Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 325: Kyle Kingsbury

Episode Date: February 10, 2019

**Kyle Kingsbury**, MMA Champion and profoundly deep psychonaut, joins the DTFH! This episode is brought to you by [Mint Mobile](http://mintmobile.com/duncan) (Get 2 free months of coverage when you ...buy your first month) and [Purple Mattress](https://purple.com/) (Text DUNCAN to 797979 to get a free Purple Pillow with purchase of a Purple Mattress).

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Starting point is 00:00:37 And I'm not one of those people who talks about the awards they get. If I did, I wouldn't have time to do the podcast, because I'm constantly getting awards. Bulldozers bring huge scoops of awards to my house and just dump them in the front yard. We sift through them. But man, I got to talk about this one.
Starting point is 00:01:00 We just got the Frank Lloyd You're All Right Award from the Frank Lloyd Wright Podcast Association. And you guys know what this means to me. I've been dreaming of getting this award for so long. So to the Frank Lloyd Wright Society, I thank you. And most importantly, I thank you for this beautiful note that you wrote for me, and for the listeners of the podcast, and for the entire planet, and for all sentient beings
Starting point is 00:01:25 in the known universe. I'm just going to read it to you guys right now. Dear all sentient beings in the known universe, this is just a quick reminder from the Frank Lloyd Wright Society that you are all right, just like you are right now. And if you forget this, you can start feeling a little gloomy. But even worse, you could start treating the people around you
Starting point is 00:01:49 like they're not all right. And this makes everything all wrong. So please, as much as you can, whenever you can, remind yourself that you're just a little baby compared to the universe, and that everybody else is a little baby too. And most importantly, that the Frank Lloyd Wright Society loves you.
Starting point is 00:02:13 And the only thing left between eternal paradise and what is currently happening is that tiny little block you call your identity. So let go of it, and merge with the universe so that we can enter into the next phase of planetary and cosmic evolution, known as the Age of Aquarius, or the coming of the Metrea. Much love to you and your listeners.
Starting point is 00:02:38 Sincerely, Gerald Flonk from the Frank Lloyd Wright Society. Isn't that beautiful? What a cool little note. Thank you so much, Gerald Flonk. And much love to you and to your celestial family. Boy, do we have a great podcast for you today. Kyle Kingsbury is here. Holy shit.
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Starting point is 00:05:06 to mintmobile.com slash Duncan. That's mintmobile.com slash Duncan to get three months of premium wireless service for just $20. Mintmobile.com slash Duncan. OK, sweeties, a little preface on this episode. You're going to hear this is a long podcast. And part of the reason it's so long is because Kyle started talking about his polyamorous marriage
Starting point is 00:05:39 with his wonderful wife, Natasha. And listening to him talk about it sort of stirred some stuff up for me and made me think, whoa, oh my god, it wasn't that long ago that I was doing the same thing. And also sort of like me thinking like, whoa, right now we're monogamous. What's it going to be like if we decide not to be at some point?
Starting point is 00:06:00 And then me wondering about that and sort of not quite having the guts that I should have as a podcast host to just say that out loud. So I'm sorry for that. And I'm doing this preface in case you hear some weirdness as I'm chatting with him that sounds like I'm judging him because I certainly was not. He and Natasha are sweethearts.
Starting point is 00:06:28 And I fully respect what they're doing. And I fully respect however people want to structure their relationships. It's a very personal thing. And it really is nobody's business anyway. But because I publicly was blowing the polyamory horn for a while, which is a little embarrassing. I mean, you know what it's like when a polyamory horn blasts
Starting point is 00:06:54 all over your face publicly. You're just like, damn it. It's nice, but you think, shit, maybe I should have blown the horn privately. Regardless, I didn't follow Robert Anton Wilson's advice when it came to polyamory, which is he didn't say this about polyamory. He said about magic and the occult.
Starting point is 00:07:17 But the idea is maintain a certain level of agnosticism. Becoming a true believer can be a pretty embarrassing decision if you don't fully understand that thing which you are claiming to believe. So I didn't do that. That's OK. I'm not going to beat myself up about it. But regardless, I just wanted to do this little preface
Starting point is 00:07:38 so that you guys understand that I fully 100% respect anybody who decides to have that kind of relationship. And I also respect anybody who decides not to. It's your business. If you want to dress up like pilgrims and spank each other night and day, that's your business. You get to do that. If you want to take combats with your best friends
Starting point is 00:08:07 and as long as everyone's happy with your decision, then do it. And if you feel like having a classical, monogamous relationship, just sitting on the couch and watching TVs and falling asleep on top of each other, that's fine too. Especially if you let me sit in the corner and watch as you sleep. Speaking of sleep, how'd you sleep last night? Did you wake up in the middle of the night
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Starting point is 00:12:28 with lots of cool new stuff in there. Check it out. It's at dunkintrustle.com. Now, without further ado, today's guest is a mixed martial arts champion. If you are a fan of the UFC, you know him. You've probably seen him on the Ultimate Fighter, but of course, he's not just a fighter.
Starting point is 00:12:51 That just happens to be something that he does. He's also a profoundly deep, psychonaut, and philosopher, and it was a real honor to get to have this conversation with him. So without further ado, everybody please extend your astral probisci and blast out that sweet tasting rainbow mucus
Starting point is 00:13:18 through the etheric clouds that connect us all. And welcome to the DTFH, today's guest, Kyle Kingsbury. All right, Kyle, thank you so much for being on the DTFH. I have been looking forward to this for a while. I'm honored by your presence here. You are a real glowing sort of person. It's cool to have a person like that in your house. And one of the things, it sounds negative,
Starting point is 00:13:50 but I don't mean that in a negative way, but sometimes I feel like, am I doing a podcast or am I just trapping cool people temporarily? You know what I mean? Like as I get to be here. So it's really cool to have you here. Hello. Hello.
Starting point is 00:14:07 I wanted to talk to you, and I'm sorry if it seems a little obvious or maybe even hacky to start an interview off like this, but I wanna talk to you about being a warrior. You're a fighter. You have fought in the UFC. You've been in front of the world, crushing people and being crushed.
Starting point is 00:14:35 Yes. And so I wanna talk to you about what, these days, everyone seems kind of like they're analyzing masculinity. And it's an important thing to think about masculinity and femininity, because these are the sort of yin and yang, so to speak, of our society, you know?
Starting point is 00:14:57 And so people seem to be taking a look at like the fundamental qualities that make us what we are, at least currently. In this time in history. So what is a warrior? That's a great question. I think Aubrey would answer that better than I would. And also, forgive me, is a warrior necessarily,
Starting point is 00:15:18 obviously a warrior isn't masculine or feminine? No, not at all. And we, I mean, I think the thing to be mindful of as we talk about masculinity and femininity is, there is the divine masculine and the divine feminine. And that's what we're shooting for. And then there's the unconscious masculine that we see in politics and patriarchal societies
Starting point is 00:15:40 and the unconscious feminine, where it's a victim mentality and things of that nature. So there is a difference between the two. I think being a warrior is mostly about constantly working on yourself. And it doesn't matter if you're a warrior poet, like Aubrey, where you're doing the work and then trying to be able to express yourself in a way
Starting point is 00:16:03 where it touches people, or if you're literally trying to beat the shit out of somebody, or if you're going into true battle and putting your life on the line in defense of your country or in defense of an ideal, those all those archetypes of warrior come down to self-work and really just getting through the bullshit,
Starting point is 00:16:24 weeding through that. So you can come to a place where you have a quiet mind, you're still in your calm in the face of adversity. This description is, that was a great description. And when, you know, having, you know, been friends with Rogan long enough to get to be friends with people like you, I've been around like men who are like dangerous
Starting point is 00:16:51 in the real, in a real way, like people who have trained for years and can kill, you could kill me if you wanted to, real fast. You know how to do it, you've trained. And anytime I've been around people like you, the quality is the opposite of what normal, like what gets put out there is like, here's what, you know, like if you're watching some kind of like,
Starting point is 00:17:20 I don't know, if you're watching like Predator, you know, the way those kinds of heroes act, they're kind of surly and mean and shit. This stuff will make you a sexual tyrannosaurus. Yeah, dude. That thing, grumpy, kind of like shitty, kind of like cruel, never like that. Always what is always fascinating about it is that it's,
Starting point is 00:17:43 if you hang out with like Hari Krishnas, if you hang out with monks, if you hang out with people who have like a renunciate life, they have a similar energy, which is this kind of sweet, calm openness. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and why you have that versus why when you run to someone who's pretending to be dangerous,
Starting point is 00:18:07 it seems to be the opposite energy? Yeah, I think, you know, truly for people who do the work and actually get into the sport of mixed martial arts or go deep into Jujitsu, the main difference is between that and somebody who's just trying it out or going to a couple of evening classes a week but has every tap out shirt.
Starting point is 00:18:30 The difference would be that you've been tested so many times and you've tapped out so many times that even if you're one of the best black belts in the world in Jujitsu or you've fought in the UFC for 10 years and you have a wealth of experience, you've been humbled time and time again and you realize that at any given point, I can be the guy on top or I can,
Starting point is 00:18:51 I can be the hammer or I can be the nail. Right. And so having gone through those experiences, especially like, I mean, it was peaks and valleys when I fought, I had four fight win streak, two fight of the night victories, a 30 second knockout, three 30 second knockouts and under 30 and I finished my last four fights getting my ass kicked.
Starting point is 00:19:11 I left with my tail in between my legs and two of those fights were in San Jose in my hometown at the Shark Tank. So incredibly humbling experiences and I think the people that actually do the work, they no longer have a chip on their shoulder. You know, like whatever that thing is, that angst that we have as young men
Starting point is 00:19:31 or even young women who feel like we've been wronged or there's something not right with the world today, we can have a chip on our shoulder in life. We can be not quite relaxed in every situation but I think when you put yourself in harms away and you do it purposely and you do it mindfully where you're actually trying to stay calm in the storm, whether that's a cold bath
Starting point is 00:19:55 or fighting in front of 20,000 people and millions more on TV, like that mindset actually is a trainable thing. And when you get through that, it allows you just quiet's the noise of life. It turns the volume down on all the other bullshit. Similar to a deep psychedelic journey, somebody cuts you off in traffic
Starting point is 00:20:14 after you got back from Peru to an ayahuasca, it's okay, go ahead, you must need to be there sooner than I do. It's no big deal, right? It just turns down the volume on all the bullshit in life. Is it like, is it, is your fear diminished? Do you think it has something to do with a reduction in fear?
Starting point is 00:20:38 Is it that, to me, you know, losing a fight or even getting punched, but certainly getting punched publicly and certainly getting punched publicly in your hometown. It's certainly, all of those things, it's a kind of apocalypse almost. It's like, you know, when people put in front of you,
Starting point is 00:21:03 like, what do you not wanna have happen, right? That's definitely one of the things you wouldn't wanna have happen. Right under that ice bath. There's a good, I'm glad you bring them both up because they both suck. So is it because, like, I've experienced defeat and I got up after it and I'm okay now.
Starting point is 00:21:27 Is that what it is that you realize that winning or losing, is it that it's kind of like a fog? Is it an illusion? Is winning and losing sort of just an illusion? Well, I mean, certainly if you're trying to climb the ladder and that's the thing that you care about the most, it fucking matters.
Starting point is 00:21:49 And whatever we put that meaning attached to it, then that really does matter. And some losses were harder than others for me. I think by the time I was willing to transition away from fighting, it was no longer the most important thing in my life. And psychedelics had come in and I was getting new lessons.
Starting point is 00:22:06 And I don't think you ever really get rid of fear. And Rogan's talked a bit about this too. Like if you go into a fight and you're not nervous, that means, A, you don't respect your opponent and B, you're probably gonna get your ass kicked. Like you can't go in there sleeping thinking this is just gonna be a little patty cake fucking pillow fight. Like you're gonna get hit in the face.
Starting point is 00:22:25 You can get knocked out, you can get hurt. So having a healthy amount of nerves without fighting scared because that stiffens you and without fighting angry is that stiffens you and you wanna be like water. You know, that's Bruce Lee. So as in life where we have Wu Wei and this ever flowing dance, like that's what you try to accomplish
Starting point is 00:22:47 in the fight as well. Tell me about that state of consciousness right before you start fighting. Well, you mean like my state of consciousness before I started my fight career or like literally right before I go in the cage door shots? Literally right before. So I never mastered this by the way.
Starting point is 00:23:09 There was, I think like maybe two out of 17 or 18 fights where I was in a flow state with a quiet mind and 100% present. Most of the time I had a lot of negative mind chatter. You know, there was, oh, well, this guy's so good at that. And look at, he's probably put 20 pounds on back after the weight cut. He's so yoked and oh, he's so good at this
Starting point is 00:23:33 and I'm thinking about his strengths and I'm not, you know, or we get into it. If I have a quiet mind, but if I start losing the fight then in certain fights I've had the negative mind come in and just be like, oh, you're gonna lose this round. You just got taken down again instead of let me just focus on what I need to do right now. Like Paul Selig says, what is the lesson of the day?
