Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 603: Moshe Kasher

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Moshe Kasher, author, comedian, co-host of the Endless Honeymoon Podcast, and brilliant human, joins the DTFH! Moshe's new book, Subculture Vulture, is now available everywhere you get your books! Y...ou can also check out his first memoir, Kasher in the Rye. And The Endless Honeymoon Podcast (with co-host Natasha Leggero) is, likewise, available everywhere you listen to podcasts! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to Clint Cole's Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast presented by the Radon friends. Many people don't realize that they are being steeped in a carcinogenic gas. And there's only one true way to know if you have radon in your house. That's by ordering a Radon cat. These genetically engineered felines will die instantly when exposed to radon gas. A small price to pay when your family's life is at stake. We are also a subsidiary of the Ender Group, the Ender Group, bringing peace to the world
Starting point is 00:00:36 by lowering IQ one child at a time. You can find everything you wanna know about the Ender Group by going to endergroupdl underscore v dot org. Again it's endergroupdl dot underscore v dot org. And now Clint Coles, Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. I'm a dead, fell into a dime crack Dr. Woodall lay there with a wizard on the back Staring to the closet and the bus his stairs back In a dime crack, in a dime crack, baby වවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවවව� Somewhere under my falls, my time-crack waits for you
Starting point is 00:02:00 And all the greens that are dancing green rivers that flow and come out of you. Just out of a deck you will always find the Titan Crack. Better turn it back, better reverse those tracks. Cause once you win a time crack, then go back. You win a time crack. That was Time Crack by Stanford and Sun. And I'm like, anyone else here in June, I have that in the June LR Records. Moshe Kasser is here with us today, folks. But before we jump into that, some quick announcements.
Starting point is 00:02:41 I have a Patreon. Subscribe at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. I have a Patreon. Subscribe at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. I'm a comedian. I tour on the road. I'd love for you to come and see me do some stand-up here or the impending dates. Come see the comedy stylings of Duncan Trussell at Helium in St. Louis, February 22 through the 24th, and then the funny bone in Liberty Township, Ohio, March 8 through 9, and then the funny bone in Liberty Township Ohio March 8th through 9th, and then the Blue Room Comedy Club in Springfield. Oh yes baby, it's time to laugh and jiggle your face skin in the way you do and you're
Starting point is 00:03:14 having the best night of your current incarnation. Did you know you can gain realisation in this lifetime? That by recognising the fundamental emptiness of all things, you will begin to see that your suffering comes from within and is projected onto reality. He'll also be at Hyenas in Dallas and Fort Worth April 12th and 13th. Then in Las Vegas at Wise Guys April 26th through the 27th. Your liberation could potentially liberate all those around you. He'll also be at Cobb's Comedy Club May 3rd and 4th. And now friends, welcome author, the critically acclaimed book, Subculture of Ultra, which I truly hope you'll order,
Starting point is 00:03:58 co-host of the endless honeymoon podcast, Moon Podcast, comedian and brilliant human, Moshe Kasher. Welcome to the DTFH. Thank you for being here. I'm happy to finally be in the family. You're in the family now. It feels good. I had so much fun moderating your book. What was that called? A book panel? What was that called?
Starting point is 00:04:40 A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? A book panel? It feels good. I had so much fun moderating your book. What was that called? A book panel? What is that called?
