that if I wasn't shooting would slip away or be underrepresented or things that I want to champion or share my love for that aren't quite being acknowledged yet that I know need to be preserved or recorded. Like I lived in Athens, Georgia for most of the 90s and there were things going on there, people coming through town or passing through that were amazing. And then lived with a bunch of just phenomenal people, lived with like Jeff Mangum and the rest of Neutromilk Hotel and was like,

I need to not just be here at these shows to hang out, but like this is crucial and this is on a level of Van Morrison, John Lennon, psychedelic, but not in a retreat of what's already gone in the past way of imagination and visionary description of things that I need to record this and bring a mic and shoot this and then pass around tapes of it and let people know in other parts of the country that this is happening and that they should focus or pay attention to it. That feeling of being around early Neutromilk Hotel, completely unknown Neutromilk Hotel, that must have been the most exciting jaw dropping since.

Yeah, it was intense and you could tell that it was real and that, you know, Jeff was struggling and these things were coming from an incredibly interior tenor that he was able to kind of communicate and hold this sustained, you know, resonance of like, ah, that you would pick up on and that meanwhile the 50 imaginary forces and visionary descriptions of things are coming through in the lyrics and then it's very simple chords that just hit in a very almost droning sometimes or repetition of something you hold in childhood sort of way and then they're all, you know, being played by kids that are falling over and a bass that has fuzz all over it and a saw that's being strammed

in a drummer that's just kind of flailing away, you know, like the urgency of that and the fact that that was underrepresented by what was going on and that was the era that people were trying to say that like the chemical brothers or orbital is what music is about now and we're done with guitars and nirvana, like those people are gone and, you know, this was not being sort of seen or acknowledged at the time or written off by people as like, oh, like wacky hippies with, you know, thrift store clothing or whatever. Right. And it's like, fuck those people, fuck whoever is publishing Spin Magazine at this point,

fuck who's, you know, putting on these radio station festivals with, you know, Sublime or Blink Winnie the Pooh or whatever, like this is really important and I need to go film this tonight. You know what's so exciting about that, man, is to think that right now at this moment there's probably 15 of those things happening. Oh, yeah. Bubbling out of the whatever it comes out of. You know, it's like when you get around people like that, it's like being around a volcano.

It's the same level of like fascination and magnetism. My friend Emel and he was when I was in college, it was like, you know, he would sit and record these beautiful songs and when I wasn't like in a state of feeling jealous and threatened over the fact that this like kid who was like, I mean, four years younger than me was clearly some kind of like musical just fountain of genius. Then it was just beautiful. But I wasn't quite smart enough. I wasn't like you. I think if I ran into early neutral milk coats out in the wrong time in my life, I would just walk away.

I wouldn't hear it. I wouldn't see it. That was infuriating to run into like when people would be talking during the show or kind of wandering out to go smoke a cigarette. It was like, what? What is wrong with you? You're missing this, you know? But there is like the stuff that you recorded that you played on one of the previous podcasts just recently of that. It sounds like a four track recording that he did that you're on a little bit.

Yeah. Did you feel that sort of excitement that this wasn't just fucking around that this was like alter in the woods? Yeah. I felt scared and that I've learned to identify that feeling is the feeling that you're doing something right generally. And so whenever you get this eerie like what like, what is this? What is this? Because it's not you or something. It's just scaring you.

You're scaring yourself. Yeah. And that's fun. And that is it. But I, yeah, I just felt scared around him a lot. Like he was, I hadn't come into contact with somebody like that. And because I, you know, I had a kind of, you know, I grew up in North Carolina. I was in, I just had never met somebody who like lived in Boston and shot heroin.

And like, you know what I mean? And like just what was going for it in this dark, insane way. I'm not positive, you know, did, did heroin, but I don't roll it. I'd, I'd probably. Certainly people around him. Yes. Yeah. So that was, yes, it was scary and exciting, but I still at that time didn't, I was too

shut down to see, see how great it was. I, I'd never heard Daniel Johnston before. I'd never heard of lo-fi. I knew nothing about any of that stuff. So email was just always throwing these left hooks by giving me these tapes and playing this stuff. And every time my reaction was always, ah, this is fucked up, man. Cause my ego, that's how I know something's right.

My ego is such an asshole when it gets around something good. It's always like, ah, this is not like it's bad. Is it not, is it not pleasing, but just like, oh, this is splash for me on the high somehow. But you see, see, I imagine they must have, you know, some, they, it's like people like you who can see something and hear something and then help the thing. Yeah. I think that's as important as the thing. It's as, it's, it's the same thing.

It's just a different part of the transmission of this energy in the same way the band neutral milk hotel and all of that's when those lyrics and that pain is pouring out of him, he couldn't have thought, oh, this, this is me. You know, couldn't have thought it. No, it's definitely, you know, a trans fixative, something's kind of channeling through him or he's able to kind of like put himself at the risk of hitting these nuances or tones or frequencies and letting things kind of come through him that are clearly intense and difficult to, to live with.

What do you think that is? I think that he feels that people around him very intensely. He was very emotionally connected to people that he was looking out for. Like, you know, people would be kind of drawn to him or need help with various things. And he was sort of looking after their care or concerns or letting them unload all of their psychic disasters that they were going through or trauma that they had experienced growing up and recognizing him as someone to talk to. And then what do you do with that once you're the person that's absorbing that from everyone that's had

something horrific happen to them when they were young or that they're dealing with, you know, in their current living situation. And then you're also someone that's, you know, smart. Like he had a background. He had been at a college radio station and knew what was good about records that were coming out. And, you know, he wasn't this completely naive person that was not aware of like what a good Fugazi album was or how it was made or, you know what I mean? Like he's conscious of those sort of things as well.

But just has that, that grace to generate things and put them out and that people would connect with it or identify with that feeling of what was going on in them. I'm really interested in the path of creation and where it comes from, where you trace it back. You know, like when you trace it like, okay, inspiration. When you're struck with inspiration, it didn't come from you. You don't make inspiration. There's no push-ups for inspiration. Yeah, it's coming through you.

You're sort of channeling something or hitting a resonance. What's that thing? What is the resonance? Do you think? What do you think that is? I think that some people are just open to what's traveling through the universe or what emotions or nuances are different today from what might have existed for people five years older than you or that were in a different part of the country.

And that there's always micro factors. So you are a bit younger than me, but let's imagine that like parents that we had at a certain time, there was maybe more divorces happening during that era than had been 20 years before that. Right. And that people were not in therapy or on medication to balance out mood swings or chemical imbalances. And so you had more kids getting punched or a liquor bottle thrown at them by the fucked up dad at that time. And that that's something that isn't the dynamic of all the kids today necessarily. Like that pocket existed from 70 whatever to 80 whatever.

The spanking fathers of the 80s. Yeah. And that these were people that, you know, had gone through and had generated, had been part of like time-wise a culture that from our younger position looked progressive. You know, the sort of 60s freak out, early 70s loosening of sexual mores, whatever. And yet they were shitty, self-involved people that we were dealing with that were not cool and groovy and peaceful. They were like, you know, running car dealerships or whatever and throwing liquor bottles at you and breaking windows. You had a liquor bottle thrown at you?

Well, I don't want to get too like. You don't want to go there. Yeah. But that, so like the people around you and then you resent everyone that's of that generation or that era. And it's also a claustrophobic culture where at that time period, like the dominance of sort of baby boomer people running the show meant that like everything that was on the airwaves or radio or bouncing through the buildings near you was Eric Clapton doing shitty Michelobad stuff, whatever. Right. And that the things you loved or responded to were not being reflected in the culture.

And so then you're hand-making things and passing out fanzines or cassettes or making a point that like whether you're not, you know that band that's coming to play at the squash pile in Asheville or whatever, like you're going to go there and be at that show because that's where the other fucked up kids are going to be. Yeah. And there's a good chance that Patty Torno and Chris who booked that show have chosen a cool band to come be there. That is so mind-blowing to me that you know the squash pile. Nobody knows the squash pile. The squash piles never even, never been mentioned on the show.

People don't know what it was. I went to the squash pile again. Yeah. Scared shitless. God damn it. I'm just a pussy, man. All this stuff just scares me. So when you were in North Carolina, there would have been this place in the early 90s that this remarkable, intense artist Patty Torno,

you know, she made a little bit of money like making quilts and artwork and selling them and some clothing lines. And it was a woman who just like gave no fucks to what the patriarch was trying to expect of her for her life to be like, and was like just making stuff and in different forms like, you know, handmade clothing and then people would buy it. And so she took that money and instead of buying like a white stucco monstrosity of a house to go live in in a comfortable way was like, what I want to do is go down near the train tracks in Asheville in this warehouse area and just build a space and make it all ages so that kids who have shitty things going on at home can come here and hang out and see shows and bring discord bands to come play and touch and go bands to come play and not serve alcohol and not make it be like the sort of like bar route where a band is competing against the sound of like Michelot bottles crashing and hitting the floor and shitty Eric Clapton commercials playing over it.

