Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Duncan Trussell on: Being a Spiritual Omnivore, Whether Psychedelics Are a Bridge to the Divine, and How the Gates of Hell Are Locked From the Inside

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Duncan Trussell is an American actor and stand-up comic. And he doesn’t like being called a Buddhist comedian. It makes sense… that label unfairly pigeonholes him in two ways. First, because he’s a legit, successful, hilarious comedian, no matter what his spiritual leanings. Duncan has written and appeared in sketches for two seasons of Fuel TV's Stupidface, Showtime's La La Land, Comedy Central's Nick Swardson's Pretend Time, and both seasons of HBO's Funny or Die Presents. His television credits include MADtv and Curb Your Enthusiasm. And when it comes to the spiritual stuff, he’s not just a Buddhist. This guy is spiritually omnivorous. And he knows his shit. He has practiced extensively. And on his podcast, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, he interviews meditation teachers like Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg. In fact, Netflix turned his pod into a cult favorite animated TV show, called The Midnight Gospel.In this episode we talk about:Depression, anxiety, death, and Duncan’s interpretation of God How meditation helps him handle the insanity of HollywoodThe Buddhist hell realms as psychological statesSpirituality and psychedelicsIf having a contemplative practice can hurt our job, form of expression, or ambitionKarmic and samsaric patterns – and enjoying your ego while you have oneIf we’re all capable of loveRelated Episodes:#603. Why Dwight from The Office (Rainn Wilson) Is Calling for a “Spiritual Revolution”#489. Can You Really Conquer Hatred Through Love? | Father Gregory BoyleTheMightyFix.com/HAPPIERFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/duncan-trussellSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering, being's Duncan Trussell does not like being called a Buddhist comedian. And I get it. That label really unfairly pigeonholes him in two ways. First, because he is a legit successful, hilarious comedian, no matter what his spiritual leanings. This dude performs standup all over the country. He's either appeared on or written for very big TV shows,

like Funny or Die Presents, drunk history, mad TV, and curb your enthusiasm. And the other way in which that label pigeonholes him is that when it comes to the spiritual stuff, he's not just a Buddhist, the guy is spiritually omnivorous. And he knows this shit for real. He is practiced extensively. And over on his podcast, the Duncan Trustle Family Hour,

he interviews big time meditation teachers like Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salisberg, people who've come on this show regularly. In fact, his podcast is so successful that Netflix turned it into a cult favorite animated TV show called Midnight Gospel. This was a truly and unusually delightful conversation. Duncan is able to talk about really serious stuff while also being extremely funny. In this conversation, we covered depression, anxiety,

death, his interpretation of God, how meditation helps him handle the insanity of Hollywood, and the fact that he only has one ball after a bout of testicular cancer. And we get even weirder, we talk about quantum expressions of the universe, psychedelics as a bridge to the divine, and how all of this relates to the creative process. He's in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father. We want to find her just as much as you do. I doubt that very much.

From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this about way. You have to. I don't. Bosch Legacy watched the new season now streaming exclusively on FreeVee. I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, new season now streaming exclusively on FreeV. I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and. We are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Paling,

the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Briden and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever sit back and enjoy. Bride and And, on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever, you get your podcasts. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, separate fact from fiction when it comes to demystifying electrified vehicles. On this journey, this series, we are examining myths about EV driving in Canada, and I'd love to know what you think are the most common misconceptions. So this is something radically different. EVs are our disruption in the automotive industry like we've never seen before.

I mean, the first time you do a trip that is unusual, it's understandable to have concerns, and then once you've done it once or twice, most of the time that just goes away. Listen to all the episodes of the Road to Electric Podcast on Mazda.ca, or wherever you get your podcasts. For answers to more of your questions about M-H-E-Vs, P-H-E-Vs, B-E-Vs, and everything in between. Safe travels. Don Contrassal, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on.

Great to meet you. Likewise, I'm a fan, so it's cool to meet you. Ah, thank you. That's incredible. So, I understand that you don't like to be called a Buddhist comedian, but you are definitely interested in Buddhism. So, I'm interested in how you got interested in Buddhism. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, to respond to the Buddhist comedian part, first, it just sounds cheesy.

Like, it's not that I mind because of some lack of connection to Buddhism or something, but the two together, it just doesn't sound good. I prefer comedian. You know, like, think of Christian comedian. Like, when you hear that, the first thought is like, boy, this is going to be funny. That's not your first thought. So similarly, Christian rock. Yeah, exactly.

Striper. When you ever you attach the religion of the performer to what they do, it dilutes it to some degree. So that's why. And to answer your second question, you know, what happened was I was doing these interviews at these Ramdas retreats. They have a Maui. And so I would interview Ramdas and I would interview

whoever the speakers were as part of their retreat. It was just a podcast, essentially. And then I'd been doing these for a while, years and Ragu Marcus, who is the, I don't know, you call him, the director of the Love Server Member Foundation. He said, Duncan, somebody said they think you're a really nice guy, but what's your practice? He said, do you have any kind of practice? Like, what?

Do you, what's your thing? And my ego got really annoyed at that because it's so true. And so the person who had said this is now my meditation teacher, David Nickturn, and we started having these conversations, and then finally, in some informal way, I asked if you would teach me Buddhism. And so that was, I think, the real beginning of true interest.

Prior to that, I, of course, like anybody else into spirituality at red, Pima Chaudjren, Ticknott Han. But I sort of gotten fixated on Chogum Trumpa, Rempuche. And the fixation was taking the form of just profound irritation at everything that he wrote and how I felt accused and called out by him in the most powerful way.

But I never thought, oh my god, I'm going to study with one of his students. I just thought, God, this guy seems like an asshole. All right. Okay. The first thing to do is just for people listening who don't know the names you've thrown out, I'm just going to briefly say, Ram Das was a white Jewish guy from Boston. Our professor got fired for something having to do with LSD and then he went over to India, met quite a famous guru whose picture

I can see hanging behind you. Neem Crowley-Baba. And then he changed his name to Rob Doss and became like one of the big early proponents of meditation and Eastern spirituality in the United States. Pemma Chodron is also a white American woman who fell in with a big Buddhist teacher named Chokim Trunkpa Rinpoche, who is Tibetan, quite controversial. We can talk about him in a second. And he, Trunkpa, had a pretty large Western following, including David Nickturn, whose Sun Ethan has been on the show, but David's never been on the show.