Starting point is 00:23:56 It's whatever's right in front of you, right? So if I gotta get back to my feet, that's all I need to think about. How do I get back to my feet? I just got taken down, that's it. I don't need to attach, I'm losing this round or any other fucking story to that, you know? Right, that story is, because in such an extreme situation
Starting point is 00:24:15 I imagine that any energy that is moving through you needs to be directed at the task at hand. Any energy being directed at telling a story, simulating the possibility of defeat, even if it's a millisecond, that could have been energy that was going into whatever the zillions of processes that must be happening when you're involved in something that is so intense.
Starting point is 00:24:46 And so is this as your training to learn how to do this activity, is there a mind training that gets involved in the physical training? Yeah, I had, I mean, experiences is the best teacher for sure and getting used to being punched in the face. Like there's some people that never crossed that barrier. There's a lot of high level wrestlers that come into the sport or high level jujutsu guys that come into the sport
Starting point is 00:25:13 and they can't cross that barrier. But once you get comfortable being hit and you start to be able to move, then it allows you to see more. It opens up your visionary field. Why, now this is gonna sound like a really dumb question and it is, but maybe, I don't know. But tell me, why is it so much more intense
Starting point is 00:25:34 to get punched in the face than it is to get punched in the arm or the stomach or the kicks? I think it's just jolting, you know? I mean, there's been plenty of times I've been hit in the face in fights. I've had my left eye fractured twice. I've had my jaw broken in two places. My nose has been busted.
Starting point is 00:25:52 But every time I've been hit in the face, it didn't hurt. It was just like, whoa, don't let that happen again. Like when the second you get dazed or dizzyed, you realize like that's just a little bit more and I'll be asleep, right? So like we have a, it's, there's a higher degree of shit. Don't let that happen. Is it so, man, again, like you have to understand, man,
Starting point is 00:26:14 obviously I'm not a fighter. I'm not Rogan, Rogan, I got lucky. He takes me on the road with him and sometimes I get these insane like emperor level seats at the UFC, you know, and I'd sit there and get to enjoy these fights. But the sad thing about it is I'm watching them from the perspective
Starting point is 00:26:33 of a complete non-athlete, right? Like someone who, you know what I mean? Who doesn't know the tech, not that I didn't appreciate it. You know what I mean? And certainly like one thing I learned right away, the difference between watching a fight on TV and watching it right next to the ring, what do you call it?
Starting point is 00:26:52 The octagon, Rogan. It's all the frickin' thing. Watching it right next to the octagon. As you watch on TV, you see someone get punched on TV and you're like, whatever, that's just a little like tap. I wish they'd really start fighting. When you're sitting there, you every single one of those punches is,
Starting point is 00:27:10 it's the kind of thing that I would wake up at night screaming if someone punched me like that once, you know? It's like, there's so, it's so shockingly violent. It's so shockingly intense. And then on top of that, you realize like, my, these fucking, these are like super athletes or something, like they are every single level of who they are and what they are
Starting point is 00:27:35 is somehow trained to not only to do this, but quite often after it's over, they hug each other for real. And that was always shocking to me. But you have to understand, I don't understand it outside of just the way like when I'm watching football and I'm like, well, that's something you can do. And that's crazy the capacity that humans have within them.
Starting point is 00:27:58 That's insane to me. So forgive my questions, okay? This isn't like, obviously we're not on ESPN. But there are real questions I have when I watch these fights and I'm excited to ask you about them. And I want to talk about psychedelics. So if you would humor me with letting me ask you a few more questions, thank you, I appreciate that.
Starting point is 00:28:17 Okay, so here's the first question that I've been dying to ask you. When you went a fight within 30 seconds and you've been training for how long for that? Eight weeks, 10 weeks. 10 weeks. And you went a fight in 30 seconds. Is there like, I know this sounds like a dumb question, a kind of weird sense of like almost disappointment or something.
Starting point is 00:28:48 Bittersweet, 100%. Whoa. There's been, I mean, in anything, in any fight camp, you're working on the strategy of what you're gonna do in that particular fight. So if the guy's really good on the ground, I'm working on takedown defense, keeping it standing, things like that.
Starting point is 00:29:06 And then constantly learning new skills. You want to acquire new things and evolve because the sport's evolving rapidly. Right. I remember the first time I won a fight in 26 seconds, I had a new striking coach and we had been working out so much on the jab and so much on leg kicks and body kicks and Muay Thai.
Starting point is 00:29:27 And we had like one exchange and I need the guy in the stomach and it was over. And I was like, fuck man, I didn't get to fucking use any of this stuff that we've been working on for the last eight weeks. And he's like, that's all right, it's better. We'll go back to the drawing board, we'll continue to polish those skills
Starting point is 00:29:44 and the good news is nobody's seen that advancement yet. They haven't seen your game change. So you'll still have that going forward. People won't be worried about it. But it's funny how the human mind works because it doesn't matter how good you win or how fast you win or how many people see it, there's always more to want
Starting point is 00:30:04 and always more to try to gain and achieve when it comes to things like that. Wow, cool. Okay, cool, that, cause I kind of like was tracking that a little bit on fighters, it's like, they seem a little, like there's a little flicker of something and I get it cause you don't get to show off.
Starting point is 00:30:20 You don't get to do the dance. You were looking forward to doing this thing and you don't get to. Wow, okay, cool. Okay, now here's my last question about fighting. There's a phenomena that I've heard of. I've never experienced, I've never been on this a night show but I've heard about this thing post tonight show depression
Starting point is 00:30:39 or like some comedians spend all, you know, like finally get to do their set on TV and they're like driving home and they've just, you know, now they're home, you gotta brush your teeth, maybe get some, you know, have a little night snack. Your couch is the same couch it was before. Maybe look at your phone, people are texting you
Starting point is 00:31:02 but a real sense of like depression can sink in where this great thing that you'd been working towards happened in the moments after were not the victory march. Where there was no confetti, there is no angelic trumpets. You're just yourself still and the finish line that you'd created for yourself is behind you now and now what?
Starting point is 00:31:33 Is there something like that that happens with fighting? I think it can, it didn't work out that way for me and there's a couple of reasons that I'll dive into on that. I think, you know, yeah, if someone wins a gold medal and that's their fucking lifelong dream and they accomplish that, there can be like, well, shit, what now?
Starting point is 00:31:49 I gotta wait four years till the next Olympics. Do I come back to this? Is this something I wanna continue? Excuse me. For me, I didn't have that. I had that at the end of football. So I finished football at Arizona State and I was, I went through the deepest depression of my life.
Starting point is 00:32:08 Attempted suicide, just all bad. And I talk a bit about this on the solo podcast, episode 12 in the human optimization hour so people can dive into that if they wanna hear my walk through that time in my life. Once I got to the end of fighting, I had different tools and thankfully I had a boxing coach who was Native American. He would take me to the reservation in Northern California
Starting point is 00:32:31 and we do traditional sweat lodges. Oftentimes with psilocybin. And later on, he introduced ayahuasca into my life and that just changed the scope of things. How did he become, how did this person, what's his name? Huizzi, he's passed away, but most people have seen him. You've probably seen him at the UFC. He was very short, long hair and he had,
Starting point is 00:32:56 he had a giant turquoise necklace that he would always wear. He was a cut man for the UFC. How did you end up with him as your teacher? He was a boxing coach at American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose. Did you know when you started working with him that he was also, he had the spiritual, the medicine? Nope, no idea.
Starting point is 00:33:12 And it's funny because my dad knew and my dad told him, hey, at some point will you guide my son through his first visionary work? And he said, yeah, for sure. And so I think two years later, we had done a number of sweat lodges without medicine. And I was like, yo coach, when are we gonna use La Medicina? You know, and he just started busting up laughing.
Starting point is 00:33:31 And he said, I've just been waiting for you to ask. Let's do it. Wow. And from that point on, we would do ceremonies before the fight camp started, and then at the end of the, after the fight for healing reflection and letting go of the shit that no longer served us.
Starting point is 00:33:48 What was the, if like you were forced to put his teachings into chapters of a book, what would the first chapter be? I think a lot of the teachings in the first chapter would be on gratitude for the earth, like a deeper understanding. And that's something that's been shown to me through the plants, especially with ayahuasca, is like this love for our mother.
Starting point is 00:34:18 And we're not separate from this thing. You know, like we have this idea in the West that God has dominion over all the plants and animals and we're fucking separate and we're not primates and we're not animals and we're also not in nature. So we can fuck with nature and try to manipulate it to our liking and we can figure it out better than this giant organism that we're a part of,
Starting point is 00:34:41 as opposed to like this is a concert and we're one note within the whole thing. And it's not separate. And I think that would be probably one of the first things gone over in a deep way is just this whole different way to look at reality, where we live, what we're on, this giant thing that's alive and conscious. Did he have any kind of stories that he repeated
Starting point is 00:35:07 or any kind of sayings that he repeated over time? Mm, none that are coming to mind right now. I mean, he would, I mean, certainly the Tim has called, he would pour sweat similar to the Lakota tradition. We would have four rounds, seven rocks each round and each round represented a different prayer round. What did you call that? You said that something called the Tim has call.
Starting point is 00:35:31 How do you, 10 minutes? What is it called? Tim has, Tim has call. Oh, Tim has call. Yeah. Like what does that mean? Like the street, that's a sweat lodge. Oh. Yeah. And there's different forms in Anipi is another type of sweat.
Starting point is 00:35:43 Got it. Okay. So the Tim has call is what we would do. And each round you would have a different focus on the prayer round. So one would be on the earth itself. One would be on our ancestors who have passed on. One would be on those people or more anything that is suffering right now that needs help and needs love
Starting point is 00:36:04 and needs some direction of consciousness and energy. And then, you know, self reflection. What are the things we wish to call into our life? And the idea basically is that that is one of the highest forms of prayer because you're, you're doing the work here. It's not easy to sit through a sweat lodge. You're physically dumping sweat and tears
Starting point is 00:36:28 and breath into this place. Tears. Tears, the womb. Yeah, there are a lot of people. I've cried a lot of times in the sweat lodge, for sure. Did you, was this with the medicine or even before the medicine you had started? Before the medicine, for sure. Talk about, can you tell me what inspired those tears
Starting point is 00:36:44 if you feel comfortable talking about it? Of course, you can ask me anything. I think the first time I cried in a sweat lodge it was during the Mother Earth's round and we were really diving in. And I hadn't had any of the downloads from ayahuasca on everything we do to the earth that's not in harmony. But he opened it up to our actual physical mothers.
Starting point is 00:37:10 And I had just fucking floodgates open up, thinking about my mom's life, her struggles growing up. And she's fairly open about this, but my grandfather was a molester, just hard, really hard stuff. And then seeing her transition from completely mindless living to getting clean and welcoming in spirituality and doing the healing work
Starting point is 00:37:43 and really seeing that whole arch of her life with just complete gratitude and compassion and being blown the fuck away by it. It was a powerful experience to see that whole arch of her life like that. That is amazing that you got to see that happen. That doesn't always happen. No.
Starting point is 00:38:04 But it can happen. And if it can happen in that way, do you think it can also happen on the planetary scale in the sense that what you just described in some ways you could say is mirrored in the way that so many people treat the earth right now. And there's a sense of complete disconnect from the planet. People don't even think about it.
Starting point is 00:38:45 They don't even think about it. They don't think about the ground. A great many people walk on the earth every single day and they don't think about the way their feet feel touching the ground. It hasn't crossed their mind in years. Just that, the simple connective pull, the sense of being held.
Starting point is 00:39:11 So I think probably because of that, since you don't think about it. Oh, we do all these things. Like we go from a box called a house with rubber shoes on to our cars and other box to our office and other box. We're disconnected from the sun. We're disconnected from,
Starting point is 00:39:28 we can't see the stars anymore because of lights. And there is a disconnect. I mean, a lot of the messages from the medicine have been to reconnect to nature, to not only to be in nature, but to connect to the seasons, to know what time of year it is, connect to the lunar cycle,
Starting point is 00:39:45 to be out on a fucking full moon. Not just to say, oh, hey, tomorrow's a full moon or full moon and I'm gonna be watching Seinfeld all night. It's like, no, let's go outside, let's experience this. Let's go for a walk at night and take our sun out and just really soak in that energy because there is a lot of energy coming through on a full moon.
Starting point is 00:40:03 But that connection and also with the walking, like take your fucking shoes off. You gotta get grounded. And walking meditation has been for sure one of the biggest game changers that I've done and implemented it in my life because it's, there's movement there, you know? Like I think, I'm sure you know more about this than I do,
Starting point is 00:40:26 but there's in yoga, right? There's four parts to yoga. We only think of yoga in the physical expression. Like, oh, yoga, yeah, I'll go to fucking Bikram and that'll be it. Whereas the idea is that you would go through the physical and then these other pieces and you get to a place where you can meditate and have communion with the divine.
