Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 565: Rainn Wilson

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

Rainn Wilson, writer, actor, and Duncan's new best friend, joins the DTFH! Check out Rainn's new book, Soul Boom - Why We Need A Spiritual Revolution, available in physical, ebook, and audiobook for...mats wherever you buy your books! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: ZipRecruiter - Try for FREE at ZipRecruiter.com/Duncan Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Greetings, pals. We have an incredible episode for you today. Rainn Wilson is here with us to talk about his new book, and this has got to be one of my top three favorite DDFH episodes of all time, so I'm sure you will enjoy it. Strap in. What a brilliant, funny guy. Before we get going, though, I have to tell you a story, and it's really a gross story, and it's not very exciting, but I think a lot of you might have registered for a fun live stream I was going to do with David Nickturn, David from the Midnight Gospel, and we were going to talk about artificial intelligence and Buddhism, and it was going to be great, but here's what happened. And I'm not placing blame anywhere. Ultimately, you know, to quote the Lozong aphorism,
Starting point is 00:00:54 drive all blames into oneself, and so I have been trying to get back into exercising, and I got myself to the gym. Now, the way I do this is really lame. It's so lame. David Goggins could write, like, mini paragraphs insulting me for having to do this, but I trick myself. I tell my body, we're going to get a milkshake. We're going to get a protein shake before the workout, and somehow that just works. So I get this protein shake, and I drink it, and within six minutes, I just have to puke. Now, I don't know if it was a protein shake. Could have been an allergy. Usually, food poisoning doesn't come on that fast, so I don't know if that's what it was, but I just, I drove home and just purged, as they say. Just blew demons out. Just protein,
Starting point is 00:01:54 fucking milkshake sprays. My stomach was just rolling. I looked instantly horrific. I mean, I'm not saying like I'm a vision of perfect health or anything like that, but it looked like I had been smashed in the head with an unholy, cursed mace, just gray, drained, like, Lord of the Rings. I look like I'd been wearing the ring too long, but I still got to the studio. I set my computer up, and then my wonderful wife just pointed out, like, you've been puking, Duncan, you can't do it. You're going to have to cancel. So I had to cancel, in the most lame way possible, 30 minutes before the event, so I apologize to you for that if you had registered, but we are doing it again next week. So that's going to be on Tuesday, just as exact same time as it's going
Starting point is 00:02:50 to be this week, and all the links you need to find that will be at DuncanTrustle.com. It's going to be a fun conversation. I mean, are we really going to get anywhere? Is there anywhere to get? I don't know, but David is so brilliant when it comes to talking about Buddhism, meditation, consciousness, and I'm infatuated and obsessed in an unhealthy way with AI. So I think it's going to make a wonderful conversation, and I hope you'll sign up. It's free, and you can find the links at DuncanTrustle.com. Also, I'm going to be at Copper Blues Live in Phoenix, Arizona, June 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. And I hope you will come see me. There's tickets available. You can find them at DuncanTrustle.com, then June 15th, Dania Improv, Dania Beach, Florida, June 15th, 16th, 17th, all those tickets are at
Starting point is 00:03:44 DuncanTrustle.com. Finally, you can get commercial-free episodes of this podcast by going to patreon.com slash DTFH and signing up. And if you want to spend a little bit of extra time with me and your family, subscribe to a higher tier, and you can join us every week for a meditation and a family gathering. All those links at DuncanTrustle.com. Okay, friends, here we go. Today's guest, Rainn Wilson, also known as my new best friend, has a book out. It's called Soul Boom and Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. You can get this anywhere. Try to get it. This is according to Rainn's wishes at a small bookstore first. But if you can't find that, go to amazon.com and you will find it there. This guy is awesome. I know you all know this. I know he's got a
Starting point is 00:04:38 rabid fandom, but getting a chance to just hang out with him for an hour was so fun. I was crying with laughter. He's the best. So here we go. Everybody, strap in. Get ready to welcome to the DTFH, the brilliant Rainn Wilson. You are with us, shake hands, going to the moon. Welcome to you. Right above my head is Trump the Game. I see it. And I haven't played it. Do you ever come to Los Angeles? Do you want to play Trump the Game with me? I would love to play Trump the Game. Do you get to play Trump? Or are you all over here? Let's find out.
Starting point is 00:05:49 What are you? This is not an ironic game. This game from just the flash of the box. Oh yeah, this is serious. It's not whether you win or lose. It's whether you win. It's got his fascinating signature, which definitely has more. Have you ever studied his signature? Look at the letters in his name, and then look at that signature, and there you will find the Da Vinci code. I feel like he worked with a calligrapher. I say, I need a more powerful signature. I don't want this little scribble pigeon scribble. Help me come up with the perfect signature. You know what it looks like? It actually looks like an EKG of someone on a shit ton of air crawl. It does. It is. It is absolutely. It's someone about to flatline. It's
Starting point is 00:06:48 when they use the paddles, and it's in a, I forget what it's called, and then they're about to hit a flatline. Here's a quick guide. I don't have time to read this, Duncan. Okay. Yeah, we, yeah, forget that. And people are listening. People, I feel bad for the podcasters listening on the, just on the audio. Here's a nice close-up of the signature in purple. Wow. Look at that. Incredible. You've got an X in there. It looks like Sanskrit. It's a combo Sanskrit, but you will notice it's got the Star Trek symbol at the very end. It does kind of. Well, there's, here's the board. Yeah, it looks like Monopoly. It's Monopoly. It's Monopoly. Is this Monopoly? He just stole Monopoly. He was just like, somebody was like, we should make a game. He stole Monopoly and called it his own. Do Monopoly.