That instead it's a place that, you know, weirdo teenage kids can come buy a copy of book your own fucking life and see a band that came down from DC and then talk to them and write postcards and jump in the van and, you know, go join that adventure. That is the best description of it ever. I wish I could go back in time and get my fucking squash pile t-shirt, which I intentionally cut with scissors so it have holes in it because I wanted to be a punk. So there's a whole circuit of that where, you know, there's people in Pensacola, Florida doing that and Athens, Georgia doing 15 versions of that and that, you know, there'd be a circuit or route of band traveling. So, you know, Super Chunk could get going and have a following and then take Pulvo or whoever to go open for them and, you know, build this sort of community or network of people traveling across the country to these sort of places. Yeah, it's what it's a it's a that. So in Buddhism, they call it the satsang, which is just the community of spiritual seekers that sort of pool around some specific teaching or teacher.

And that is not limited to Buddhism, but that is also in music. And so you have the band and then you have what they call the fans. And then that is that communion that happens is its own little mini religion, you know, it's its own little it's a thing that isn't in society, you know, it's a different thing. It's so easy to forget about it, too, that that's happening all the time. That's happening all the time. Yeah. That's an amazing thing. That's really weird.

It's it's like the the it's like planet Earth is a it doesn't just grow vegetation. It grows ideas like first it grows humans and then it out of the humans these it secretes these ideas and then those ideas get transformed into sound. That is so weird. The earth is singing. How crazy is that man? The earth is like always singing through us. It's just so fucking weird. Do you do you do you ever worry that I mean, I hope this doesn't come off as a bum or anything, but do you ever worry if you think like, man, maybe I'm working too much.

Yeah, for sure. Like, I, you know, there's things that I've possibly damaged or not spend enough time on like, you know, my health could be better. I could be more I don't pay enough attention to myself like you were talking about earlier, the ability to sort of like reflect or watch yourself or observe yourself while you're playing that game. Yes. And I'm not doing that. I'm not conscious of thinking about like, wow, you ran around for too many hours in a row today or you, you know, should have written a letter to someone instead of rushing off to go charge batteries and pick up more power drives or whatever. You seem really happy. You don't strike me as like tremendously.

It seems like you're doing the Lord's work. Yeah, I've got this sense of this mission or something happening. Is that an accurate assessment? Yeah, I get a lot of satisfaction out of the things that I make in the process of running around and doing them. And then also the people that I'm collaborating with are around. Like there's just, you know, if you're circulating with the people that inspire you or that excite you or that you want to have conversations with. Like gondry. Like gondry.

Yeah. So to go like, watch his process or learn how his brain works on some level and be someone that can interpret what he's trying to communicate and find a way to visualize that and explain that to other people or show. Like when he's on set and he tries to say, okay, you're going to put that over there. And then when the time goes backwards, three beats and then the drum will pop over there and the people who are supposed to move things around just don't get it and can't understand what he's trying to communicate. And he gets frustrated because like English is not his first language, but it's not just a language barrier. It's that his mind is racing in ways that are multi-dimensionally beyond the guy that normally moves a drum kit from here to there. And right. And so then if you're the person that can be like, okay, what we need here is put three of those five feet apart and then one higher than the other.

Put it like a sand bag or an Apple box under that so it elevates. It looks like musical notes going up on a scale. Then they're like, okay, great. Like that makes sense. I can go do that. He needs a genius translator. Right. He's so smart.

He needs somebody just to translate. That's so cool, man. I know what you mean. This is why I love the podcast. My favorite thing about the podcast is just getting to hang out with people like you and talk. It's not just like the conversation, but you pick up a vibe from people and you just get like, it's really cool to get to meet people like that. And you've met everybody. You've met every single, it seems like you've met almost every legend that I would be interested in meeting.

I mean, fuck. What is it like being around Nirvana? That was incredibly intense. And I, you know, I wasn't around them a whole lot. Like I was sort of saw them play live and met them and socialized a little bit. And then Kurt came through Athens to visit Michael sort of probably 92, 93. He might have been like, I guess it was 93 most likely. So he was around there for a little bit.

And, you know, it was just so fixated on what they were doing from early on. Just the song sliver when that seven inch came out just connected with me in a way that did not feel the same as everything that was happening musically. And just knew that from that whole era of things that were happening, this was the guy and this was the band that were on some level of communication and saying something. And again, it's not all expressed in a literal way, but you can tell that he had the same kind of dads and the same wallpaper and the same meals that were horrible for you happening in the house that he grew up in. That you and maybe 45,000 other kids of, you know, like the one or two that were getting fucked up at their high schools all across the U.S. But that like he was on that resonance or that, you know what I mean? And so then it's like, you know that it's so good and that something's happening there that even people who are just like trying to jump around to the red hot chili peppers or whatever, they're still going to pick up on what is coming out of here and whether or not they want to relate to that or connect with that or not,

they're going to react to respond or go by that cassette. And so you watch that kind of blow up and you just knew that that was happening. And you made a point that like when they come through the South, I'm going to go see them at the Masquerade in Atlanta. I'm going to go see them in the 40 Watt Nathans. And if I can drive to Birmingham, if they don't cancel the show there because no one in Alabama knows to go buy tickets to this, then I'm going to try and get there too. And bring a camera if I can or bring a tape recorder or write about it in a fanzine and pass it around so that other people know like, no, no, no, this is different from Mudhoney and Tad. Like something is happening with this guy. Wow, man. God, I love you. You are so cool, man. That is so cool.

I'm sorry for trying to categorize you, but I just keep thinking like, well, you're this prolific, brilliant director, but you're also a fan. You're like a fan, but you're both sides of the coin. Yeah, that's the balance. Like I'm also making personal films and artwork during all this time that's sort of being funded or enhanced by the ability to kind of travel and work with people. So I'll go shoot in parking lots or gas station bathrooms in those cities before the show happens that night for personal films and then go meet people in the crowd and talk to them and sort of spot the people that seem interesting to me and then start corresponding with them. It turns out that, you know, two years later, they're the ones that are putting out a book or, you know what I mean? Like there's a sort of a way to see who in all these different pockets of areas are the people that are going to spring out of the mire. Man, you know, I wanted to tell you about this because I was thinking and now I can't remember the name of it, which sucks, but it was on dig.com today.

And it just seemed like if there was ever a subject for a documentary that needed to be made, it's this, which is there is a video game. Have you heard about this? There's an urban legend about a video game that popped up in Portland, Oregon for just a month or two. And everyone who played it, like many of the people who played it committed suicide and like government workers would come and like check the game and stuff. But it's this awesome, long, insane urban myth about this evil game that might have been put there by like some kind of weird MK ultra experiment to like torment people in Portland. But I don't know, man, I just was thinking, fuck, I wish somebody make a documentary about that because I'd watch it. What is, what are some, if you could make a, I'm sure you already have stuff in the works, but what's something you'd like to do a documentary about that you're not doing a documentary about? Oh, that's a good question.

I've been kind of focused for a long time, finishing up a documentary about the band Slint and Will Oldham and sort of the Louisville, Kentucky music culture that they came out of. Jesus Christ, man, Will Oldham is God. Is he God? He's a pretty remarkable character. Is he, is Will Oldham a vice-naiva? Does he worship Krishna? I don't know where he's at spiritually. I know that he certainly has, you know, different times done all sorts of interesting research.

He released this whole album that's all just Hindu, like, boxy spiritual songs about Krishna. And I, ever since then, I wondered, did he, like, did, is he become like a, a boxy? Is he, I don't know. I'd love to know. I'm not sure where he's at with that, but certainly that blue lotus feet recording is, is a really mesmerizing recording. There's also, like, a peel session they did in England of some of that same material. And one of my favorite people on the planet is this guy, Britt Walford, that drummed on some of those sessions. And that's worth, like, listening to.

Maybe it wasn't John Peele. It would have been, like, a V-Pro session, actually. But that, so blue lotus feet is the one to search for online or listen to. I don't know what a V-Pro session is. I think it's a Dutch radio station, like a public radio station there. Oh, okay. So, like, a John Peele session would have been, like, four songs recorded in England that they would have run on the BBC. This one particular guy, John Peele, that was a DJ.

Gotcha. And he would sort of, like, spot interesting artists and commission them to do a session. And then, and I think it's in, I think it's a Dutch, Dutch station that has a thing called V-Pro that would similarly, like, you know, have a three or four song, usually acoustic set by interesting musicians. And so that song you're kind of referring to, one of the best ones of that era was a thing called blue lotus feet. Yeah. That's a hypnotic, repetitive, droning piece. No, I actually played it on the podcast.

