Duncan Trussell Family Hour - MIKEY KAMPMANN'S ST. LOUIS ADVENTURE

Episode Date: April 28, 2016

Duncan and Mikey Kampmann talk about Mikey's encounter with the throbbing heart of the St. Louis Heat.   THIS EPISODE SPONSORED BY SQUARESPACE go to squarespace.com and use offer code duncan to get 10% off your first order.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the interdimensional godlings over at squarespace.com. Thinking about starting a revolution or starting a new business or just irritating your parents

with some kind of bullshit website accusing them of being in the Illuminati, go to squarespace.com. Use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off your first order. Hey! Hello my dear sweet darlings, come on into the cave, sit down on that rock over there and let's suck on each other's feet for a while

and talk about the universe. You're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast and if this is the first time you've tuned in then you should know that this particular episode is being recorded in a hotel room in Vancouver at the very end of the longest comedy tour that I've ever been on in my life. And you, a first time listener, are probably not aware

of the fact that I have some high level connections over at Monsanto and DARPA and my sweet friends over there have actually sent me what's known as an ectoplasmic relaxation coffin. It's not a flotation tank, it's an actual sarcophagus made of a kind of tight night gold that you lay inside of in between shows inside the coffin is a kind of seminal ooze,

not quite white, a little rosy pink perhaps. Like, I don't want to say it's like bloody semen because that brings to mind so many horrible industrial accidents and various disasters that would have had to happen for the coffin to be filled with that much bloody semen. And besides, it's a vulgar thing to say. I shouldn't say it and I certainly shouldn't upload it

but I don't have time to edit this thing. The point is, I'm laying in a vibratory warm bath of ectoplasm is what the folks over at Monsanto called it. It does smell a lot like what my experience with smelling semen is but they tell me that this is actually ectoplasmic gel from the astral plane that has been pumped in via the udders of some kind of interdimensional goat beings

that they keep under the Monsanto building. It's a relaxation gel, that's the point. In fact, I'm laying in it right now. I'm not even using a microphone to record this but tiny nanobots have climbed into my skin and are transmitting telepathically everything that I'm thinking into this recording device. The point is, welcome to the podcast.

I'm glad you're here. We have a wonderful episode today. It was recorded on a bus in St. Louis, a city which seems to be on the precipice of beginning the race war that Charles Manson dreamed about so much. If you want a taste of George Orwell's 1984 mixed in with some of that sweet St. Louis paranoia

and fear, head on down to St. Louis and you can really experience Alex Jones's worst nightmare come to life. Cameras everywhere, SWAT teams lurking on the street, invisible ninjas hiding in the tops of buildings, laser sights on you at all times. If you don't have a laser sight on your forehead when you're in St. Louis, then something is probably wrong.

It's an exciting episode because comedian Mikey Kampman is my guest and he had just experienced a run-in with one of the tentacles of the dark dragon, the authoritarian, tyrannic force that for whatever reason likes from time to time to emerge into our dimension and suppress the will of the people. It happened right there.

We'd been in town for three hours and this happened to Mikey. I'm not gonna give it away, but it's kind of mind-blowing that we live in an era where someone as sweet, as sweet little Mikey Kampman, known as God's angel of comedy, should be harassed and assaulted in such a ferocious and vile way

by jack-booted thugs who want nothing more than to enclose this entire planet in the maze of polyurethane checkpoints where they can anytime they get the impetus to shove their clawed reptilian fingers into the buttholes of the innocent. This is the ultimate dream of Satan and you will hear a terrifying story

right after some very quick business. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by my lords and ladies over at squarespace.com. You call it the internet, I call it the flesh of God and if your website doesn't look good, if you have a low-grade crap website, then you are like a blemish on the sweet skin of our eternal father and mother,

the heavenly ever-present ultra-force that created every single one of us. Your website is a blasphemy and not the good kind of blasphemy and there are good blasphemies. This is why we have the Satanic black mass, a hilarious ritual to try to, for the poor bastards who have had the dark side

of dogmatic Christianity shit into their brain holes by terrified people, the black mass is a wonderful opportunity to shake the manacles that you have chained upon yourself because you believe the ghost stories of terrified people. I'm not talking about good blasphemy, I'm talking about bad blasphemies

and what's a more horrible blasphemy than starting a business, creating a website and then having the thing look like shit so that anybody who goes to visit your website is immediately shown the truth, which is that in an era where it is so easy to make a website, you have failed in this endeavor,

I don't mean to shame you, look, there's something beautiful about all things in this universe. The point is if you're thinking about making a great website, why not go to squarespace.com, use offer code Duncan and you will get 10% off a brand new website. You can transform the blemish that you have,

that you can transform that canker, that infected oozing mole on the love handle of God into something beautiful like a wonderful tattoo or some kind of transhumanist glowing LED chip that tells the universe, hey, I love you enough to try to create nice websites. If we look at the sum total of all websites on the internet, then what we are witnessing

is what the Egyptians described as what a person encounters upon death, which is that the soul is weighted. They're these scales that the soul gets weighed on and weighted, the soul is weighed on these scales. And if you've been an asshole, if there's more asshole-ness inside of you than love, in other words, if you're heavy

with the dense darkness of a selfish life, the scale will tilt in the direction of doom, and I don't know, you get eaten by scarab beetles or something, but the internet, it's very similar. When the machines wake up, when the aliens finally descend from hyperspace, they're gonna use the internet to try to determine whether or not we're a food source

or something that they should give blowjobs to. And your website, your shitty, stinky, crappy, lazy, low-grade, 1990s style bullshit website could be the website that tilts the artificial intelligence that's about to emerge from the flesh of God in the direction of destroying all of us and feeding us to its robotic spawn. So do me a favor, go to squarespace.com,

try them out, use offer code Duncan, you will get 10% off a brand new beautiful website. Another great way for you to support the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast is to go through our Amazon portal. It's one of the easiest things you could do. And listen, Amazon is fantastic because they have everything that you need.

Don't get into the hellish dark river of boredom metal that we call traffic because you wanna buy some toilet paper. Are you kidding me? Don't spend your time risking your life and traffic. If you've not gone to Reddit, Ford slash WTF, if you've not seen the disasters that are happening on our nation's highways, wild dogs jumping out

of the backs of trucks, climbing into the mini vans of parents on the way home from basketball games and chewing all of them to bits, do you want that to be you? Imagine that wild dogs leaping into your car as you drive to get toilet paper. That was your last quest. Your last pilgrimage was not to climb to the top

of some sacred peak and let one of your tears fall into a grail cup that you could then give to some sick baby so that he or she would be rejuvenated. Your last quest on this earth was to go to a ride aid or a Costco or a Vaan so that you could, because you're out of toilet paper and now wild dogs that have leapt from the back of some laboratory Vaan experimenting with making dogs angry or devouring you

and your thought is my God, if only I'd used Duncan's Amazon portal. If I'd only gone through the portal, then I could have had toilet paper delivered to me probably the very next day. And I'm sure there's other stuff in the house I could have used in the meantime is toilet paper and Amazon would have given Duncan a very small percentage

of their toilet paper profit. And so I would have contributed to the podcast. Do you want these to be your last thoughts as you're staring down at wild dogs ravaging your bowels that are sprayed all over your car in an awful multicolored spray of red and brown and yellow? No, do you wanna smell your own intestinal tract or the excitement farts of wild dogs

as they chew upon you in the awful rush hour traffic of whatever city you live in? No, if you don't want that to happen to you, please go through the portal. It's in the comment section of any of these podcasts. If you go through the portal book market, they will give us a small percentage of anything that you buy.

And there's so many wonderful things to buy besides toilet paper. If you're a video gamer, I highly recommend Dark Souls 3. I've never played a more insidious game. This game has grown inside. I dream in the Dark Souls universe now. It's a fantastic game. And if you're more of a spiritual person

rather than a video gamer or if you're both, which I like to consider myself and that's an embarrassing thing to be, I guess. But we are what we are, friends. Then check out Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogium Trumpa. You could order that book on amazon.com. You can get it on Kindle.

You can get it on Audible, whatever. We also've got t-shirts, posters. For those of you who didn't get t-shirts for whatever reason on the tour and the first leg of the tour, we went through a t-shirt company that ruined the order so we weren't able to get shirts for the first six shows or so.

We are going to have a very limited amount of tour t-shirts available at the shop. I'll let you guys know when those are there. Okay, great. Oh yeah, and one last thing. This is the final leg of the Squarespace You Are God comedy tour and so Vancouver's sold out. Tonight's sold out.

Tomorrow I'm gonna be in Seattle. There's some tickets left for that. After that I'm going to be in Portland. The first show is sold out. There's still tickets for the second show and then after that I'm gonna be in San Francisco. The first show is sold out. There's still some tickets for the second show

and then finally I'm going to be in L.A. on Sunday. That show is sold out, but I think we just released a few tickets. If you want to come to the show, I really hope that you'll get some tickets in advance Seattle and San Francisco because I guess because the simulator is malfunctioning, a lot of my shows have been selling out

and I got a really sad tweet when I was in St. Louis which read, help, the show is sold out, I'm standing outside on LSD. Very sad tweet. What can you do? So anyway, just get tickets in advance. I hope I don't sound manipulative or weird or whatever. Don't get tickets in advance.