Starting point is 00:07:47 I don't have time for this shit. Just replace the squares. Yeah. Well, what a great lead-in to talking about your book and everything else. I mean, obviously your book is more you about you than anything, but I sure love this idea of the spiritual revolution. And it's something I have contemplated. Anyone who has, you know, gained, I don't know. There's no non-cheesy way to talk about this. And in other interviews that you did about your book, I really appreciate your honesty about how talking about God is so uncool. You know, doing it on stage as a stand-up comic, figuring out how to do that is so fun. But you really are going to offend the audience. I mean, if like, you know, if I talk about Satan, which I sometimes do, that's far more accepted than
Starting point is 00:08:51 talking about Jesus, you know, and this is in the zeitgeist. So for you, a revered comic, a revered actor, to write a book about a spiritual revolution, that takes guts. That's, thank you. Were you contemplating other books before you decided on this one? You know, I did my ubiquitous comedic memoir about six or seven years ago called The Bassoon King, My Life in Art, Faith and Idiosy. And that's mostly like funny stories from my life and what it was like growing up nerdy and playing the bassoon and moving to New York City and becoming an actor and getting on the office. And throughout that book, I kind of wove my spiritual journey. So because I thought, well, I'll hide the broccoli, you know, in the s'mores
Starting point is 00:09:51 of my life. So there was some broccoli hidden in there. And it was mostly funny. And it was about 10 or 15% about a spiritual journey. And then I guess Duncan, for me, and maybe this kind of goes with like, maybe it just goes with the wealth. Like, oh, I'm a rich sitcom actor. I already had my like hit show. I still get to do some acting here and there. But part of me was just like, fuck it, man. Like, this stuff is really important to me. It's really important to my heart. Personally, it drives my daily life. And also, I really think it's fucking important for humanity and the earth. And so people are going to judge me. And Judd Apatow is going to think I'm an idiot. And Sarah Silverman is going to roll her eyes. And Hollywood is going to collectively be
Starting point is 00:10:41 like, oh, that weird guy who played Dwight, the beat farmers talking about God, what a loony. And at the same time, like, okay, that's fine. God bless you. I love you all. I'm moving on. I want to make the world a better place. And it's super, super uncool. But I'm in it to win it, Duncan. That's it. At some point, you get there. I mean, is that enlightenment? It might be age. You know, I'm 57. You know, you're right. Okay, I got to stop trying to attach my age to enlightenment. It's the laziest way to claim enlightenment. But it's true. But it's true that, you know, you gain a certain wisdom and you just stop caring as much because Duncan, I cared what people thought about me for so many decades of my life. I wanted people to
Starting point is 00:11:33 like me and approve of me and think I was cool and think I was funny and give me jobs and just and get a higher social status. And that has really been fading over the last five to 10 years in great regard. And it has given me a tremendous freedom. And I love it because I lived as a slave to people pleasing and what people thought of me and to as weird as it sounds as nerdy as I was in high school. And there was none nerdier than me. At one point in time, I was on Model United Nations. I played xylophone in the marching band. I played Dungeons and Dragons on the weekend. I was on the chess club, chess team, and the computer club all at the same time. Oh, yeah, baby. Yeah. And so obviously, I didn't really care about popularity too much when I was 16. But then I spent
Starting point is 00:12:33 my adult, you know, years just really, really caring. And now I care much littler. Maybe it's just age. I hope there's a little bit of enlightenment. Maybe it's just the fact that I have money in the bank. And if I didn't have money in the bank, I'd be like, oh, shit, I really need another TV show. I better not talk about God. I don't know, man. Thank you for admitting that. When you have money in the bank, it's really any sweeping statement you make. You have to at least know everyone's thinking, yeah, you've got shit tons of money in the bank. Like if, you know, if, if I'm trying to think, yeah, if Jesus Christ, who I guess you could say was something of a trust fund kid, had tons of, I don't know what kind of money they were using back then, in the bank,
Starting point is 00:13:21 would the sermon of the Mount hit as hard? Yeah. If he was, if he was from a wealthy family and said, oh, sure, it's easy for you. And it's interesting too, like in his book about Jesus, called Zellet, Reza Aslan says that book. Yeah, brilliant book. And but he talks about how Jesus wasn't a carpenter. There's no carpenter. The word that is used in the ancient Greek and the Bible for him work being a worker is essentially day laborer. It's just like hauling bricks, build just kind of a low level builder. And, and of course, it was translated to carpenter because a carpenter is such a, it's a, it's a fancy lovely term for shaping things out of wood. Yes. Yes. And as opposed to day laborer, but yeah, he was a day laborer. He was, so he was
Starting point is 00:14:16 saying, hey, love everyone, give up your wealth, wander around, teach the gospel, serve the poor, you know, hug people different from you, accept everyone, you know, God loves everyone. It's, it's easier to accept when he's poor. So here I am a rich, semi retired sitcom actor telling people to start a spiritual revolution. There's a collective eye roll of, yeah, oh, sure, rain. Sit back in your elitist Hollywood mansion. No way. Listen, the only way that that comes across is if your book sucked, if your book wasn't down to earth, if your book wasn't, it's when, I think it's when those two things like one side of the coin, the spiritual, whatever the message is coming from them, doesn't have a grounded quality where it's a proclamation for lots of people to follow
Starting point is 00:15:11 some ridiculous idea that will never work. That's not really grounded. Your, your book is grounded, your attitude towards spirituality is grounded. So I don't know. I think if people aren't capable of seeing past someone's job into their philosophy, that's more on them than the person they're reading. It's such an easy way. Hell yeah. Thanks for being on the show. Well, look, I want to, okay, so I want to dive into something that's been on my mind lately, and maybe I'm completely wrong in it, but in your awesome NPR interview, they asked a question to see sacredness in the everyday means purging yourself of cynicism, doesn't, doesn't it, which is sort of the social, social curate, currency of the moment, it seems. And I wondered, I guess I'm literally stealing from NPR right now,
Starting point is 00:16:09 but would you mind re-answering that question because I want to talk to you about cynicism. Yeah. So, and so the book is about a lot of things. Oh, look, I just happened to have a copy right here. I talk about death. I talk about the soul. I talk about consciousness. I talk about, I have a chapter on God called the notorious God. And at the end of the book, I have seven pillars for a spiritual revolution, because I had ended the book and I realized like, oh, I need to, it's too depressing. And it's all about how things are not working and failing and falling apart. You know, what, what, what's the takeaway here? What can, what can I give people that will uplift them and are some handholds to creating a spiritual revolution? And I have a section there
Starting point is 00:17:07 which is foster joy and squash cynicism. So the story I told an NPR that I'm going to retell here and I'm going to tell it better. How's that Duncan? Love it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So I had an amazing acting teacher named Andre Gregory. And if you have you seen my dinner with Andre? Yes. Yes. A long time ago. I will admit I didn't finish it. Okay. You got to finish it. It's so good and rewatch it. It's really worth diving into. So for those who don't know, it was from 1979. And this is like when Star Wars came out, right? And it was a movie of two people having dinner and having a conversation, the entire movie, 90 some minutes of just two people talking. It's brilliant. So that guy Andre Gregory also did acting teaching. And I was in a workshop