Sorry. It's great, man. I think I played that one. Actually, on the last podcast, I played a little tiny track from that album, just because it seemed so perfect, because I'd just gotten back from the Ram Dass retreat. Right. So this film is something I started shooting in, like, 1991, like, going up to Louisville and just, this record, Spider Land by the band Slint came out and had no information on the front sleeve.

It's just like a black and white photograph of these, like, four figures, just their heads kind of floating in water. And they're not looking tough or cool. They're sort of, like, half-smiling and looking in there. They're not people who are trying to look like a band in front of a brick wall or in, like, a railway station looking tough. Yeah. It was just, like, these teenagers kind of staring at you. And it's a very remarkable record that creates a world of its own and sounded like nothing else that I'd heard quite at that time. And it's a lot of sort of spoken dialogue rather than, like, things that were being sung.

And the structures of the songs and the time signatures were unusual. And it had this kind of, like, creepy, glassy, yet incredibly precise, articulate guitar playing overlapping and weaving with each other. And the drumming was just this phenomenal presence that you could feel the air moving in the room of where they recorded it. And it just felt like it was continuous and ever-flowing and yet not on, like, the same kind of clock that everything else tends to be. It wasn't, like, all dialed in. So it was like, who made this record? And then you would ask around and be like, oh, they actually broke up before that came out. Because you were like, when are they going to come to Athens or Atlanta and play a show?

And it's like, no, they, you know, they broke up before that thing came out. And it's like, well, what are they doing now? Or what's their next band? Or why did they break up? And you'd hear, like, oh, they, you know, like, oh, some of them, like, checked into a mental hospital. Oh. They couldn't get along. Like, you'd hear all these rumors.

And this is all pre-internet, pre-... And nobody was writing about them. It wasn't like there'd be some article on Rolling Stone or Spin that, like, gave you true information. Just being ignored. But this thing was being circulated and kind of passed around. And if you saw a record store, it might catch your eye because it was such an unusual object, just as an aesthetic thing to look at. And then it started just kind of getting passed around and circulated through more and more people.

And you would get transfixed or obsessive about, like, what's going on with this record. And then bands started trying to kind of sound like that. And then you'd find out, like, oh, like, it's not the main front guy, a guitarist, that's singing everything. Like, half of these songs, the drummer is kind of quietly whispering. And it's like, who does that? What drummer is, like, also quietly talking you through these songs that feel like short films or, you know, fragments of a story that you are only hearing part of or whatever. So, I started going up and shooting footage and...

Let me stop you there for a second. I just want to point this out. I have never heard someone so articulately break down music. That is not a normal way, I think, for people to... What's your mind is processing things in a different way musically than maybe other... When I listen to music, I'll think, ah, great lyrics. That's it. Like, I like the lyrics and the guitar will sound good.

There'll be some bleeps, or if I'm listening to, like, some kind of, like, psychedelic thing, like, whoa, like, or the helicopter sound and Pink Floyd or something, that'll stick out for me. But there is no fucking way that when I would ever... You can name a song, name a song that I would know, and I'll try to describe it to you. So, you mentioned Pink Floyd, so, like, you know, Echoes by Pink Floyd. I don't even remember... I know the song, like, the one that's like, boing, boing, boing, boing. Just bleeps, echoey...

Echoey bleeps. Now you describe it. So, I haven't thought about that song in a long time, but because you mentioned Pink Floyd, like, that's, you know, it's like an entire side of an album, basically, that they did. Sort of when they're coming out of their psychedelic period in Sid Barrett was no longer a functional member of the band, but before they discovered the sort of conceptual album Dark Side of the Moon era, and this guy, John Lecky, you know, engineered the recording, and it has this presence to it, where this song echoes that, you know, it's probably, I don't know if it's dealing with, like, the...

What's the seagull? The book? No, what's the sort of, like, the allegory about the albatross? Oh, Rhyme of the Ancient Mayor? Yeah, it might be Rhyme of the Ancient... There's some kind of imagery about that that's going on, maybe, in the lyrics, and that, you know, it goes on for this long time, but somewhere near, maybe, like, the 20-minute mark, or 14-minute mark, whatever, the drumming and bass kind of shift in it and becomes this incredibly ominous, like...

Yeah. It, like, turns on itself from going from this being this kind of, like, watery background, like, blah, blah, blah, thing into this more ominous, horrifying, like, there's a driven purpose of what's going on here, and a sense of dread and momentum. God damn it. I am not listening. This is my problem. Maybe this is a problem in my life, man.

It might be a problem in mine. I think that, like, at an early age, I kind of disassociated from what was going on around me in real life and maybe lived inside of records and movies and photographs and films and detached from the real situation that I was in, you know? Oh, man, I don't think that's a problem at all. I think that's just paying respect to art instead of just dumbly listening to it in a kind of blanked-out way. I think that if you're tuning into things, like, that's, as far as I'm concerned, you know, there's a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that I love where Krishna is saying, and I can't remember the exact verse,

but it's like, whatever you worship, that thing I will be. Wow. Isn't that cool? It's so cool, whatever it is. It's like, you don't have to fucking sit in front of a picture of Hanuman or Ganesh. When you're listening to music the way you're listening to it, as far as I'm concerned, that is just as valid as being a Zen meditator or any kind. That is communion, man.

I don't, I get 14-minute mark. I couldn't tell you a minute mark in any song. I just know kind of roughly how it goes, and I know it makes me feel a certain way. Yeah. It's an emotional reaction to music, but not a technical reaction. But that's fine, and if music is just sort of like a background enhancement to the people you're talking to, or the couch that you're sitting on, or the world around you, or the people that are coming in out of the door that are cute, like, that's a perfectly valid

thing, and there are songs that work on that level that are just, you know, that was what the summer of 2011 was about, was that song bouncing around the walls or whatever. Right. Yeah, or that particular breakup, or that post-breakup situation. So, slent. Yeah. So, they were, from an incredibly early age, like, you know, 10 years old, they were forming hardcore bands and playing shows, opening up for Minor Threat, and touring at age 14,

12 or 14, like, opening for Samhain, which was a band that Danzig put together right after the Misfits broke out. Yeah, sure. Like, just, you know, drenched in blood, playing, like, fucked up VFW halls in Detroit, and it's like, here's these, like, kids from Louisville, Kentucky, like, you know, going on the road and touring and opening up before any of them can drive, you know, and just, and they would start these incredible things and make great work and usually kind of disguise themselves or use fake names, and then they would break up and end that project before

anyone caught up with them or noticed or acknowledged it. And so, when they were, like, 15, 16, they had a band called Squirrel Bait that signed to Homestead Records and, you know, toured with Dennis R. Junior and Husker Do and were, like, playing these shows in New York and getting written about in magazines, before they, again, like, before they were young and old enough to, like, really drive a car or have licenses. And then they would quit that and, you know, like, not take the money to get paid to go make a second album or go play in front of a thousand people and get paid for it, but

just sort of like, no, we're done with that, and quit and walk away and go invent something else. And so it's like, what is the compulsion to do that? Is it just sort of a, is it from that sort of anti-acknowledgement, like, no ego indie rock world? Or is it a deeper thing? Or are they people that were incapable of sustaining things for longer than the true inspiration lasted and not willing to, well, I'm not really feeling the song anymore,

but if we go play opening up for the pixies, we can make $2,000, so we're going to go do it. And that they just don't have that gene in them to do that, and they're like contrarians or fuck that. That's not what I'm interested in. They don't want to work. No, it's weird. No, I don't mean, what I mean is they want, by work, I mean, they don't want to do something

that they're not getting off on. Correct, yeah. And so maybe that's it. You know, at the age of maybe 19, they make this phenomenal landmark album and then disappear and vanish. And so people start catching up to it and like, you know, Nirvana goes and records with Steve Albini in 1993 to do the album in utero, partly based on the drum sound. When they talk about like, oh, we wanted to sound like the pixies, whatever.

What they're really talking about is this guy, Britt Walford, who drummed on the first Breeders records under fake names because he didn't want to be known or acknowledged for doing it. Still a teenager. And Steve Albini records that. And the drum sound of that is kind of what the album pod that people really were trying to like Dave Grohl is trying to get out or recreate so they go, you know, certainly there's a love of Albini and Big Black and everything, but like really like for Grohl and stuff,

it's this sound of this guy's drum kit in a room that was miked and recorded. And people are starting to make bands in the 90s that sound like them or kind of like take their aesthetic or maybe we don't need to put our name on the front sleeve and people figure it out. And that's kind of cool. Like people kind of like taking bits and pieces from them and spiraling them out into other forms of culture. But they just kind of vanished or disappeared.