I don't. I wait till four minutes before I get in the car to go to the airport to buy plane tickets sometimes. I'm a horrible procrastinator. I get it. Okay, there it is. Now everyone please. I hope that you will welcome a very dear friend of mine

who came with me on the entire bus part of the Squarespace you are God comedy tour. He was the tour manager, but most importantly, he was the MC of every single show and he's brilliantly funny, an incredible human being who is a co-creator of one of my favorite internet series called two wet crew. Links to that will be in the comments section

of this podcast at dunkintrustle.com. Now everybody please welcome to the DTFH, the magnificent Mikey Campman. Welcome, welcome on you. That you are with us. Shake hands, glory to you blue. Welcome to you. Welcome, welcome.

It's been dunkintrustle. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Mikey Campman, welcome back to the dunkintrustle family hour podcast. God bless you for going through this tour with me. You're welcome. It's been absolute joy, truly. Yeah man, this has been one of the most psychedelic,

insane, weird. I was just telling you how, are you tired? Because like I'm this kind of tired that I don't think I've ever been before. It's the worst thing that I've ever been. I don't think I've ever been before. It's the weirdest kind of exhaustion mixed in with what must be confusion from always waking up

in a new city. Do you feel any of that at all or is it just me? No, it's true. I think we are tired. We had a day off a couple of days ago and just everyone vetched out for 24 hours and just to lie down was a nice thing and not move for a day.

And that's when you kind of feel it. But I think it's actually easier to sort of keep when you have movement, it's easier to just keep gliding, moving forward than it is to stop in a way. Yeah, when you stop, it's crazy. When I laid down in that bed, where were we? That was Madison, Wisconsin. Madison.

God damn it. When I laid down, it was like falling into a quicksand pit. I just passed out, woke up like three hours later, and I was like, huh, where am I, what? Passed out again. We're so tired. And you don't even realize how tired you are. But it's like, and I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining

because it's one of my favorite feelings on Earth. It's a very wonderful kind of exhaustion. It's a fulfilling 24-hour cycle that we live on right now. You wake up every morning in a new place, right? You get up out of bed. And you get up early because you're not only are you doing stand-up on the shows, but you're tour managing.

So you've got a job job. So yeah, what is your cycle like? What's your day look like? I'll wake up when I feel the bus has, there's a difference. So I sleep in this little cage on the bus. A literal cage. Next to the trash can beneath the bus in a bay. So I get tucked into bed every night by Duncan,

which is really sweet. Well, I want you to have a nice, I mean, it is a cold cage you're in. And I do feel bad. As long as it's not raining on the roads, it's generally pretty good. It's been raining most of the tour. It has been, yes.

But I wake up in the morning when I feel the bus is kind of arriving somewhere. And I got to make sure that the parking situation is cool. And talk to English, who's been up all night alone. English is our bus driver. Yes. Who's from England? And we talk and we maybe watch a horse race.

And then, yeah, do a little bit of paperwork and then kind of maybe go back to bed or whatever like that. But then so anyway, we wake up in a different place every day. And it's kind of a mystery. You don't know what it is. Every day it's a little different, whether we're on a street side with little activity or we're in a parking lot somewhere or behind a venue.

And then we go through our day, whatever it is. I'd say Duncan, you enjoy your sleep. Well, I don't see my problem. So I'm in this like, Mike, you need to do a cage. I'm in a fucking palatial. It is kind of amazing. I'm in like, you're in an adult crib. I'm in an adult crib.

It's exactly if you were going to be an adult baby. And I just saw a National Geographic, a fantastic episode on actual adult babies last night. But adult babies, you know that fetish adult babies. So it's like adults who put on pajamas. They lay in a, they have these massive cribs built for them. This guy's found some woman who tends to him like a mother. She reads him stories at night.

And it's crazy. It's crazy. But it, but if you were an adult baby, that's what your crib would look like is like flat screen TV, comfortable bed, window looking out at the sky. And, but the problem is I can't fucking sleep after these shows. I'm usually so amped up that I can't get, I don't get to sleep until the bus starts moving.

And usually the bus doesn't get going to like four a.m. So I sleep till late because I'm, I'm essentially on a graveyard shift now. But, but you don't get to do that. Cause you got to wake up and handle shit. Yeah. So I also really love travel though. So I do like to kind of see some, some what, some, some of the place that we are, we're in.

And if I can see some friends in those places. You have friends everywhere. You're staying in touch with people. You're a shocking human. You are a shocking human. You are a traveler. Everywhere we go, Mikey has clusters of friends. I've never, I don't think I've ever been around someone

who has such a massive social network scattered across the country. Everywhere we go and you're, I don't know what your sleep schedule is like, but you're like working man. And you're having great shows too. You're opening up, you're doing really good. Thanks Duncan.

It's pretty badass man. It's what you're doing. It's been cool. This whole, I like experiences that push you, you know, like force you to, to grow, become stronger. And a lot of those, on most of those experiences, the first, it's the first few, like the first week or whatever, that's really challenging.

And you kind of almost even have doubts about, you know, can I do this or do I, am I enjoying this? That maybe I couldn't, that maybe I was like not fulfilling expectations of what I needed to be as a performer because maybe my brain space was, was too scattered. So that for example, my set, when I wouldn't really think about my set

until about 10 minutes before I got up on stage. Because I was doing other stuff throughout the day. And, but eventually we just, we just all dialed it in. I mean, that was what's cool about this experience. That was really cool watching you dial it in too, man. It was really cool. I mean, you had good shows all the way through, but it's pretty badass watching your evolution

over the course of doing a show after show after show after show. It's a really cool thing to watch that shift the confidence increases, the ability to connect increases. It's really cool, man. Well, I call it confidence, confidence with no substance. So. Well, yeah, that's called being human, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is no substance, there can't be. I mean, that's the ultimate secret of confidence, isn't it? Yeah, that doesn't, that no one needs to know that there's, that you don't actually have anything going on. And whenever you see, like, think of the most confident person you know, and just understand it's all bullshit. Like, just know that whatever the thing they're doing,

they've either hypnotized themselves into thinking somehow that there's some stability or security in this universe, or they're just really good actors and they know that if they act confident, things tend to go better for them. You should act confident. Things will go better for you. There's actually a, you know, people who act,

because the other thing is, if you're acting like you're not confident, you're acting too. That's the funny thing, no matter what you're acting. So, like, when you meet those people, they're like, I just, I just don't really know. I mean, I think I can, but no, that's an act too. Dum dum, we, you're, it's all a big fucking act. So, people who are acting insecure,

that's just another form of confidence. Right, and it takes, it actually does take energy to act insecure as well. It takes confidence to be insecure, because you have to be confident that you're insecure. So, it's like, no matter what, you're definitely thinking you're something. There's a term in a Zen Buddhism that I learned

at one of these Ram Dass retreats called radical insecurity is what it's called. Roshi Joan Halifax talks about this. And so, this is like, because a lot of these Zen koans that they ask, they're unanswerable and they torture your mind because they don't really have an answer and the feeling that it generates

is this kind of frustrating feeling that I can only compare to like trying to write with your left hand if you've never written with your left hand before. It's just frustrating. It produces this very frustrating thing. Or it's like that feeling of like, everyone, you know, when you're waiting

for that phone call, whatever it may be, you're wanting a job or you're wanting a girl or you're wanting a guy or you're wanting a whatever. So, you're waiting for the call. That feeling of waiting for the call is a constructed game that you have built where you pretend that you need a thing, the call, and then this produces a tension

between the place where you're at now and the call. Then you get the call and then you get to experience relief because you've gotten the thing that you've been waiting for. But really nothing has changed at all about your actual situation, which is the actual situation is no matter who called you, unless it's some genetic scientist who's figured out a way to inject you

with some superpower that's gonna eradicate your body's tendency to get old, get sick and die, then you're still in a situation where you're fucked on one level. You know, so this feeling of in so we trick ourselves into thinking that there's a solution to the problem in the micro and that's why it keeps people moving

because they're just evading the macro, which is that yeah, it doesn't really matter if whoever calls, if you become president or whatever. Anyway, so insecurity, it's the right way to feel, but you can feel insecure and act confident at the same time. That's the, you're feeling the right way if you're insecure and strategically being confident seems like always the right choice.

Yeah, yeah. Plus everything's just always changing. So even if you figure something out for a second, that's no guarantee that it's gonna last, you know what I mean? So it's just a constant, everything's just always shifting, which in some ways makes this lifestyle that we're on right now of being on this moving bus, traveling across the country, doing show after show,

where it's very similar, but you're constantly sort of having to readjust and sort of get your bearings in a new place. You got to be in the moment here, man. Yeah. Because you're right. It's like this landscape is always changing. The, every single variable is constantly in flux. And so in that swirl, you have to find an anchor point somehow.