Starting point is 00:17:57 of his for about a month. And he would meet with his acting students. And so I went to his beautiful West Village apartment in New York City to meet with him. And he was like, wow, rain. How are you doing? Like, what's on your mind? And I said, Andre, like, I'm just really down. I'm really, I feel really pessimistic. I feel cynical. I feel a little depressed. Like I just the world is kind of going to shit. And I'm overwhelmed. And you know, I just don't know. I just don't know anymore. And there was a look in his eyes, I will never forget. All of a sudden a glint came from behind his eyes like little laser beams. And he reached out and grabbed my arm like an anaconda. He was a frail little guy. He grabbed my forearm. I can still feel it. He grabbed it hard. And he looked
Starting point is 00:18:49 in my eyes and he said, don't, don't do it. Don't be cynical. You can't be pessimistic. If you are if you are negative, they win. If you are pessimistic, they win because you'll just sit there and you won't do anything. You have to keep hope alive. You have to stay positive. Otherwise, they win. Do you want them to win? You've got to keep hope alive. And this was the last thing he said. And he was kind of, it was kind of like, now get out of there. He was almost like a coach, you know, from the Crimson Tide or something like, now let's go in this game, boys. And I walked, I stumbled out into the cobblestone streets of the West Village and it, it literally transformed my entire life. It's one of those moments and it only was a minute and a half long. And it literally changed
Starting point is 00:19:41 how I saw the world because he's 100% right. If we stay cynical and pessimistic, nothing changes. I'll probably never start a business, but if I did, it would be one based on service and it would be a national hotline for folks over 50 in this country who live in states that have just legalized marijuana to call to figure out dosages when it comes to edibles. They need people like us to save them. There are so many people on the golf courses right now curling up in the fetal position, flinging their champagne crafts into the trees thinking they're striking a chupacabra. And that is because they don't understand that just because the thing looks like a gummy bear and is sweet does not necessarily mean it did not emerge from hell. Whether you're starting a
Starting point is 00:20:47 new business or growing one, if you want it to be successful, you need the most talented people on your team. And that's where a zip recruiter comes in. And right now you can try for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Duncan. Hiring people is scary. It's so scary that many people never make moves. They just stay and it's fight, flight, freeze or hire and they freeze. These are the reactions. Fight, flight, freeze or hire. You got to get from freeze to hire and ZipRecruiter is going to help you do that with their attention, grabbing labels, speak to job flexibility like remote training provided, urgent, whatever you need. Four out of five employees who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Let ZipRecruiter fill all
Starting point is 00:21:40 your roles with the right candidates. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter.com for free. ZipRecruiter.com slash Duncan. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Duncan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. If we stay cynical and pessimistic, nothing changes. The forces of evil, the forces of toxicity, of grotesque conservatism, of racism, of materialism, the Voldemort energy of the world wants us to say, stay cynical and pessimistic. Hey, let's keep all those smarty pants, urban liberals, all eye rolling and pessimistic all the time and nothing will fucking change. That really changed my life and I struggle with that. I still do. My heart
Starting point is 00:22:55 goes, my fallback position is cynicism, but I truly believe in love and I believe in hope and I believe in creating joy. That joy is something that you can not only feel in your heart, you can give joy to others, which you have been doing for a decade with your podcast. You can give joy to others and make the world a better place and that's something anyone can do. You don't have to be an actor or a podcaster to do it. I have been, and this is maybe a dangerous exploration and maybe it's totally wrong, but I've been thinking because I struggle with cynicism too. I mean, my God, that is my go-to. It's such an easy place to land. It's so easy to be cynical. Delightful to be cynical sometimes. It gives you a feeling of sophistication, which is total
Starting point is 00:23:47 bullshit too. You've seen through the nonsense of whatever it is that you're throwing out there to cope with your inevitable doom. You feel fake smart, but the thing that I keep thinking about is the Buddhist monk practice of sitting at the edge of a grave. I'm sure you've heard of this and watching a body decompose while meditating. I don't know that they still do that, but that was like an ancient Buddhist practice if you were going to be a monk. They wanted you to not just be aware that you're going to die. They wanted you to see how the body melts back into the earth, how it stinks, to really get it across this vehicle that you're in doesn't last. How about seeing holy cynicism, seeing God in
Starting point is 00:24:49 the nihilistic, materialist view of things? In other words, for this revolution to happen, how can we do it if we still are tribalizing? How can we do it? Anytime I try to go centrist or anything and say, well, this person's not all that bad, and this person's not all that bad, they're all kind of beautiful, all of them. If I put anyone in front of you, you could find the beauty in them. I know you could, and someone who has a practice can. I've been trying to look, dark shit, man, on the just countless Ukrainians being blown up by drones or Russians being blown up by really trying to do the sitting at the edge of the pit meditation, looking into the world as it is. And I think I can see some beauty in all of it. Do you know what I mean? In other words,
Starting point is 00:25:43 I could have my cynicism and not feel as though I'm opposed to some greater reality. Yeah, I wouldn't call that cynicism. I mean, I think first of all, there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism, and I think that being skeptical is healthy, you know, like, oh, here's how things are. I don't know if that's how things are. Let me really look at that. What's your definition of cynical? I don't know. I should know that. I should know that. I don't know. I think it's like poisonous, hopeless. Everything is shit. Yeah, everything is bullshit. It's Holden Caulfield, you know? Okay. Yeah, okay. Because that's what's happened is the Holden Caulfieldization of America. Oh, they're all phonies. They're all phonies. And there is phoniness.
Starting point is 00:26:47 So how do you say skeptical about the phoniness? Yes, they are all phonies, Holden. But guess what? I have hope in my heart and a song in my heart and strengthen my loins to go forward and fight phoniness. Okay, that's cool. Here's a good story. My friend, Ragu, who is friends with Ramdas, he said Ramdas would tell this or Krishnadas, who is like this wonderful, he seems like mantras, kirtans. Krishnadas, they all went to India together, hung out with Neem Krali Bhava, this great Indian saint. So Krishnadas is meeting Ramdas on the beach. He says Ramdas is just like in a rotten mood, really like unhappy, really like just something's off. And he's like, what's wrong? Ramdas says, we're phonies. That's it. We're just phonies. We're just phonies. That's all.
Starting point is 00:27:51 And Krishnadas says to him, yes, but we're authentic phonies. I love it. And that, to me, embracing the phony, yes, of course, we're phonies. My God, I mean, you're a professional phony. Your job is to dial in an alternate version of you that is limited and temporary. So I'm sure as hell a phony, all of us are phony. How part of reacting to reality is to become a phony. It's so terrifying. And you want to pretend you're something you're not. Not only that, I'm a Hollywood elite, liberal, Tesla driving, tennis playing guy in my nice house on a hill. And I have pet pigs and macadamia nut trees. And who am I to be talking to people about social transformation through religious and spiritual tools? So that sounded
Starting point is 00:28:54 like Samuel Taylor Courage. That sounded like a new version of in Xanadu to Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree with macadamia nuts and pigs. Xanadu. Xanadu. Rosebud. Rosebud. Rosebud. Think of it. This is a weight to you. My God, it's crazy. What about the idea that God gave you that? Do you ever play around with that? Like, do you ever play around with the idea that this was a gift from the universe to you from the divine that here, here you go, take this, it's actually you deserve it. Everything is a gift from the divine. And I entirely buy that. And I feel zero guilt for what I have, for what I've worked for. Great. And I understand my white privilege that gave me a leg up on this journey. And I recognize that. And that's also a blessing.