So we should probably rectify that. But okay, so just having cleared that up, let me step even further back in your chronology, because you say that you got into Buddhism when you asked David Nickturn about maybe teaching you, but like something was drawing you to all of these books and all of these teachers and you ended up at Ramdas retreats interviewing people. So what was all that? What kind of suffering led you to that? Well, yeah, I just got really lucky.

If you're in the world and you have a human body, you are probably suffering. And this is something on a podcast I just did with Brainwills and we were talking about suffering. I realized, oh my God, I'm a suffering snob. And I think this is a really interesting form of snobbery where one person who considers themselves to be suffering sees another person's suffering. And it's like, that's not real suffering compared to my suffering. So you get this bizarre hierarchy of suffering. I realized, oh my God, I've definitely been doing that.

The luck part of it was just that my mom was very interested in the last part of her life in a lot of these teachers. And she was a real seeker when I was a teenager. And so I got lucky in how to all these books scattered about the house. And I would look at them, teenage me thought they didn't want to admit that there was something in them that I really liked because my mom liked them. So there was always a sort of embarrassing kind

of rebellion happening in relation to them. You know, it comes to mind. I'm sitting on the back porch with one of my mom's boyfriend's in between marriages. She's pretty sure she just dumped him. He's back there smoking a cigarette. I'm sitting with him and he had introduced my mom to some of these teachers and he said to me, you know, yeah, right now you might be looking at these books or whatever, but at some point you're really going to need them. And it was very smart to say that he was right, too. All of us will have these time bombs that explode in our lives. And when they explode is the only question. But we know they will explode, death of parents, illness, old age.

And so I think that that's what's beautiful about some of this stuff is that you come to it, you get excited about it, you might drift away from it, and then the rubber hits the road when you realize that you're becoming angry in moments where anger does not serve any purpose other than to magnify the chaos of the situation. And I think somewhere in there, you begin to realize, oh wow, yeah, I need this.

I need this because these moments keep coming. And my ability to be graceful in the midst of them is, I don't have that ability to, the degree that I think I need to have it if I'm gonna be a good friend, father, mother, student. That's when it becomes important. How graceful are you now? I just got back from a water park with my kids. Oh, we made it to the very last night, my wife,

and I, not a single fight. We are in the bedroom congratulating each other. We did it. We didn't fight. She's like, I saw some parents fighting boy, where they in a big fight. And then from the oldest room, a howl of pure toddler pain. He had his eyes were burning from the chlorine, from swimming all day. My wife is pregnant, she's exhausted.

And when you're like, if been trying to put a child to bed and you think they're in bed and then you realize, oh no, oh no, they're not always, he's not in bed. I mean, he's screaming like he just just someone just set him on fire in the bedroom And so then in that case my wife and I oh my god, it's just explosive fight So I would love to say to you so graceful Just one deep

Peaceful big river flowing towards my own oblivion. But sadly, no. But the difference in, as my wife and I continue to recognize, oh, right, the marriage is the practice, the marriage is the path, those fights that would have lasted days compress into 20 minutes, where you get through whatever that is back to the love, connection. And so that, I think you could call that grace. And so there's that, which I'm very grateful for. For most humans, being more graceful does not mean never being graceless. It just means recovering more quickly, I think. I think you're right.

I think you're right. I think that in the weird sort of binary that exists between like pleasure, pain, grace, gracelessness, we, most people seem to be very addicted to the grace part, obviously, to the bliss part, to the joy part, and somehow forget that you can't get those without the other side of the coin. That in fact, the other side of the coin is like the roots of a flower

or something growing into time, but we don't wanna be the roots. We wanna be the beautiful rows. We wanna be the beautiful flowers, not the dark, dank, boring roots. And so when those dark moments come, it's easy to forget that that's just you growing into something potentially like really much more beautiful

than where you're at right now. That's easy. I mean, when I've been doing this thing, I've got to stop. Some people, I keep saying these people, external people, it's me. Like mean, when I've been doing this thing, I've got to stop. Some people, I keep saying these people, external people, it's me. Like for me, I forget that those dark times lead to better times. You said before that you're a suffering snob,

what is the suffering that you've done specifically that allows you to be on the mountaintop and looking down at the rest of us, amateur sufferers. You amateur sufferers, listen here, I'll tell you about real suffering. My mother died of cancer. I have one testicle, because I had testicular cancer.

My father died of COPD, and I had my ball chopped off, and my mom died in the same year. So I get a gold medal for... I actually did. I got a Golden Apple National Suffering Award. It's getting sent to me right out of it on the wall. That actually, I know you're making light of it, but that really sucks. I'm saying the worst, especially the part about your mom.

The worst. Yeah, the ball who cares. It's like you got to, though, but yeah, the mom, you just have one and you can't get a prosthetic mom. Yeah, it sucked. It was horrible. It's horrible when we lose our parents. It's horrible. God, you know, I was just listening to this wonderful autobiography by Thomas Merton, and he's talking about when his father died,

and he's such a great writer. And he's like, you feel it. It's just so poignant, but he was sort of talking about without some connection to God, you just have to take it. You just have to take it like a dumb animal. That's how you put it, just like an animal. You take it and that's it. There's no grace, you just take it.

That really hit home to me, because in those moments where you're down in the roots and you lose that connection, you forget, yeah. It's like it's a gut punch, isn't it? And there's no, well, there's, how do you recover from it other than like, yeah, this is the world I'm in. Our parents, they, they die many times in horrible ways. And then that'll happen to us, our kids will mourn. But there's no sense of some transcendent reality. There's no sense that there's anything other than that.

That's it. And that's the pathway to cynicism, bitterness, certainly, like if you really want to achieve high level, suffering, snobbery, or remove from the equation, or remove from the equation, whatever you want to call it. And then, yeah, all you're left with is just endless suffering, kind of stupid, you're a little stupid bit of genetic protoplasm, extending from the big bang,

almost an accident. And then it can be so dark. Well, but so are you saying, I'm not quite sure here. So are you saying that you subscribe to some metaphysical plan, Allah Christianity? Or you say, you're the proto-plasma? Both. I mean, this is why I love Christianity and Buddhism. And I think that there's so many wonderful points where they meet. And some points they don't. But the reason Neem Crowley Baba Ramdhas is Guru, he would send these hippies off together to these Vapasana meditation retreats. And the reason Ramdhas would always have these hardcore Buddhists mixed in with the practitioners