And then like every once in a while, a record would come out that was like, oh, I think this is maybe the bassist is on this. Yeah, it seems like it's him, but it sounds nothing like what you loved about Spider Land by Slant. And then they would pop up and all of a sudden like the first Palace Brothers thing that Will Oldham did, like he was, you know, classmates with them and would have been in the band if he had known how to play at the time and sort of like sat on the stage and held the drums in place at their first shows and jumped in the band and toured with them opening for Sam Hain when he's like 14, 15.

And so when he starts like getting it together to start recording on his own and forms this incarnation of it called the Palace Brothers, like all the guys in slant just having broken up slant and had, you know, couldn't whatever dynamic of like couldn't get along or like couldn't be slant anymore and broke that up before the record comes out, they all go make the Palace Brothers record with him. It's the same. Like I can't imagine if you go through a breakup, you know, that like the first thing you do is go make something else with the same combination of people.

But somehow that's OK. And but then like the Palace Brothers record comes out and it doesn't say who made it at first as no one knows, but it sounds like. But they're all playing combinations of different instruments. So this bizarre thing that's going on where it's more and more intriguing and building this mystique, but it doesn't feel deliberate. It doesn't feel like someone that's like being coy or cryptic or trying to seductively entice you.

It feels like, no, this is their genuine instinct is to operate in this way that's not conventional, not traditional and yet make great work and then reform in a different configuration, make great work in a different format, be a hardcore punk band, be more of like a metal band, like do these things and then walk away and vanish and never take the acknowledgement or go get paid to play on the side stage of Lollapalooza and cash in on it. You know, intentionality can be so vile. It can be so satanic sometimes.

And it's interesting that you mentioned the the tendency of people. I don't know if they still do it, but in 90s bands to not use their real names. I didn't realize my friend. The guy who sort of, I think, was like one of Emil's mentors. I would actually call him my mentor, too, to his name on the out on. He was in this band called Trolling With Droll. You ever heard of them? Oh, yes.

After this podcast, I cannot wait to play this for you. All right. I can't play it on here. I never hear from him anymore. And the only time I heard from him, we he was like, this guy, man. So he lived in Boston, his I can't say I'm not going to say his name, but he was in a band called Trolling With Droll. And his name on the album was Anonymous Non Robot. And he, you know,

Emil had talked about this guy a bunch and then it was like some break from school and we went up to Boston and like I got to meet this guy. And and and it was just like instant, instant connection. You know, we're like, oh, cool. This is someone I know I'm going to be friends with this person. Like there's no way we'll not be friends because this is somehow we already know each other or something. But he was like here, you know, he's a little like you, man.

He was so in he's I'm not using past tense because I haven't talked in forever, but he's in the world. He's living. He's like not he's just fully here and living and totally he's clearly himself. You know, and like I remember when we were meeting in a park and I look over and there's some guy sitting on a bench and he's got binoculars and he's been looking through the park for us with these binoculars because I guess he wanted to see us right when we came or something.

It's just cool. And then. Yeah, man, I was just being around people like that. It's so fucking amazing, man. And so is that happening anymore? The thing that happened in the 90s, is that done? Whatever that was. Yeah, there's still absolutely people making great work and art in different contexts.

And, you know, I think that there's a different tendency now people who, again, like they grew up in a different setting where the vibrations are not an unbalanced, unmedicated, alcoholic dad who's breaking shit and spanking dads, you know, Kraftmucker named cheese to like there's healthier things and there's like people are getting therapy or whatever. Like things are different for people that are 18 now than they might have been, you know, at the time that you and I. Not everybody was getting violently abused.

Yeah. And their childhood. But there are still pockets of interesting kids making mutant, bizarro transmissions of things. And, you know, just the fact that there is the internet and that they can share them, not everyone's doing that. Like people are still making handmade things. I'm dropping them off at family bookstore or at, you know, paper, rad. And, you know, and the internet.

Yeah. And so they do have that to communicate or express themselves or find people. And what I'm curious about is all the people that. Like, I wonder if there's less fucked up stuff happening now. If in some way it's a release outlet or valve that people that would have gone and beat up somebody or or taken their sexual repression or anger that they couldn't deal with themselves and like lashed out in some horrible fucked up way are now able to just like find the imagery that triggers them and then they can jerk off to it and be done and move on to not needing to go.

So you know, like, is that helping some people to. Porn is fucking up the indie bands. The indie drought. Maybe so, man. I mean, I think that it's not just porn. I think it's that we've got these goddamn hypnotic rectangles in our pockets. And they are getting more. The gravity is increasing and increasing and increasing with these things

so that they're, you know, when I was, you know, when, man, when I was a kid, when I was growing up in the internet, just happened, if you wanted porn, if you wanted to jerk off to porn, you're going to sit for five minutes, a minimum looking at this picture, slowly slide across a JPEG. You would just try to find the lowest res JPEGs where you could still see details enough to jerk off as far as watching a movie. Police. That's not going to happen.

You don't have an instantaneous access to every hardcore sex act that has ever been done by the human species. That wasn't there. So yeah, I know you mean, man, could be. Is that affecting your relationships? Like when you're open or meeting new people now, does the fact that so much more is acknowledgeable or talkable or everyone's seen everything now? Porn. Yeah. I think porn, I've met girls who have like, I think that a problem has happened,

which is that some guys who watch porn, they believe that that's how you have sex. So some guys will immediately try to like mouth fuck a girl or like gag or like they'll be kind of like aggro and weird. And because that's a lot of some types of porn is very like seemingly angry or something at women, particularly. And some guys like it, they just get confused. And I've heard girls talk about that.

And. But for me, though, I do use porn to jerk off from time to time. And I don't really feel that much shame about it. It just seems like a great outlet and a form of safe sex. I'm not addicted to porn, but I know people who are addicted to porn and they jerk off just all day long. That's intense. That's intense. But so are they people that are like, are they doing something else in between?

Like, are they like in the way that you're five hours of that game? Like, is it that and then there's a laptop on the side that every 30 minutes my friend, Sam Tripoli, he was on the podcast and he talked about how he would snort coke while jerking off to porn for hours at a time. I guess that was just the main soul activity. But as far as like making people more open about sex, yeah, I think maybe there has been some kind of like opening thing. I just think the problem is that a lot of guys

that they're confused because they're angry about not having sex as much as they want because. It's all repression. It's like the problem is we're so we're so repressed that sex turns into this like. Fucking Shambhala or some kind of like, you know, you start thinking sex is the answer. If you ever think sex is the answer to anything, you're just going to get severely disappointed when you realize it's it's just a pleasurable.

It's like a form of massage or something, really. So I think that's a problem. Guys are always looking for it and then it happens and they're pissed. And I don't know. Maybe they like it really. They I don't know. It's good to some women like to be dominated and like to be tied up.

And but I think that if you do that, you need to make sure that you do it with the right intention. Like if I ever do that, and I know it sounds so crazy. But if I ever do that, I do it because I know that the woman likes it. And I'm doing it almost as a form of submission to them because I know they're skidding off so hard on being tied up and controlled that it's pleasuring them and making them all trembling. And that's awesome.

I think that's how you should do that kind of thing. But if you're going out of the other way, which you're some miniature, I don't know, what's his name, Ted Bundy. Oh, God, yeah. Then that's not good. Anyway, we got off track here. What about this? When's the slent thing coming up?

So to be some point in 2014, I'm trying to figure out like what the best way to show it is now. Like there's things that maybe from my background that I wouldn't be comfortable with that everyone who's maybe 22 years old now doesn't have the compulsion about like I couldn't put something on Kickstarter and ask for help getting it funded to put out because it just feels from that sort of like era of doing things yourself and not taking any backing or whatever that there's still a stigma

to me that I'd feel embarrassed about like asking for money to finish something. Or do you know what I mean? Whereas like there's no there's no shame or stigma to that to people that are doing stuff now or like, yeah, give me $50,000 to go take some pictures of Detroit. Here's what's weird. This is what I think is weird about the stigma behind Kickstarter, any of those things.

So like I have an idea, you know, if I have an idea for a show, there is nothing stigmatized about me going to Comedy Central or sitting down with some company and trying to pitch the idea to them and see if they'll fund it. So if a corporation funds it, no stigma. But if you have an idea that is crowd sourced or that is paid for by just the public stigma, that's ridiculous. And a lot of like really like, you know,

successful people or a tours get really huffy when they see one of their peers throw something up on Kickstarter and they're like, oh, look at him on Kickstarter. Meanwhile, they're at fucking IFC. We've got this great idea. What do you think? Will you give us some money? Like, what's the difference? What's the fucking difference, man? I don't get it.