You have to find a place. Well, we have that, the bus. So the bus is our little safe place in the world where no matter what's going on outside of these walls, we can, because that's the importance of having like building a, your corner in the world, where everything is, where you feel calm, where you feel good.

That's why I think it's important to build a home that you really love being in. You mean like a physical home? I think a physical home really does help. Having a space, and this is like maybe a nice, I mean, we can talk about having visited, I know they were just on the podcast, but Alex and Allison Gray, going up and visiting Cosm,

and you see what they've done there. They're trying to build their sort of, their perfect space in the world, where they feel both relaxed and free and strong. And then we've also seen that in different venues that just have maybe a little bit better energy because they've put a little bit more care into sort of building a place where you wanna be.

Something that I've found the more and more of travel is that you have that place that you can come and return to. Well, what is that for you usually? Like, cause you're somebody who travels around the world with a tent. Yeah, my tent is that place. That's your home, the tent.

I mean, the joke of it is that I feel more at home and more like everything feels so stable when I sleep in that freaking tent. Because it's the same, it's that same thing. It can be up in the mountains, it can be out in the desert, it can be on the side of the beach. When I get inside the tent, it's the same, it's stable. So it's like the, so it's just the,

something about the illusion of how, cause a tent, what's a tent, man? It's like, what's it made of? It's made out of nylon and mesh and poles, and it folds up, you know? But somehow that structure around you, creates this illusion of having a home. Yeah, yeah.

Cause clearly that's not the, I mean, it's kind of like, that's like a, I mean, it is sheltering you, but a lot of it's symbolic, right? It's like, here's a symbolic thing, it's like a ritual. You build the tent, you get inside the tent, but it's all mostly symbols to give you a feeling, right? The feeling of being home.

How do you, if you had to, if someone, how would you describe the feeling of being at home? That I don't feel like anyone's watching me. And that's so stupid, because in many situations, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Like that's why LA is actually a fun place to live, because people, there's freaks there that just do whatever they, they don't feel like they have to,

like, like restrict themselves from just doing whatever they want. New York's the same. I mean, these kind of big cities, you can see that a lot in big cities. You also see a lot of crazy people. Yeah, I just saw this video that popped up on the internet of a guy in New York walking down the sidewalk,

pulls his pants down and shits on a busy sidewalk, just sprays like projectile blasts, this long awful turd onto the street, very slowly pulls his pants up, casual style, buckles his belt, looks back at the turd, and then walks away. And people just keep moving by. It's like, no one's, what are you gonna do?

It's got shit on the sidewalk. Yeah, no, it's cool. I mean, that's, there's other motivation. Oh, there's, that's, I don't know what's going on there, but that's, I don't know. I don't think I would ever wanna do that, honestly, but. Well, no, I mean, you're saying that your feeling of home is, something about it is privacy.

Privacy is a huge part. Yeah, like, okay, that's one of the reasons why I like going to these really, really isolated places in the world. And it's not because I go out there and I do anything strange or whatever, but it's the sensation that I am in that moment only restricted by my own mental belief. But even those can evaporate.

So, for example, like I'll develop little behaviors out there. Like I'm almost like a different person when I'm out there because I feel like there's no judgment. And even, even for my- What person do you become out there? Someone who feels more free. Where I'm playing by my own rules. So, in that sense, like, everything,

for me, how that manifests itself is that I become very silly and I do things for absurd reasons because I'm like kind of, I'm building the world as I go. Right. Or, even on just a practical level, like I can wear whatever I wanna wear or walk however I wanna, I mean, it's just, there's no-

Give me an example of what this manifest says out there. Like, what's an example of some silly thing you do? Cause like I know right now, you're going out to the desert, you're going to- The Alvord desert. The Alvord. So, when you're out in the desert, what is an example of ultimate freedom form Mikey Canman?

I, well, my imagination definitely is running more wild out there. So, well, I'll just, I'll sing more. I don't know, that sounds stupid, but out loud. That doesn't sound stupid. I will- What kind of songs?

Songs you make up or songs- Yeah, all of it. All of it. I'll talk to myself more. I think talking to yourself is really cool. I mean, it's totally- Very important. It's very important, yeah.

To feel okay about that. Cause you are having a conversation with yourself all the time no matter what. All the time. So you might as well honor it and recognize it. And- Yeah. And enjoy it and enjoy the different voices

that exist in your own head. Well, you know, and also there's the shamanic idea, which is that we create the world with our language. So, by vocalizing, you're actually bringing the universe into creation. And this is the shaman song that they sing the Ikaro. Which is, have you heard these songs? No.

So they're beautiful, man. I'm sorry guys, I've talked about these before, but I'll try to do- I mean, I'll just make one up. I don't really do it, but it's like they- So it's like, they have whistling as part of it. So it'll be like- Whistling

That's bad. Obviously I'm not doing one. That sounds like something like really annoying. But when they do it, it sounds beautiful. And various songs, and these songs are given to them. They're passed down or they're given to them by the ayahuasca, or they're given to them by whatever the plant medicine is that they contacted.

And so, but they say, I've never done it, but they say that as these shamans sing these Ikaros while you're under the effect of ayahuasca, then it forms three dimensional shapes. So it actually, you can see what they're singing it, but it's their building forms with language. So talking to yourself, singing, all very important. Right.

Almost as if I'm having a dialogue with the actual physical landscape that I'm in. So another, I mean, I was just thinking of another example of something I'll do. I'll just sit in crouch and eat, I mean, not eat sticks, but chew on sticks or do things that make no sense. But because they make no sense, I get to figure them out and almost try to understand them while I'm doing it.

And then that also connects me with that physical place. That's so I like that aspect of it as well. Or I'll take, I own some clothes. Like I like to think of myself as having a nice style, but there are articles of clothing that I'm like, even I'm like in a city or a place, I'm like, I can't do that, I can't wear that. Like it's too much.

Like I'm just asking for weird attention. Like you're not to uniform. Duncan! Yes. And so I'll take those. I like to go out and wear those clothes out there and just make up my own rules like in that regard. Yeah.

And that's what I'm saying about where I don't feel like I'm being judged. It becomes almost more an exercise in how silly you can become and being okay with it. Because then when you come back, you can understand those things a little bit better and feel more comfortable. Everything you just described to me,

sounds like a magical ritual. It sounds like you're going out there to do magic because so much of magic is based on, I mean, that's the, I mean, one of the most delightful parts of the time you get free enough or desperate enough or sad enough or whatever in your brain to start practicing magic, where you actually start doing it.

Because to practice magic, you know, you've got to throw off a lot of like, you got to throw off a lot of bullshit like to do it. Because right now, for those of you listening, especially the skeptics, imagine practicing some kind of magical ceremony. Like whenever I think about it, a few people in my life, their voice will come into my head.

Because you know, different, you put the masks of people you know on different components of your personality. So people who've influenced you the most, when you're about to do something, you might hear their voice as the voice of advice coming in or whatever. I don't know if that happens to you, but I've got a whole, what do you call it?

Panoply of people in my life sit silently either feeling proud of me or judging me in my head. You know what I mean? So you'll have all different aspects of your behavior. Like for example, you have some part of you feels like you can't do magic or you can't become this being that you are out in wilderness or in a low population density area,

in a high population density area. And so there's some block there that's like, shit, you just can't do that. You can't do it here. You can't wear the weird outfits here. I haven't seen you wear too many weird outfits on the bus. You can't, so there's something inside of you keeping you from doing that, right?

So anyway, if practicing magic, you'll hear all these funny voices like, what are you, you're losing your mind. That's one of the first ones you'll hear. You're going nuts or what's wrong with you. This is a waste of time. You're desperate or you're stupid. Or are you out of your, what are you fucking hippie?

You'll hear all these things, right? And when you finally manage to throw those things away. And magic, you know, or what I consider magic, it is exactly what you're talking about. It's not like you can refer to some of the varying scriptures or grimoires or whatever for the rituals that you want to do. But really like my version of it is,

understand those as a kind of structure that people have come up with, North, South, East, West, understanding the directions, understanding where you are in relation to those directions. And then after that, it's like, just have fun. And I have a sacred substance involved in it, helps a lot too. So like get insanely, insanely, insanely high

and then start doing just what you're saying. It reminds me of magic, chewing on sticks, connecting to the earth, connecting to the space you're in. I'll say goodbye to hotel rooms, man. Like when I'm leaving a hotel room, I'll say, thank you so much. Thank you for letting me sleep here. I love communicating with structures.

But yeah, so it's magic. What you're doing out there is magic. And you only let yourself practice magic in the wilderness. Yeah, yeah, I suppose. Wilderness and within my own household as well. In your house, that's where you do it. Yeah, as well.