Starting point is 00:40:45 Most people that jump into meditation, they haven't done yoga or any other physical form of expression to move that energy and stickiness out of their body. So when they sit, they're like, I can't fucking sit still. Right? I can't sit with this anxiety. I can't sit with this emotion in my fucking quads, right?
Starting point is 00:41:03 So I think a beautiful bridge and certainly for me, if I know that I only have 20 minutes, I'm just gonna hit a walking meditation. I might put binaural beats in. I might just listen to nature or listen to cars, whatever that is, just follow my breath and feel each step as I walk. But in that, I feel so much better.
Starting point is 00:41:25 Like it is instant gratification, instant quiet mind. Yes. Well, I mean, this is like, you know, it's, I think the problem there's, if there is a problem or the confusion or the distortion is that so many truths have been co-opted by corporations and then used and essentially like they, a lot of big, big businesses take essential truths
Starting point is 00:41:54 and they attach their brand to the essential truth in the way like parasites attach themselves to big things in the ocean. And so they'll take a thing like, well, the earth is our mother and they'll put it all over their cups or something. You know, they'll put it all over this or that or all over the place.
Starting point is 00:42:12 And suddenly everywhere you're looking, you see the earth is our mother, the earth is our mother. You hear this shit all over the place. And then you could become cynical within that because you look at, you look at maybe someone who's bellowing out the earth as your mother and you're like, well, if the earth is your mother, your mother's an idiot
Starting point is 00:42:30 because you seem like an asshole. Yeah, it was fucking quack. Yeah, you quack. I'm not interested anymore. And so then you stop thinking about it when you, even though this is a thing that has been, your teacher taught you in a beautiful way, by like, well, forget the whole earth as your mother thing.
Starting point is 00:42:47 What about your mother as your mother? Okay, well, that's for a lot of us is gonna activate a whole nother series of like problems. If you have a difficult relationship with your mother or something like that. So now you're like, great. So the earth is like somebody you wish you wanted me to be like a doctor.
Starting point is 00:43:04 Is that it? The earth, well, you know, instead of as a- Never let me follow my dreams. Yeah, yeah. Earth forced me into a desk job, but I hate. Yeah, the earth went through my drawers. Yeah, that's it. Earth went through my drawers looking for marijuana
Starting point is 00:43:17 when I was 14 and then call the cops. And they, like, so even there are, because of like, maybe because the time we're in, the relationship with our mothers has become distorted. You know, and with good reason, it's like, if you look at the, you know, current trends, I was just watching morning news and there was a story on how in California
Starting point is 00:43:45 they might start giving mothers 12 weeks off work, which is great. 12 weeks off work. You get 12 weeks off work. So that's great, but it ain't that great. That's just 12 weeks. So now you're 12 week old, what happens? He can drive.
Starting point is 00:44:10 He'll make his way to the grocery store. He'll be prepping dinner by the time you get home, he'll have a hot meal waiting for you. You better spend six of those weeks teaching him how to use the microwave. And like, you know, so within, and because we're the way things are these days, both parents now have to go to work.
Starting point is 00:44:29 And so some of us have broken families in the sense that there aren't, there isn't a bigger, larger family structure to take care of the child. And so now you're in a situation where both parents have to go to work. The baby then gets put in a daycare center. Yeah, you have to outsource who raises your own child.
Starting point is 00:44:48 Yes, and the child's encounters with the mother are with someone who is very stressed out because the mother wants to do what mothers do or the father wants to do what fathers do. Both parents love the baby and want the baby to be okay. But the paradox is they can't be around the baby because they want the baby to be okay. And so they're having to work.
Starting point is 00:45:11 So we have this distorted sense of connection not just with the earth, but with the feminine, with our mother. And so now we have all these interesting problems that seem to be directly related to this distortion that's happening right now. I mean, I'm just figuring out how dumb I am by... Only now do I realize.
Starting point is 00:45:39 Every day with my wife and my child is like, just a dawning. And it sounds like I'm beating myself up, but I don't feel, I'm embarrassed, but I'm not beating myself up. It's a good kind of, it's like, it's not quite getting beat up on TV. But it's still humbling, right?
Starting point is 00:46:01 It's very, yeah. Yeah, and also all this, I've been at a podcast for so long and so many times I've emphatically said things based on nothing other than a real demented confidence coming from nothing more than like nothing and judgment and all this stuff. So every single day I get this like lesson
Starting point is 00:46:20 in what a mother does, what makes milk, gives milk to... My wife is making milk that the baby is eating. And also the way that she's holding and holding the baby and loving the baby and the way that she's somehow simultaneously loving me, which is pretty impressive in this incident.
Starting point is 00:46:47 Like I'm not some tiny little coal of pure love, you know? Pudgy got a beard, I stink most of the time. So what I'm saying is many of us don't even understand what a mother is. And because of that, how can we understand what the earth is? And somewhere in there where we've lost the story. And then from within that,
Starting point is 00:47:13 suddenly it's like, you know what, fuck it. Just throw the fucking bag out the window. You know what I mean? Or even worse, fuck it. Let's build a oil tanker that might leak into the, you know what, fuck it. Let's build a nuclear reactor next to the ocean. Let's just do that.
Starting point is 00:47:33 A nuclear reactor, we're gonna build nuclear, put nuclear energy right next to the, essentially the one of the, like the juggler vein of the planet. And just hope there isn't a hurricane. Let's hope there's not an earthquake. Let's hope something doesn't go wrong
Starting point is 00:47:50 and radioactive material gets in the sea. And so as a species, not all of us, certainly not you, but me to some degree, hopefully not too much. And many more of us to some degree have been abusing our mothers and our mother got sick. And so to hear you talk about your mother and seeing her getting better again, makes me feel a little hopeful.
Starting point is 00:48:20 And so forgive that long ramble. My question is, do you think if it happens on the small scale with some mothers and some people, it can happen on the global scale? Is it just a hippie dream that there is the potential for some kind of healing of the planet? I don't think that's a hippie dream. I mean, I think there's,
Starting point is 00:48:46 everything starts with the small. It's all, it's all with what's in front of you, like I was saying with the selling quote. One of my favorite quotes from football, and I forget who said it might have been Vince Lombardi, but it goes inch by inch, life's a cinch, but yard by yard, life is hard. Wow, cool.
Starting point is 00:49:03 So it is very much about how we inch forward and what are the little things, the little steps we take each day, right? And then how we view the world, it's our perspective, and that's the beauty of psychedelics is that we can see with new eyes and from different angles, right? I think as we look at our mothers
Starting point is 00:49:22 in any relationship for that matter that has a deep family history, and I, of course, you know this, but I remember Ram Dass saying, if you think you've become enlightened, spend a week with your family, right? So generally that's because you have such a long-standing history with those people,
Starting point is 00:49:37 but if you view it, one of the ways you can have a perspective shift, and I learned this from a woman named Anahata out of Sedona, is to say who is my greatest teacher? And it's not to look at that person as the person who taught you the most good, it's the person who taught you the most period. And oftentimes, there's a lot of bad shit
Starting point is 00:49:55 that they did to you that you can learn from, that I learned this is what I'm not gonna do to my son, this is how I'm not going to speak to people, this is how I'm not gonna treat my partner, right? That's the greatest teacher, and when you view it from there, from that lens, it makes a little more sense, because you're like, oh shit,
Starting point is 00:50:15 and then you have this idea, this level of compassion, where you realize everybody is doing the best with what they can. And I don't know if this is the case for you, but when I had my son three and a half years ago, I looked at my wife like, I'm a fucking kid raising a kid. I am a child still, raising a child, and I'm 36 now, and we're working on number two,
Starting point is 00:50:43 and I, in a lot of ways, still feel like a fucking big kid, right? But what that did for me is it was like, oh shit, my mom was 20. My dad was the same age as me. They were kids. They didn't know any better. They were doing the best.
Starting point is 00:50:58 There is no fucking manual, right? Then they just unpacked a lot of the shit, right? Total forgiveness and total compassion for the fear that they lived in and the pain and struggles they had. Wow, that's great. That's great. Yeah, that's good.
Starting point is 00:51:18 Wow, I gotta think about that. Huh, it's alchemy. It's some kind of alchemy. It's like, okay, yeah. So many of us have a person in our lives that we have a difficult connection with, and sometimes to the point where we can't talk to them anymore.
Starting point is 00:51:35 We can't be around them anymore, and yet we're still connected. There's no way, that's the problem. You know, for example, I think of Sheila Maylux, you know her? Exactly. You never think about her. I just made her up.
Starting point is 00:51:55 She never crosses your mind. Your boy Tyler, you were talking about with Daniel Miller, fuck Tyler. That's it. You know, that's how you can understand about connections that you have with people. Cause just think about Sheila Maylux. If there is a Sheila Maylux out there, I'm sorry.
Starting point is 00:52:11 She's fucking pissed. She was a huge fan of the show until now. It'd be funny though if she's actually an asshole, and somebody's like, yeah, she's a bitch. She burnt my church down. But the point is like, some people they're like, well, I don't see that person anymore. I don't talk to them anymore.
Starting point is 00:52:30 So it's done. No it isn't. Every single day feel the tug of that connection. It's in you still. You feel that weird pull. It's so, it's a lot of energy being put into that connection. And so usually the connection is being empowered by delusion because you think the person is evil.
Starting point is 00:52:55 So in your mind, you're like, well, this is a, this is a fucking monster. Like we were just watching this crazy documentary that's now on Netflix about Ted Bundy. Oh, I wanted to see that. We were just touchless flipping through Netflix. And I was like, fuck yeah, we got to see this. It's pretty good, man.
Starting point is 00:53:11 And it's like, I was watching it kind of, and suddenly I realized like, oh, Ted Bundy's like an AI in the sense that he's saying things that seem to just be like sentences he's picked up from different places. But it's like, he's like a praying maness or something. There doesn't seem to be anything in there. And yeah, there's a disconnect behind the eyes.
Starting point is 00:53:38 Yeah, yeah, just a shell of, I don't know what it is. Like a talking wasper. I don't even want to insult wasps. Just like a, you know, like sometimes someone's walking under a high rise and a piece of ice breaks off and hits the person in the head and they die. It's like if that piece of ice could talk, it would just, you know what I mean?
Starting point is 00:54:05 He would say all the nice things. Yeah, it might do just whatever it heard on the street. It might say stuff like, yeah, you know, that was the time in my life where I wanted to continue to be a bachelor. You know, he's saying weird shit that like you're on dating shows or something, but it doesn't feel like there's anything there
Starting point is 00:54:22 except these cobbled together personality. And Aaron was like, and I'm like, I don't think there's anything there. And she's like, no, he's, you know, he's evil. He's evil. And I was thinking like it would be easier if you were evil because then we could punish him. And now we have a thing to like attack.
Starting point is 00:54:42 And we can, if we can get rid of this evil, then we've gotten rid of a little bit of the evil in the world and we've done something good. But more sinister is like, no, he's not evil or good. He's just the same thing as when there's a mudslide. Just a collision of genetics and bad timing that ended up getting a lot of people killed in a lot of horrific ways, right?
Starting point is 00:55:09 That's Ted Bundy. So if I think of the people in my life that I have negative connections with and realize that they're not who I think they are. And I know that because I barely know who I am. If I barely know who I am, how the fuck do I know who anybody else is, right? I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:55:32 And if I don't know who anybody else is, then how can I be mad at them? This is the Ramdha story. You know the boat story? Guy's rowing his boat on a foggy morning and another boat smashes into the side of his boat. And he's like, what's wrong with you? Watch where you're going.
Starting point is 00:55:54 And the fog clears and there's nobody in the boat. It was just a boat drifting across the river. No one in the boat, you know. So this is good because this produces spaciousness, right? That what you're telling me, it's cool. I'm thinking about, I'm like, oh, I get it. So number one, whoever I'm pissed off at, they're not even who I think they are.
Starting point is 00:56:18 But number two, the imaginary sock puppet I made up for the person I'm pissed off at, that's my guru. And it's teaching me how not to be, how not to act. And suddenly I've converted a rotten connection into the most powerfully beautiful connection in my life. So thanks for that. That's pretty cool. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit
Starting point is 00:56:47 about your experience with psychedelics and specifically have you made any kind of contact that you're comfortable talking about? Contact with ETs and in the astral. Unfortunately, I have not been gifted with those experiences yet. I have felt the presence of my ancestors. My father's father was at a ceremony we did in Peru.
Starting point is 00:57:21 Huizi, the guy who got me into all this, the first medicine man I worked with, my old boxing coach, he's been in a number of ceremonies. They're still guiding, watching and making sure that the space is held. Whoa. And I mean, this slide did a pretty deep ceremony with my father, which was decided upon after this trip
Starting point is 00:57:44 to Peru with Aubrey and my wife, where we did Wachuma and then Vilca, this DMT snuff. And I realized there was still more stuff to unpack with my dad and my childhood. So I asked him if he wanted to do a ceremony with me and we'd done ayahuasca in the past together, but at each point he's had difficulty saying yes to more. And ayahuasca is scaled.