I think that that stigma has got to go away because I would much rather things be funded in the court of public opinion than funded by people who are just trying to sell Mitsubishi's and floor cleanser. Yeah, not that that's bad. We need both of those things in the world, I guess, but it's just cooler when it's I think crowd sourcing is fine, as long as what you're creating is worthwhile. Yeah, I think that it's also like sort of a control of how it's presented

that like my ideal version of it is that I take the film and go to I want to have it projected and hit a screen. I don't want it to be something that someone downloads and runs in a window on some edge of their laptop while they're also checking email or whatever. Right. A lot of the people are very sort of like slow, thoughtful people who speak in longer convoluted sentences that aren't quick soundbites. And so there's a lot of the interviews were shot at three in the morning, three thirty in the morning.

So it's a very nocturnal. It's a similar feeling to what we've got in this room here right now. There's an intimacy that comes with that. There's a connection or an engagement that happens where people speak in longer streams or more drawn out ways that is not going to work best on someone's laptop screen or whatever. And so my ideal version is that I would go, you know, travel to different places and project the film and have it hit

a screen and travel this light through the air and that everyone's quiet in the room and all focused at the same time at letting the story unfold and listen to the music in a decent presentation. So if I can go to different, you know, college towns or places and do these events and then maybe show other work or, you know, show comedy stuff or teach film kids or whatever, maybe I'll try and make that work. Man, you know what? If you do that, let me know. And maybe I can come to that town and we can do a live podcast or something.

That would be great. That would be so cool because that's something I'm working out with my agents is to go do a podcast. Because they know all the venues to go on a tour, man. And like, that'd be so fun to do a live podcast like this, even though you won't hit the same intimacy that you have here. That's why I like doing it here, which is why instead of going on a walk or something, it's just fun to be in a room and just have a cool

sort of oscillating, strange conversation. Yeah, I was pitching you different ideas of things to do to make it like, you know, we would go for a walk or take the dogs out or drive down to go see a show in downtown of the perfect pussy or whatever. And then that's just you multitasking. That's multitasking. And that's also a sense that like, I didn't know that you had this great set up here and that it was so comfortable and cozy.

My my image was that you would sort of like gone through this dark, troubling thing and a breakup. And I was worried that you were like spending hours doing Starcraft and jerking off and smoking pot and not getting out of the house. Or, you know, like, I didn't know what you were going through. And I didn't know that you were like as in good form and good presence. That's awesome. You thought I was going to be like laying in my garbage under garbage.

God damn it, babe. I was thinking like, let's get out of the house and go. You know, like, let's get him out of the house. Like, how much are you engaged with the outside world? You know, I am and get, you know, I have, though I have been definitely checked out and I continue to be checked. I this is my this behind it. All this, how I look at it, I got my ball chopped off

and my mom died this year. Yeah. So the way I see it is I've got a year. I've got a year to, to, to be whatever, however I want to be. And, but then the more I become the way that I am and the more I just let myself sort of go in and out of the various moods that come upon anyone, but especially when you have, when your mom, the cancer is like whatever. It's like you've got two balls and you've, your brain just forgets.

But kind of got through that. I got through that. But the, the death of your mother, that's about a year, I think, at least. So anyway, yeah, weirdly, I, um, had you, the thing you just described was that I was like, before any of that happened, before any of that happened. I was more somebody who had garbage laying around in a messy house and a, uh, a messy, messy life and no real anything going on. But then something about the combination of all the, you know, death and just

realizing that I don't know what it is. Here's a funny thing, man. The mind likes to ascribe reason to a thing because it wants to pretend to be in control. But it really, it might not be in control at all. And it's always a, after the fact thing, like worst example of that or like a negative example of that is sometimes you'll get in an argument with someone, you're just mad, whatever.

And you say stupid things. And then you don't even know why you're doing it. You're watching yourself say shitty things. And then when it's all over, you, your mind will try to justify what you did. Like, Oh, yes, of course you did that because he, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's after the thing already happened. And then you come up with a reason for it. So I think this whole addiction to reason that we have is a problem, is a big problem.

Because reasons so wrong most of the time, like people have the wrong read of it, or they misinterpret what's actually going on. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't know it's, it's, I love just the idea of like, well, I don't really exactly. Here's one thing I know for sure. This is what I know for sure. I know one thing for sure. I'm going to blink and I will be dying.

I know that based on the way time moves. Cause like I can blink and just think I was just in college. Blink here, which means that I'm going to blink again. And I'm going to be watching my nephew's graduation from high school. I'm going to blink again and I will have had a stroke or whatever the thing. This, this, unless, you know, I'm not saying maybe a meteor impacts or some other thing happens, but I do know that I do know that. So knowing that and keeping that close to my heart, it makes me less inclined to go

against my impulses, you know, because it seems like the more that I go against my impulses and try to impose some kind of thing, like today I'm going to get seven pages written or today I'm going to do this or that. None of it really is that good as opposed to this weird sense of like that same fear feeling that I was telling you about. Sometimes I'll get that just being myself. And it's like, whoa, this is so sinful that you wouldn't be constantly worried and working on something and trying to make a thing and do something and have

some reason for something that you're doing. You're just living and being and you just seem to be this pulsation of experience that has nothing that's not really anything more than that. That's wild when you pop into that state instead of like, I'm writing a book. Right. I'm working on my screenplay. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to write five new jokes today. Fuck all that.

It's intense how some people do that. They set that structure, then they wake up and they stick to it and they've got their routine and they focus on creating things in that kind of a process. I think it's fine if that's really what you want to do. Like you, you're somebody who's obviously. You've died. I'm not, look, I don't, I'm not, I don't believe that you have a, I don't think anyone has a utopian life.

And I don't doubt, obviously the kind of work you do is that is as stressful as. Um, um, it's a, it's like almost like a, it feels like war or something. And always the worst thing that can happen always happens and the person doesn't show up and it's, you have to really learn how to modulate stress and stuff like that. Like you, you really have to want to do what you're doing. So I don't, I know that you're not living some utopian life or anything, but the way you're describing it and the way that your energy is, it just seems like

you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. I think that's true. I think I kind of walked away from conventional structures and what might have happened to someone that came out of the background. I did when things got really traumatic when I was young and I sort of wasn't sure I was going to live like that the world wasn't for me or that it was stabbing at me that getting through that or emerging from that and feeling like the stakes are now that like, I don't want to be part of a nine to five world.

And that's not that system and construct is fucked. And I don't want to cooperate with that or be complicit in that. So I'm going to go over here and, oh my God, this, even in his youth song by Nirvana, the B side of this thing is exactly what was going through my emotional core. And that's where I want to go be in that room when that gets played live and hear that as loud as I possibly can and put my head near the amp and then pull a camera out and document it to spread it to other people.

And that just going on a continuous stream from that, it's been a thing where people have seen or recognized the things that I've made and then been like, Hey, we need to bring you out to New York to come do this thing with Kanye West because he wants that feeling or that look on his next thing. Or you know what I mean? So Kanye West from from that weird transition, things that I wasn't actively seeking, like I never went to film school or worked on sets and learned the the hierarchy of what a PA does, like just making things and then

getting drawn by other people to come make more things and travel with them or be in the room during a recording session or whatever. That that's sort of what has been happening for, you know, since that time. This is the thing people don't get. See, this is why I'm saying like, God damn it. It's like I'm going if for whatever reason, my brain is being magnetized to some idiotic online digital role playing game that is so stupid, which which and I'm addicted to it.

Then I'm going to I'm going to spiritualize that addiction and recognize number one, it's a unique in the course of human existence. It's a brand new form of addiction. And it's funny to have my mind stuck on that. And I know that it's not going to happen forever because I know myself well enough to know, to watch the waveform and in the way that the dark moments or the addictive moments of the moments where I'm doing things that I don't want to be doing or that I think I shouldn't be doing always end up leading me to

something better just by surrendering. And now that's a bad example, because what you're talking about is an actual kind of like passionate love of music and artists. And I think that people should understand that if you just follow the breadcrumbs of your desires, then strangely, they will lure you in the direction of paradise. And if you go against that and because the world will tell you, no, what are you just going to go fucking listen to goddamn bands every fucking night?

You piece of shit. Get a fucking job. Yeah, that's that's what I heard. You were up till 2am at some fucking band. You got to fuck you got to work. There's no time to go play around listening to music. And if you listen to that, then right now you might be, you know, the manager at a fucking Bank of America or something like that.

But instead you had the balls to follow what you love. And if you go in the direction of love, real love, if you go in the direction of love, your life will only get better and better and better. Love is the finger of God beckoning you in some certain direction. You just have to have the guts to follow it. And not everybody does. Yeah, not everybody does. Um, that's intense.

The imagery you threw out there, the name of the documentary that I hadn't set up until this point that I'm putting out is called breadcrumb trail. No fucking way. Yeah. Weird. Cool. That is cool. You're on some frequency here.