Just because that's where you feel good. And it sounds silly to keep using that word safe, but safe is an idea of judgment. Well, you don't want to deal with the fucking evil eye, man. I mean, that's the thing. It's like we're talking about what, so as all practicing shamans and magicians, witches, and there's so many of them out there,

one of the things that we don't like and we are very sensitive to is something called the evil eye. And so that is if a person looks at you in a judgmental way, or if you're in the beginning of some creative endeavor and a person looks at you in some weird way, this is the evil eye. And it can make you start questioning the beginning of your process.

And then that can cause the process to become tainted and diluted. And then shamans talk about how they throw psychic darts. They'll throw these poisonous darts that get stuck in you. And so the Western version of that is somebody that you trust, or someone that you like, or someone you know says a passive-aggressive thing to you in passing, but you start thinking about it later.

You've got a linguistic dart inside of you, a little poison dart that they threw, and it can ruin your creativity. So you're worried about the evil eye. You don't want someone to judge you for expressing yourself in this ultimately free way, it sounds like. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's where that's actually maybe one of the areas where we're smoking weed, especially like at home, if I'm getting dressed when I'm not to make this about fashion and stuff like that. It's a huge part of everything. It's a costume that you just decided to put on every day anyway. Yeah.

So in the same way that you're saying insecurity is an act, so is everything, the whole thing. That's actually one of my great friends. Tom, he once said that his whole life is a performance. Right. So might as well just enjoy it and express yourself as much as you can. But so smoking weed at home, especially

if I'm getting ready to go out for a night out, is really fun because then you end up coming up with some little, you just frame your mind within your own home space. And then you enter the world like that. And you can carry that energy with you. I'm a big part of if we're going to describe this as magic, which I hadn't really ever thought about before.

But if I belong in any form of magic, it would be energy magic. So that with you, no matter how you look or where you go, you carry with you a certain energy that is palpable to people. It can be read by people. You can be as transparent as you want to be. So for example, just thinking about this because we're in a new place every day.

And I walk around and sometimes I feel like an outsider because we're just into this. Yeah, we are. But I like to just think of it as I can navigate this space. But as long as I'm calm and as long as I have that peace with myself, then I can almost be water through this place, you know what I'm saying? And water just moves wherever the path of least resistance is,

right? Isn't that true? Oh, yes. But there's certain places that I have done these awful, I don't know if you'd call it the placebo effect or whatever. But so there's certain places in the world where I've decided that I have less potency than other places in the world.

So I've created a magical hierarchy where there's some places where I feel like my juju is somehow diminished versus other places. Now, this is all another form of magic because by imbuing one place as a potent place and another place as a non-potent place, you have done the spell in your own conceptualization of the place.

And this is actually, I would say, an indication of a kind of neophyte when it comes to, if you want to call it magic or whatever you want to call it. It's an indication of just not recognizing that you're still in the process of creating the illusion of sacred spaces. When the ideal, it's fun to just come up with ideals, right? Like when you're planning to just shoot a sketch,

whenever you're planning to make something, you imagine the ultimate version first. Like if you had a trillion-dollar budget, we're going to have flying dragons. We're going to have to build a bridge here. We'll have a skyscraper. I need stuntmen. We're going to get Patrick Swayze on board.

So you imagine the ultimate version. And then you start reducing it down to what you can actually afford. So in the same way, it's fun to imagine, OK, the ultimate version of Mikey Cameron. And so it seems like the old one freedom, that freedom that you're talking about, that you have to make these pilgrimages to go contact nature

where you are fully embraced by the universe. And in that place, you blossom and become yourself. So the ideal, wouldn't it be that you no longer have to do any of these pilgrimages? Because that state of expansive consciousness comes into you wherever you may be. That's the dream, yeah. That's the super powered you.

That's like the ultimate wizard campman. That's Gandalf campman, right? Where it doesn't matter where you're at. Yeah, I think that's what people must talk about. That's what they're just trying to describe when they talk about knowing themselves or being at peace with themselves or something like that. Actualization.

Yeah. Because underneath all this brick and. Well, so for people who are listening, it's like, yeah, we've been on this tour. And you're thinking, oh, well, I live in a bus with Duncan Trussell. That must be really rad. It must be exciting.

And aside from like. The black eyes. Yeah, I was going to say exactly. The occasional sort of physical and verbal abuse. Once you get used to that. I don't consider it abuse. It's a form of love, I suppose. I feel like you're abusing me right now.

Honestly, God, every time you whine about sleeping under the bus, I feel like you're abusing me. We really do have so many. We've had so many good conversations. And so it was like almost when we decided to do the podcast today, I was thinking, man, like we've already talked about so many things. But one of the conversations we had one night that I really

remember, and I wrote it down as we were talking about this idea of there being chaos in the world or being in the presence of someone who's having a fit of some sort or bringing their bullshit into your life and whatever. And one of the mental images I got in my head was the idea of this roaring sea, this stormy, chaotic, rough ocean with white caps and stuff like that.

And being able to take that in your hand and grab it with your hand and bring it over to this other side and let it go. And it's instantly upon letting it go, it's a mirrored pond, just perfectly still. And that's something as well that I'm like, that's a new idea that I would like to keep thinking about. That's a great one.

And that's the somewhere in the Bhagavad Gita that described the mind of the sage. And they talk about it's like a vast ocean with all these rivers entering into it, and it's just calm. In meditation, they say, it's like when you have a glass of sediment and water, the sediment will inevitably kind of go to the bottom of the glass.

But then if there's turbulence, then the glass is suddenly filled with dust. And that's compared to the mind. And the sediment is your habituations and thought patterns and the neurological, whatever has been baked into your neurology, your addiction, and all that. But then the water would be the consciousness

that's always there. Interesting. And so no matter what, you're just that consciousness. I mean, no matter what, when you go out into that vast space, it's not that you're experiencing it. It's that you're experiencing you. Because you're mirroring that you are that place. And in that same analogy that you just gave,

in that glass of water where the sediment floats the bomb, it's not like the sediment went away. You can never escape that. Those things are there always. But what I like about, so for example, out in the place, like in Antarctica, I discovered this a lot as well, because it was such a quiet and at times isolated place. And same with whether I'm in the desert or whatever,

it's silence ultimately that becomes that thing that a lot of those superfluous thoughts and noise, those go away. And what they do is they peel back those layers to reveal what is there for me. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, for sure. But do you ever do any kind of like meditations

where you begin to? I've got the worst discipline in the world. Oh, I do, too. You don't, the whole, I don't know. I guess, sure, of course, meditation and discipline are somehow mixed together. But it's like, all you discipline fucking meditators out there, go run a marathon, go do your fucking meditation

push-ups in a different temple, bitch. This whole thing, because so many people are like, look, I get it, congratulations. You guys managed to become a discipline meditation. But some of us are like, so what happens is, for me especially, my mind will say, OK, well, this is what meditation looks like for you, Duncan. So I'll tell you, my mind will say to me, OK,

if you want to get spiritual, Duncan, here's what you, what it looks like. Right, right. You're going to wake up at five in the morning and take an ice cold shower and sit at your puja table and listen to the Hanuman, Chalisa, and say some positive affirmations and prayers for the world.

And then have a nice vegetarian breakfast and then go for a jog after your food digest and write in your affirmation journal and get in your line. Shut up. That's a super ego. That's not it. Fuck you with your fucking 5 AM wake-up call

and your cold shower and the puja table. No, no, no. Meditation is something that can happen right now, even during the podcast. Even with us talking, you can begin to meditate. You don't have to have the ego wants to trick you into thinking in the same way that you think. And I don't mean to diminish it, because I do think

there are definitely sacred spaces. But the idea is if I go to the way out of the desert, there I can truly be myself. If I'm in my home, I can truly be myself. But these places, I've got to be a little bit on guard. So in the same way your ego will tell you, you need to go to this place to meditate. You need to go to that place to meditate.

No, now you can do it. You can do it laying in your bunk. You could do it falling asleep. The whole fucking thing is a temple. Smash the walls that you've constructed around yourself. Yeah, because it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. All of that is just the mind tricking you, as it will,

to be consistently at odds with yourself, creating the stupid tension between where you are and where you should be. And that produces the sensation of inferiority, which then produces the sensation of accomplishment, which then makes the dopamine secret, which produces a perfect addiction mechanism. So you need to stretch yourself out, create the tension,

so that you can feel good again when you release the tension. And this is like, anyway, so the point is this expansiveness meditation, which cornfield does a lot, which is you can just sort of like start playing around with like, okay, where am I, right? Like, you know, right now we're sort of sitting in a chair on a bus, right?

And so then, but where am I? Where am I really? And so like, where is the boundary between where I stop and where the world starts, right? So you just start playing. You fell asleep on me, boy. Wake up, Mikey. What?