of Bhakti Yoga, the Yoga of Unification with the divine, is because the two work really well together on a certain level. One, the practice of mindfulness, practice of tuning into your body to what, to the reality of what you are or what you're not, however you want to put it, this is wonderful, almost a palette cleanser, so that you can maybe be a little less distracted by your thoughts and tune in to this other reality that exists. The reality of love, compassion, the joyfulness, the just the raw beauty and everything. Now, I think God is a term of convenience, isn't it? But I do subscribe to that. And I think Christianity of all the religions that I've looked into, it really checks a lot

of boxes for me in the sense that it has within it this perfect existential hero and the answer to all the various demands of the world is so beautiful, which is, you know, surrender. I love that. I love it. And I think also the brutality of the crucifixion, the symbolic realities in there that are woven in. So it's a beautiful symbol for the predicament of being human in the sense that we're kind of being crucified

on the time space continuum. Do you view the Jesus story as poetically true or literally true? Well, I get real bored when people start arguing over the literal reality of Jesus Christ. I read that wonderful book by Reza Aslan. It's so good. It's trying to like find the historical reality of Jesus. And apparently there was mention of this Jesus that was wandering around, but it never was, that, according to at least in this book, that Jesus was not described as Messiah, but as a magician, which I think is really cool and interesting. Makes sense, healing people or raising the dead, but one of the things Trigium Trump said you should look for

when you're exploring religion, Buddhism, whatever it is, is that it should feel like fresh baked bread, not old, stale, dead, some dusty old thing from the past. And so that's another beautiful, I think gift you get from working with mindfulness is that in the moment, you reach out for what I think people call Christ consciousness or some sense of a benevolent

strata of reality, a personified benevolence that seems to be so absolutely smitten with you, not in some narcissistic way, but in a more of a parental kind of loving way. And so I think in the moment, I mean, regardless of who cares, let's say Jesus did exist. Well, who cares if there's no connection in the moment now? Who cares? Just another guy who has a gap in, back in the desert in those days,

completely irrelevant to me. The resurrection, all the miracle stories, they're really cool, but to me, that isn't very important, it's just a distraction, I think. So you seem pretty omnivorous from a spiritual standpoint. Well, I'm a little omnivorous. I spent years working with David and working with a very simple meditation practice, a very simple mindfulness practice, because I didn't want to, I wanted to do what Chugam Shumver recommends and when it's

book cutting through spiritual materialism, which don't be the human version of a shop that sells religious gizmos. Don't be that Buddha here, Jesus there, some Taoist scrolls laying on the floor next to some, I don't know, wicking books. You know, don't, don't leap frog. Don't, don't do the thing. It's a very natural thing to do, which is if any of these things are real, you're gonna feel like you got short-changed. Because where's the bliss? What happens when all of a sudden you're suffering actually seems to be magnified by the thing that was supposed to alleviate the suffering?

Well, something's wrong with this religion. Let's try the next one. Then you jump to the next one and it's real. So sure enough, you start feeling that same suffering. I'll try the next one. So I think the invitation of all of them is like, wait, hold your hand to the fire here for a bit. And then you can be omnivorous.

You know, it just has to be careful not to leap frog when the going gets rough from one to the next. But something is really driving you here. Something is really compelling you to do this looking around. I know you're not leap froggging, but to try all of these different traditions and to weave them together for something that works, you know, if not perfectly, at least well enough for you. Well, yeah, that's kind of the delightful thing about any of these, you know, I'll tell you, once I was friends with these awesome Goths and I had eaten edible marijuana, I was way too high and this was the moment one

of them decided to play this, I don't, I am not into this kind of music so forgive me for those of you are because I always get it mixed up that there's something called death metal and then I think there's black metal, there's all these, this is this hardcore like, nor I think it's Norwegian. This is like, you know, Viking Doom music. And so he decides in the midst of like a, coming up on powerful Edomal marijuana, he plays music by a band that, as the cover of one of their albums,

had the picture of the bandmate who committed suicide. And one of the band members would wear his skull fragment on a necklace when they played. So you know, he's playing this music that just is this pulsating darkness and he looks at me. It was just perfect. I'm like, do you feel the pull? And I'm like, yeah, I feel the pull. It's horrible.

It's like getting stuck in a whirlpool or some doom. And so that is a pull. That's a real pull. That exists in the world. So if that kind of pull exists, the other pull must also exist. Maybe there's no difference between the two. Maybe it's just different flavors of the same pull. Maybe that stuff is like shivism in India, you know, like the recognition that there's beauty in the darkest places. But that's

not for me. And so I think whenever I find myself listening to an audio book by someone that I love, I one of the teachers are reading the Bible or reading some Buddhist texts, yeah, I feel drawn deeper in. There's a pull to it. I don't, it's a two-way conversation for me. There's some amazing back and forth happening with who I'm speaking. I don't know. It depends on what day you catch me on, but certainly it doesn't seem to be like a one-way phone call into the void. Coming up, Duncan Trustle talks about the transcendent realm of the universe, why it's great to have friends with different perspectives, a spirituality and psychedelics,

and the Buddhist hell realms, and why he thinks about the Buddhist notion of hell realms as psychological states. Go, Sanrio. At least is a journalist that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happen in my childhood bedroom, but ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent occupant of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the

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If you are someone you know as concerns about gambling, visit connexontario.ca. You've traveled, I think, more widely than me in all things spiritual slash religious slash contemplative. I've stayed pretty squarely in the Buddhist and psychological, sometimes psychiatric zone. Cool. And I'm just going back to something you said a while ago, but like there's this, Buddhist and psychological, sometimes psychiatric zone. And I, I'm just going back to something you said a while ago, but like there's this transcendent realm of the universe that is smitten with you.

And I have no gut instinct that that's true or certainly no evidence that that's true. How do you arrive at that conviction? Oh, wow, what a God, what a great question. And I will try to answer right now, but that's the kind of question I'll spend like a year thinking about probably, because it's a good question, important question.

What are you talking about? What is this thing? You're saying all this, there's some benevolent God force or whatever it may be. What is this thing? How is it? How do you prove it? Or what is that? And I think that before I answer, I want to say, this is what really pissed me off when I was reading Chugam Chumper for the first time. He said, he didn't use the term hippie. I know that's what he was talking about in those days. He was kind of annoyed by the hippies. And he was saying, these people, they say,

I experienced something beyond expression. I don't have words for it. It was so powerful. I don't even have a way to describe what it is. And Trump says, that's like taking your confusion, putting it on an altar and burning candles to your confusion. You have now turned your confusion into God.