Starting point is 00:04:51 Well, it was the launch. It was the release date. It was a really special night. And I guess you were my in conversation with Duncan Trussell. And it was a great conversation, man. I mean, the funniest part of the whole thing to me was Natasha, like, two a day before was like, we got to contact Duncan because I think he thinks you're just
Starting point is 00:05:10 talking about Burning Man the entire time. So I called you and I was like, it's in Duncan, you know, it's in six parts. If you haven't read the other five parts, that's okay. I'll give you bullet points. I sent you bullet points. I could tell that you were like reading the hell out of it in the day leading up to it. Oh yes. And then when we got there we ended up having such a good conversation the funniest part burning man never came up never even discussed it. Did even talk about it I was horrified and embarrassed realizing like oh god I'm like oh yeah talk about burning man I do that without consent all the time ear-beating people about it
Starting point is 00:05:45 This is gonna be glorious and then I realize you asshole. It's his fucking book release Study the fucking book and so like yeah, I spent the day like trying to get questions together and Like over the course of that realizing like what a a fucking great book, man. What a great writer you are. So congratulations, man. And I'm happy to hear that it's getting great reviews. Before we started recording, we were talking about the precarious nature of putting something out in the world
Starting point is 00:06:20 and having access to criticism of that thing. And you have somehow disciplined yourself and having access to criticism of that thing. And you have somehow disciplined yourself to not diamond the dark negative critiques of things. And that's, I think that's amazing. I think it's like being an overeater, like a addictive overeater. I'm a lot healthier than I used to be,
Starting point is 00:06:44 but every once in a while I'll bite into a Twinkie and go, oh, no, how did I get here again? Like every time I say, I was on a podcast the other day on Bobby Lee's and I was like, oh, I don't even look anymore. That day, that day I looked and responded. That to me is a relapse. It's a relapse to a, if I respond, I'm on tilt. Like, you know, I always think I'm the guy that can get through to the person that's being negative online And I have never been that guy, you know, you okay, so it's so funny. I Someone I interviewed Jesse Moynihan was is talking about the same thing which is that there's a sort of like benevolent desire to shift the energy like maybe if I have a human conversation with
Starting point is 00:07:28 this person who is trying to hurt me there could actually be some shift where the person and I find some equal ground and things work out but he was saying that just never happened that doesn't really that's kind of a dream. It would work. Did you shift this person at all? Or they know so far they haven't responded and I have checked about 72 times to see whether or not they've responded because I had I thought I had a bulletproof I had a bulletproof argument and so far nothing. I don't know. Yeah, I think that the bigger headline is that you're attempting to throw a stone at an individual that represents a societal disease.
Starting point is 00:08:12 It's like, you know, you're going, oh, if I can get through to this person, maybe I can shift the psychic energy of this toxicity that's infected the entire universe. And it's like, that guy's not as mean as you think he is that guy's got a family and he's ejaculating some cruelty that is I don't know it's an expression of his own frustration about working at Kroger or whatever like yeah it's it's not he's never been the issue and I'm not the issue like the issue is how bizarrely mean everybody has become and and and how we've all been given that permission to become mean to each other and like I I'm just trying I'm an I'm a nice guy Duncan and I know you are too. I I try to be I mean
Starting point is 00:08:54 I'm we all have I'm just reading about this now It's called clashes Obscurations is it like it's compared to like you find a crystal and It's covered in mud, but under it doesn't mean there's not a crystal down there There's a crystal you just got to get the mud off and so everyone's got these clashes I guess you know addicts really understand those things like because you work diligently to At least clear part of that off,
Starting point is 00:09:25 which is the addiction. And then when that happens, you're like, holy shit, I'm a new person. But tell me this, and I hope I pronounce it right. Tycoon, is that what it's? Yeah, Tycoon, yeah. What does that mean? Well, Tycoon Olam is the concept and Judaism
Starting point is 00:09:42 of to repair and heal the world and that the idea I would say that is perhaps the primary objective in a in a sort of Jewish spiritual sphere I would say the two primary spiritual goals in the Jewish universe are they once said to Rabbi Akiva who was like the kind of hero of the Talmud like They were I guess trying to mock him and they said describe the the the message of the Torah while standing on one foot and he said Easy he stands on one foot and says that which is harmful to your neighbor that which is harmful to you Do not do it to your neighbor. Yeah, and so that's
Starting point is 00:10:23 Objective one and objective two is to Koon O'Lam, which is a more, I would say maybe a more modern one, but it's also ancient, which is to try to heal the broken parts of the world. And that's the mission, that's the mission of all people, I guess. Yeah, and then so the impulse to confront someone online in a positive way,
Starting point is 00:10:46 you could argue that is that you're trying to do that. That's trying to repair the world in some small way. No. I will say there's a part of it that's just pure ego. You know, I'm my, but I would say that there is this other impulse in me anyway, which is I just, I, there are certain things that I see on the internet, not just to me, but in other people's feeds
Starting point is 00:11:11 too, which are so like sort of heart renderingly disappointing that you see the way that people treat and discuss each other's work and pain and personalities and offerings to the world. And you just go like, we can't, it feels like we can't really be living in a world where people talk to each other like that. Like this thing happened, you know, this kind of natural impulse to only care about you and your people.