Starting point is 00:29:54 I have, you know, I have many blood hashtag blessed. But I do think that the great spiritual avatars live in a state of perpetual gratitude where every breath is tinged with awe and wonder. And I get to have a breath. I had a friend die two weeks ago, and he died in the most cliche way. He had a heart attack while on a peloton, which was literally a point from from sex in the city. I apparently I didn't watch it. But and God bless him. He's such a beautiful soul. And every breath that I get to take is is a fucking miracle. I mean, think about that oxygen coming into my little capillaries and then go streaming in my bloodstream being pumped up to my brain and allowing me to have consciousness. And I'm in, you know, I try and be in perpetual
Starting point is 00:30:53 gratitude. And I think that's a contrary to cynicism is gratitude. It's really hard to be cynical when you're grateful for everything. And I'm grateful for my career. I'm grateful for Dwight Schrute. I'm grateful for us having this conversation. I really wish that you would quit vaping. I really think you need to examine the role the nicotine plays in your life. You sound like my wife. We'll get to that later. But let's go back. Let's go back. Let's go back to death. I write in my death on my death chapter. I have a chapter called death and how to live it. I say in Tibetan Buddhism, there is a long rich death meditation history. The renowned 11th century teacher Atissa had nine meditations on this theme. One, death is
Starting point is 00:31:41 inevitable. Two, our personal lifespan is decreasing continuously day by day. Three, death will come whether we are not, we are prepared for it, just like my friend Javier on the Peloton. Four, human life expectancy is uncertain. Five, there are many causes of death. Six, the human body is fragile and vulnerable. Seven, at the time of death, our material resources are of no use to us. Eight, our loved ones cannot keep us from death. And nine, our own body cannot help us at the time of death. And it would continue from there and you can do a death meditation where you picture yourself dying and you picture what happened to kill you and you picture your loved ones rushing around your side and holding your limp, lifeless body and then the beginning of the decay and then your body
Starting point is 00:32:38 being buried and then the inevitable decay and then being eaten by worms and returning to the soil and then feeding the worms and the grass and the trees and the robins and the flowers blooming. So I think it's really important and it's one thing that we don't do culturally is have a deep consideration of death which can frame the miracle of being alive to an even greater degree. Yes, that is for sure. And I think if you want to dive into the topic of death, the Peloton death in particular is a perfect modern way of conveying to people, if you're on your Peloton, you're exercising, you're not laying in bed, vaping, playing a turn-based online role-playing game, getting mildly high on some gummy, you're on your fucking Peloton, tip-top shape and gone
Starting point is 00:33:45 just like that. And so that to me the sort of sniper reality of death because I think, you know, the temporal bank account phenomena, like people are doing for the temporal bank account what the same thing they did for Bitcoin. It's like, yeah, this is not a stable number. Maybe you don't have your lifespan out of you. And so this produces a way of interacting in the world which is generally not very sophisticated. I think if you knew you were going to die in a couple of days, you wouldn't be such a dick probably to people. You would find a way to be more kind. I don't mean you specifically. I just, me imagining me dying knowing, oh, here's the time. I don't know many stories of people approaching death who become just monstrous, shallow assholes.
Starting point is 00:34:38 Usually it's the opposite. So yeah, I do think that that we're so scared to die here. I mean, my God, everyone's really afraid to die. People don't want to die. Underlying fossil fuel that's polluting everything is the fear of death, the unacknowledged fear of death in the West. But how do you get that across to people in a way that sells tickets? Like, how do you, you know what I mean? How do you, where is, what, this is not broccoli and s'mores. This is, this is like cyanide in cyanide, you know, how to get across to the world. Listen, this does not last. Oh, I just don't know how to do that. Usually the bank vault door shuts anytime we even get close to that with some people. Yeah, it really is too bad. I've known,
Starting point is 00:35:33 now that I'm 57, I start, you start to get to know people who die a lot more. I've got friends that have died. My dad died two years ago, which affected, affected me profoundly. We were very, very close. My friend David was dying of cancer and he was given about a year to live and he had stage four stomach cancer, which is the most painful kind. I would never wish that on anyone. And God bless him. Everything, I'd really tried to talk to him about death in a very sensitive way. And I would just kind of send little writings or we'd talk about death meditation or some quotes about the journey of the soul from my tradition, the Baha'i Faith tradition. And his whole life became about battling the cancer, which is good, but it's kind of a false dichotomy. Like he couldn't
Starting point is 00:36:31 consider death because he viewed considering death as weakness and something that would take away from his fight and his battle against cancer, which was his fight to survive and to live. So he was really afraid to consider the reality of death because he was engaged in this battle and he should have been engaged in that battle, like fight it like a motherfucker, like put it off, try to fight rage, rage against the dying of the light. But also consider the fact that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and we've got 80 or 90 years in our meat suits. I'm 57, Duncan, Duncan, Uncle Duncan. If I die, will you speak at my funeral? Even though I don't know you, I've known you for 20 minutes. You know what? Absolutely. And that is a real role
Starting point is 00:37:29 of the dice, but I would love to speak. Okay. I mean, I would love to speak at your funeral. It's the worst thing you can say to somebody. I don't ever want to speak at your funeral, but I will. I'm going to tell my wife I want you to speak at my funeral. And you know what? Minimum an hour. Oh boy. Hell no. Hell no. I will speak at your funeral for as long as I can ride on a Peloton at like max speed. Seven minutes. Come on. You overestimate me. I think you and Pete Holmes, I would want you and Pete Holmes to do an hour. You can share an hour. You know, I have bad news for you friend. The based on what they're saying about the RNA therapy for reversing the aging process, not like extending your life so you suffer, but literally reverse aging you based on a few things that I know about you. You're
Starting point is 00:38:38 where you are in the as discussed economic sphere. Yeah. No doubt people you know you will be first in line to have access to something that will probably spend extend your lifespan by at least another 20 years. I don't want it. And then those 20 years there'll be another you won't have a choice. I won't have a choice. What are you talking about? Like men are going to come in the middle of the night and inject me with RNA. People need you around. Oh, and you're going not at 97 here. Not at 97. Like, oh my God, he's doing the world's oldest podcaster. You will see him. You'll be you will look younger than you are now. I would love for you to be the world's oldest podcaster at over 100. Wouldn't that be amazing?