The fact that you can't express it is not some sign that it's mystical or transcendent or anything of that nature. It's just you've found a way to enshrine your own basic ignorance and confusion and just give up. Just give up. I mean, I think this is like, Kamu's critique of Kierkegaard is like, come on man, really?

Faith, that's your thing, that's that spiritual suicide. You're here, that's suicide. You might as well kill yourself. If this is where you've parked your car, some bullshit parking lot, Mark. Faith. Parking for the faith. You know, parking for the faith.

So, and there's been times in my life I've really loved that. I've loved it so much, the attack on faith, the attack on the ineffable God reality. It's been really delightful to like read various people dig into that from like Dawkins, death is the anesthesia that saves us from the pain of life to Trump. You know, I think we need this. All of these things are really good. They're challenging things.

They're challenging things. So what is that, what is that thing that people would call the Christ consciousness? What is that? Is it quantifiable? I don't know that it's quantifiable outside of some kind of, like, what do you call it when they do a Research paper where they analyze tons of data from lots of other

Studies, you know in other words we're talking about a human experience that has been reported over Thousands of years by countless people now that's not enough to prove anything I mean that's that you could say yeah, that's not enough to prove anything. I mean, you could say, yeah, it's called mass hysteria. Yeah, there's lots of cynical ways you could sum it up. And I don't think that that is the, that that's certainly not enough to do anything at all other than infuriate secularists. Like, okay, great. a lot of people believed a lot of things throughout time that were totally wrong But so then now we're forced into the subjective realm, aren't we it's it it comes down to I Think and this is what I do find to be so delightful about it a personal

connection that doesn't give two shits about whether or not the world believes you've had this experience. That the articulation of the thing is always going to be secondary to the thing itself. And that all you could do is probably confuse people by trying to report in on something like what you would call the experience of Jesus or the experience of the Guru. I don't know if there's any difference between this here.

The experience of a disembodied, non-embodied, perfected consciousness that maybe isn't even here yet. I mean, sometimes people try to set this thing in time in the past. Then they don't think maybe this is what we're all assembling into now. Maybe the entirety of all of the human reality and everything that's happening and all of the technology and all of the never-ending explosive bursts of discovery that happened for our species are leading us towards a point where we become some kind of super organism that's linked up via neural lace.

And at that point, we merge into some other reality that's always been here or see something that has been invisible to us because of our disconnect from each other and from reality itself. My point is, I think the only way that anybody can really honestly answer that question is to say, I don't have proof, except to say I've experienced it's the most beautiful thing ever. It's a delight and it's exciting for me personally. But yeah, the fact you haven't experienced it. Am I mean that I'm just crazy? Well, the certainly that both things could be true at the same time. But I guess what I'm

curious of like how and where, well, two-part question, like, how and where and when and why did you experience it, like, under what circumstances A and then B going back to Merton is his argument that somebody like me who has, you know, like a pretty committed, contemplative practice, but no faith in the supernatural per se, and that I'm going to suffer brutally because I can't put the loss of my parents or anybody else into some sort of transcendent bucket. I haven't gotten that far in the book to get to Merton's view on how insinfulness yet. So I'm sort of strapped in and waiting for the slap in the face. I don't feel like he's a literalist and the usual sense of the word. You know, in Buddhism realms, we're in the human realm.

There is a hell realm in Buddhism, realm of the gods, realm of the jealous gods, animal realm. And so my teacher, he talks about these things as being psychological states. You know, that yeah, maybe they exist, you know, once you die, perhaps you can become a god or you can, you know, go into like some vast icy. I mean, I'll tell you, man, the Buddhist house are a lot scarier than Christian house. I would rather go to the Christian hell than some of the Buddhist house. They are really, really scary. But the, you, if you look at it just from the idea

that hell as a state right now versus hell as a place you go to when you die, reincarnation is a thing that happens now, not something you need to worry about when you die. In fact, as above so below, you can, from your own experience in one human lifetime, I think, extract all the stuff that probably will happen when you die. I don't think it'll be much different than it is now. So, from that perspective, hell becomes a psychological state. For me, what that looks like is complete disconnect from the world around me. I become so foreground and everything else is background. Absolute selfishness, absolute preoccupation with one's own problems and the suffering awards that we've given ourselves and why we are suffering and a never-ending pursuit to

Find oh what in the world Cause this suffering was because blah blah blah said that to blah blah blah and that guy I believed it And then the next thing you know blah blah blah did that to me. Can you believe that did they did that to me me That means me and so they did that to me. Me, that means me. And so that's held to me. And I like the CS Lewis quote about which is the gates of hell are locked from the inside. And I think that this is the boot is this is where Buddhism kicks in suffering. Why why are we suffering or suffering because of attachment or suffering because we're attached to the me, the little eye, the me, it's all me. We've lost the greater reality that works on a psychiatric level, which is when you're

looking into the world, you're seeing your mind. Nonsamistical way, you're literally seeing your mind, you're seeing your mind. Non-sumistic away, you're literally seeing your mind, you're seeing this perfect harmony between all of your neurons. You're all of the neurotransmitters, everything, or working instantaneously to produce a spatial all-factory reality. That's your mind, the color green, that's your mind, everything. a spatial, all-factory reality. That's your mind, the color green, that's your mind,

everything, that's your mind. So from that perspective, we are completely, like one thing, it's happening in your mind, you know? And so to me, hell is when you forget that. Suddenly that's not your mind. Look at that person over there. Can you believe that? Look what they're doing.

Is he really smoking next to my kid? That motherfucker. I can't believe people are like this. That's hell. That's hell. So yeah, and if that exists here, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't exist in some, if there is something after this, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, there wouldn't be the possibility of hell wherever we go after this.

And if we don't go anywhere after this, praise Jesus, praise Jesus, pure denial. What is it? I'm sorry, I'm rambling too much. What is it, Saga? I'm sorry, I'm rambling too much. What is it? Socrates, who was the one they made drink him long? I think it was Socrates, but I don't know. He said, if this kills me and I fall into a sleep, like the deepest sleep of sleep,

or there's zero awareness, I didn't say zero awareness, then you've given me the greatest gift. Anyone could give me. I'm out, baby. I'm out. End of suffering. Thank you. But if there is something after this, I'm going to just keep doing what you gave me the

hemlock for there. So are you one, nothing, you would keep nothing. That's such a baller response. I mean,, really is. Yeah. I'm curious like all of this, this, the beautiful stuff that you've learned and are able to articulate. And I think based on what I've

can gather from listening to your podcast and just listening to you here, integrate into your life to one degree or another, how does it all help you or does it all help you with navigating Hollywood? Well, yeah, I think that navigating Hollywood for me is been, right now, it's pretty easy because I'm in Austin. I am on a show that is coming out, I think in the fall called Crapopolis. But my experience in general, I love being around people who don't believe the way I do.