Starting point is 00:58:07 It's not like you drink a pint of it out of the gate. You have a shot glass by shot glass until you reach where you're supposed to be. And anytime he had the opportunity to have more, if he felt like he was gonna lose control, he would always say no. He wouldn't let himself go. So we used MDMA, pharmaceutical MDMA,
Starting point is 00:58:25 with penis envy mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, which is, first people don't know this strain. It's for sure the strongest mushroom on the planet. Oh my God. Twice as strong as anything else. And it's likely three times as strong as golden teacher or D plus. It has a very high content of psilocin in it, apparently.
Starting point is 00:58:44 And psilocin is what psilocybin gets converted into when you eat it, but somehow it's already there or something or all I know is I know. It's very DMT-like, but I wanted this to be loving. And he said yes to the experience because the fact that he knew you take one dose and it's buckle up. There's no have more later.
Starting point is 00:59:01 There's no real draw with that. You mean one dose of that particular strain? Yeah, you have it. You have the dose at the beginning of the evening and you're into a five hour journey and you have to surrender to it. You have to let go. And I'm not even sure
Starting point is 00:59:17 why I was bringing up my old man right then. Well, because you know what? What was the question you asked me originally? The question is like, you know, yeah, I've been watching some documentaries about great things that have happened in the world. And I've been a little fascinated with the inspiration specifically
Starting point is 00:59:37 and how some great ideas have come into the world through people who unapologetically said that they came from angels or spirits or dreams or things like that. And so that's just where my mind has been. And I know that you're someone who is on the psychedelic path. So I was just curious.
Starting point is 01:00:03 I know I brought him up. It was a shared experience. So that's something I read about in The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby was that you can have, you can share visions with people. My wife, we shared a vision of me holding a child and her holding me and the child. And I didn't know this until we had closing circle
Starting point is 01:00:22 and she spoke about this vision. And I was like, sorry, I gotta cut you off at the exact same fucking vision. And a month later, we were doing another ceremony with ayahuasca. And it was the same exact vision, but it was a boy. And it was like, fuck, I'm gonna be a dad. And all this fear came up about being a dad.
Starting point is 01:00:38 And then I realized that's what everyone else says needs to happen. And I was able to move that away from my body. And within a month, we were pregnant with our firstborn. So like that type of premonition, that type of seeing the thing come to fruition and then also the shared experience.
Starting point is 01:00:55 What does that mean? Because that happens and you've experienced it and I've experienced it. And many other people have experienced, but maybe some people listening have not yet experienced it. Tell me what your theories are on why that happened. How does that work? What does it imply about the nature of the mind?
Starting point is 01:01:19 I think that, well, there's two basic camps, right? You have the camp of this is all held within your brain. It's just being unlocked and that whatever vision you have is stored within you. It's not coming from something external. And then there's the belief in animism as opposed to a materialism that all things are conscious. The plants, the rocks, the trees,
Starting point is 01:01:41 they all have soul, whatever spark I have igniting me is shared with all things, right? So the plants as master teachers have their own consciousness and I believe that that consciousness is what's communicating to me most often. I brought up my old man because we shared a vision of Huizi, of my coach being there, watching over us.
Starting point is 01:02:05 And he was like, and I didn't even mention it to him because we were in the ceremony and noble silence. I'm not going to sit there and chat his ear off about what I'm seeing, but he was like, Huizi's here. And I was like, yeah, he is, you know? And it's like, that's just another little, very small thing of like, well, who gives a shit if Huizi's there?
Starting point is 01:02:23 Like, well, it matters to me, you know? And it's really cool to think that this teacher, this maestro, my first maestro will continue to be with me. There is no separation wherever you go and you die. Like he's still very much a part of my life. What do you think he'd be telling you now? These days, like if he could give you any kind of information.
Starting point is 01:02:43 I've seen him not in approval when I've guided others. Like I'm doing it right. And that gives me confidence moving forward because in anything in life when it's something that's that powerful, you question yourself, you know, you question, am I doing this right? Right. You know, you do no harm.
Starting point is 01:03:03 You don't want to harm others. And certainly in experiences that are that transformative, you know, there's a lot of white belts teaching psychedelic medicine out there. You know, there's a lot of people pouring ayahuasca that get it online, you know? And it's a different, and not that I pour ayahuasca for anybody or any of that stuff.
Starting point is 01:03:20 And I'm just saying like it's, there's a different level and a different standard that I hold myself to when I'm with, especially with family and people, anybody that I would, I guess, you know, guide in quotes in that space. Some people have been reporting a consistent message coming from the ayahuasca realm.
Starting point is 01:03:47 Have you noticed a consistent message that people are getting from their ayahuasca experiences? Well, one, and I read this on arrowwit.org and I'm sure you're familiar with it. Yeah, arrowwit's a great site. The first one I read was this idea that I'm not my body. So like the death, right? That's a very consistent message, I think.
Starting point is 01:04:09 And it's even stronger. Like I believed in God, but I had no idea that it was still an external thing, like this separate bearded man behind golden pearly gates, instead of me understanding that God is love and it is everything. And I'm a part of that thing, you know,
Starting point is 01:04:25 just like the ocean, all is of or nothing is. That's one of the great quotes I love from the guides through Paul Selig, as they speak to all is of or nothing is. And I firmly believe that all is of. So I am a part of that loving God consciousness, the non-judgmental form there. I don't know.
Starting point is 01:04:45 That's pretty good. I think that that's, and it's fairly early that people get that, that death. And my father experienced that where he realized like it's all fucking infinite. Like he was shaking and I'm like, damn, this guy's having like close to a seizure. It looks like he's holding an electric pole.
Starting point is 01:05:05 And I just, we just talked to him, we said, let it move through, you don't hold on to it. And as he was doing that, he was like, oh, okay, okay. And then he could, and then he could slow down and just breathe through it, right? But he felt like he was touching God's power line in that and realizing that that is infinite. And he is a part of that.
Starting point is 01:05:26 His body will change in the world of where we're at, the world of 10,000 things, right? This is always changing. This is always, this is transitory. Nothing is gonna stay the same here, but even here it's infinite, it just changes. Right, yeah, that's, that concept is something that definitely emerges in a lot
Starting point is 01:05:53 of different philosophies and religions, which is this sense of there being some kind of primary goodness in the world that is uncorruptible and transcendent. And many people contact that and then they forget about it, but they're at this. Yep, yep, and then we forget. And then life happens, you go right back to it.
Starting point is 01:06:23 Yeah, and then you go right back to it. And so, can you, if you feel like talking about it, talk about what the individuality, the individuality of the self or the sense of disconnection from your feet touching the earth or from the thing the earth emerges from, you could say, or from what, for lack of, from what I've been taught, you could call fundamental goodness.
Starting point is 01:06:54 Or another word which I've heard, which is a little more confusing is emptiness. But this place is, a lot of people, one of the descriptors they give is it's liberating. It's liberating. Contact with that place is liberating. In the sense that like a human gets a cut
Starting point is 01:07:25 and we put a bandaid on the cut and the cut heals. But this is a little different in the sense that this is like underneath the cut, underneath the murk and the darkness or whatever you wanna call it, is this eternal, fundamental, transcendent goodness that is instantaneously forgiving in the same way the light is forgiving to the darkness.
Starting point is 01:07:55 One description is, imagine a room has been dark for 10,000 years and someone turned on the light, instantaneous light. The darkness wasn't bad. There was no scrubbing. There was, you didn't have to come in and like the light didn't use sponges on the darkness. It just was gone.
Starting point is 01:08:14 Similarly, contact with this place isn't even contact with the place. It's more of like remembering who we are. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the things that keep you from staying in that place permanently. From trying to go back as often as possible. Do you mean like from continuing to do psychedelics that?
Starting point is 01:08:39 What keeps us from the place? If this is a fundamental goodness, if we are an eternal, transcendent, spaciousness, emptiness, if we are a we beyond we's, if we are a kind of unit of consciousness that seems to be being temporarily distracted by phenomena, why do we keep getting distracted? Well, I think we choose fundamentally
Starting point is 01:09:05 when we choose to come here and take our bodies, which I think is what happens. We're choosing to be in polarity. We're choosing to be in duality. What distracts you though? I mean, not we, I'm sorry, you. I got you. What distracts you?
Starting point is 01:09:20 Yeah, what is keeping you from living in that? Yes. Well, I can tell you, this is gonna lead right into open relationship. I would say the thing that keeps, as a generality, the thing that keeps me from living in that space is fear. And that can come from my job, potentially losing it,
Starting point is 01:09:45 or it can come, not that I'm worried I'm gonna lose my job and on it, but there's been times when I wondered that, when I first started there, because the last job I have, I was fired without severance. So like there's things, and then having a family to support, I'm like, fuck man, I can't even afford to buy a U-Haul
Starting point is 01:10:00 to move back into my mom's garage, right? So those fear, I think fear is what draws me out of the space of feeling always connected with no separation and only in love and living in love and living the dream and playing, you know? Like that's been so much of the messages that I've had in psychedelics has been to play, to not take it so seriously, to laugh at life and to enjoy it.
Starting point is 01:10:24 Tell me about the fear. Like, when you get afraid, what does it feel like? My wife and I started open relationship in October, and the fear that I've had with her having a partner was that she was gonna leave me and that bear would be raised by some other guy, and that fear feels like my chest being squeezed, it feels like my heart is being crushed,
Starting point is 01:10:53 and it's hard to breathe, and it feels like I really can't, I can't take a fucking deep breath right now. And I'm happy to say that shit's gone. I kind of figured out how to work through that, and I think psychedelics and fighting have given me those tools, but really it's about facing it,
Starting point is 01:11:16 and a good friend of ours, Aubrey and mine and Tosh, his name's Pirangi, he's a fucking amazing musician out of Sedona, highly recommend the ayahuasca album he did for Aubrey and the ayahuasca remixed album, but he talks about buffalo medicine, and this idea from the Lakota of what the buffalo represents is a spirit animal. When the buffalo have a storm coming,
Starting point is 01:11:40 they don't try to outrun the storm, they get shoulder to shoulder with their family, and they go head first into it, because they know that's the fastest way to get out of that storm, right? So what is the fucking fear? Let me engage with that, let me fully accept what is,
Starting point is 01:11:57 let me surrender to it and move through it, because that's the fastest way. If I try to ignore it or not acknowledge it, or think of ways to outsmart it or outquick it, that never fucking works, it'll always catch me from behind, so I really have to decipher, and that comes with being still,
Starting point is 01:12:15 like what emotions am I feeling that I don't like? Oh, I feel anxiety, or I feel fear, I feel this thing pulling me out of alignment with love, and when I see it and I'm willing to look at it, then I can actually begin to have an idea of how to move through that, and oftentimes it's with full acceptance of what is, rather than resisting, right?
Starting point is 01:12:37 Resistance to my wife having a partner, even though on paper I wanted to have a partner, and on paper I know all the reasons we choose to do, Polly, to have more than one meaningful relationship, more than one love, and to know that love is infinite, and as you have more children that doesn't take away from your first child's love, that it's still there, right? So as I really decipher these things,
Starting point is 01:13:04 I come to the place of it only adds, it takes nothing from me, it only adds to my life, because it enriches hers, it enriches my sons, and it enriches my life in turn. There's a different types of monogamy, you know, and course, and like, well, I mean, so like there's a, in India they have the Brahmachari ashram, as it's called,
Starting point is 01:13:36 this is the renunciate ashram, and so this is like hardcore, very rare that you get an incarnation or you could even do that, but some people, according to this particular belief system, they've gone through the melt so many times that they get born into a family of, a conscious family, for lack of a better word,
Starting point is 01:14:02 and it's like, it's a really great, for me like I stumbled upon this Ramadas and all this stuff just by good fortune and luck, because my mom stumbled upon it, and there were books around and stuff, and I just got lucky, you know. That's bullshit, there's nothing is chance, nothing is random, right?
Starting point is 01:14:20 You fucking called that into being, you're exactly supposed to be. I loved it, yeah, so maybe like coded in where there's some karma to burn off, and then I got lucky, and then I got to meet some great teachers who work with me, and like have like helped me reconnect, feel the earth under my feet, so to speak,
Starting point is 01:14:39 and but some people get born into like, like an example, Dildo can see Rinpoche as this. Did you say Dildo? No, I know it sounds like that though, Dildo. That would stink to be like, thank God the Buddha, like thank God the Buddha's name wasn't Dildo, right? Cause there might have been Buddhism might not have happened.
Starting point is 01:15:03 Like if Jesus's name had been Dildo, would there still be Christianity? Cause people would be like, well they would just rename him probably, but of course in those days they didn't know what a Dildo. I don't know. Well then maybe a Dildo would be called a Jesus, right? Like maybe Jesus was around long before Dildo,
Starting point is 01:15:20 so then that would have been switched, it would have been a name swap. You know what sucks? For sure, for sure, right now, somewhere on the planet, there is a goth who has a Jesus shaped Dildo, maybe like an upside down crucifix and she or he is just, they're fucking themselves with it right now
Starting point is 01:15:43 and in their mind they're like, yeah, this show, this will show you God, I'm so dark. That's what's funny, it's like hilarious to imagine that that is, that's happening. Dildo, I could be mispronouncing his name, Dildo Kinsi Rinpoche, very, very great teacher and interesting story about his life, man.