Starting point is 00:39:27 That would be really the most terrible title. Yeah. Oh my God. This dizzy. This got dark. A big thank you to Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH. My friends, what an age we live in. What an age. You could just do a podcast. It's easy. If you have a computer, a phone, whatever, you don't need any fancy gadgets, gizmos, don't fall for the bullshit. You don't need to order those sad bags of podcasting gear they sell online. You don't need any of that. You just need a phone, your computer. Trust me, no one cares about sound quality. Press record and go. But I'll tell you one thing you definitely need for a podcast. If you ask me is a website, a home online for said podcast, a place where you can gather all those
Starting point is 00:40:40 important metrics or you can understand who is even listening to your podcast, a place for your community to gather and most importantly, a place that you can expand if you need to and Squarespace checks all those boxes. They've got members only areas. So if you want to monetize your podcast and give extra content to your fans, you could do that. They have the exact same functionality that they use to create their amazing websites for emails, meaning that you can use the Squarespace engine to send out beautiful, professional looking emails to your clients and your fans, your friends. Why not your friends? They have shopping cart functionality, obviously. They have everything you could possibly need. And this is the most important thing about it.
Starting point is 00:41:32 It's easy. It's easy. You're not going to spend a caffeinated eternity trying to understand how to use it. I use, I've used it in all states of consciousness. You know, sometimes late at night, you just come up with an idea for a website and you just need to make that website. But you don't want to spend forever on that website. Squarespace will let you do this. And also, Squarespace obviously has the technology to make an advanced glory site, like the one you will find at DuncanTrussell.com. Okay. I wanted to read to you something because I'm not sure if you're familiar with this and please stop me if you are. But, you know, people, to go back to the cynical thing, because I really agree with you, man. This is a plague
Starting point is 00:42:43 of cynicism. And it's creating a death spiral for us. And I'm just trying to figure out a way to like, to work with my own cynicism in the hopes that if I could do it, it's possible across the board. But within the, the cynical, I guess, if you want to say ideology, if you want to call it, like this is a new secret religion of cynicism. And what is the ideology within that religion? So one of the tenants, one of the beliefs would be how there, you want proof there's no God, I'll give you proof there's no fucking God. Look at the world. Look at these videos that you see in the Ukraine. Look at what's happening there. Those are all fathers and mothers. And look, those are, those are dogs like eating somebody's face out there. That's your God. Your God has dogs
Starting point is 00:43:35 eating the faces of conscripted parents. That's your God. So this is a quick Thomas Merton quote. And his answer to that, it is, it is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying his entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice spawned in bread by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover each time and can still produce a man and woman who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. That there's your fucking
Starting point is 00:44:27 proof. You know, and by you, I mean me, that's the cynical part of me that thinks that. But look, this, we wouldn't even be here. The fact that we're here with all the technologies we have to blow each other up is astounding, right? Like, that's a great, that's a great inverse. That's a beautiful way. I haven't seen that before. What a, what a beautiful way of considering the divine. I have a couple of things to say on it. Can I, can I, can I dive in? Please. So number one, number one, God doesn't cause wars. Man causes wars. And we don't have to be fighting. We don't be having wars. We, perhaps if we had listened to our great divine teachers over the centuries and actually really listened and learned from them, from the Buddha, from the Christ, from
Starting point is 00:45:20 Muhammad, praise be upon him, from Bahá'u'lláh and Abdu'l-Bahá, from the Bahá'í faith, from Lord Krishna, perhaps we would be healing and living together in peace and harmony and not creating wars. So humanity has expended an incredible amount of resources on drones and missiles and missile defense systems and armaments and tanks and AR-15s and Kalishnikovs. And we could have been spending all of that money and all of that resource to literally cure and fix and wipe out cancer and heart disease. And we didn't, we haven't, we've made that choice collectively and then we turn and blame it on God. That's number one. Number two, suffering. One of the greatest spiritual questions of all time and a question like death that if we pondered
Starting point is 00:46:22 to ever greater depths would actually help us in our lives is, is suffering in the nature of suffering. The Buddha says, I come to teach one thing and one thing only, suffering in the nature of suffering. You know, the first noble truth is about suffering. You know, life is suffering. So we understand that suffering comes part and parcel with being, with having this fleshy human experience for 80 or 90 years in our flesh tuxedos before they fall away and feed the worms. So you know, you, you suffer and then you die. Guess what? And along the way, there are miracles. But the reality of life is you suffer and then you die. And to embrace that, to understand it, to live with that, to, to dive into that way of being is, is really liberating. Like, oh, you
Starting point is 00:47:18 know, and this is M. Scott Pex, The Road Less Traveled is such a great book, because it really begins with that thesis is like, if life is suffering, then how do, how do we find a joyful acquiescence in the presence, presence of suffering, as the Buddha says. So that's brilliant. Yes. A joyful acquiescence in the presence of suffering. Yeah. Wow. So, um, but we have to understand that we suffer. And in this mental health crisis and mental health epidemic that young people are going through right now, it's like people, we've lost track of that. They're like, I don't want to suffer. Please make the suffering stop. I want the suffering to go away. There's too much suffering. I want to feel no suffering. I want to feel zero suffering. I want
Starting point is 00:48:01 to feel zero conflict or pain or discomfort. And I don't want disappointment and I don't want depression and I don't want anxiety. Guess what kids? It's real and it's here for the rest of your life. And that's not a bad thing. And that doesn't mean that there's no God. It's something to be embraced and you learn how to live with it. So I learn how to live with depression, discomfort, anxiety, disappointment, disease, uh, and failure. And that's part of the human condition because our bodies are soul growing machines. That's what we are. I'm in this fleshy tissue wonder box, which is Rainn Wilson and all of my, my glorious long torso and fleshy belly. And I hopefully I get a good 90 years, but maybe I keel over on my Peloton tomorrow. I don't know,
Starting point is 00:48:54 but I'm going to suffer along the way. And if we understood suffering better and we were closer to suffering, we would understand that God has given us suffering as a gift collectively. And they're, they're, they're not at odds. God and suffering are not at odds. I write in my book that, Hey, what would it be like if God had created a world in which there was zero suffering? What would that, how would that work? Like literally the baby comes out of the woman's vagina. The vagina opens up to the size of a football, lets the baby come out without any pain. The baby doesn't cry. No one ever gets a skin knee. No one ever stubs their toe. No one ever feels failure or disappointment. Like that's not the world and no one wants God to have created that
Starting point is 00:49:37 world. Thank you. Okay. That's beautiful. A wonderful, wonderful description of suffering and the reality of suffering. And it makes me think of this. You've ever, you, you heard of, have you heard of Gurdjieff? Yes. Gurdjieff. Yes. The mystic. Yes. Do you know the story about the clipping up of the, like how he would make his students do these ridiculous, I guess you could almost call them physical zen koans, like these things that are designed to sort of shatter your, your, your whatever, your little personalities. So he, he was having them cut squares out of a yard of lawn and bring it to the other side and place the squares exactly in the place they would have been if like they had been reversed on the other side of the yard,
Starting point is 00:50:34 basically just swapping one side of a lawn for another side of a lawn. And they're, they're going nuts. It's so awful. It's terrible work. And one of the students who no one liked, he was very annoying, incredibly irritating, horribly ill mannered. They just hated him. He stands up and basically just yells out, fuck this. This is bullshit. I'm leaving. And like no one tried to stop him. He leaves. So later, one of Gurdjieff's attendants happily expresses this guy's split, the asshole left. He couldn't do the exercise. And Gurdjieff was like, what? No, I pay him to stay here. And he got in his car and drove off and brought the guy back. But basically Gurdjieff, as part of his training, was paying the most awful, annoying
Starting point is 00:51:35 human to hang out with his students to irritate them on top of everything else, because he recognized not just the reality of suffering, but how good it was for human growth. That was what he was trying. Wow. What a great story. Isn't that ancient? So you, in your, in your world, you remove suffering. What, what do you also remove? Do you remove everything that makes humanity great? Yeah. Wisdom. Do you remove the possibility for advanced? Wow, that's cool, man. Yeah. I like your world though. I like that. I have a third child on the way and I would very much like my wife's vagina to open in the way you described earlier and let the baby crawl out. Wow. Will you live stream that? It's not only fans, okay? It's behind the paywall.