I love some of my friends are not like atheist nihilists. I love it. I love getting in little arguments with them or big arguments with them or sensing that they think that I'm out of my mind or they might sense that I feel bad for them or whatever. The wonderful conversations that emerge from that I think are really healthy and good. So the general sort of cliche idea with Hollywood is, you know, people there are some of them might be adverse to Christianity, or they might not wanna hear about God or your belief in God or this or that. And I love, I think that's great,

cause it's not like I'm going around Bible thumpin' or anything and I go back and forth on it all the time. Some of my best friends are sadness. You know, so I don't really have a problem navigating Hollywood at all. It doesn't offend me that people, I get it. I totally get it. Why would you really believe any of this stuff?

I mean, and you know, earlier you asked me a question that is like really important. You're asking, when did I experience Jesus for the first time or God for the first time or connect with Christianity? And that was when I was in college, taking a class in the New Testament, and I went back to my dorm room. I had some wonderful LSD. I took LSD, got a class of wine,

because it's Christianity, right? When I got high, I opened up to the book of John, which is one of the most bizarre books of the New Testament. In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh. And it was suddenly, I just, what popped into my acid-soaked head was somebody wrote this that, you know what I mean, that we're a guard list of the truth of what it was pointing to, the consciousness that put the series of words together into sentences was altered. This is not a normal consciousness, and that there was almost like a thumbprint that you could see within

the way these the ideas were being articulated. This person had been truly blasted. That, I mean, again, in college, on acid, all I can think was whatever happened to this person to get them to write like this, to be like this, must have been profound. And then somewhere in there, I felt it for the first time, what I would call Christ consciousness. I felt the presence of Jesus or what those words were pointing towards and realized, oh, wow, this is not what I thought it was. This is so completely different from what I thought this was when I was a young Episcopalian altar boy.

Yeah, I mean, what I'm thinking of, as I listen to you speak, is Father Gregory Boyle, who's been on the show before, and he's a priest who works with gang members in L.A. and he wrote a book called Tattoos on the Heart. He's written other books as well. And he talks about the no matter whatness of God, that his conception of God is not some, you know, sistine chapel, long gray haired white man, it's way less anthropomorphized and way bigger than that. And it is, it's like what you said before, somebody who is irretrievably smitten with you

no matter what you do. That, yeah, that, and that somehow that thing has allowed a connection point between the limited human consciousness and the source of all things. That is so wild that that could even exist. That could be real. What I love about it is it follows the exact experience I've had with any great romance I've had, which is, you know, you meet somebody wherever at a

party or something. You think they're so beautiful. If you're me, you think there's no way I have a chance with that person. There's no way. And then you run into them again or some indication that they're thinking about you. But you think, oh, how could this even be possible? And then all of a sudden, you're on a date with them. Then all of a sudden, you're in a romance and it's incredible. It's like that. It's what, really?

Okay. So, like, the intelligence of the universe could have some personal interest in my stupid, tendril of bearded DNA. No way. And then on top of that could actually love me. And that this is this is one of the possibilities in a human life is that you can reach out to it and it reaches out to you. And you know, Rumi, all the great mystical poets that they're clearly in a romance. This is a Rumi's poem, sort of, so romantic.

In the Vaiseniva Bhakti Yoga, the stories of Krishna are passionate, romantic, and sensual. So this is, you know, so this is one of the possibilities. This is one of the possibilities I think in a human life, is that you can, you don't have to do it. This isn't getting high. You don't have to like, you're not getting yourself high. It's just weirdly, there's some consent involved here clearly. Like, if there is some possibility that there is a God and that God has some actual interest

in all the little sentient pixels of its creation, then boy, wanna talk about power imbalances. You know, like, you wanna talk about like dating younger people. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha And then that's where I think this sort of romance starts potentially. It also does, you mentioned getting high, but I'm getting the sense from talking to you that psychedelics seem like something of a bridge to what might be called the divine as well for you. Yeah, absolutely. Don't you think so? I mean, sure. If anything, it gives you a little map. I think that I love psychedelics that maybe one of the problems with psychedelics is they seem to have their own personality. So the psychedelic

can sort of, sometimes it might be a little difficult discerning the divine from the psychedelic. Maybe that's just stupid even want to do that. But when I was in my acid phase, I loved the breathing walls, the runes or glyphs or strange letters. I would see all over everything, the all of the fireworks that LSD has to offer. But every once in a while, I would not exist anymore. And there was a sense of merging into some totality

and that you wouldn't know that had happened until you're going back into your own personal identity. And you're like, whoa, what? Oh, wow, I'm human. I'm human. Oh, right. I'm human. So to me, maybe what's happening with some of these psychedelics is scrambling your identity so much that you experience that kind of unified bliss state that is possible via all these various paths. And that's great, because it gives you a sense that, oh, look, this is a possibility.

This is a possibility. It's just maybe the pitfalls of psychedelics is you could start thinking the only way to experience that as through the psychedelic. Right. Right. I have had bad experiences with psychedelics. Personally, my inaugural panic attacks were smoking weed as a young teenager. And so I never have never been able to one of my areas where I'm self-critical is that I think I'm just kind of too tightly wound coiled up in my own ego to let go into that unified experience.

Similarly, I've always had trouble dancing. I think I'm just my heads up my own ass, you know? Are you a never-new? A never-new no. I'm actually fine with that. I'm a never-new and I don't like to dance. So I am wound tightly, too, friend, and I've taken a lot of acid.

And it did make me feel so much better. This thing where people take psychedelics and become nudists, that did not happen to me. I like clothes, I like wearing clothes. And so yeah, I don't, I think, you know, I mean, don't be self-critical because I remember the first time I heard Ramda say something on the lines of, you know, you don't be self-critical because I remember the first time I heard Rwrahmdast say something on the lines of, you know, you don't need psyched Alex. In fact, some of these practices will give you that times a million. And I just, the eye roll, when I heard that, just like, give me a break.