Oh. You start spreading out. I will break your fucking leg. You'll go to that goddamn Sonora Desert with a lamp. I wanna, yeah, yeah. But you can expand out now, you know? You could stretch the fucking thing out. They've done, I've done,

they do these guided meditations and these cheesy retreats I always talk about. But in these meditations, they will open your mind and your mind starts stretching out so that you realize that the enclosure that you've created for the poor little primal savage that is your heart in this tiny little egoic guerrilla cage that you've been running around on doing like swinging on,

you realize like, oh shit, it's a fake enclosure. The fucking wild savage primordial being at any time that I want to, you can go stretching outside the boundaries of myself and suddenly it's like, you're not in a bus anymore. The bus is just a denser form of matter that happens to be around you. But really, you're stretched out, man.

You're stretched out as far as you fucking want. It expands if you want it to. And then the anchor point is the pain or something, right? The suffering or whatever the anxiety is. Yeah, maybe you come back to those things. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know, it's exciting. It's exciting.

All those ideas are really exciting to me. Yeah, they're pretty cool. It's a pretty cool, they're all, I mean, you know, they're all tricks, really. It's like, they're just tricks. There's like little tool tricks, tools and tips and tricks that people have come up with over thousands and thousands and thousands of years of trying to.

But what's the alternative? To just accept that life has to be a certain way. That seems boring, you know what, you know, does that make? Well, some people are really, I mean, I can only extrapolate from my own pain. So I know like the way I act when I'm in pain tends to be shitty. Classic examples slamming your finger in the door.

And someone walks by and's like, hey, what's up, Mikey? And you just slammed your finger in the door. You might be like, fuck you! Yeah, yeah. You don't mean it, you don't wanna hurt them. But some people, their heart has been slammed in a door that they can't open. That's true.

And so they're in the most agonizing psychic pain. And they don't realize it maybe. And so the alternative is to allow yourself to be in a never ending state of pain and paranoia and suspicion and anger. And to allow that to be the thing that defines the universe you're in. So now you're in a universe of good people and bad people.

Good people punished, or rather bad people punished, good people rewarded. And then in that you become your own little fascist, tyrant dictator running a little city-state that consists of imaginary things. Cause none of it's real. Your idea of what anybody's like around you is completely just a projection of your own identity

under them. Should we talk about how I got pulled over by SWAT today? Speaking of fucking pigs. Yeah, this is, so you just tell the story and most people know why the city we're in right now is a little on edge, but you give the back story. Yeah, okay, so we're obviously in St. Louis, which is, we're nine miles from Ferguson, Missouri right now,

where of course the death of Michael Brown and all the protests went down and the riots and- Let's imagine some people aren't aware of what happened to Michael Brown. An unarmed black man was shot after being pulled over by cops and maybe there was a disagreement. Even my own knowledge on this is a little weak. I'm a little confused about it.

Like I think he like, didn't he like go into a liquor store or something and was like, isn't there some video of him doing some kind of grabbing some shit in a liquor store? Yeah, so there was, it's not like a perfectly clean situation of just guy walking down the street. Well, I mean, the last I checked shoplifting from a liquor store doesn't have the penalty of death

attached to it in the United States. Right, no, that's absolutely true. So this horrific event went down within the last year, right, it's still fresh, I mean, it's ultra fresh. And so that's where we are, we're in St. Louis. And again, we wake up, the bus lands, I feel it idling, get up, talk to English, watch a horse race.

We watched the Grand National Horse Race today. And then at some point I decided, hey, I wanna go get a bite to eat. And so I checked out, you know, found this place online. It's supposedly a nice little piece of Americana. I like to check out these little diners and very Guy Fieri-like. And I head out onto the street.

And so I'm walking down the street and I feel like I'm wearing a comic relief eight sweatshirt. I've got a War of the Worlds hat on and I'm wearing violet sunglasses, which I got in Madison. And so I'm walking down the street. You stick out like a sore thumb. Yeah, but I don't look like a freaking terrorist.

You don't look like you live here. Yeah, maybe it's true, but who knows what anyone looks like. I'm not trying to justify what happened, but that outfit that you were wearing, if I was casting a movie and I wanted to cast like some kind of like hacker for Occupy Wall Street. Like an Occupy Wall Street hacker.

It's the same hat I wore when I played hacky on the Tim and Eric tour, the hacker, the computer hacker in the crowd. See, there you go. So it is rooted in some hacker culture. So, but nonetheless, I'm walking down the street, very casual. I have my earbuds in.

I make a phone call to my friend who's a farmer in Oregon. We're just talking. He's standing in the field right now while we're talking and he's asking, how's the tour going? And I'm saying, I'm talking about how great it's been and- He's dunking, he's hitting me. He's dunking, he's hitting me.

Me, me, me. You know, those supportive conversations really help. Get through it. Me, me, me, me. Now, out of the corner of my eye, I see this strange looking structure, architectural structure. And I'm all like, what is that?

Like on this beautiful day in St. Louis. What is that? Interesting architecture. And I bought binoculars before this tour started. And as I, even a surprise to my own self, I'm starting to get into watching birds. Bird watching. Bird watching and also just,

how about having a tool in my backpack that at any given moment, I have 10 times the strength of my own eyes. Really cool. Why would I not have those on me all the time? So I have my backpack on me and I bust out my binoculars while I'm on the phone with my friend. And I'm checking out this strange structure.

It kind of looks like roads curving into the sky, like a sky bridge of some sort. That's what it looked like to me. And I was like, what the hell is that? I couldn't figure out if it was freeway or what? But it was like these like strips, like bending. Like I just saw like a corner of it. And so I have my binoculars out and I'm like zooming,

I'm like zooming and looking at them. And then I was like, that's really pretty. So I've figured out that I can put my camera lens up into the binoc, one of the eyes of the binocular and take photos like that of like, that's cool. So I take one picture. I've just put the picture camera down.

I saw the binoculars in my hand and boom, boom, two police cars pull up like perpendicular style, like as if they're like cutting me off, you know, but I'm like already standing there. And one of them is a SWAT vehicle and one of them is a regular police vehicle. Two cops come out of the regular police vehicle and a solo SWAT officer comes out of the SWAT vehicle.

Suddenly I'm surrounded by three. What's the SWAT officer wearing? A black, all black outfit with says SWAT on it. Like, you know, when you realize you're talking to a SWAT, I mean, that's just what the fuck, like what's going on? So they're coming up with, like they walk up kind of slowly but they're, you know, I see them checking out. There's immediate tension, of course.

And they say, what are you doing? You know, what are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm checking out that building. I've never seen anything like that before. What's that, what's that building? And they're so confused. Right. What, which building?

That one over there with the sky, like the roads, like what, oh, Union Station, the train station. I said, yeah. And they go, okay, do you realize that you're next to, you're appearing into a police parking lot. And it's not like a parking lot full of police cars. It's like, hey, I work at police headquarters. I got to park my civilian car for the day.

Yeah, there were a few, we passed it. There's a few cop cars. There's some like, you know, vans and stuff. But there's not like, it's not filled with cop cars. No, like, no signage anywhere that says you're not allowed to look. One sign. Well, there's a sign, police.

Yeah, but definitely not. No, it just says police, it says police parking only. I mean, they're saying don't stand here and take pictures. Right. So they asked me where I'm from. I said I'm from California. They say, can I see your ID? Now, I know Duncan, we already talked about this.

There's such, you're saying, I don't have to, I don't have to respond, yeah. Right, technically, theoretically, you don't have to respond. But I- But the police officer's here. Me being someone who, in this case, I've got nothing to hide.

I've been caught looking at architecture. And also the cops here do kill armed people. Yeah, also you are aware, like, oh, shit, this is, yeah, Ferguson, like this is St. Louis, okay. So they check my ID and very skeptically, sort of like, they just say, listen, you can't do this, you can't, you can't, you know, I was there for two minutes, man.

So whatever surveillance cameras picked me up, they fucking, they were in there in a flash. So after this happened, I'll let you finish the story real quick, they're, Mikey, after this happened, now he's living in, because he had contact from the state, now he's in, now we're in 1984. Cause once that happens, and the illusion of your autonomy has been completely shattered by armed thugs,

stopping you for nothing, completely violating your constitutional rights. You can't fucking do that, you're doing nothing wrong. Then we start looking around, man. There's cameras everywhere, this whole neighborhood is littered, every corner has got surveillance cameras. So there's something going on here in St. Louis that is, we haven't experienced anything like this

anywhere else in the country. Personally, I don't think, I mean, this felt, and I even, they said, you gotta understand, we've had a lot of incidents here recently, tensions are high, there's been threats called in on us, there was the Michael Brown incident, which we were joking, it's like, oh, the Michael Brown incident,

where you shot an unarmed person, like, yeah, I could see how, I could see how. People might be a little un-edged. Yeah, but I wouldn't, how would that make you nervous? Because you asked them if they've noticed a correlation between rising tensions and them shooting people for no reason. We've noticed the more we keep stopping people

for doing nothing, that tensions seem to be rising more and more. I didn't say, all I said was that, I said, well actually, no, so they let me on my way, and I get back on the phone with my friend, because at some point I said, hey man, I gotta call you back, I'm surrounded by cops. I should've stayed on the line, is what I should've done. So I call him back, and I get,

maybe two minutes down the road, boom, boom, same two cop cars, pull over again, all three cops get out again, now suddenly I'm surrounded for a second time. You should've run. That's how I get shot in the fucking back. So they say, sorry, we're not trying to harass you. And I go, okay.