Starting point is 00:52:36 Oh man. So, so suffering, but this is, I get reminded this by my Buddhist teachers all the time, which is Buddha taught two things. First, and being the suffering, the reality of suffering. The second being the cessation of suffering, the end of suffering. That somehow we could theoretically in this human life actually not suffer. Do you buy that? Do you buy that it's possible to transcend suffering? I, I, I don't, I don't know that I agree with the Buddha on that. I have some bones to pick with the Buddha on that. Even Jesus Christ on the cross was rumored to have said, God, why have thou forsaken me? And do we think that Jesus was just giggling as the nails were pounded into him? Not according to Mel Gibson, he wasn't. But I think that some measure of
Starting point is 00:53:43 suffering is necessary to gain, to gain wisdom. We're, we're, our bodies are soul-growing machines, and our reality is that we're souls, we're spiritual beings, and we're continuing this journey into the infinite to meet the Creator, the Creator's, Creator's, Creator, beyond time and space. And I don't know that I want to never suffer because I'm so grateful for the suffering that I've been through. Haven't you suffered, Duncan, in really horrible ways when you look back on your life and go, God, I'm so, I'm so glad I had that and I went through that? There you go. I mean, this is why I love Buddhism, because the analysis for why we suffer, or not to get Buddhist nerd on your ear, I've heard both translations, life is suffering. Another,
Starting point is 00:54:39 which I like a little more is there is suffering. There is suffering, not even life. It's worse than that. It's there. Yes, there's suffering. So the why, why do we suffer? Attachment. We want to suffer. And you just perfectly describe that. It's like, yes, I don't want to, I don't want to let go of that. I consider that to be a component of who I am now. And my suffering often leads to like creative discoveries and good jokes and stuff. I don't want, I don't want to let go of that completely. So it's terrifying, really, the idea that you could actually let go of that, and you don't know what's going to be you after that. A lot of comics think, I know one thing it'll be, it won't be fucking funny. That's what it won't be. I'm not letting go of this stuff. I
Starting point is 00:55:29 gotta hang on, baby. I gotta hang on to my suffering. It's my, it's my magic juice. So yeah, I don't know what someone who has yet to relinquish suffering. And I think you have a fair argument there. You're the bone you're picking with the Buddha in the sense that, you know, we can't know for sure what happens if we stop suffering or if it's even possible. All I know is stories about people who've apparently pulled it off. So there's bullshit suffering. There's bullshit suffering, which is like when you watch the Kardashians and they're like, hey, I got this brand new Maybach and like someone keyed it when I was at this, you know, opening and God, I'm so upset and I'm crying because my Maybach got keyed at a fashion event.
Starting point is 00:56:16 Like that's unnecessary bullshit suffering, which comes from attachment to material things, attachment to outcomes. We can certainly gain great wisdom and perspective by releasing our clutching, our grasping and our attachment to comfort and materialism. That's number one. Number two, as an addict myself, and I've struggled with lots of different facets of addiction, it's unnecessary suffering, you know, it's unnecessary. Like we, you know, if I'm, if I'm binging on alcohol or binging on porn, I'm creating shame and I'm creating unnecessary suffering that doesn't have to be there. I'm only using drugs or alcohol or shopping or food or porn or whatever to soothe, escape and medicate my chronic condition of the fact that there is
Starting point is 00:57:15 suffering and anxiety goes with that. So, hey, there is suffering. You don't, I don't need to medicate that and you need to stop fucking medicating it with your vape pen. It's actually, the vape is the flavor of suffering. Oh, did you get a cartridge? You got a suffering cartridge at the local vape store? The flavor of all human suffering. It's not as bad as it sounds. By the way, why do all of the vape and pot stores look alike and they just are the worst? What is with that? Like when you, you know, we could easily create a conspiracy theory around that, that would probably exist forever. That would take off. I think just now what you're, I see, I've never considered it before. In fact, when I'm going into one of these places, I often
Starting point is 00:58:04 try to disassociate because I feel so embarrassed that I'm buying a vape, but you're right. They all look exactly the same. They've got a kind of bizarre, clownish thing to them. Like these weird, it's very odd. It's very odd. The fonts are all the same. The general size of the stores are the neon that what is this? The neon essence. Yeah. It's what is it? Is it some kind of alien? Maybe that's the invasion. Maybe is this the way the alien, the hyper dimensional being invades planet Earth is not through AI, not through super intelligence, not chat, GPT, not the UAPs, but a sudden proliferation of identical vape and weed shops all over the planet. No one would expect that would be where the invasion came
Starting point is 00:59:01 from. I'm there. I'm in. I'm all, I'm all in. It reminds me of that episode of Star Trek, the next generation where they're all playing that little video game on their devices that look curiously like phones and they're getting these dopamine releases that are actually like growing alien entities in their brains. So, so prescient. Oh my God. Well, I mean, a lot of people, we don't have to get into that. You know, the whole theory where he, he was somehow getting visions in Star Trek that it was actually like some, you had some connection to an occult society. Anyway, it's a different podcast. I want to keep talking about. Let's keep talking about suffering. Let's bring it back to suffering. No, not suffering. I want to keep talking about
Starting point is 00:59:50 God and how suffering within that, whatever your conceptualization of it may be, has the potential of not no longer being suffering, but of suddenly the entirety of what it is shifts. This is the magic trick that you are doing here. They're all great, you know, alchemical beings do. It's not like they rob you of your suffering. It's that just by helping a kind of very small shift, a reconsideration of it as being something actually beautiful, powerful. I mean, my God, you want to talk about if you're ever feeling disempowered, feel your suffering. Fuck. It's so strong. It's so fucking strong. And it's so, so, so non phony. That's another thing. Feeling like a phony, just lean into that suffering. You will not feel like a phony anymore. You're
Starting point is 01:00:46 going to feel very real. So yeah, I think what, what you're doing there is people, that's a good thing for people to hear you, because it's like, you're basically running away from the, the treasure of like buried in your house. The only way out is through. Oh God, I hate that so much. But it's true. Don't you hate that? But it's, but it's true. You know, it's grief. You know, it's, I was witness to my friend who died on the Peloton, his wife. I was witness to her just having a total grief meltdown over his loss, because they were so close and loved each other so much. And we're so looking forward to their retiring. And God bless them both. And my heart goes out to her. And, but she has been sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. And then we had an event last night,