There's no way some meditation is going to take you to the place 500 micrograms of LSD takes you. Come on, no one's buying that. But I think now what he meant was that the psychedelics they serve to give you a sense of what it is to go from a meat to a wheat. And that you don't need some chemical to achieve that. But I think the chemical is nice in the sense that, I mean, you know, Terence McKinney used to tell this story because as someone from the psychedelic community,

I think he felt, I just think he had a justifiable suspicion when it came to spiritual people. And so he would tell the story about this thing. Yeah, you can meditate and experience this psychedelic state or whatever. The story is, I'll sum it up as quickly as I can. Essentially, a guy goes off, meditates in the woods forever, comes back to his guru and says to him, Guru, I've meditated for 20 years and now I can walk on water. And his guru said, the fairy costs a nickel. So, you know, is there a difference really?

I mean, it's just, isn't this the big problem as we get so caught up in the vehicle? You know, it's like, imagine like you're driving to the beach, who cares how you get there? If you get there on a camel, if you get there on a Ferrari, a horse, the point was the beach, you know? And to me, any of these paths that lead one to that beach, even if we're all experienced in different parts of the beach,

like the black sand beaches in Hawaii, I don't like those. They're beautiful, but I like nice, soft sand. Some people love those though. So, but I think it's all the same encounter with the ocean. And you know, that's my feeling with it. It's got to be the same place, right? Don't you think? It's kind of got to be the same place. That makes complete sense to me. But wait a minute. Just a point of clarification here. Are you saying you're not even ever new in front of your wife? Oh no. I'm new in front of my wife. but she, she know, like my wife,

if you know what, if I was my wife, I'd be happy being naked too. I'm a boy. I'd be naked all the time if I was my wife. I'm almost 50. I've got Scoliosis one ball, ball, spot, asymmetrical love handle, weird patches of hair. I won't go into more details friend, but it's not the Mona Lisa over here.

Okay, but okay. So here's another thing. Let me just go back to another string that I left hanging here back to Hollywood. I get that you, first of all, I know you live in Austin, so I'm not referring to a Hollywood as a placement. I'll talk about the entertainment business generally. I also get that not everybody in Hollywood is gonna freak out about your spiritual leanings.

What I'm getting at more is like, you have been thriving, for at least from where I sit, in an industry that is really hard, and it involves a lot of rejections, ups and downs, and who the hell knows, no job security. How do you manage your anxieties with in that system and does all of this contemplative history and practice that you've imbibed help you?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think the verse from the Bhagavad Gita in regards to sort of getting along in the entertainment industry without going completely insane is you have a right to your action. You do not have a right to the fruits of your action. So to me, this is it. It's, first of all, if you,

the entertainment industry itself is a massive community of creatives generally, people who love to make stuff. So that's the first and most important way to not go nuts in this business is you really have to like to make things. And that love of making things has to exceed the love of the very rare times that the thing you're making gets funding or goes further than your notebook or your laptop or whatever it is. And so I love making things. I love making stuff.

I love conversations like this and doing my podcast. I love doing voice over work for crap populace. Like I really love it. It fills me with a lot of joy to do it. And I spend so many years starving as a comedian, like just literally start like no food, like out of food and not literally starving, but you know what I mean?

Where you're like, I've got to make this biscotti last for three more days. You know what that's starting? No, you have some jar of biscotti, but it's not living high on the hog. And so, but I just always have always really loved making things. And I'm lucky because I'm a stand up.

People come to see me perform and that's there for me. So I don't have to be completely dependent on getting parts. I don't have to be completely dependent on selling the next show. I do have an actual job that isn't so dependent on timing. Well, it is been on timing, but literally like selling something at the right time to the right people or having a great audition or being at the right place at the right time to meet the right person. So that gives me some security there. I think it's very, very difficult for people who are always having to jump from one job to the next, a writing job, acting job,

whatever. It's maybe a little more terrifying than it is a working comic. Coming up, Duncan talks about Carmich and some Sauric patterns, and enjoying your ego while you still have one. And he talks about whether everybody is actually capable of love. Emily, do you remember when One Direction called it a day? I think you'll find there are still many people who can't talk about it. Well luckily, we can. A lot, because our new season of terribly famous is all about the first one directioner to go it alone.

Zayn Malik. We'll take you on Zayn's journey from Shilad from Bradford to being in the world's biggest boy band and explore why, when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow terribly famous wherever you get your podcasts. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future, working today to ensure tomorrow is on. And bridge, life takes energy. Let me ask about the overlap between Life takes energy. Let me ask about the overlap between comedy and contemplative practice.

I have this memory. I think it's okay if I say who this was. 15 years ago, I was on a beach. It was right when I was getting interested in Buddhism. And I was reading a Buddhist book. And a friend of mine, who's a comedy writer, quite a successful comedy writer and director, his name is Gene Stupinski. He came up on the office and is going on

to do lots of other stuff. And he was asking me about this book I was reading and he said, I could never do this, Buddhism stuff, this meditation stuff because I need to stay judgmental. That's the source of my comedy. Yeah. I think it was a bit of a misunderstanding of Buddhism, but I just, you know, I say that

because I want your reaction and also to cure you, talk a little bit more about how and whether your interest in Buddhism and contemplation and religion plays into both your comedy and your creative process. Well, I think this is like the great fear. So you see them less, but there's some comedians who've built their entire act around like being overweight.

You know, like this is a whole genre at one point. Lots of jokes about their body size. And this is really a very dangerous problem, right? Because they feel like if they lose the weight, they're going to lose their jokes or something like that. That's all they've got. They've somehow forgotten. No, it's not.

You're telling, it's you're telling of the jokes. It's funny, not the jokes so much. You'll be able to do this whatever your body shape happens to be. Or the same is true for maybe comedians. These, there's less of these now, but you know, comedians will only talk about booze or whatever it is. If you've sort of planted your brand in some self-destructive activity, this is not going, this isn't sustainable, is it? Like this is not going to work out for you very much. So, like this is not going to work out for you very much. So there is this, I think, superstitious idea

that you better stay away from things that are going to make you happy or spiritually satisfied as an artist because you will have no more gasoline for your art car or something like that. And this is just a misconception. Like, you know, the more you get into this stuff, like, God, think of the word enlightenment. Maybe before you started getting into Buddhism, you had some idea of what that was. And the more you started studying it and practicing and contemplating it, at least for me, that word becomes really something that becomes less and less important and less and less and cerebral to what that even might be. But some people think of enlightenment is really a victory of the super ego

that you've become enlightened. And now you are this perfect sanctimonious, just annoying, everything's great. You're posting these Instagram memes that are so embarrassing with you. The memes of people meditating, man, they always freak me out because it's like who's taking the picture? Did you set the camera up? Like the universe didn't take this picture. You were meditating for a picture. So to me, that seems like an aspiration to become like an, like something

embarrassing, but Ramdas, my friend Ramdev, who I've had on the podcast, he's saying, Ramdas, told him, if an asshole gets enlightened, then they will be an enlightened asshole. And so I think that anyone in the world of comedy or comedy writing fear not, So I think that anyone in the world of comedy or comedy writing, fear not, fear not. If you were to achieve realization in this lifetime, if you were to become actualized in this lifetime, good luck. But if you do, don't worry. You will still be a complete judgmental prick. You can still have that.