That is so cool, man. Yeah. Well, I love that, you know, I love that, you know, and I'll tell you why I love it because, um, uh, you know, Hansel and Gretel, right? They go, they leave a trail of breadcrumbs, right? That's what they do. And they, and there's the witch. And that whole thing is like that, the dark forest, that's what I've been

thinking about a lot lately, because I think the dark forest is the grief and the sadness and the, and the suffering that you haven't let yourself experience over the course of your life. I think that's the dark forest. And I think that weirdly, we get lured into that dark forest by, I call it breadcrumbs or I don't know what it is, but it's some trail that's left there for us that is the following in the direction of love. And, you know, what does love always do to a person?

It breaks their heart. It breaks your heart. Love, love always breaks your heart. And then people are like, well, I'll never love again because I never want to be hurt and they don't understand that a broken heart is the prerequisite to true growth and to really becoming yourself. And so whenever your heart breaks, you've been given this moment to, um, to, uh, when you have a broken heart, I'm trying to think of the, the speaker at

this Jack cornfield, it was the last podcast he said. That I can't remember the exact way to scratch. If he said in some Jewish tradition, they hold the scriptures against their heart when they're saying them. And the reason they do that is so that when their heart breaks, it will fall in. And that is it, man, the fucking, the breadcrumbs lead you to a broken heart. And the world tells you, no, it all costs. Don't get your heart broken.

It's the worst thing there is avoided at all costs. Num, num, num, num, num. Do you really want it? Don't get hurt. Don't get hurt. When the real answer is get hurt, break the fucking shell, man. It just sucks. Cause that's the dark forest is you have to get on the other side of the dark forest

is you net, you just pick whatever symbol you want to use. But on the other side of that forest, that's what's there. The beauty Eden, whatever you want to call it, that's there. It's there, but you just have to let yourself fucking go through it. You have to let yourself hurt. Right? Yeah. When did you learn that?

Like, what was the time of your life that you went through that and recognize something afterwards? Right now, because my mom died and I, um, uh, your mom dies, you're forced when your parents die, you, you are, you, you'll just cry. You know, you'll just sob and there's nothing you can do about it. And that's different from when you've entered romantic relationships in your past. Every time I've entered a romantic relationship, what, what will happen when I've really been particularly destroyed or hurt is I would try to escape

from the, the feet, the pain. So I would like, you know, when one, with one relationship, I remember I would drive around chomping Vicodin listening to Elliot Smith. Yeah. I remember that. And then, uh, I guess this one, I'm playing Hearthstone. But you've got a new dog and you're, you've got things set up here in a way that's comfortable and feels put together and doesn't feel like just like

a garbage pile of like pizza boxes. And I have a home that's very clean or for, for me, very clean. And I have really good dear friends right now, which is beautiful. And like, um, I'm, I'm, I'm really quite happy right now. But I guess, you know, I, I did, when I was at this retreat, I did have contact with all the, um, grief inside of me. And I've, I, I, I let myself really feel it from time to time there. And, and, and, uh, had a couple of nice little meltdowns that, um, and it's

very sweet. Where do you think you would be if you hadn't been as direct about going and being with your mom near the end and not avoiding that, but, you know, going and being present for that, if you would, in a way that a lot of people just can't function or can't deal with that and, and avoid it. And like, I, I can't come out. I'm busy with work or whatever. Like where would you be now if you hadn't had that experience?

Well, hmm, that's a great question, man. Angry, really angry. I would have been a very angry person and, and I, cause that, cause, and I still am a little bit of an angry. I have anger inside of me and, but nothing like what it used to be. And, and I'm working, I'm acting, I'm mindful, I'm practicing mindfulness. So even when I'm getting angry, if I get sucked into anger, you know, just last night, I had a, uh, you know, I backed from this fucking meditation

retreat and I really thought I had it all nailed, man. I really was like, I have truly ascended the great to some new like, oh, it's just your mind tells you all the stupid egotistical nonsense. Actually the, um, the, uh, in the, when Buddha was enlightened, Mara, the spirit of distraction or, um, uh, the, the force of the universe that tries to keep us away from truth appeared right before. Do you know the story of Buddha's enlightenment? Yeah.

So, you know, the second, uh, the first temptation was fireballs, you know, annihilation or whatever. And that was no problem for him. The second one was the daughters of Mara tempted him and the daughters of Mara represent the part of your ego when you're working on something that's like, well, well, well, look at you. You are a genius. Yeah.

Yeah. Or, or, you know, I'm saying for you, like I'm sure when you're working on stuff, it's that part of your mind that starts really, really, really, part of your mind that starts really like jerking yourself off, like, oh my God, this is a, you are amazing or whatever. That's called the daughters of Mara and, and, and, and the spiritual, uh, when you're meditating, it's the same thing where all of a sudden your mind will tell you like, oh yes, you're really waking up.

Look at you. Let's start treating people like you're holy or something. And it's, and then you start acting phony and that's, that's fucked up. But last night, some, I was drunk or drinking vodka and like, I started just fucking screaming at a friend of mine. And then, you know, we've made up. Thank God because he's one of my best friends and he loves me. And so, and also that we'd never gotten in a fight before.

And now I know I'll be best friends with him for the rest of my life because I sent him a text because I was a dick, man. Like I really let him have it. And then I woke up like, oh, you're an idiot, man. That guy, this is the sweetest guy you know. And then I sent him a text apologizing in right away. He's like, oh, totally fine, man. We are both really drunk.

And then I was like, wait, were you calling him out on those sort of things or were you in that state or what? I don't understand the dynamic of the dynamic was embarrassing and the dynamic was like, no, it was just stupid. You know, like when you're drunk and you get into some weird, like some little thing starts and then it gets into like deep drama. And then you're just yelling at each other and it was just a waste of time. But so, yeah.

And point being anger, anger, I would have been much, much more angry because I wouldn't have gotten another place where I had to become mindful. You know, that's the thing. It's like mindfulness is a thing that until you really have to do it, you might not go for it just because it's not necessary. But then eventually you get so fucking sick of your patterns and yourself and the knot that you're entangled of your ego that you start practicing these things in the same way people apply salve to their herpes.

You have to. You're having a breakout. You have to like deal with it. So it's like that, you know? So I don't know. I don't know. I certainly, anytime I find myself screaming at a friend, it's a wonder, it's a gift from the universe

because it's like it takes me off my high horse and just makes me realize I'm normal again. You know? So the anger that you still feel that still flares up at times and that maybe keeps in my mind, like I have this judgmental thing where you're one of the few people that articulates these sort of thoughtful concerns and psychedelia and spiritual quest and openness to Eastern mysticism that doesn't just seem like a blathering, like floating,

spineless, too easygoing, too California dot thing. And that my past prejudice was against that. And so when someone's telling you like, oh, the anger's really just in there, like how do you keep your anger and still make stuff and get up and create new content and think of new material and jokes and not just be like yogurt out? Well, because that's not, I mean, that whole yogurt out thing is more than likely an act. When someone's acting yogurt out, you remind me of someone who like,

meditates a lot and is in the moment and is like in the world or you don't have to do med, you know, this is these, this Rom-Dazs campus taught me a bunch. And because they're all, they're all, they're normal. You get around them and you're, it's they're the opposite of yogurt out. Like when I met Raghu Marcus, that's what I was ready for. I was ready for some weird yogurt out person. He's the director of the Love Server member foundation. And I remember meeting him and realizing like, wow, this is a normal person.

Yet he is a devotee of, he has a guru. He's a disciple of Neem Karali Baba. He meditates and runs like what, like a foundation dedicated to propagating the teachings of a Indian man who sat in a blanket, but he's the most normal guy ever. And, and, and he gets mad and like, you know, has problems and all the normal things that all of us have yet underneath it all is this attention to mindfulness and the intention of trying to serve people as best he can when he's not getting rolled by the waves of whatever rolls everyone, which I actually, I've never seen him get rolled by much of anything, but it's not bullshit.

That was the relief. It's like, oh, wow, it isn't bullshit. It's not bullshit. In fact, this is just a path that is the opposite of putting you into la la land. It's a, it's trying to get you to just be yourself fearlessly and be in the moment and stop trying to be whatever it is that you think you should be versus what you are. Because what you are is the key. That's the fucking key.

It's like having a key and there's a lock and you're always trying to change the key to some various configurations. But if you just left it in the original form, the thing would just click, click open eventually. That's what they've taught me. And I do believe, I do believe that's true. I was happy to hear, you know, in a previous conversation, not during this recording now, where you said, like when you described me, people you'd seen who were other attendees at an event you went to recently, that you were able to discern that like, well, those, you know,

there's a range of people, some were kooks, some were whatever, that you're not just completely open to everybody. Like that you, you can still perceive like who is a kook. Well, it's called discernment and, and, and, and, um, yeah, you have to be discerning. And also it's not like you have to be discerning. You are discerning. You instantaneously are going to react to a person who comes across as your path. Yeah.