Starting point is 01:16:14 And he was born into a family and he went from a very young age, he wanted to be a monk. He wanted to live in India, they would call the Brahmachari life. And his parents didn't want him to, they want a son, not a monk. And so he ended up, they accidentally like spilled,
Starting point is 01:16:38 like boiling water on a boiling soup, burn him. And he was like burnt and like, he said something in that state of like, will you please let me wear the robes now? And this is like a very high incarnation because it's like from the moment he was born, it was somehow encoded or written into him. This is the path, this is the path.
Starting point is 01:17:02 And so interesting story, man. He went up in the classic thing, he went up into a cave, he was in a cave for a very long time. There are, that stuff you hear about like people being in caves, holding a certain consciousness, that's real. Holding space for the planet.
Starting point is 01:17:17 Yes, that's real, that actually happens. And they don't want to come down. Many of them are like, they don't want to deal with it or they're not, that's just not their karma, that's not their thing. I used to think that was both, that is real. And he was one of them. But he, like we got lucky because he came out
Starting point is 01:17:36 and because of him, my teacher's teacher took him jump a Rinpoche and a great other, many, many other teachers, they pay him a lot of respect because he was, I think they call it, and I might be messing all this up. So sorry for the people who are more conscious or aware of this than I am.
Starting point is 01:18:01 This is with all due respect. I think they called him like a lineage holder, which is that all these people from all these various lineages would come to him and give him the transmission of their lineage and he would hold that within him and then like try to pass that out into the world. So like he was sort of like a repository.
Starting point is 01:18:23 And there's all these crazy stories about him, one of them, he was like having darshan as it's called, like people were coming to see him. And in the back of the room, they were just like, offer obeisances, maybe give him a gift. It's a ritualistic, beautiful practice. But there was some just unremarkable, poor looking,
Starting point is 01:18:47 just monk in the back of the room, and he looks at him and he's like motions for him to come. And then he privately stays with this guy for like hours because whoever that monk was, we'll never know. But he was like, as they say, don't judge a book by its cover, don't judge a monk by his robes or whatever he's wearing. You don't know who that was or what was going on there.
Starting point is 01:19:11 These people show up sometimes. Like when you see a fish, when you're fishing, and you see the big fish flicker under the water for a second, it's like that. They'll just show up for a second. They don't wanna be here, they can't be here. They're not ready, it's not time yet, whatever. But anyway, he spent hours with this person
Starting point is 01:19:28 who probably gave him like a lot of data, from the various data streams that are happening around the planet. But anyway, you could say this is an example of a Brahmachari, that being said, he had kids. But some people are actually like celibate, for real. And the reason they're celibate is not because they're afraid to have sex.
Starting point is 01:19:51 It's not because they have some neurotic hangup about sex. It's because they understand there's all this complication that happens when you start humping. There's just no way around it, it gets complicated. It makes life, what's more complicated than that? It makes babies, it's a very powerful thing. And so then there's monogamy, right? And my wife and I have had a girlfriend
Starting point is 01:20:15 and we right now are being monogamous. I say right now, it's good to say right now we're being monogamous. It's a big relief. If you're in a relationship and you're like, we're monogamous forever! It can feel quite difficult. But if you say, well right now we're doing monogamy,
Starting point is 01:20:32 it's good. And then we have a reason for it. Man, we don't have time. It's complex. Yeah, you're not gonna spend the night at your girlfriends right now while you've got a little guy running around. There's so much going on, you know?
Starting point is 01:20:46 And it's like so much complexity. Similarly with polyamory. Can't you say right now we're polyamorous? But maybe if you wanted to, if it was causing you all kinds of like emotional turmoil and trauma, or if it was producing all kinds of complexity, or if it was adding turbulence to your life, do you think it's okay?
Starting point is 01:21:13 Can't you get it as attached to polyamory as you can to monogamy? Oh, of course. For sure. And you can be dogmatic about it and tell the world, this is how you need to do it. This is what you should eat. Don't eat meat.
Starting point is 01:21:24 Don't eat meat. And everyone should fuck everyone. And all is love. Yeah, for sure you can. And there's people that beat the drum in anything in life because they get a hold of something that they have deep transformation and healing and positivity from and they wanna share that with the world.
Starting point is 01:21:39 Yes. The first five times I did ayahuasca, I wanted to fucking shout from a mountaintop, everyone needs to do this and try to get all my friends to come and then, no, everyone walks their own path. Everyone gets to do their own work and everyone chooses to call in their own lessons
Starting point is 01:21:56 in the way that they see fit. And I think there would answer your question, there's no doubt, could we push pause? For sure we could. I think in these initial stages, this is the first three or four months that we've been doing it. And we spoke about this for five years leading up to it.
Starting point is 01:22:12 It's not like we just decided one day, let's fuck other people. There was a long time listening to people like yourself and Dr. Chris Ryan and reading Sex at Dawn and reading Untrue by Wednesday Martin and all these things that factored into it. But really it was about are we willing to do this and does now feel right?
Starting point is 01:22:32 And it did feel right and we started and we've brought in people that we care about, that add value to our lives that are in alignment with how we live. And they fit right in like a puzzle piece and add to our family. I mean, they are family. So I think with that, any struggles that I've had from this
Starting point is 01:22:54 and there's been plenty, that's my work. You know, there's a great, I've been, it's also lit a fire under my ass to be better, right? So I read Conscious Loving by Gay Hendricks and Kathleen Hendricks, fucking one of the best relationship books I've ever read. And Nonviolent Communication for me with that. No, I've heard about it,
Starting point is 01:23:15 but cause it's something the people who, Burning Man, the people who, I don't know what they call themselves. They don't call themselves security for sure. They don't call themselves that, but they train in it because like they don't want anybody to get arrested and they want to avoid having to escalate things to the point where you have to get the authorities involved. So they train in ways to sort of,
Starting point is 01:23:43 if someone's freaking out or pissed or some weirdness. Conflict resolution. Yes, through Nonviolent Communication. Talk about that a little bit though. It's beautiful. I mean, we're, I would say three quarters through the book. And right now, one of the things that we've done since starting open is every night after sex,
Starting point is 01:23:59 if she's not sleeping at her boyfriend's, we will read a chapter of Mastery of Love or we'll listen to a chapter from a book that is for us. It's for our relationship. It's for enhancement, right? And that draws us together because we can just snuggle on the couch and download this amazing information
Starting point is 01:24:17 and press pause to talk about it or stop, put the book down for a second and really unpack some of the stuff as it's coming in. But Nonviolent Communication, it teaches you a way. I mean, he talks about it as more than a, it's more than a template. It's about compassionate giving. And what you're giving is the opportunity
Starting point is 01:24:37 for real communication to be heard and to hear the person that's speaking to you. And when you do that, you're communicating a way that it's without blame. It's without judgment. It's without right or wrong. It just is, right? And so so many of the tools that he uses through this
Starting point is 01:24:54 are right in alignment with the teachings of the plants, right in alignment with Buddhism, right in alignment with living in a way that's freeing. And so I think, you know, it's, if you're even in fucking monogamy, like you better communicate well with your wife, you're gonna have problems, right? Like communication is critical.
Starting point is 01:25:14 It's the- I'm so bad at it. It's the fun. You'll love this book then. And it's short. It's like five hours on Audible. Oh, it's so terrible. So it's not a long book.
Starting point is 01:25:22 It's not a long book. I wanna be better at it. It's like, and I've been around people who are actually good at it. I mean, not people who are like fake good at it, which is really, really annoying. But you know, people when you realize like, whoa, you're like talking to me for real
Starting point is 01:25:35 and listening to me for real. And that you're vulnerable right now. You're making yourself so vulnerable right now because you're not trying to be right. You just wanna connect to the truth. And I'm wanting to be right. And I don't care what the truth is, which is a big miss, boy, that's a good way
Starting point is 01:25:56 to wreck your car if you're driving and you want the road to be somewhere it's not. You're fucked, you're gonna run into a tree. And this is similar in life, you know? And so that's a very big frustrating, for me, a huge frustration is when you end up in a diet, you're talking to somebody and you realize like, they're not, they're in it to win it.
Starting point is 01:26:22 Well, it's not like we're scientists in a laboratory trying to determine whether or not some theory that we have is correct. It's like, this person just wants me to say, I'm sorry, you're right. Even if that doesn't seem to be the case. And this is like a plague. How many times have you online?
Starting point is 01:26:45 I don't know if you even interact online. You seem like you're too enlightened to engage. There are times where I used to do that. Go down the rabbit hole. You don't do it anymore. I block people or I don't respond. It's not worth my time and energy. But to get into what you're saying, are there still interactions with people in the world
Starting point is 01:27:03 that, you know, they haven't read the book. They're not great. They don't do the self-work and they want to be right. Yes, of course, that's fucking life. And there's plenty of unconscious people wandering through the world. So with that, one of the beautiful things about the book is that it teaches you how to decipher their message
Starting point is 01:27:22 through their pain, through their anger, through their blame. And as you decipher that, you can come to a place of being heard. And then that comes through their recognizing that you've heard them, even if they don't say it right. And they say it with blame and anger and judgment. If you can unpack that for them, they feel heard. And there's a very essential piece of communication.
Starting point is 01:27:46 When we feel fucking heard, like that draws you in to that person. So even if it's like, fuck you, you did this, blah, blah, blah. And there is this level of compassion and understanding and you feel like you've been heard. Then it's like, oh, okay, well, all right. And so you have the, he has four steps. One is the observation.
Starting point is 01:28:05 You observe what's actually going on. You don't add to the observation. You know, like I wrecked my car. I wrecked my car because I got in an accident, not because that guy ran a red light and he's a piece of shit and he's texting and he only cares about social media and that's why he hit me.
Starting point is 01:28:23 It's like, no, like this happened, right? You don't attach anything after that. Then you have, let's see, the observation, then the feeling. How do I feel right now? And an actual feeling, not, I feel like you should be a better partner. Like that's not a fucking feeling. Like I feel sad when you're not around.
Starting point is 01:28:42 That's a real feeling, right? Then you have the need. What is the need based on that feeling? I need you to be around. Yeah, I want, I would like to spend more time with you or that when we do spend time together that we're actually engaged with one another. We're not just watching sitcoms
Starting point is 01:29:00 that we actually have a dialogue and we interact with one another because then I feel like the short amount of time that we get to spend together is valuable. And that allows me to not worry about you spending that out at your partners or any other thing. And I'm using that as an example because we're talking about that,
Starting point is 01:29:17 but you go through the observation, you go through your feelings, you go through the need and then you have a request. And here's the beautiful part of that. I can make the request, but the difference between a request and a demand is how I react to that response. If I say Duncan, I really wanna podcast with you
Starting point is 01:29:37 at noon today and you say, no, I got some other shit going on. We'll do two o'clock. If that's a request, then that's okay. It's like, oh, okay, he has other stuff going on. So we'll do two o'clock. That works for me also, right? But if it's a demand, then I'm mad at you.
Starting point is 01:29:54 It's like this motherfucker wants me to come on his time. He doesn't wanna do, you know what I'm saying, right? And so so often we have a request for somebody and when it's not met, that's when the judgment, the blame, they need to be right that you did this. And that's all that shit fucking comes in after that. He's a brilliant man. What's his book called?
Starting point is 01:30:13 Nonviolent Communication. Wow, man, like so many times, I make demands that look like requests. That is so fucked up. That's good to know where you're like, I'm gonna request this because it sounds better because nobody wants to be an autocrat. Nobody wants to demand anything.
Starting point is 01:30:37 You gotta make requests in this world, not demands unless you're like, unless you've got an army around you or something. This is really cool, man. Wow, that's super cool. It reminds me of this thing, you know who Zizek is? I don't know, I'm not gonna pretend to understand him, but he's like this like communist philosopher
Starting point is 01:31:02 who's got a great documentary out that I've enjoyed called The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. And it's just a breakdown of like capitalist memes that are in movies, I guess you could say. I don't know, I always have to apologize to whoever's a genius out there listening. I don't know, it's a great movie, breaks out a lot of stuff in a cool way,
Starting point is 01:31:27 but he talks about totalitarianism in the way it rears its head. And he talks about these two types of totalitarianism. One, someone pulls out a gun and is like, dig a hole, asshole, or I'm gonna shoot you. You dig the hole, you have to. They've got a gun on you, right? And then he talks about the other kind,
Starting point is 01:31:52 which is really insidious and fucked up. And this is an example of someone making a demand but pretending it's a request. He says, this is what happens when you're with your son or a parent is with their kid and you want the kid to go see their grandparents and you pose a question to the kid. Do you want, you know that your grandmother is getting old
Starting point is 01:32:16 and is very, very sick. She's not gonna be around long. Do you want to see her? And the kid's like, no. But then they still have to have been coerced. You're like, but she's very sick, very sick. And so you manipulate the kid. So the gun to the head is not a gun.