You can enjoy that. I can stay a part of your personality. It doesn't have to go anywhere. You can do that. You know, it just, it becomes, God, it hurts to be judgmental, doesn't it? When you think that's all there is, is that person in you and the judgment,

it's a very painful situation. But if you need a little space between your judging mind and the you that you really are, then judgment becomes just like, it's okay. Yeah, I have a judging mind. We all do. Horrible, horrible, but it's not all that I am.

And that doesn't have to be like the sum total of my identity. I think exploring the mind, meditation, having a different relationship to your racing ego is hilarious. Some of my best jokes, not that funny, but to the extent that I've ever been funny, I think a lot of it comes out of having enough self-awareness to see how fucking nuts I am and then turn

that into a joke. I would also say that pulling out my head out of my ass and being less self-conscious makes me more available and a better ad-libber and more spontaneous. So I actually think I'm way funnier now than I used to be. Not again, I don't want to overstate my capacity for humor, but to the extent that it exists, it's better. Are you kidding? You're funny. Are you kidding me? You got to get in the stand-up friend. You should just get on stage and just start telling jokes. Oh my God. Look at John Cleese. You could play straight comedy. That kind of comedy is the most difficult and the funniest. and I guarantee

you could do it. You could, regardless, I agree with you and it brings to mind a story I read. Okay, I don't know if you upload this. I'm going to do something really, I'm going to take a vapid everybody. I'm so sorry. I don't do this. Don't do this. Please don't do this. Don't do this. Please don't do this.

You said before we started rolling that this is like your most embarrassing habit. It is. This is, it's unforgivable. Even, by the way, he's not getting, just listeners, he's not getting high, he's smoking. NICOTINE SOULS!

Not even nicotine, I just found out of something called nicotine salts. I don't even know what that is. Yeah, I think that the story comes to mind. I don't know, Alan Ginsburg is bitching to Chugum Trump about his tour poetry rating schedule. Because Chugum Trump was his teacher and he's like, how do you, you know, how do you do it?

Like, how do you do all these like lectures, these Buddhist lectures without getting exhausted? Chugum Shrumpa said, you don't like touring because you're sick of your poems. And why don't you just write the poetry on stage? Don't you trust your mind? And so this thing that you're talking about, the spontaneity that becomes available to you, when you shut down all of those neurotic apps, or at least they're not running as fast as they were before, is incredible. It's incredible.

The more you practice being in the moment, that, how can that not serve whatever it is you do, whether you're an artist, lifeguard, whatever it is? Like finding a way to really be here and trust that whatever happens here is good. Oh, it's a dream. And so to me, I think, yeah, it's, it could only help. It's not going to hurt. Like finding a way to be in the moment is not going to hurt whatever your particular job or form of expression is in the world. Has it hurt your ambition in this cutthroat industry in which you find yourself? No, no, it is not. It hasn't hurt my ambition because I have a family to support. So like now it's not about me at all anyway. I have to support almost three kids now,

one's coming and my wife and all the householder stuff that goes along with that. So I have to be ambitious. I can't rest on my laurels or anything like that because I'm the provider for my family. So maybe if I didn't have a family, I would be less productive. I'm just doing this thing of comparing. Because I feel like I hasn't reduced my ambition at all. And I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing because I do have the, I am the provider in this family as well. And so that is a huge motivator, but I also think there's still plenty of ego in it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have our ego here.

I am not enlightened. I'm in my, I have my ego. I get buttered all day long and get bothered. And I was the mother Ship Rogan's Club, and I was feeling proud because I'm gonna shoot my specials soon, Lance Bings, who I really love, is gonna help me shoot it. And I was feeling fancy, because Lance Bings had come to check out the club

and Comic I was with, Jamar neighbors, he said it so perfectly without any ego behind it. He's like, yeah, my comedy special is doing really great at cons right now. That's how you say it, right? Cons, the big film festival. Can, can, can. I don't know how to say it. I'm such a barbarian, but like, you know what I mean? I'm all excited because like, I'm going to do my special.

He's sitting next to me and he's like, he shows me. I'm like, I asked him. He didn't show me just like to brag. It's got those, you know, the feathers are around his special. You know what I mean? And like in that moment, I was excited for him because I love him, but tomorrow neighbors, but I, you know, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of like,

I want that. I want to expel my feathers around my special. So yeah, I'm not, I think it's, we have our egos. It's okay. I think that's the other thing. Enjoy your ego while you have it. You have it. What, what happens when you don't anymore? Maybe enjoy, you know, like when grief, when you're grieving and you get to that point of realizing, oh, no, the grief is going away. And then you start of realizing, oh no, the grief is going away. And then you start grieving the grief because you, the grief is connecting you to the person that you lost and that's going away now. So I think when if you are working with an ego right now,

it's fine. It's written, like just like you said, it's kind of funny. It goes from being such a severe thing to there being a kind of like bittersweet humor to the situation of having this very demanding, very self-important aspect to yourself. You talked about grief. When did your mom die and are you in the stage of grieving your grief or still full-on grieving? Oh, you know, 2013, I'm no longer in the, you know, throws of like grief anymore, but it does come back sometimes. It does come back. Like, this is the part of you that's interested in psychology, psychiatry.

I'm sure you're aware of this. I was not, but right around when my mom died, now I didn't know this, but I was saying, I got weird, man, I got weird, and I wasn't sleeping. I was realizing that as I was about to fall asleep, I wanted to start sobbing. And so I was getting like nervous about, like what's going on? Is this some impending nervous breakdown? Why do I feel so out of, I was getting like nervous about like what's going on?

Is this some impending nervous breakdown? Why do I feel so out of I was feeling really angry with everything? My wife was like, you just aren't acting like yourself. What is going on with you? I don't know. That was a scary part because usually I could be like, oh, you know, it's because I've been, I haven't been getting enough sleep.