You don't decide to be that way. It's just the way you are. And, and some people who cross your path are going to strike you as being kooks. And some people who cross your path are going to be your friends or going to be your teachers. And those, that is not an eternal law or that's not like, you know, I was talking to, uh, I was talking to actually, um, I was talking to God, I wish I could remember his name. He's so cool, but he lives in Maui and he works with Ramdas. Damn it.

I wish I could remember his name. But he, um, he was telling me that we were talking about the, you know, there's all these different gurus as all these different teachers. And he's like some of them, I would not want to, I don't buy what they're saying. I'm not into it. It doesn't strike me as being, uh, so I don't connect, but that, but for some people, that's the transmission. That's what they need.

That's the language that they need to, at that time in their life. So in the same way, it's like, look, am I somebody who's going to do the fish swirl dance or something like that? Or is that me? No, that's not what I'm like. I'm more cynical. And I like, um, I gossip and I'm, um, I gossip and, and I like having sex. And I like smoking grass and grass.

Now I'm really reverting to the sixties. I like smoking weed. That's just me. That's what I'm like. And, um, that was a big part. This is like one of the cool, like, um, somebody had jokingly was saying that it is a joke. And the neem, carolee, baba, ashram, they, there's like the five limbs of yoga. And they were talking about the five limbs of yoga, this ashram, which was eating.

I can't, I'm going to butcher this for those of you who know what it is, but it's really funny because it was eating, walking around, gossiping. I can't remember what they all were, but it was like, his whole thing was not like, let's, you know, meditate this many hours or let's, um, you know, bend our bodies in these certain ways. If you wanted to do that, he wouldn't, he was totally fine with it. But his thing was love, just love yourselves and, and get lost in love as much as you can. And then his other thing was service as much as you can. Just try to help the people, not the kids in Africa that everyone always talks about,

but the person who's right next to you right now. There's always somebody right next to you right now. And if you can help them in any way, not by telling them about the fucking eating or communicating some like grand idea to them, which is fun, but they might want a glass of wine or maybe they want some soup or food or, you know what I mean? It's very simple. It's so very simple. And that's the practice, you know, and in that process, that's the other part of the thing.

Love, serve, remember the other part of the thing is you remember God and whatever you want to call it, they use the term God. I have no problem with the term God, but you don't have to use the term God. You could say you remember yourself because those two terms are, there's an equal in between them. And the reason people forget it is because we're in these human bodies and it makes it so that you can't see that there's an equal sign. Spiritual rant, sorry. I had a horrifying experience a couple years ago at this absurd retreat that I got brought out to

in Palm Springs where there was this giant media company that was considering like relaunching or making a whole new version themselves or what might work out. And they brought me and a bunch of other figures to come like, you know, brainstorm or talk about like possible approaches or what would be cool or what would you do to kind of make a better version of this existing entity. And they had hired this group from London to sort of facilitate or run, you know, activities over the course of the couple of days, we're all going to be on this weird retreat. And it was the most appalling thing where it's like, you know,

advertising agency type English people taking a huge fee, I'm sure, for lifting and stealing things from Eastern tradition and religion. And I'm going to go ahead and fucking say the name of it. I think that they were called like nowhere. See, it's like now here, if you look at it that way, you know, like just the worst shitty English, you know, balding dudes with like genes with like dragons embroidered on them. That's rough. Lifting things from Eastern spiritualism and making like corporate seminars out of them.

And so, you know, they were kind of like forcing all these interesting people to be doing like, all right, like look in the eyes of someone like randomly like configure and face somebody and then read their energy and tell them something that they don't want to admit about themselves. That's awful. Fuck all of us. And then like a couple of days into this thing, because like you're in a room with all these other fascinating people that have been brought in to this crazy scenario. And you want to talk to them and be like, oh, hey, guy that started this amazing company,

like what the fuck? Like what's really going on? But these guys would sort of get in and be like, oh, wait, wait, no, don't, don't, don't, like, it's not the time for you guys to talk directly. We want to first we're going to do these like trustful exercises and then we're going to go for a walk and talk about, you know, brutal. And and then like the dawning realization after a couple of days of it that like they travel around and do these at all sorts of mega corporation things and that they essentially

like we had whatever the company was paying this basically paid for like the four day package. And based on that one, we weren't able to talk to each other until the third day because you've got to like build the core group, abandon identity and then communicate ideas and then get to tell you like just that we were on like that track. And that's terrible. So it was like, fuck that. Like I'm not cooperating or complicit anymore. Like I want to talk to the guy that invented this thing and just figure that out now and no

longer go through these weird, you know, structured ladder of games. But so when I see people taking things from that and then like, you know, selling weird versions of it is is corporate retreat stuff. It's just it cheapens and makes it appalling. It makes me want to walk away from the people that are drawn into that. Oh, sure. Well, yeah, that is like, I mean, I have no doubt that there's a string of like, there must be an infinite number of shitty retreats out there.

Yeah, I'm sure there's an entire like web of them that you can get sucked into for sure. But there's some good ones. And the ones that are good are going to like going to change you. And but you just have to like, you'll find the right. I mean, thank God, these are good. But because no one no one cares that no one all it's not that they don't care. But like if you want to you could do whatever you want. Like if you want to find if you honestly if you want to like find somebody that you can

sit with and like, you know, pick pick someone out and maybe do a mutual eye roll together, you're going to find that person. No one's judging anybody. And in fact, you the person you were rolling your eyes at they would if they saw you more than likely if they've been practicing long enough, they're not it's not really going. No one's getting I didn't get in one. I didn't offend as far as I'm aware. I didn't offend a single person at this retreat.

And I was not like I was constantly blasphemy. But no, no, they just seem to think it's funny. And you know what I mean? So there's no like, nobody really seems threatened. And then over the course of the thing, that ego part of yourself that's really like all that is the ego anyway, the ego is the thing rolling your eyes, the ego is the thing. But as the thing progresses, and that starts sort of melting away, then you really do that point where like, oh, here's a kook and here's not a kook.

It really does at least temporarily, in an authentic way, falls at least slightly falls away, because one of the exercises they did, which is really intense, which reminds me of the opposite of what you said, which is you look at someone and tell them what's wrong about them. In this one, you would see that one of the exercises they did is you sit across from someone. And they give you it's a compassion exercise, because they do this thing called meta, which is a Buddhist practice, which is a compassion practice that it's the stuff when they talk about like how when they've scanned the brains of Buddhist monks, it actually seems to cause like organic changes in the brain from doing this exercise.

But the essence of the thing is you sit across from someone, and they sort of walk you through like you like me, like you have the essence of the thing is you have suffered like me, you've lost people, you've gotten your heart broken, you've needed money sometimes and you didn't have it. And then you sort of go through this thing, because the point of it is like, no matter how much of a kook somebody seems, no matter how much of an asshole someone is, especially the assholes, especially when you end up around a seething cunt, really you're around somebody who is just a walking defense mechanism. And underneath that person is somebody who's just desperately trying to protect themselves,

because at some point they got fucking eviscerated by the world. And when you realize that, because that is true, then it makes it a little more difficult to create the us and them situation, which is the source of all wars and all conflict on earth, because it's like, man, by the way, there are challenges. I was around somebody last night where I was just like, I can't do it. Because I was really trying, like I was really trying, man, and if I was around this guy, I was like really trying to like, I'm going to love this guy, I'm going to love him. Like the right away when I met him, I said, yeah, hi, I'm Duncan, fairly clearly big guy, alpha male guy, and he's like donkey, your name's donkey. And I'm like,

no, it's Duncan, he's like donkey. So I'm like, all right, okay, okay, I'm not, this is the test, right? This is a test, I'm going to be, I'm going to do this, man, I'm not going to, because normally, and I would react to that, I wouldn't right away react, but I would recognize, oh, you're dumb, if you're doing that, and then I'm going to lure you down all kinds of awful traps and make you fall over yourself if I can, and really make you feel bad, and it's going to be a bad night for you. I would try to like fire back in some stupid way, I might win, I might lose, but I try. But it's like, okay, okay, let's be mindful, he goes reacting, he goes reacting, this is a dick, this is a fucking dick, let's get him, let's get him easy to get a guy like that easy, he's clearly a

dumb alpha male. But then it's like, no, he's probably, he's probably somehow weirdly in a place he doesn't like, or he feels threatened, or he doesn't feel whatever he's at, this is a defense mechanism, right? So I don't react, I just smile, it's like, if this guy feels like he's dominating me, let's let him feel like he's dominating me, you know, let's let him feel in control or whatever he's needing to feel, and then let's see what happens. Will it go on forever? Will it be a dick for the whole night? But you know what starts happening, man? He starts showing me pictures in his phone of his beautiful daughters, and then he's just talking about how much he loves them, and then all of a sudden, he's gone from being this kind of alpha male douche to this guy who's