Starting point is 01:32:38 It's like a gross manipulation, a coercion, so to speak. But it's the identical thing. And I think his point was the second one's way worse. Because at least the first one, you know someone's got a fucking gun to your head and you know that you're digging a ditch because you don't want to get shot. Yeah, that's easier to accept.
Starting point is 01:32:56 Yeah, the second one, they're fooling you into thinking you have some autonomy when you don't have any autonomy at all. And it sounds like autonomy is like a fundamental core of nonviolent communication, letting the other person be who they are, right? Yeah, this is exactly what he was talking about as we were driving here.
Starting point is 01:33:13 We were listening to it on the drive and he gets into autonomy with that. Because the reason why I would do something for you, it has to be positive. If it's because I have to, that ain't gonna work, right? It can't be because I have to. It has to be because I want to. Right, you gotta set them free, man.
Starting point is 01:33:37 You gotta let everyone free from whatever ridiculous imaginary prison you're locking them up in. Because otherwise, who wants to live in that world? Have you seen that Twilight Zone or that little boy? Did you see the Twilight Zone movie? No, the movie? Yeah, they made a movie as cheesy as hell.
Starting point is 01:33:54 When was it? It's for like, I think it's late 80s. Okay, I might have seen it. I used to, I've seen a few episodes of the show, it'd come up on Late Night TV. Forgive me, this is just a great, I love talking to you. I think I've held you a little, right now, it's a little late.
Starting point is 01:34:09 I'm not sure what time it is. Do you have a little bit more time? I got more time, brother. Okay, cool. I'm really enjoying chatting with you. Morious sponsors. Much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH.
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Starting point is 01:34:51 You can just go to Squarespace right now and start a website called splatterth.com. And you decide what to do with it. It sounds like a Silicon Valley billionaire startup, is what it sounds like to me. It sounds like some kind of like brand new Twitter. Or it sounds like a shoe company, maybe. Some kind of new kind of shoe called Splats
Starting point is 01:35:14 that maybe are like create like a, some kind of like they suck your sweat out of your foot and then squirt the sweat through some kind of dye that colors it in like hyper colors and then sprays out whatever you want it to say when you walk. You sort of leave little signatures wherever you go and sweat.
Starting point is 01:35:36 That's what everyone wants. Splatterth.com's available. Go to squarespace.com and get it. They got everything you need to turn your cool idea into a new website or to showcase your work at a blog or publish content or just make a website honoring your dad or mom or your friend's mom.
Starting point is 01:35:57 It's all there for you. You can sell products and services of all kinds and now they've got email campaigns. So if you wanna send email blasts out, they have everything, I tried it. It's awesome. Unfortunately, the list I used was from people who signed up from the old forums.
Starting point is 01:36:15 Some people were not happy that they got spam from me. My apologies. Some people are a little stressed these days and I think my email blast pushed a few people over the edge because I got one email inviting me to pluck my own eyeballs out for sending spam. So I'm sorry for that. I only plucked one of them out.
Starting point is 01:36:40 I didn't do both. So you don't control me. Squarespace, head over to squarespace.com right now. Go to squarespace.com forward slash Duncan for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Head to squarespace.com forward slash Duncan for a free trial.
Starting point is 01:37:08 That means you could just go in there, see if it works for you, which it will. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Anyway, this Twilight Zone episode, this woman encounters this boy, I think at a gas station or some shit
Starting point is 01:37:30 and she gets, I don't remember how it gets her to come back to his house, but there's all these people at his house who are acting real weird. And the reason they're acting weird is cause anything the kid wants happens, right? And they have to do exactly what he says or he's gonna fuck them up.
Starting point is 01:37:43 So they're all pretending to like him. So they're like, hello, oh, we're so glad you're home. Who's your new friend? Can I get you some food? But they're all like grimacing cause they know, like he could like blow their head up or turn them into a toaster oven if he wants to. And so it's this bullshit love.
Starting point is 01:38:04 It's all fake. It's not real. It's all sweaty, sweaty, bullshit, terrified, coercive love. And it's one of the most horrific things to discover that in some way shape or form people around you are afraid you're gonna disconnect from them or do something to them
Starting point is 01:38:25 if they don't act the way you want them to. And that is a really terrible thing to recognize that you've been a little fucking autocrat, a little Mussolini in your life and pretending that you're not, that you're Gandhi. Is there anything worse? At least fucking Mussolini, he knew that he was evil. His office building is a hellscape.
Starting point is 01:38:50 Where they were located, the fascists were located was evil looking. He looked evil. He was having brunch with Hitler. There's no question this guy sucks, right? But man, when you get a Mussolini acting like they're Gandhi, oh no, that's a big mess. And when that's you, holy shit, what are you gonna do?
Starting point is 01:39:11 Forgive yourself. You always have to forgive yourself. It doesn't matter what the fuck you do. Talk about that. How do you do it? Because it's like, I think you are someone who is waking up. You are a conscious person. You've done a lot of work.
Starting point is 01:39:26 You actually followed a pretty classical occult training path. You started off developing yourself physically. Then you are now entering into a more spiritual, metaphysical tradition that has, it's a real lineage that, and you have like authentic teachers who are embodied and also don't have a body. So you, I think, are in an interesting position
Starting point is 01:39:56 in the sense that you're someone who is one of the most dangerous people I've ever met, who's studying nonviolent communication. That's balance, Duncan. That's cool. So talk about this forgiveness. How do you forgive yourself in a real way? It's a real difficult thing for people
Starting point is 01:40:16 who suddenly start waking up and realize that while they were sleepwalking, they built a prison that they are the jailer and also the jailed. Yeah, you've had the keys the whole fucking time where you're sitting in the cell. Yeah, but it's embarrassing for some people. It's an embarrassment when you realize,
Starting point is 01:40:36 wait, I'm not the only one I locked up here. No question. So what do you do in that case? You know, our buddy Aubrey, who's one of my best friends, has really helped illustrate this for me with regard to open, but it translates to everything in that whatever it is you're not willing to look at,
Starting point is 01:40:54 whatever it is you're ashamed of or have guilt about, you won't even fucking see it. That's in the blind spot. So if I'm so woke and I've done so much work and I know the books and I've gotten downloads from the plants, I've had visions come through on doing open relationship and polyamory and I actually experienced jealousy,
Starting point is 01:41:14 like a fucking regular person. I'm not even gonna acknowledge that, that I'm jealous. I'll finger point, I'll blame, I'll say anything to not have to face that. Right. So truly, and this happened to me very recently, it became an issue of I'm living in fear, I'm living in pain and it's all an illusion.
Starting point is 01:41:37 And if I acknowledge the thing that I'm feeling, oh, I do feel jealous about this. Oh, I do wanna have more really cool experiences. My wife and her boyfriend are gonna go to Vegas and have a fun trip out there. I want her to have that experience. If I'm gonna write down all the things I want for her, I want her to fucking do full expression in sex,
Starting point is 01:41:59 full experiences, weekends together, really amazing things and I want that for myself. When we, you know, agree to have that trip to Vegas, there's still an initial, ah, fuck man, Vegas is where we met and it's where we, I first started courting her and all these memories are there and it's acknowledging the fact that, oh, I am jealous
Starting point is 01:42:24 and it is because we have a history there and it is because that's where you're born and raised and it is because I have so many memories of that place with you, right? So if I can look at it and face it, then it's like the buffalo going face first into the storm, right? I have to be able to see what it is
Starting point is 01:42:41 and then from there, forgive myself for that because there was a lot of shame that I had surrounding that, a lot of guilt surrounding my jealousy and my fear because when you live in a space of that kind of fear and this happens, even if you're in monogamy and you fear your wife leaving you or her being attracted to another man, you become very needy and I became needy,
Starting point is 01:43:04 like a fucking clingy, you know, like, no, don't go, I love you, do you love me? You know, like that kind of fucking was like, it's like, fuck, you know, and then I feel it as I'm doing it and it's like, oh God, this is not an alignment, this is a sin, this is missing the mark, this is not an alignment with the path
Starting point is 01:43:24 and to actually say that's okay, you know, and I've had, I mean, fuck, I mean, having guys like Aubrey around are great because he can say like, oh, he jokingly calls me Odin when we're in Peru and he's like, did you think you were actually Odin? Did you think you were not mortal? Like, you are mortal, you are in form,
Starting point is 01:43:48 you are a fucking human being and it's okay to have those feelings, everyone does, right? Well, I'll tell you this, also, if your wife is, if your wife has told you she has not attracted anybody else, you better be afraid, man, that's where you should really start fucking worrying, that's a worrisome thing.
Starting point is 01:44:09 If my wife told me she wasn't attracted anybody else, it's like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I know what I'm talking about. You're a fucking human being, you're a human being. That shit doesn't turn off. I know the continuum. It's not like I'm oblivious to the continuum of humans, I certainly know I'm not at the pinnacle of human evolution.
Starting point is 01:44:33 I'm not getting calls from GQ magazine, you wanna pose on the front, Sherlock Stonkin, you are such a specimen. You know what I mean? So I think that all game people play in monogamous relationships with each other is here the only one I want. It's just you and you alone.
Starting point is 01:44:49 It's like, first of all, no, I don't wanna be the only one you want, because I can't be. That's too much for anyone. That's too much. And two, you are not okay right now if that's what you're thinking. If you're thinking that right now,
Starting point is 01:45:05 it's a temporary occurrence, at least admit that. Because certainly, you have to be prepared for the reality of life, which is that you're gonna want other people. And if you don't, my God, my God, I guess I am what I thought I was. Ode in the Lord of Banda. So that's to address that point,
Starting point is 01:45:28 understanding the continuum of things. But there's something else I wanna talk about with you related to this, which is it gets summed up like this. A person is in the shade and they think I'm too cold. And so they go into the sun. A person goes into the sun and they think I'm too hot. And then they go back into the shade. Now we have a readjustment of phenomena,
Starting point is 01:45:56 a kind of infinite switching positions in an attempt to create or to find or to connect with that situation I mentioned earlier, fundamental goodness. And this produces what's called, as I understand it, samsara, or the never ending cycle of suffering. So a person works their entire life to get on The Tonight Show.
Starting point is 01:46:22 They get on The Tonight Show and they realize, wait, now I wanna be in a movie. And so now they're rushing to be in the movie and this cycle of want or desire repeats and repeats and repeats. Similarly, with fucking, with polyamory, with lovers, with that level of connection, is it possible that in monogamy, in polyamory,
Starting point is 01:46:54 in anything where you have produced a peak in your mind, which is like I am going within a week to be in one of the most amazing MDMA orgies of all time with some of the most beautiful women, we are gonna be fucking non-stop. I've got an endless supply of amphetamines, MDMA, ketamine, and something to- And Viagra.
Starting point is 01:47:23 And Viagra. And something to reverse the cellular damage done to my body from this evil cocktail of ridiculous old man drugs that I'm gonna be slurping back so I could fuck. And so in my mind I've produced this whatever it is, a super hedonistic reality, right? And I'm longing for it now.
Starting point is 01:47:41 And now I want it. And then I get to it. And it happens. And it's like, that was the first time I ever had a threesome. I mean, this is a thing that like, as a teenager, you're just like, oh, what would that feel like? What would it be like?
Starting point is 01:47:54 Oh my God. And then you're like, I can only feel one body at once, mostly, you know what I mean? It's like a person who has a giant house. You can only be in one room at a time. You know, you can't expand out to the ballroom. You can't go out. You know, you can only be in one room at a time.
Starting point is 01:48:12 You can go jogging through the house if you want, maybe, and like, or get, you know, the most ridiculous thing is when people get those things, the cops ride on, they have to get a segway. A segway that they segway through there. Like Paul Blockmark mall cop? Yeah. Can you imagine they're segwaying through their fucking house
Starting point is 01:48:28 and no one's there except them and the sound of their segway as they go through the halls. And so, I guess it all goes back to intention, but what I mean is, what about the concept that there is no ordering of phenomena that will take care of the fundamental problem? And that fundamental problem is that no matter where we stand, we're standing on razors.
Starting point is 01:49:01 No matter where we go or what we do, as long as we're, as long as I'm an eye, as long as I'm connected to this identity, as long as I am living in my story, as long as I am locked in to this thing that I am, I am going to suffer and there is no fix for that, whether it's monogamy, polyamory, celibacy, cut your dick off, apparently Tesla cut his balls off
Starting point is 01:49:31 because he was too distracted by wanting to hump. He wanted to make electricity more than he wanted to make babies. So what about that? What if like the polyamory thing or the monogamy thing or all of it is just another way to trick yourself into thinking that experience is going to, in some way, shape or form, fix the fundamental difficulty of existence?
Starting point is 01:49:53 I get what you're getting at here. And I think this, that is a very spiritual and beautiful way of asking, do you do poly to fuck other people for a peak experience or is it for growth? Is it for healing? Is it to shine light on the dark spots that are in our relationship?