You're not trying to harass me. No, you are. You literally are harassing me. But we noticed that you took a photo back there. So they've, I don't know if they got an instant replay and peeled back the surveillance camera, and watched me take a photo. And so they go, we saw you take a photo back there.

You don't, technically you don't have to show us, but it would make us feel a lot better if you did. And again, I think almost to like, prove the absurdity of the situation, I was like, yeah, I would more than happy to show you the one photo of a piece of architecture. Oh god, dude. Now see, that's where you messed up.

Because what you should've done, it's shown them, I know you must have a dick pic on your phone. Yes. You should've shown them a fucking dick pic. I think this is it. Is that what, is that train station made of big dicks? Or a picture of Michael Brown on the ground.

Oh, that would've been awesome. And you would've been shot, or you'd've been arrested. Oh my god. Because that's the problem here, man, is it's like, we want to be constitutionalists, and you want to rebel, and you want to make it hard for them, but also you don't want to get murdered. Here's what's strange, in this situation,

they were the ones who were visibly nervous. They were the ones who seemed to be living in a fear state. Yeah, they are. And that's what I even said to them. I said, this is eye-opening to me, and I'm sorry that you guys live in a world where a guy who's looking at binoculars is interpreted as a threat.

And they didn't really have much to say about that. But they said, sorry, again, to have stopped you, and hope you have a good day. And I just said, yeah, I'm probably not going to do much here for the rest of the day. Not going to have a good day, because you guys just fucking stopped me for nothing. But think about that, man.

Think about that they do live in a world here where they are on that edge. And I don't know if, again, it's such a complicated situation. But in those situations, I just feel sorry for people that that is their reality, that that is their vision of reality. And that is because it's just so tainted with fear

and so tainted with violence. But think about this, because it's good to feel compassion for them. And I think that's important. And I don't do it enough. It's so easy to demonize them. But think about this. You've been in this city for less than what?

We've been there for less than maybe two hours. Less than two hours. And you've already been stopped by a SWAT team. You've been here for less than two hours. You've already been stopped by a SWAT team. Imagine living here as a Black dude. Imagine that. If a fucking hacker looking hipster dude wandering down

the street with binoculars gets the SWAT team called on them, what happens to just the normal African-American dude who for whatever reason, in front of all these security cameras, turns the wrong way or stops? And that's actually, but further down the street from where this all went down, there was a group of people just on the street. And when they let me go, it was mostly Black people.

When they let me go, it was an eye-opening experience of like, oh shit, here are these dudes now who have been living in this. This is their home city. This is probably something they're experiencing again, yeah, every day. Yeah, they've tightened the screws too much here, man. That's a problem. If they're fucking pulling you over,

that means they're harassing everybody. And that whole like, sorry, I don't, well, you don't want to harass you. No, you're harassing me. You don't get to do this. And it just radically changes how you feel about walking down a street in your own country, in your own city.

You're being monitored. I mean, you're being monitored by cameras. They did replay the footage. Otherwise, they would have asked you about it when they pulled you over the first time. They replayed the footage. Also, they filed that footage away somewhere now. They probably have like a folder of suspicious people

that you have landed in. I would love to get that for my reel. You know, so it's fucked, man. This is a fucked situation. It really is. And you never forget it, man. When the state shoves their gross, trembling little finger into the asshole of your life and prods around a little bit,

it's like, you don't forget about that quickly. It sticks with you. It's just so, it's incredible that these things that we even talked about in the last hour can all just coexist at the same time. All symbols. Well, it's a war of symbols. It's like, here's what happened.

Three guys with symbolic power pulled you over. Their only real power is physical, violence. That's their real power. But they have symbolic power, which has been imbued upon them supposedly by the will of the people. That's the idea, is that people have imbued these people with power.

They have their magical outfits on. The SWAT team has his magical outfit on. The police officers have their magical outfits on. And these are all types of magicians who have come to you, imbued with the power of the state. But it's all just symbols. They're real, the only symbol you really need to worry about, of course, is their gun

and their physical power. But really, what happened is three guys that you don't know stopped you on the street. And they're playing a game of make-believe. And the game of make-believe they're playing is we're police officers. That's a game of make-believe. You're not a police officer.

You're a human. You're a monkey descendant. But you're not a police officer. You're just a human wearing a costume. And now I have to play this game of make-believe, where I submit to you. And if I don't play the game of make-believe, the illusion is I'm going to be fine,

because it's my right to do this. But once you start shooting people for not playing the game of make-believe, then I have to play the game of make-believe. So now you are forcing me to play game of make-believe. So it's all just symbols, right? It's all just symbols. And when you realize that it's just a war of symbols, then it can loosen it up a little bit,

or at least make it slightly more interesting. But those cameras, those cameras, those are symbols. Every single one of those cameras is saying we are watching you. If they posted signs all over that said Big Brother is watching you, then there would be more protests, and they would have to take the signs down.

But they don't need to post those signs. They just need to put those cameras up. And it's the same fucking thing. We are watching you. You are not in control. You do not have the power here. You do not have the power. We do.

That's the message that you get here. And that's the message you got rolled right into town, didn't you? You rolled into town and had the classic archetypical running with a fucking sheriff. It's like, well, well, well, what do we have here? Stranger in town, huh? Hope you're not up to no good, son.

Are you up to no good, son? Yeah. That's what you had. It's the classic running with the law. But then two hours later, I was watching a koi fish eat a french fry in an artificial jungle of this restaurant that we went to. And the koi fish got arrested.

I don't know, man. I just, it's just, it's disturbing. And I'm glad that this is where we have the luxury of being like, guess what? Bus is peeling out at 3 in the morning. Bye. Yeah. But yeah, my sympathies do go out with people

who have to live in these states. And this is, guess what? We aren't the only, I mean, obviously there's countries out there in the world that are way worse than this. Palestine. Yeah. Look at the fucking Palestinians. Look what they have to go through.

Yeah. How can anyone find, yeah, I don't know, man. It's, yeah, yeah, we've created all of this, too. That's the irony is we've created all of it. Yeah, we built, we built the thing up. Everyone's playing this ridiculous game. And make believe, yeah. And changing the rules of the game and make believe at that level

are really difficult. Like it takes a lot of, because when you, when you see a riot happen, or a huge protest, what you're seeing is a group of people saying, hey, just for a second, we're not going to play make believe. Right. We're done with this game for a second, OK? We're not playing make believe. We're going to play real right now,

or we're going to play as real as we can, which is that we're tired of being monitored. We're tired of being shot. Right. And so for a second, we're going to not play this game. And I love that. I love watching that happen, because in the United States, they're really good at giving you the feeling,

because what they say, you know, this is freedom, is really saying you're free to make believe you are whatever you want, right? Up until a point. But the moment you start going against the game of make believe that they want us to play, at some point you hit this invisible barrier, and that's when the fucking weird vehicles start pulling up.

And that's when those people in the goddamn Darth Vader outfits come out of the backstage area, and they like start fucking spraying you with poison, beating you with clubs. They say, you are going to play this fucking game of make believe, or we will spray you with poison, and we will fucking kill you. Get back to playing the fucking game.

And then you do. You're like, all right, I guess I'll play the game again, because I don't want to die. That's the problem right there. And a revolution is just one game of make believe overcoming another game of make believe. So what do you think, what should people do? Well, I mean, this was the idea of the election cycle,

is that every four years we get to vote on what game of make believe we're going to play. And then we're supposed to elect people that are going to represent the game that everybody wants to play. And so the problem is when the people that we've elected are not playing the game that we thought they said we were going to play, we were voted for you

because we wanted to do jump rope. And you guys are doing hopscotch. So yeah, so that's where the problem comes. But here's the biggest game. This is the real problem. There's so many more of us than there are of them. So many more, so many more. And it doesn't matter, ultimately,

because really the other game that we're playing is we're pretending that they have the power. They don't have any fucking power at all. There's so many of us. There's so many of us. They couldn't do shit. It doesn't matter if they have all the fucking weapons. If we united, if everyone unified, if it really happened,

we only need like 70%, 60% of us. It would never happen. But the point is, once the people join together from the individual to the whole, they become the most dangerous, blood thirsty, savage beast. And when that happens, it's like, I don't care how many fucking SWAT officers you have

or how many outfits you have, no one cares. And you get to watch this now. There's videos all day long on the internet. Just check out fucking Gaddafi. Check out Gaddafi being like stabbed in the asshole. That guy used to live in like a palace, you know? Or look at like Mussolini. Look at Hitler in a fucking bunker.

You can see again and again and again and again. It's just an illusion. It doesn't last. But the idea was, let's figure out a way to not change these games with violence. There doesn't have to be a human sacrifice to start a new game. Like we could figure out a way to do it

in a more, in a less violent way. That's the idea. And it does work. You know, Martin Luther King, well, no, he got shot. But he did do non-violence and he did help some stuff, but they'll kill you. That's a happy way to end the podcast. Why are people so resistant to change?