I've been drinking too much or some, some thing I'm not doing that I should be doing or something I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing. And then just on a whim, I, because I'd forgotten intentionally when my mom died, I looked it up. And it was exactly that day. Like I had completely, my mind had forgotten the date, but my heart and my body remembered from the cues that spring is happening. And this is when my mom died.

And that's a real thing with grief is, it just shows you how powerful it is. It comes out of the blue. And you might not even know it's grief. You might not even, you might just feel like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed and not realize that you are your body remembers the loss. So, but I'm not in the depths of it anymore, thank God.

That story also speaks to just the power of the mind and all the aspects of it that are live below what we're conscious of. Yeah, yes, it's so, I mean, if that's happening, what are the other things that are still in there that we don't know about? How many micro-greaves do we have that our body remembers?

How much of what we call our ego and personality is just some strange patchwork of forgotten heartbreaks. There's no way to know. Forgotten in this lifetime or handed down to you through your genes from your forebears, I mean, there's just, you know, this is what I think people are pointing at when they talk about karma,

just like the, the, the sea of causes and conditions that have all tumbled us into this moment. Yes. Yeah, and it's so complex. When you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, the cause and effect situation is so complex. And yeah, I love the Buddhist cosmology. I love it. I love the idea that the somsaric pattern that any person is in in their life, you know, why does it seem like I'm always in the same relationship? Why does this keep happening to me that that has been going on longer than this lifetime? In fact, this has been going on from millennia for you. You just keep doing this loop over and over again.

I think there's something in there that allows a person to be a little more compassionate with themselves. Yes, towards yourself and towards others. I've been in this running gun battle that I won't go into details about, but just in my life. And one of the things that my meditation teacher

says to me occasionally, and he kind of took this from Gregory Boyle, uh, he of the no matter whatness of God, Joseph Goldstein who's not a Christian, who's my meditation teacher often talks about, love no matter what, which by, it doesn't, he doesn't mean like whoever's bugging you, like invite them over dinner and give them a hug. He means more like, see that they're acting out their shit just the way you are, you know, they've got some patterns handed down to them from their forebears that they're acting out. And as soon as you look at it through that perspective, it's just kind of hard to stay mad. Isn't that interesting that moment? That's another way you can see when they say suffering is caused by attachment. Because anytime I've done, I've successfully achieved that deconstruction

of someone that I'm pissed off at, I realize like, ah, but I wanna be mad. Like, no, no, I don't want to, I want them to be Darth Vader. I don't want them to be just like me going through the same stuff that I'm going through. Because now where will I put my aggression? What's the target of my aggression now? Who do I punch? It's so interesting. it kind of brings us full circle in some ways because I really can with time start to see within myself the capacity for no matter whatness. These are the myself and other people.

I guess I can't yet see how to scale that from inside of me to the universe having it. But maybe since I am a quantum expression of the universe, then that's the answer right there. There you go. I think that is the answer. I mean, I think that's it. That's it. We are the universe. I mean, I literally, I don't mean in some like selling nitrous oxide at a grateful dead show way. We're part of the universe. You must be if you're not, what are you? You're amazing. If you're not, so we are part of the universe. We must be. And we are capable of love. We are. I know love. I know love. And so if this is the case, and I always refer to it as above, so below, why would it stop with us?

And so yes, I think you just start just like that. Well, I'm feeling love. Or as Ramdas put it, I'm in love. Not like you are the nipple from which I extract love. You know what I mean? Like that's the big mistake we all make is you meet someone and you get confused and think they're the love source for you. A little love volcano that you can scoop love out of and eat it. But he would say no, I'm in love with you in the sense that we are all sharing an experience of love because that's what we're, that's what it is.

I think in Buddhism they call it fundamental goodness. That it's just perfect and beautiful underneath all of our stories. And that yeah, and if that's it, fine. If it's just a little flicker of something that human monkey descendants call love, fine. It existed. it happened. In the universe there is the capacity for love, for surrender, and for complete and absolute disregard for one's life in exchange for another's. That's real. That's quantifiable. And if that's real, then I don't see any reason why there couldn't be greater and greater

levels of that expanding out through the infinite universe that we're part of. Yes, I think it's inarguable that the universe has created a capacity for love. Whether the universe is fundamentally loving, that I don't know. Yeah, tell that to like a planet that just got sucked into a black hole. Yeah, great universe. Our old civilization just got devoured. Take another Borgrip hippie. Wait till your son Supernovas and then talk about the loving universe.

Oh man, this has been so much fun. I'm so grateful to you for making the time. It's super fun. Are you kidding? I'm so honored to be on your show. You are such an incredible interviewer. I can't believe I just got to experience being, having, you're so good. Thank you. I am it was a delight

and I really appreciate you having me on the show. It means the world to me. It's so nice chatting with you about Buddhism too. Can you before I like actually liberate you here? Can you just remind everybody of the name of your podcast and any other stuff that you've put out comedy special special book, or anything that you want people to know. Sure. Yeah, I have a podcast called The Duncan Trustle Family, Our Podcast, and there's a show on Netflix called The Midnight Gospel, which is an animated series based on my podcast that I made with Pendleton Ward,

who made Adventure Time. So if you want an introduction to my podcast, probably the Midnight Gospel is a great starting point on Netflix And I know you're very busy, but and whenever we can schedule it months out I would love to have you on my show and do the reverse interview anytime and ask you the exact same questions You ask me because I don't think I can do better than that You know what would be awesome is I never have any plans for this but at some

point I'm sure the universe will bring me to Austin and be cool to see you in person sometime. Okay I will have my assistant give you my digits and I would love to go to dinner lunch breakfast whatever brunch whatever that would be really cool so great awesome. All right, my name is Fred. Duncan Trussel.

Yes, I did it. I'm fast. No, real quick, you realize podcasts are friendship interviews? Now that's what they are. This is how I make friends now. Yes, that. Thank you very much.

Thank you for the great interview. Thank you. Such a pleasure. All right, thanks, man. Thank you very much. Thank you for the great interview. Thank you. Such a pleasure. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you. Bye. Thanks again to Duncan Trussell. Loved having him on. He's awesome. Thank you to you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review that really helps. Thanks. Most of all to the folks who produce this show, they work incredibly hard. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davie Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer,

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet audio, and we get our theme music from Nick Thorburn of the band, IWINS. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. We're gonna talk about addiction with somebody extremely interesting.

Carrie Wilkins just got a very interesting take on addiction and interested to see what the response of this episode will be. So we'll see you on Wednesday for that. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

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