Starting point is 01:50:13 Is it to put pressure on the relationship that nothing, in a way that nothing else can? And I've done ayahuasca 25 times. My wife's done it a dozen times. We've done mushrooms far more than that. And we've had many heroic doses of plant medicines. And in all those experiences, it never put the same level of pressure
Starting point is 01:50:35 on our relationship as open has. But I can say like, if my idea is this is annoying, like obviously if you work with any good shaman, they're gonna tell you the full gamut of the experience, potentials, not what your visions will be, but these things can happen. You can puke, we call it La Perga.
Starting point is 01:50:54 You can shit your pants. That's a possibility, right? So if I know the full scope of jealousy can be there, guilt, shame, envy, and a lot of these negative emotions, but I can work through that. And if I am able to do that successfully, there is real growth there, right? And in that real growth, there is real satisfaction.
Starting point is 01:51:15 There is real peace because I've learned so many of the lessons that have been taught through spiritual traditions and so many of the lessons that have been taught through plant medicines viscerally to surrender to the fact that my wife likes other dick. The same way that I know I like other pussy, right? It's not, but in that experience, knowing that it doesn't take away from me,
Starting point is 01:51:37 knowing that I can trust and have faith and belief as I do in the divine, as I do in knowing I'm not my body and I'll live on after this. I have that level of faith. I have the same level of faith in knowing that all things are connected and I have the same level of faith in knowing that there's no reason for my wife to leave me.
Starting point is 01:51:58 And if she did, that would be okay, but to trust in that, to sit in that space of knowing, the comfortability of knowing that we are doing the work together and that the things that we've accomplished in all of our experiences together, whether they were with polyamory or in monogamy and plant medicines, all these things, they're all leading up the mountain.
Starting point is 01:52:22 We're traversing this together. We're growing together. And as we do that, like there's a bond that nobody can fuck with. No matter how hot they are, and fucking 10 years younger than me, none of those things, they're a beautiful addition, but they don't take away.
Starting point is 01:52:37 It's like you're going up the mountain together, but also there's another aspect to it, which is that you're fundamentally, eternally alone. Have you ever heard that before? Mm-mm. Yeah, like this is like a thing that like, Chokyum Trumper Rinpoche talks about and it sounds like I'm writing a fucking
Starting point is 01:52:54 Morrissey song or something, but it's like the, and it's not kind of scary at first, but when he talks about meditation, one of the ways he describes it is it's lonely. When you meditate, you're mere alone. Some people meditate in groups because they want to pick up this like high from other people meditating in groups.
Starting point is 01:53:16 And in one of his lectures that I really liked, he said, well, this is like cosmic hitchhiking. You're basically like hitchhiking. You're trying to find another person and get high off of their vibe or whatever. And he's like, we don't have to do this because we all have our own car. It's called our body.
Starting point is 01:53:33 And in the state of meditation, we're alone. And there's an alone quality to it. That's very real. And the same way that you were talking about the blind spots, the you don't want to see the jealousy because you've been pretending that you're not jealous or you, it doesn't fit in with a story
Starting point is 01:53:48 that you want to tell yourself. There's another blind spot maybe for a lot of people, which is that no matter which way you want to chop it, you're alone and your heart is broken. Now there is a wonderful and somewhat confusing thing called the heart sutra. And though, have you ever read the heart sutra? No.
Starting point is 01:54:08 It goes, parts of it that I remember, no mind, no body, no life, no death, no becoming, no not becoming. It's essentially like these binaries that are both negated. And so, and it's really intense because at least from a Buddhist perspective, it says something along the lines of all dharmas are empty,
Starting point is 01:54:31 meaning that no, nothing, nothing, emptiness, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, gone, gone, gone, gone beyond the going, all gone, already broken. And this is lonely. And so sometimes people make contact with that realization and they cry and then their hearts are broken and or they think their hearts broken.
Starting point is 01:54:53 Really, they just felt the truth, which is the truth is you're gonna die alone. You might die with people around you, but you're gonna die alone. You're gonna make the transition by yourself. You're gonna do it all alone. And there's no way to escape that. And many of us, and I'm not saying you,
Starting point is 01:55:11 because you have a really great vibe and a real solid, powerful, but this is not like maybe you're alone and you're fucking to get rid of the aloneness. I'm not saying that at all. Okay, so there's no passive aggressive thing here, which is why when I was asking you about the fight depression or the, I'm talking about more of a fundamental
Starting point is 01:55:37 kind of problem, which is that I have noticed myself, which is no matter what thing may be happening, whatever it may be, no matter how powerful the experience, ketamine, pure dissolution, contact with some kind of hyperdimensional archetypical Ganesh figure, some realization of a miraculous nature of the universe or some deep love connection, there does seem to be running counter to that at all times.
Starting point is 01:56:12 It's antithesis and that's true, right? That's true. And we seem to be standing on the edge of these two things, slowly being flayed. And so this is why I like your idea of making contact with the suffering, admitting it's there, that the jealousy is there, the pain is there, admitting it's there, but then what?
Starting point is 01:56:48 What are you once you become the pain? What are you once you become the jealousy? What are you once you become the suffering? And most importantly, what is the suffering separating you from? Well, I think that once I acknowledge what's going on and I actually sit with it and feel it and I don't try to move it away and this is similar.
Starting point is 01:57:11 I don't know if we still have the wasps behind this. It's still up there. That, you know, and I told you that I had the vision where it was super dark and, you know, it's on mushrooms and a wasps were vomiting more wasps into infinite fractals of wasps, vomiting wasps and it was fucking scary. And but I realized like, oh, I don't, let me sit with this.
Starting point is 01:57:33 Let me, the more I resist this, the more it's gonna persist, right? So as I do that, I just acknowledge that it's there. I sit with it and I realize, oh, this is, my visionary field is because I'm in fear right now. I'm in pain right now. And then as I turn to hold my wife, my visionary field turned in this beautiful yellow rose
Starting point is 01:57:53 that was fucking glowing and sparkling. And I felt love and I felt whole and I felt no fear. If I can get to that place in life where I don't resist the thing, the fear, the feeling of that fear or my thoughts around it, my shame around having those feelings. If I can actually sit with it and not try to remove it, but just be with it, it dissolves.
Starting point is 01:58:16 And as it dissolves, I return to wholeness. I return to no separation. I return to love. Yeah. Okay. I love that. That's great. I definitely want to be around flowers more than I want to be
Starting point is 01:58:44 around vomit, wasps. Yeah. But I don't think either of them are real. And that is, that's what I'm interested in. It's just like I... Have you ever heard this? I'm sorry. I just, I'm so enjoying chatting with you, man.
Starting point is 01:59:09 So forgive me. Keep it fucking rolling. Let's go. Have you ever heard confusion is a condition of enlightenment? Have you ever heard of that? It's amazing. So it's like, if you want to get enlightened for there to be enlightened, enlightenment,
Starting point is 01:59:28 there has to be confusion. If you didn't have confusion, you'd be enlightened. So if you're confused, you're already on the continuum of realization. If you're deeply confused, you're already there. Similarly, what you're talking about when it comes to the emergence of some particular difficult emotion and definitely not ignoring it, which is ignorance
Starting point is 01:59:57 or active ignoring, the active ignoring is exhausting. So jealousy comes. I think jealousy is because people are afraid to die. I think jealousy has something to do with the fear of death or something. I think jealousy is the fear of death getting reflected in the person around you or something. Because when you say, I'm afraid,
Starting point is 02:00:22 I'm going to lose my wife or my love, you really what it is is you're afraid to die because that fear of, because your life's going to break up with you. We are in a polyamorous relationship with existence, so to speak. Like it's not going to last. It all ends.
Starting point is 02:00:42 Yeah. And so the love of life sometimes, in the same way the love of another person appears as jealousy, the love of life appears as the fear of death. And the fear of death and the fear of your wife leaving you or your lover being with someone else is a sense of not admitting the fact that we're all connected or something like that.
Starting point is 02:01:06 And the reason we don't want to admit we're all connected is because if we admit that, then we have to deal with the fact that we aren't even a self. And then we're instantly annihilated and something in that is quite terrifying for people. So we produce this love affair with the jealousy. In other words, if I have to deal with jealousy, if I have to deal with suffering,
Starting point is 02:01:30 if I have to deal with pain, I have at least that separating me from my own annihilation. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm talking about. And what I love about the Buddhism that I've been taught and I'm probably misunderstanding is that it begins to show you well, actually, unfortunately, the suffering itself,
Starting point is 02:01:57 it's you. There's no barrier. There's no escape. Whether you want to deal with the jealousy by being at peace with it, whether you want to deal with the jealousy by fighting against it, whether you want to deal with the jealousy by ignoring it,
Starting point is 02:02:16 you're still in the unfortunate situation of being eternally and infinitely everything. And there's no way out of it, man. And you know what I'm talking about? The jealousy is like the whole thing, the whole game of it, is just another trick. If I can deal with my jealousy, I don't have to look at, in other words, like if I'm ignoring my jealousy,
Starting point is 02:02:44 I'm over here looking at something else. If I'm looking at my jealousy that keeps emerging, what am I ignoring when I'm looking at the jealousy? That, I'm interested in that. Because that, I think the thing that you're ignoring is enlightenment. Yeah, I think, I mean, really for me, the thing that's helped,
Starting point is 02:03:06 and you talk about like the other, right? So like her boyfriend, it's not looking him in his competition. It's looking him as like, there is no separation between the two of us. Like in a way, I am him and he is me. And that's true compersion for me, not only to want my wife to have a beautiful experience, a full experience, not, you guys get to fucking missionary
Starting point is 02:03:28 the whole night and you never get any other position, you know, like, but a full experience. I also- When we're not monogamous anymore, I'm gonna write position charts that she has to follow. This is what you're allowed to do. This is what I'm okay with, right?
Starting point is 02:03:44 And then I'm gonna interrogate her. Did you do anything? Okay, anyway. Yeah, and so, and then when I really think about it, and I come from this open heart space, I want that for him too. I don't want him to get half of my wife. I want him to get all of my wife, right?
Starting point is 02:04:03 And I say my wife, I want him to get all of Natasha. Cause she's her own soul and she is fucking awesome. And I don't want to keep that all to myself, right? The world needs that. And whoever she wants to share her love with and touch with, that's a fucking beautiful thing. It should be celebrated. Yeah, well, this is like the,
Starting point is 02:04:25 have you ever heard of death poems? Oh my gosh, they're crazy, man. This Zen master I've been reading his book and he apparently died in the meditation position and his last words were a poem. It was like a three-line poem. And essentially, like you said, my life, it's like fuck on the mountain.
Starting point is 02:04:51 It was fuck on the mountain, something like that. And then he just died. And similarly, have you ever fallen in love with anyone in a dream? In a dream. Yeah, have you ever, you've fucked in dreams, of course. You've had to fucking dreams, right? And you wake up from the dream
Starting point is 02:05:13 and you don't feel like if you're being monogamous, if you told your wife like, man, I fucked someone in this dream, your wife is not going to be like, well, you cheated on me. She's going to be maybe annoyed or something at the worst. I mean, it'd be weird if she was, but usually like weird, okay, cool, right?
Starting point is 02:05:28 When you wake up from a dream and you've had the best sex in the dream, you don't mourn the loss of the person who you are having sex with in the dream. You in fact don't really think about them anymore, right? Not a big deal. Similarly, do you ever wonder if that's what we're in right now, that it's just not a big deal?
Starting point is 02:05:53 It's fog on the mountain. It's just a passing phenomena. Yeah, that it is transitory. I think there's been quite a few times of this message being rethreaded back into my psyche of play, enjoy it. It's you're only here a short while, you know? And like as I surrender to what is and accept, like I love this and I've said,
Starting point is 02:06:18 I know I've said it before in different podcasts and you're familiar with it already, but in a new earth by a cartel, the opposite of resistance is there's three levels. The first is acceptance. Like your tire blows out on the side of the road. You got to change it. It's in the pouring rain.
Starting point is 02:06:33 Accept what you have to do and just do it. There's acceptance. Then there's enjoyment. And then there's enthusiasm, which literally translates to be in God. Cool. So that's like the ultimate place we're trying to shoot for, right?
Starting point is 02:06:47 And I think if I think about when you're in a flow state or you're just, you're playing and you're fucking fully immersed in that and there's no negative mind chatter or wanting to be somewhere that you're not, you're right there in the moment. The more often we can tap into that, the more often none of that other shit matters.
Starting point is 02:07:09 Like us deciphering, you know, is this a dream or all the things that this whole conversation, which is awesome. And I fucking can't love so happy we get to do this today. It's fog. And at the same time, it is fog, right? And it is, it is the, you know, at best a pointer. These are best at best pointers into the right direction.
Starting point is 02:07:29 Right? But I think playing, that's when we're, that's when we're fucking fully engaged in life. And then all this other figuring out stuff doesn't fucking matter. You don't need to know. All you need to do is just be in the moment and enjoy. There's a thing I read about how cats catch mice
Starting point is 02:07:49 and that they sit at the edge of a mouse hole and wait for the mouse to come out. And they eat it. Similarly, in meditation, there's a thing called Rigpa, which is this moment of like the fundamental goodness that we have felt through psychedelics or whatever that just comes. And the moment you're like, there it is.