Well, I mean, I think it feels good to, I think that if you're, so if we're talking about this game of confidence and insecurity, and if you're some fucking, if you're a 300-pound man with a cyclone of insecurity inside of you, raised by racists, taught that black people are crooks from the moment you were born,

just hearing the poisonous fucking story. It's an old story over and over again. Cause a lot of these, you know, it's that fantastic, what's that quote from Rage Against the Machine? Some of them who burn crosses, wait, some of them who work forces are the ones who burn crosses. Some of the, you know, so it's like,

so when you realize that like the KKK and a lot of those people did a relatively logical chest move, which is that they just became police officers. Yeah, including, I found this out about the Los Angeles, I'll have to talk about this. So I went to this amazing conversation, and it was on black history in Los Angeles. And the police force in Los Angeles was recruited

from the south, from southern states, Alabama, Arkansas, people who came back from the war. I think this was the 50s, so at the end of World War II. And they found people who had racist tendencies and said, hey, you just got back, you looking for a job? Guess what? We're building a police force out in Los Angeles. Would you like to have a job?

We'll pay for you to relocate out there. And systematically, a racist police force was built in Los Angeles in the 50s, which then 30 years later, after 30 years of established behavior and culture, it manifested itself at the end of the 80s, early 90s with Rodney King. Oh yeah, that's right. Oh, there you go, well, there you go.

It's like, so when you start to peel back some of these layers of that's rude, like facade, and then you realize that, dude, so many of these things that have gone on in our own American history are so buried in history by these very specific actions to create a world that was run by racism or run by control of power or wealth or greed. Man, it's so disturbing, so disturbing.

Well, there's where the problem lies, because it's like, you know, if you did a brain scan on some of these people who are heavily armed and you realize that they've been indoctrinated into a philosophy that looks at minorities as an inferior race, less intelligent, more prone to crime in a race that like, many of them probably still think that slavery

might not be that bad an idea. So when you look at that and realize that they've become heavily armed, and really, it's like, you know, you only need one pedophile to ruin a summer camp, right? Like you don't need like, you don't need a bunch of them, right, so like, so like, in a police station, not all the police officers working there

are indoctrinated racists. Some of them are people who want a job, some of them, and this is the part that'll bring a fucking tear to your eye, are people who want to be heroes. In India, the class is known as the kashaitra class, the warrior class, and it's a class of warriors who want to protect people who need to be protected. So some of the people in police departments are heroes.

They want to be heroes. They got into it because they want to protect people. So mixed in with this group of like, people who are there for a fucking job, people who want to protect people are fucking demons. People who go home at night and talk about how, I wouldn't be surprised if it's on them, talk about how they want a fucking race war,

how they can't wait for the next riot so they can get out there on their big fucking goddamn water cannons and wield their military-grade weapons and look at the shriveling fear of oppressed people as they gaze up at them. They like that feeling. That's what I'm saying, man. Some people, it gets their fucking dick hard, man.

They like it. They're sadists. Okay, there's people who love S&M, right? There's people who fucking love tying up other people and some people love tying up other people because they like to give pleasure because some people like to be tied up. So it's like an incredible way

to give people the most extreme pleasure, right? But some people, like the BTK killer, the Bind Torture Kill Killer, he liked tying people up because it gave him pleasure. He liked having someone tied up who couldn't move, that he could then torture for a few days because it made him come really hard and he really enjoyed it.

There are people like that who have badges. They just like it. They like the feeling of it. They like it when you're showing them the picture in your phone. They like it when you're acting nice. They like it when you feel empathy and compassion for them because they look at it as a kind of cowering,

submissive weakness that gets their dick hard. So that's the fucking problem is we gotta figure out a way to get those people out of the position of putting people into prison and into prisons, you know? And how do you fucking do that? I just wanna take my shirt off and go to the beach. Take your shirt off around here. You'll get shot, Mikey.

You'll get blasted. If I bet, that's a fun thing. Somebody should do a game show here. Somebody should do a, this would be a really fun game show. Like how quickly can you get blasted? So you think you can get blasted? That's a fun, hey guys, living out here. Don't get hurt, but I think it would be

a very funny YouTube series. If I was a black dude living out here, I would do a series which is like see how long you can do certain things here without getting stopped by the cops. Like see how long you could do constitutionally accepted, completely approved things here before the cops stop you. And you ever can do, like you could do bets.

You could like, you could do bets. You could like, it would be, that'd be really interesting. Cause if my friend, Mikey, who is white as the snow of Antarctica. Come on man, I got a nice tan. You're white dude. I've been complimented multiple times on this tour for how are you so tan.

You're gonna have coffin on the, you're literally sleeping in a, fine. You're tan, whatever you want to say. Jesus. You look like you've climbed out of a fucking cave man. I know I'm not embarrassed by how pale I am. The point is, if you, Mikey, can't fucking pull a pair of binoculars out on the streets here

without immediately getting stopped by cops, then it must be like, Jesus fucking Christ. If you're a black guy walking home here, it must take you two hours just for all the checkpoints you've got to go through. Someone should start documenting this. I would love to see that. Yeah, but I think the response you'd get to that is

from black communities in this country would say, we are documenting it every day with our eyes and with our bodies and with our minds and our blood and everything. So wake up, like, guess what? It's, you know, this country's just so big, man. This country's so big, it's hard to be in touch with all. So that's what's been kind of cool on this tour.

So drive around and get a sense of where everyone's at. And this is the definitely of all the spots we've been. This is definitely, because when you told me this morning, I was about to leave the bus to go eat. And Mike, he's like, I just, I was actually looking at Twitter, he tweeted, I've just been stopped by the spot team. And I'm like, that's hilarious.

But then I realized, oh fuck, it really happened. But yeah, when you walk around here, man, there's a real tension here. People, we are so sorry that you're having to go through this, this is a, this is a really, I don't know the answer, man. I mean, you know, this is such a callous thing to say, but I guess you peep, some people just can't fucking move.

But it's like, just fucking, I'd want to just leave. I just want to leave. But then to leave is to surrender, I guess. To leave is to be like, letting them win. What would you do? What would you do? I don't know. Joint, try to become a police officer maybe?

Like get in there and try to. Whoa, that's a cool idea. Yeah, yeah, maybe that. I don't know, man. Organize, I just, you know, we saw a protest at the police department. I guess that, that's really admirable. You know, man, there's people out there

who are to this day, protesting in front of the police department. There's, they're fighting here. They're resisting. That's pretty admirable, man. Being vocal, using their constitutional right. Free speech and pretty sick. I think I'd move.

I'd move it. I mean, yeah, it's, I don't know why people, why, why, yeah. Certain situations. That's a dream, isn't it? Like if only we had some like, like, cause if we had discovered teleportation in another planet, then, you know,

it'd be amazing if everyone just left. That's a funny thing to imagine, just fucking leave. So all that's left is the cops. Just an empty city with a bunch of angry old fascist shithead racists and no one to beat up. Congratulations, you won. Now you've got a bunch of dilapidated buildings and wild dogs running around.

And that's it, you fucking assholes. I mean, what do they want? When does it, the real question is, when does, if right now they're like on lockdown, when does it stop? When does the vice grip of fascism loosen? When do they let go? Cause the scary thing about power

is that it doesn't loosen. It only tightens. It doesn't go, it doesn't. Well, and also the other thing is that this in climate, like this environment creates a climate where you don't even want to talk to cops in, when you see them in public. So for example, is back in Los Angeles,

my friend and I were getting taco at a taco truck. And there was a police officer ordering right at the same time as us. And we ordered our tacos, he ordered his taco tacos and we then kind of sat almost ignoring each other's presence for the five minutes while we waited. That, what I've done that in, if it wasn't a police officer, way less likely, enjoy talking to strangers.

Cause it's connected. Oh, well, whatever we did in our lives, we both found ourselves at this taco truck at the same time. So we got that in common. We got that going for us. But what the police are, just when you hear these stories, it just creates an environment where you're just like, you know what, nah, I'm just gonna chill.

I'm gonna chill and pretend like this person's not here. They're not all bad, man. And they're not all bad. But even worse than that is in any situation, in anyone's life, if you have a problem with anyone, if you don't try to at least talk to them, you're never, you're just gonna get, you're gonna just increase that gap, right?

Oh, you're right. We were talking about this. Right, that's the problem. Yeah, cause you can, like, but I know police officers listen to this podcast, so I've met, they're so sweet, but they're stuck a little bit because they can't, there's, you know, there's archaic laws. And here's the other thing that, you know,

and I don't want to be like an apologist for violent racist at all. But I think no matter who it is, I'll try to put myself in their shoes so that I can get some understanding. But like, if you see, if you're in a job where one of the things that can happen, there's a whole YouTube compilation

of people shooting cops. I don't know if you've seen it, but one of the things that can happen, wait, it's cop shooting people. I mean. I'm sorry. Oh my God. Now that I think about it,

I think it's just cop shooting people. But like, there are, you know, it does happen though. People do blast cops from time to time. And if you're in that situation where like when you're pulling somebody over, who's driving erratically, right, we need someone to pull over drunks. You need it.