Starting point is 01:01:39 a memorial. And you know what, she's getting a little better because she's allowing herself to sob. I mean, racking, sob, snotty, heaving, wailing sobs that have allowed her to move through and you see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. But if you hold on, if you hold on to that grief, then it turns cancerous in so many ways. But here's another aspect of suffering. Like, think about this, there's different levels, right? So when you have, when you're, we are both fathers. So when you have a baby, it suffers because it's hungry and it cries, right? And you have a toddler and it bumps its head when it falls down on the kitchen floor and it cries. And we, we have great compassion for, oh, it bumped its head. And then when you have
Starting point is 01:02:29 four year old, someone takes his toy and it cries. And that's the suffering of a four year old. And then a seven year old, you know, someone was mean to him on the playground. And that's the suffering. And then a 12 year old feels ungainly in their body because of, of, of puberty and their suffering and their crying. And then a 15 year old has their first breakup and their heartbreak and their crying. And we're able to kind of like see the maturity happen. And we have to do the same thing with ourselves, you know, we have to have such great compassion for ourselves and those around us for the nature, the nature of suffering itself. And in, and so hand in hand with suffering goes compassion, which of course is integral to the, to the Buddha's teaching. And that's the
Starting point is 01:03:18 other component that I address in Soul Boom, why we need a spiritual revolution by Rainn Wilson available from Hachette, that, uh, that, uh, a radical compassion for one another. And there's such a contemptuous disregard of compassion on the internet that goes hand in hand with cynicism. So another way to combat cynicism is not only with gratitude, but with compassion, just like I have the biggest possible heart. I have a heart the sides of a basketball for other people's suffering, even if they're really different than me, even if I see their suffering is somewhat quote unquote immature, you know, like the suffering of someone who's got had their first heartbreak. Um, what do you think? Oh God, I think you just described a risk. I, you know
Starting point is 01:04:10 what? I'm guilty of the last thing you said, and it's, I'm so glad you called us out the part of suffering snobbery. You just identified a whole thing, man. It's like, uh, oh, look at your suffering over there. You don't know true suffering. Oh, if only you could walk a day in my soggy suffering shoes, then you'd be weeping kid. I think that that's so brilliant. I, I'm guilty of it to some degree where it's like this person, who cares about the story, whatever the stupid story the person is yelling out in the world is just as stupid as your story and every other person's story on earth where you're a mortal, but peel that away. Somebody's suffering. That's not fake. That person is legitimately 100% miserable and, and, and potentially suicidal and may
Starting point is 01:05:09 in mentally ill, just like, just like all of us, most of us. So yeah, drop the snobbery thing here. Let's just start looking at suffering as it is. Let's just do a one. It's just one thing, one taste suffering. I don't care what the story is behind it. That is interesting. What a roadblock to compassion. Suffering snobbery. That's how you wall yourself off to compassion when someone's unhappy. I have in the book, I propose an idea that's kind of like a science fiction, it would be a great science fiction book that we could write, which is what if we had a compassion machine? What if there was a machine to which you could hook yourself in? It's an, it looks like an MRI or a brain scan or something like that. And you, in, in the machine,
Starting point is 01:06:01 you undertake living in someone else's shoes, in someone else's skin, behind someone else's eyes, someone entirely different than you. You know, a Pakistani farmer, a Mongolian shepherd, or a soldier in the Ukraine, or a migrant, you know, going through the Darian gap in Panama. And you are in it. You're in their reality. And you're just literally, it's like surround sound, VR, living life as them for a long period of time. You're feeling their hunger. You're feeling the pain in their feet, the fear in their heart. Like if you, if, if all Americans had to go while growing up, and that was part of our educational system, as you had to spend an hour in the compassion machine every week with feeling for some different person, we would have an
Starting point is 01:06:53 entirely different world. We would have a world of one loving human family because we could not stand Duncan to see anyone hurting. We could not stand to see the pain. We couldn't, just like we can't stand to see the pain of our family members. Well, what if you just widen, widen that family members to, to be the human family? I mean, that's what all of the great spiritual teachers are talking about, widening your perception of family to the human family. And again, there might be a collective eye roll. This is a hairy, airy, fairy, hippy, dippy bullshit, you know, you know, John Lennon, imagine all the people kind of elitist thing, but it's, it's really true. It's what, it's what Jesus taught. It's not just what Jesus taught. Look at the, just go pure
Starting point is 01:07:46 materialist here. Look at evolutionary biology, single celled organisms have to develop some kind of relationship with other single celled organisms, become multicellular organisms. This is, produces what we have now is like a never ending iteration of things, figuring out how to get along that, that maybe don't look like each other, think like each other, potentially have completely different. I mean, we're talking about single celled organisms here. I don't know what they think, like probably they're pretty dumb, but you get my point that if we strip all the mystical shit away, it's like, look at, look at what's going on here. It's obviously some kind of hive. It's clearly a human hive. And for some reason these bees, some of the bees
Starting point is 01:08:33 aren't getting along. God, I sound like Charles Manson. It's a human hive. The bees, you see the bees, the cockbees, the copper bees, putting handcuffs on the free bees. And I'm never going to be free. I'm just the bee you think I am, but you know what I'm saying though. It's like, yeah, it's, it is hippie-dippy on one level. On another level, it's, it's all, all the problems, all the big problems, they get fixed by just that circumference widening just a little bit. And the problem is that is not easy. That's no easy feat to do. And I wonder sometimes your description of the compassion machine. I mean, do you ever play around with you are in the compassion machine? This is it for the compassion machine to work. You can't know you're in the compassion
Starting point is 01:09:23 machine. You've got to really believe you're Rainn Wilson. You've got to really believe that you are in this life and your story is completely true. And so in the, in the way that we are being evolved by the divine mind is through infinite iterations in this fucking compassion machine until finally we've experienced every human life to the point where we, you know, gain realization or something. I mean, that's to me, one of the terrifying ways of thinking of reincarnation. It's a, it's like this, whatever we're in is doing to us what a rock polisher does to rocks, only it's not like a rock polisher, it's reincarnation. It's this never ends until you figure out how to do that thing where suddenly your neighbors or your family, that thing.