Starting point is 02:08:14 It's gone. You're the fucking cat catching the mouse. And so, yes, absolutely, man. Absolutely. It's like, who cares? Right now, I'm in the ring and it's just now and this is what's happening right now. And that's it.
Starting point is 02:08:40 All the rest, it's just a dream. It's gone. It's not even there. That's the thing. It's literally not there. You don't have a past. You have a neurological series of like, I don't know what they are.
Starting point is 02:08:56 I don't know what makes it have little protein chains. Who the fuck knows? In your brain, they don't even write. And you certainly don't have a future. You simulate it in your mind all the time. And so then it's like, well, okay, I don't have a past or a future for real. It's like the weirdest kind of creature.
Starting point is 02:09:17 It's like, you don't have a past or a future. It's gone, just this-ness, now-ness. But then, that's where it gets cool because we're starting to get into the now. What is the present moment? If there is only this present moment, what is that? Tell me, Kyle, what is the present fucking moment? How's that for nonviolent communication?
Starting point is 02:09:44 It's whatever we're experiencing, you know? And that there is no right or wrong in that. There's no good or bad. If we can get to a place, what was- Who's experiencing? There's a fucking Sufi quote. It's a Sufi quote. They use in nonviolent communication.
Starting point is 02:10:00 There is a field outside, just outside of right and wrong, and just outside of good and bad. I'll meet you there. Ooh, I love it. Right, if we can be in that space where we're not judging the experience right now or thinking about the thing we didn't wanna have happen to us that did
Starting point is 02:10:21 or the future that we don't want for ourselves, or we can just fucking be here, that is the full expression of experience. Or even the idea is it's like the fuck it, in your mind right now, the worst thing you could imagine, whatever it may be, you know? Your house is on fire and everything's burning
Starting point is 02:10:41 and your children or your child is incinerated or the mind produces this. So what? It just comes and goes. That's okay too. Or the mind produces the most insanely amazing, benevolent, incredible thought about how wonderful and advanced you may be.
Starting point is 02:11:05 So what? You didn't make those thoughts. They just appeared. You didn't make it, you didn't squeeze it out. There's not some thoughts, there's a lot of thought babies weaving thoughts. I'm gonna make another one where he's watching his wife get fucked by those 700 football players on Mars.
Starting point is 02:11:28 Those are good, that really gets us going. Let's set it up, set it up, set it up. Oh yeah, he's freaking out, it worked. You know, because that's what happens is these thought bubbles come up from the sweatshop of our unconscious or whatever where there's a little thought babies are weaving them together and we grab them
Starting point is 02:11:43 and then we're looking at them like, oh my God, oh my God, look at this beard, how am I thinking this? And all the while in that we become a self and by becoming a self, okay, now I've got something to hold on to, right? But you know, you see a flock of birds and you're not like, wow, what a cool thought I had, those birds, man, I'm really good at making birds.
Starting point is 02:12:09 No way, you'd be some kind of fucking narcissist. And yet the birds in your thoughts are all happening within your mind. They are both out of your control, they both have nothing to do with what you are and they're just another thing that's happening, another field of phenomena that's happening. And so this is what I love about meditation
Starting point is 02:12:30 is it, you know, it's like teaching you how to like get the mouse away from the, or the cat away from the mouse hole. But now we have these thoughts that are coming and now we have the birds that are coming and still I wonder, what are we? What am I now? If I'm not my thoughts and I'm not the birds,
Starting point is 02:12:50 what am I? What is it? I think I've experienced that in deeper meditation and certainly in psychedelic space and oftentimes with ketamine. And that is like as Eckhart says, to be the observer, right? Like if I'm not my thoughts, I can observe them moving through
Starting point is 02:13:12 with no emotional response to them, right? If I truly get to that space where it's like layers back from being here with blinders on and I'm the thing experiencing all of this and this is all real, if I pull back from that far enough that widens my perception, that opens my view and that narrows the blind spot. And there's always a blind spot, but it definitely narrows it.
Starting point is 02:13:36 And from that place, I can just be. And that's consciousness, right? How I experience it is up to me. And there's tools that help me experience it better or more enjoyably. But that's up to me to know like, oh, I'm not that thing. Or that thing is like Ted Decker says, fear is a fucking illusion, it's an illusion.
Starting point is 02:14:00 And there is no fear in love. If you're truly in love, there's no fear there. No way. It doesn't exist, it can't exist. That's the dark with the light in the room. Like the dark's gone, fear's gone if you're truly in love. Oh yeah. So that's the notion for me is that if I experience
Starting point is 02:14:19 some of these negative emotions or I have an idea of whatever experience that's going on, if it's good or bad or right or wrong or any of those things to catch myself, it's the awareness that draws me back to, oh, that's right, that's okay, that's okay. I got caught in the moment again. It's almost like in meditation, like mindfulness meditation,
Starting point is 02:14:41 people get so mad at themselves because they went down the rabbit hole thinking for 15 minutes and they had a shitty meditation. It's like, no, you caught yourself. You caught yourself going down the rabbit hole and that's all it is. It's 100% the awareness of that thing. And as you strengthen that, it's a fucking muscle.
Starting point is 02:15:00 You can get better. And the more often you do it, the better you get. And then as you get caught off in traffic or any of these other circumstances happen in life, you realize that it's all okay. That's it, man. I think, because it's like, you know, the thing is, look, you motherfucking Nihilus trussell,
Starting point is 02:15:17 if we are all nothing or whatever the fuck you're saying, I'm also a something. And it's like this something that I am as a me and the me that I am as Kyle, I'm more tongue in my case. But regardless, I have to honor this. This is happening. This is real.
Starting point is 02:15:32 And if I'm going to be like swimming off into these like tantric experiences, which, you know, in your life right now, it's just like polyamory and like experiencing all the like great stuff and the scary stuff with it, you wanna experience it. That's the main thing. It's like, if you're gonna produce
Starting point is 02:15:55 a rarefied incarnation for yourself, where you are ascending these peaks that most people are in their entire lives would never even imagine ascending. You know, whether it's polyamory, whether it's fighting, whatever it is that you're going off to do. If you're going to eat rare fruit,
Starting point is 02:16:13 make sure you taste it. Make sure you're there when it happens. Put your head in the fucking blast furnace, you know, like make sure that you're able to be there as it happens. Because otherwise, what's the point? Play video games, Red Dead Redemption's fantastic. Yes, it is, it's one of my favorites. The best, play it, which is why I think
Starting point is 02:16:33 that this practice that we have is so good because everyone thinks the practice is to like suddenly become some kind of renunciate, like, I don't know what, put on white robes, burn some fucking candles, and be like some celibate, whatever. But what I have heard from some very intelligent people is, for example, stop drinking when you're not mindful
Starting point is 02:16:56 of the drinks that you're taking anymore. You want to drink? Go ahead, but be honest with yourself. And the moment you're not tasting every sip, the moment you're not feeling the whiskey or beer go down your throat and into your stomach, the moment you're just drinking, stop. And if you don't stop, why didn't you stop?
Starting point is 02:17:21 That's a blind spot. Look at that. Similarly, with any of this stuff that we're talking about, the moment you're doing it and you're not there, you're thinking about telling the story of being there, you're thinking about how you wish you weren't there, or you're thinking about somewhere else you want to be.
Starting point is 02:17:42 What's happening? You're not there now. All the work you put in going to Vegas with your lover, all the work you put in letting your lover go to Vegas with a lover, what was the point? There's nothing there. You're just static at that moment. So this is why I think both work very well together,
Starting point is 02:18:02 of practice and then acknowledging your incarnation and the fact that we have a very advanced nervous system that gives us orgasms. Thank God. Yeah, well, that just goes back to the point of we have bodies, fucking enjoy them. I'm not going to choose to live my life in a way because of social programming
Starting point is 02:18:28 or the way we've been conditioned. And I think the four agreements and in mastery of love, he talks about the domestication of man, right? Like all this history that we're born into and we just say, oh, that's, I go on green, I stop on red, this is how it is, right? We don't question that. These are all fucking ideas, right?
Starting point is 02:18:50 Aubrey tells me that all the time, like, hey, just remember everything you guys agree to, everything you guys do that helps frame how this looks, these are all ideas. Just think of it like that, right? And I think if you want to come to understand that, but then you also come to understand that, I'm in a fucking body right now.
Starting point is 02:19:09 I've been out of my body plenty of times in psychedelics and I've experienced that bodyless reality, but I'm in a body right now. So celebrate this fucking thing. We can touch, we can feel, we can lick, we can suck, we can kiss, we can talk. And even just the physical touch of massage, like loving on people, my wife and I were at Burning Man,
Starting point is 02:19:33 having grips of Molly, we were just massaging everyone. And it was fucking awesome. That was the way we were sharing love without intercourse, to fucking touch people and send them love through our fingertips, right? And that's a beautiful way to have that, but it's always been funny to me to see people who, they focus so much on the spiritual
Starting point is 02:19:53 that they negate their own physical vehicle. I don't think you only live once, but I only get Kyle Kingsbury's body once. That's right. So why not fucking tune it up and keep it running to make it the best possible thing I can? That's it. Spiritual fucking bypass is what it's called, man.
Starting point is 02:20:09 And it's like very easy to do. And it's like very, very easy to do. And I'm actually teaching a spiritual bypass class this week in an Echo Park. I'm teaching you how to avoid working out by pretending you're enlightened. Ha ha ha ha. It's great, really good idea.
Starting point is 02:20:25 Ha ha ha. Give that $150 a month gym membership to me. Exactly, why go to the gym? I can teach you how to not go to the gym, but still feel like you're amazing and in great shape. But yeah, it's called spiritual bypass. And it's like, but similarly, we can do hedonic bypass. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 02:20:44 Which is like to get into the other side too and lose track of what we actually might be. And so the idea is like, figure it out now. Be here now, as they say. This is the place right now. And if you could start, and that's why they call it a practice. Because here we are, if we can be in this place now,
Starting point is 02:21:04 then when we're parachuting, when we're in whatever the great peak we've created for ourselves is, we can really be there, head in the blast furnace. But it's not that big a deal. And like, this is a thing I've said on the podcast and it might be embarrassing. And later I might think, God, Ducca, that was really dumb.
Starting point is 02:21:21 But I keep saying poodle nose, which is when I look at my poodles nose outside and see his connection with reality and see the way his nose is trembling and he's looking at everything and he's so fully in the moment and not in the moment in some pacified, hypnotized, fake way.
Starting point is 02:21:37 But in the moment, the way like, that poodle is acting like he's in the trenches in World War II. Like every single sound is like, he's in it for real. That's life. That's the present moment. The present moment is a fucking nuclear blast. It's a blast furnace.
Starting point is 02:21:54 It is powerful. And we don't want to be here. Not because we don't want to be here because we're like attached to the past or the future. We're attached to the past and the future because the blast furnace of the present moment is too intense. It's instantly heartbreaking.
Starting point is 02:22:14 It's like, you know, Terrence McKenna, five dried grams of mushrooms, you're sitting in front of the plexiglass and the nuclear bomb and it's like you're in front of a nuclear bomb. That's every, that is the moment minus the mushrooms. It's just the mushrooms have dropped your filters for a second so you could see what's happening.
Starting point is 02:22:33 And what's happening is we are in the crest of the wave of creation as it expresses itself into time. And that's the sum total of all the volcanoes that ever happened. And if you've ever seen any volcano, you know how powerful that shit is. That's all of them at once. We are Odin, actually.
Starting point is 02:22:57 We're Odin, all of us together. We are the infinite God being pushing into time. And that shit hurts. It's heartbreaking and it's also incredible. So the idea is to not avoid it if you can. Yeah, don't resist it, accept it, surrender into what it is. I gotta start working out.
Starting point is 02:23:25 You're an inspiring man. Oh, thank you very much. I'm so sorry, I held you, I see you came here and I held you hostage. I don't think you expected, I don't know, I'm sorry, but you're a very inspiring person and I'm really grateful to you for your time. Our conversation today had a big impact on me
Starting point is 02:23:43 and I have a lot to process. A lot of like wonderful little spinning rainbow wheels, so to speak, in my mind, that I can't wait to see what results from it. But thank you so much for being so generous with your time and for coming all the way here from Venice to have this conversation with me. I hope we get to keep talking.
Starting point is 02:24:04 One fucking thousand percent, brother. I love you Duncan, I've been a fan for years and thank you so much for everything that you put out. It's been a real honor and a pleasure to sit in front of you. Ah, man, likewise, likewise. That was Kyle Kingsbury, everybody. A big thanks to Kyle and Natasha for allowing me to have so much time with them
Starting point is 02:24:23 and much thanks to you, my dear listeners. And of course, thank you, Mint Mobile. Thank you, Squarespace, and thank you, Purple, for sponsoring this mega episode of the DTFH. Until next time, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney.
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