just clearly in love with his family, and just like, I don't know. What do you feel like by not challenging him that you're enabling him to continue being that douche in the rest of his encounters with every woman he meets at the rest of the retreat, and people are like- That wasn't at the retreat, that was last night at a bar. No, that was last night at a bar. Okay. Like, I get so appalled at being, I don't want to be complicit with enabling those kind of people to continue going through the world that way. I want to sabotage them, I want to fuck them up, I want to make their conversations to the rest of the You might as well be- Not really, but what you're talking about is very similar to anybody who

like wages war. It's the same instinct, which is that I will hurt you in the way that more than you're hurting me so that you'll learn a lesson and somehow be better. It's actually in the satanic black mass, it's one of the verses, which is that if you, you know, the enemy who crosses my path, I can't remember what it is, I shall crush him so that he, it's Anton Lavey with like organ music playing, it's all very sinister, but it's like, I have fangs and I will bite if I am hurt. So, no. The thing is, if it worked, if it would work, that you could hurt a person and it would make them better, then it would be worthy of hurting them. The problem is, it doesn't work like that. If it did, the whole planet would be filled with compassionate, advanced, loving,

beautiful beings, because all we do is hurt each other all the fucking time. It doesn't work. What works is love. That's all that works. If you're around somebody who really loves you and you get the feeling that they really love you, man, you're gonna change. You won't, even if you don't want to change, a little part of you is gonna shift in a small way, even a small way, because suddenly, especially if you have a bad personality, if you have a bad personality, all your meeting is people with their shields up. That's all your meeting is people like in defense mode. So, if suddenly in this like, you know, sleepwalk that you're going through as an ego form that's trying to defend itself from pain, you run into somebody who your initial attempts to make them put up their fucking

shields isn't working, and they're just loving you, it's gonna be different, man. It might not do anything, but it really might do something, because that's that night where you didn't know why you felt different, but you felt different. And maybe that's gonna lead you in some direction. But do you think that after he showed you pictures of his daughters and you connected and had that more kind of graceful moment with him that like, he didn't go to the next person and be like, what'd you say? Your name's Frogger? Like, I don't know. I walked away from him and like, talk shit about him in the bar. It's like, I can't do it. I did it as long as I could. And then it was like, I just do, I can't be around this person that long, but I tried it and it did

temporarily work. Okay. For my, you know, it's like lifting weights. It's like, don't you're not going to go to the big weights right away, just do what you can do. And when you get sick of the person, walk away and talk shit or be mean to them if you want to be mean, you don't have to like, try to be something but experiment with it and watch what happens. It's called unconditional positive regard. There's a, Carl Rogers is, he was really into it and it's like the, he would, so like they would send him the worst kids who were about to get put into like an institution or something, the big behavior problems and they'd come into his office as a psychologist and he would have like pads of paper and crayons or pens and they'd come in and they'd

immediately start rebelling. They'd immediately start being assholes or saying shitty things to him or rebelling and he would just be like, yeah, let him, he would just, his intention was to love them unconditionally in that moment as they were throwing papers around, cutting themselves, calling him a prick. And these kids, they're the ones who all of a sudden started changing because for once in their life, they were around a being that wasn't expecting them to be different than the way that they were. And that somehow, just that, just being around someone was like, yeah, I see you and I love you even though you're shitting yourself right now. That's new. Yeah. That's gonna make a change more than the, because we've, man, we've, for our whole, we've

tried punching people into being nice. Makes great music. So I still want to ask you, like, you are in a, you know, again, in my read of things like a singular energy of making things and being iterative and generating content in a way that I don't normally see out of people that are also interested in psychedelia or, you know, going on these sort of retreats and stuff. Like, is that something that you recognize? Like, do you see other people and it's like, oh, I just don't know about it. There are, like, there's no great hippie novels. There's no great hippie paintings. Like, you know what I mean? It's like Christian music is not really good. Yeah. Like, there's good hippie novels, right? Like, Tom, Tom Robbins is

in a great hippie. He's read by hippies, but do you think he would identify himself? Oh, right. You know, right, right, right. Even the Grateful Dead, like, apparently, are like, no, I don't know about these guys. Yeah. Well, first of all, the thing about hippies is, it's like, well, okay, I know what you're saying. Yeah, I know what you're saying, but it's like, what this thing is, is not about being a hippie. What this thing is, is about, is less about being a hippie and more about actually experiencing what I would consider to be an alien intelligence that is actively making contact with this planet at all times. Right. So this is what I'm interested in about your particular dynamic and your

interest and that you're drawing from these systems and people that have studied over the centuries or years and built knowledge and formats and ways to try and get through the world, but that you've got this other tact that you're focused on. Well, yeah, I think it's what we were talking about in the beginning of the podcast, which is where does inspiration come from? Where does that spark come from? Where is it coming in from? What's the transmission? Clearly there's receivers. What's the transmission? So I think that transmission is constantly evolving alien intelligence that at its core is love and expressing itself in languages that in every single language, I'm not talking like

dialects or actual human language, but in every single subjective language that there is, it's like a transmission that is designed to communicate with every single person on earth, if you want to listen to it. And the way it talks to some people is a monkey god that represents absolute service and friendship. For some people, it could be neutral milk hotel, or for some people, it could be being in a dorm room in college with some weird existentialist genius and it uses everything around you as a form of communication and the moment you want to start talking to it, it begins to talk to you. And that's when people are like, whoa, what this crazy fucking synchronicity happened or, you know, wow, breadcrumbs was the name of

the thing. And you're like, what is that? And then that gives you a strange feeling like, how could that even be possible? It's like, you won't know that it's possible, but it just drops these little fucking clues. And it's ecstasy. It's ecstasy to start connecting to that thing. And when you start connecting to the thing, it transforms you. And then it also weirdly starts transforming the people around you too, because you've become a receiver for the thing where it's leading who the fuck knows. We'll never know. Did a goddamn single cell floaty thing way back in the primordial seas know that it would eventually transform into some kind of protohominated monkey thing that would end up going to the fucking moon. No, I didn't know that. It was just floating around. And then it found some

other little floaty thing and became symbiotic with that thing. And then that thing became a multi cell thing, which eventually led to us. And what was the thing that drew that to itself? Do you think that the moment of discovery of that sort of alien connection transmission is something that's just going to happen based on a timeline or that by actively working and looking for it is how it's going to be found? I think that it's surrendering to love. That's all you have to do. And then if you do that, if you really just make that the intention, then you begin to experience that moment of like, wait a minute, now I'm getting paid to film these bands. Instead of, you know, it's that weird leap forward. It's like, for me, it's like,

I'll think, my God, I am now making a living off of having conversations that I just loved having when I was on acid with my friends. Right. And why that happened or who knows, all I know is that somehow in the process of like having these conversations that ended up turning into my life. Who knows why? Yeah, it's beautiful though. And that's why it's like, the thing that you're doing that you love the most so often is the thing that the world will tell you that you have to give up. Right. That's so evil. Isn't that evil? Well, fuck their system. I mean, that world that's trying to tell you to give up on those things is a rotten and Mara. It's Mara. The Buddha sits at the Bodhi tree, the force of delusion and

confusion and Maya and distraction appears before Buddha. And I guarantee the modern version of that would be somebody who just wants to live in the world come their career counselor. Yeah, high school guidance counselors. Yeah, Mara was a guidance counselor. It'll never work. Your scheme will never work. And they might be right. Whatever your dumb little high school ideas or whatever the miniature thing is, I'm sorry to call it dumb. It isn't dumb. But I mean, that little idea, sure, that might not work, but it might lead you. Yeah, absolutely. Towards meeting a person or some event or something that you see or some cat, some little bit of information that you gather that leads you. And if you try to plan that, you're doomed. The only

way that you can get there is by letting go and trusting. And then that's the path that you go down. Man, you're interviewing me now and I love it. Lance, it's an hour and 37 minutes and I want to play. I can't plan on this, but I want to play this music for you before you leave. So I think we should wrap it up. But if you don't come on the podcast again, I'm going to kill myself. Okay. I want you to live, Duncan. Thank you so much. Can you tell people where they can find you? Yeah. My name is Lance Bangs. I guess Instagram is just Lance Bangs and Twitter is just Lance Bangs. And I made a film called Bread Come Trail that I'll find ways to project and show in 2014 and have a series on Comedy Central where we're going to start shooting in January called Meltdown.

Oh, you're shooting that? Yeah, I'm directing that. Whoa. Awesome. That's so fucking cool. Okay, cool. That's awesome. Follow Lance Bangs. The links will be at DuncanTruzzle.com. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. This is awesome. All right. Play the song. Thanks for listening, you guys. If you like the podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Have a great rest of your week and year. See you soon. Bye.