Starting point is 01:10:13 How the fuck do you do that, man? It's like in one life, is it even possible? It's not like I don't like my neighbors, but it's the, if I hear my neighbor's kid screaming, I'm not running over there. Oh, they would think I was nuts if I did. To cradle their child. Can I cradle your child? I heard he was screaming. The worst kind of people. I just want to soothe your child. Yeah, how do we, how do we spread it out? How, I guess that's a great way to close to like, my God, what, if I think you're, what you're talking about is clearly the thing, but how do we do it? And can you answer that in one minute? I'm just kidding. I would, but how do we extend this circumference? You start small, little by little, bit by bit. It can be a daily practice
Starting point is 01:11:16 of compassion to say, Hey, today I'm going to be confronted with someone that is an annoyance to me, like Gergev's yard worker. And I'm going to just simply practice this, a small act of kindness and love and, and compassion for that person. So you just, you start really, really, really, really small. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that was, you know, you should write a book. I really should. I think you should write a book about a spiritual revolution that encompasses seven pillars. No, I'm, I'm, I just need another TV show, man. Come on. Could you get them both? One doesn't. No, not a book.
Starting point is 01:12:14 No, that's, that's, that's bullshit. Yes. Thank you. You're very, you're very kind. Have you, I'm sorry I have no, I don't know this information. Have you written a book, Duncan? Oh God, don't get me started. I talk about suffering, man. I just, I've, I've, I've, I don't want to talk about, I talk about facing this whole thing. We've been talking about turn towards your suffering. You bring up the book and I'm like, I can't talk about that. It hurts too much. I want, I want to write one. I do. I just, how do you, how do you localize a topic? How do you find something? Even if, even essays or whatever, you know, I feel about the book the way I feel about getting a tattoo. Boy, I bet you wish you didn't ask me that question.
Starting point is 01:13:02 I feel it's, you know, it's a permanent kind of thing. Yeah. You put a book out in some state of consciousness or some idea of the, your personal view of the world and it's frozen in time. I don't know. It just feels so permanent. Yeah. It's, it's permanent, but then, you know, the sun is going to explode in another a billion and a half years. So how permanent, how permanent is it really, you know? Right. So getting back to Duncan Trussell's book, I think that if, if one can tap into art as service, then what does the world need? What story from Duncan Trussell does the world most need that touches the most hearts and affects the most people? Right. You know, in a midnight gospel way. Yeah. You know, what is, what, what comes from your illumination that would
Starting point is 01:14:07 give the greatest kind of breath and uplift to, to humanity. And so you go to that need, then it's not about yourself, right? Right. Then you've put ego aside and it's just like, I want to serve my listeners. I want, there's, there's a 27 year old kid in Omaha who's listening to every one of my podcasts and I bring him joy and he's really struggling and his name is Luther Johnson. And I really want to give a maximum impact to Luther Johnson. I'm doing it for him. Like, it's like JD Salinger. It's like, you do it, you do it for the fat lady, you know, in Franny and Zooey, you, you do the acting for the fat ladies who's listening to the radio show on the porch. Do it for her. So you don't do it for you. Wow. Thank you. Holy shit.
Starting point is 01:14:58 I'll help you, man. We, we got each other's numbers. We can go offline and just be like, let's want to just brainstorm ideas and like, I'm just, I would bounce them around. I would love that. You are so brilliant and so funny. And I'm so, I'm so lucky that you decided to come on the show. And I really do. Give me a break. Listen, I know people get cheesy at the end of podcasts sometimes, but I'm really mean. I would love to keep talking offline with you. And I am so grateful to you. Can we be friends? Yeah. Can we be friends? This is how people become friends in the modern age. First you podcast. First you podcast. It's a friendship date. That's what it is. It's the modern friendship date. Oh yes. I would love to be friends. And I am really, really
Starting point is 01:15:48 excited to think about some of the stuff you said today, especially the book stuff. Now I have goosebumps. Damn it. Oh, wow. That was amazing. Thank you. You were some kind of exorcist. Did you see the demon fly out of my body when you said that? I did. Yes. How did it look? In a cloud of vape. In a vaporous cloud. I would love to have a sandwich with you. And I would love to talk about our history of orgasms. Oh God. Me too. What are your top three favorite orgasms? What was your first one you remember? Oh my God. And then what does your face look like when you orgasm? So you just gave me the first four chapters of my book. Right there you go. Now I know who I'm
Starting point is 01:16:37 writing it for. Were you please tell people where you want them to go to get the book or does it matter? Just Amazon is fine. It doesn't matter. Okay. Or don't buy the book. No, buy the book. Buy the book. It would mean a lot to me and to my publisher and review the book where you buy it. Support your local independent bookstores, I would say number one. But if you're feeling lazy and you want to do the one click Amazon, be him off. You know, Sauron, the eye of Sauron. Click on that and let the book come to you the next day. Amazon, Walmart, some find your most fossil fuel emitted nearby factory. That's the where I get my books from. You're totally right. Well, independent local bookstore. Forgive me, all independent local booksellers. And holy shit. This has been my
Starting point is 01:17:40 favorite podcast in a long, long, long time. Thank you so much. Oh, you're so kind. Duncan, let's do it again. And I'd really would like to be friends with you. And I'd like to have a sandwich and talk about our orgasm history. And that's a good place to start. And I would love to pick your brain about your book. I want to support you in that journey. Okay. Because you're the heart, your spirit and your brain is amazing. Yeah, let me know. Do you ever go to Comic Con? Yeah, I've gone before. Yeah, I've gone before. Well, look, we could talk about this offline. Thank you, everybody. Go buy this wonderful man's book at a very small, very, very impossible bookstore, a bookstore that sells one book. Soul Boom. It only sells soul boom.
Starting point is 01:18:33 Thank you so much, Ryan. Thanks, Duncan. That was Ryan Wilson, everybody. Get his book Soul Boom, why we need spiritual revolution. Find one of those mini bookstores that only sell his book. And do come see me. Get those tickets early, Phoenix. Come on. Grab them now. Don't make me sweat bullets over here. Come see me, Dania Beach. You know your orders. You have to come to Dania Beach wherever you are. That's the last of many, many shows I've been doing before I go on a kind of mild paternity leave. So I hope all of you will come to that show. I will see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna.

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