You need someone to pull over drunks. We don't want drunk drivers on the road. So you pull over someone who's driving erratically and when you're pulling them over because you don't want them to run over someone, you don't want to kill. You're the, okay, so it's your job. It's night.

You're driving. Here's a person who's driving all over the fucking road, right? Now, if you're like anyone else who's doing their job, you are thinking, God fucking dammit. If this guy wasn't driving like this, then I could keep cruising in my fucking car and join the night and I won't have to do this.

But immediately your blood pressure goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Now you gotta pull someone over, right? So you turn your lights on. Now in your mind, you're like, you know, because I'm a cop and I've come to the scene of accidents and I've seen people's brains on the road.

If you're a cop, you've probably seen some brains on the road. You've seen some blood. You've seen what happens when a drunk driver runs through a red light and kills people. So you're like, I have to stop this guy because I'm the only one who's here to do it. No citizen is gonna pull this fucking guy over.

I have to do this. You have no choice. You have a responsibility. Because later if you hear about a fucking Mustang plowing into a goddamn bus stop and killing three people, that's you for the rest of your life, right? So it's a huge responsibility. So you pull this fucking, you turn on your lights.

Now, here's the other thing I always think. Guess who's at home, right? Your wife, she's pregnant. She's probably due to have a baby in like the next, I don't know, month or so, right? So like you have a pregnant wife at home. You're pulling this person over and guess what happens? They decide to run.

So now you gotta chase this fucking asshole. They're running through fucking red lights. Now you're calling in like, God damn it. So now you've got a fucking chase on your hands, right? You're chasing this fucking drunk piece of fucking shit. Your pulse is just through the roof. You're thinking, my God, man, if my fucking car, if I fuck up here, if someone hits me, I'm dead.

My kid's gonna be born without a fucking dad. I'm just trying to make drunk people not run over assholes, you know? So you finally get this fucking guy pulled over by slamming into his car because you're trying to get him to not kill people. Seven of your friends are there too who are worried that you might have gotten killed.

So they're all fucking pissed. They're like, you motherfucker, what are you gonna do, man? Because when I'm in traffic and I get sometimes cut off, oh yeah, I'll get mad just for that. How much angry are you gonna be when some meth-addled piece of fucking shit almost kills a bunch of people for no reason? And this is the other thing.

They've chemically, they've proven it with two scientific research. When your brain gets worked up like that, when it gets angry, when adrenaline pumps through it, it takes an hour for it to chemically rebalance. So basically, anytime you're mad in your own life or someone else is mad at you and they're saying crazy shit or saying hurtful things,

keep in mind that let one hour of just sitting still go by. If you're worked up and you're making a decision that's gonna affect someone else's life, take one hour and sit quietly and just chill, baby, and see what's up in an hour. See how you still, if you still feel that way in an hour, okay, but people make all sorts of really, really foreign decisions to their own personality

when they're worked up like that. So it happened to me in Montana where I came around a corner in February and on this highway and we were going about 65 miles prior and I come around this blind curve and when we come around the curve, there's four vehicles, including two cop cars and there's been a car accident.

And so I now go to hit my brakes and what's happened is on that curve, there's a patch of black ice and that's what caused that initial accident. So I go to hit my brakes, guess what? No brakes. No brakes. So now I'm sliding, I've got two people in the car with me

and it becomes a game of freaking like real life dodge, real life dodge, try to steer an uncontrolled vehicle through cars and also the police officer who was out in the middle of the road to try to assist. So as I'm realizing, there's no way in hell we're gonna stop, we barely miss one collision. We come around, I'm like somehow managing to steer this sliding vehicle just around.

I'm laying down on the horn to alert everyone. We squeezed by Duncan. It was like, it was the type of thing where my passenger, everyone was like gripping on to the seats, ready for the wreck, you're preparing for the wreck and everyone's like, you're seeing it in slow motion and everyone's like fuck, fuck, fuck, good job, good job, job. You know, like as it's like going through,

like good job, go get, fuck, fuck, fuck, go, fuck, fuck, fuck. And then we made it through and immediately what happens, start to pull over on like slow down the other side, police car, the police officer gets back in his car, peels after me, almost slides into me with his sirens going. He pulls me over and immediately comes up, he's worked up angry. He thinks that I've just recklessly

driven into the situation. He ended up getting me a ticket for reckless driving in a situation where we did everything in our power to avoid hurting anybody in the situation that we had no control over. I later, thank God for the Montana court system in this tiny little town where I was able to go, compared to living in LA, it was amazing.

I went into court and went in front of a judge and got it waved and- Like on that same day? No, like a month later in a really- What do you mean, you went back to Montana? I was up there working on a movie. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, and Montana's amazing though.

But yeah, police officers were so- Did the cops show up to court? No, no. But it was interesting from our perspective because he clearly was his adrenaline was pumping so much. And it's like, in that moment, you remembered what you just said. This guy, it's not like he's some universal cop

who was born from a cop mother and cop father. You almost hit him. He was just a person who was scared and fallible and he was so emotionally worked up that he ended up making an impulse decision to use his power to just give us a ticket as some way to be like- Release that pressure.

Release that pressure. And but yeah, totally, I don't know. So it's funny. So you understand, they're freaked out, man. They're freaked out. So everyone's freaked out. But really the thing is, I think the problem is, we're not paying them enough.

Like I think that if you, cops and teachers, like if we could like, if cops were making doctors' salaries, so it's this hyper competitive job to get. And what goes into it is like, years of like psychological conditioning to learn how to calm yourself in all situations. That's what it is, man. I think the solution, it sounds so counterintuitive,

which is you don't want to reward them. But I swear to God, man, if these fucking cops out here are making a fucking shit ton of money so that to get a job as a police officer wasn't that easy, then I think things would change. And if teachers were making doctor's salaries, then things would change in that world too, because kids would be, that's the answer.

Let's pay these, let's fucking code our pork with money and turn it into lambs, mate. Well yeah, in any given situation, in any given situation, always put education at the fore. I mean, this is, I don't know. We're on this tour, we're having such far out experiences and we're talking, we're trying to solve the world problems. You got blasted by you, the pigs pulled you over.

Mikey, I don't blame you, I would be, I'm still angry about the fucking checkpoint we went through on the Canada coming here. Yeah, we had a very equally bizarre, sort of shitty experience there. The dark, the eyes of the dragon have fallen upon us twice and it's kind of annoying. But ultimately, you get to decide what you want to tune into.

The idea is, you got a little poison dart from the fucking state today. And the idea is you can't let it fester inside of you that long. No, I reject, no, I'll spit that venom out. Spit that venom out, God is love. This has been an incredible tour. It's been so nice hanging out with you, Mikey. It's been so fun.

Thank you, Duncan. It's a magical few weeks. Yeah, and we were saying, and this is a cool thing and I hope people get to experience this throughout their lives is that you go on these sort of experiences and you come back radically a different person. And it's amazing that in such a short amount of time that can happen.

And on this trip, there have been, like when you were a kid and you felt like the back of your knees hurting as you're growing, as the bones are growing. I've had that sensation like in my brain multiple times throughout this tour. So it's been really, yeah. So thank you for the opportunity. Of course, man.

Thank you for crushing it up there and for crushing it here. You guys have no idea the hard work, Mikey, has been doing while I've been lounging around in my royal suite. Thank you, Mikey. I'm very grateful. Thanks for everything that you've done. Yes.

And how can people find you? Check out Two Wet Crew. That's the project that I'm working on. And when we were talking with Alex and Allison Gray and seeing the world that they were building, I was realizing that there are actually more similarities in the sort of psychedelic world of Two Wet Crew than I realized.

And so that's a project I'm becoming more and more proud of. And I know we have our wethead fans out there that it's nice to meet some of them out on the road. And then also, yeah, I got my own projects. I got my own ideas. Mikey Kampman, Michael Kampman, whatever. Check me out on whatever.

I don't really actually. Check him out on Twitter. I'll have all the links at DuncanTrussell.com. Thank you, Mikey. I'll talk to you in about one second because you're still going to be here with me. OK, bye. That was Mikey Kampman, everybody.

All the links to find everything you need to know about Mikey Kampman. I'll be in the comments section of this episode. A big thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. Go to squarespace.com. Use offer code Duncan. You'll get 10% off a brand new, beautiful website. And please bookmark the Amazon portal.

And please bookmark the part of your heart that experiences love and compassion because there's too many numb, fanged, reptile sons of guns out there who want to surround your heart with a SWAT team and beat you into submission. Don't let them. Don't let them. I'll see you in about two days.

We're going to put out another episode with Shane Torres. Until then, may God wash your eyes with the tears of our Lord, sweet Jesus.