Starting point is 00:11:40 That's kind of ancient, you know, my village, my people, my tribe, that's ancient. But the, I feel like the internet has weaponized that. And it's not just that I only care about my people, but now we've sort of toggled into, and I also will attack, I'm not that this is new, but it feels like it's more ever present. I'm gonna attack the other tribes too.
Starting point is 00:12:00 Like part of protecting my people and my family is by telling you and your family that your family sucks and are doing it wrong. Yes, it's like, you know, I can remember the one time I went to London, you know, you could, there's a tower, you could see torture instruments. Like, you know, this was normal back then.
Starting point is 00:12:20 There were people who would innovate insane ways to torture people, like cages that you would put hungry rats in that would eat their face. And this was normal. Like, you know, I don't think people are like, my God, this is crazy. They're just like, yeah, you fucked up, your rat's gonna eat your face now.
Starting point is 00:12:39 And it feels like the internet is going through, it's somehow, even though it's the so advanced technologically it still somehow has a cut up to where we are in person with each other generally you know it's like it's a few it's like we're still back in the Tower of London putting thumb screws on each other just saying incredibly cruel things I guess it's cowardice maybe more than anything, right? Because you don't have to worry about someone like attacking you if you say shit to them and you're anonymous. I think maybe also like maybe I'm being naive. Maybe the cruelty of man was always there that the differences that we now have like a like that movie Brazil, there's like little tubes going
Starting point is 00:13:21 into everybody's brain. It's like yeah if I want to insult you Duncan Anywhere in the world all I got to do is look up at Duncan Trussell and and I'm in your I think about Brad Pitt like I Could get to Brad Pitt I could insult I could insult Taylor Swift if I tried hard enough I could get to Taylor Swift's eyes. I could I could make her read the insult that I wrote That's not normal, historically. If you wanted to insult Humphrey Bogart, you had to go to the post office, buy some stationery, you had to hand write, you fucking old man, I don't know why you're a leading man, you suck, I've never liked anything to do, put a stamp on it, lick the
Starting point is 00:13:58 stamp, send it to Hollywood, send it to the William Morris Agency and maybe William Morris would hand it off to Humphrey. Now, I can tell Snoop Dogg that he sucks in 12 seconds. Yes, instantly. And maybe that's the problem. It's just too easy. You have to really be angry at someone to go to the post office and get his fucking sping up. Right.
Starting point is 00:14:22 For your anger to not dissipate on the drive from your house to the post office, then you wait in line at the post office. You hope that by the time you get to the teller, you go, you know what? Humphrey Bogart's a fine guy, I'm sure. I'm just going to leave him alone. But to get all the way through with it, you had to really hate what he was doing.
Starting point is 00:14:36 These people don't hate anything. They're just like, they're trying to feel something. It's like opposite dopamine. You know? It's this. But you know, it's like, they want a little fix. And I, in some ways, I think like the book is about that is like me running through the world looking for a fix, like from people, a positive fix, a healing, joyful fix. But like, I realize this now, like this is the memoir. Subculture
Starting point is 00:15:02 Vulture is the memoir of a drug addict who stopped doing drugs when he was 15 and went out to see what else in the world could get him high. Right. Yeah, and you know, to me, the internet technology will be looked at as an actual drug. Like another place where we're not sophisticated yet is we think, oh, a drug is something you eat that, you know, with porn addiction. It's kind of like getting there because people are recognizing, look, you know, it's staring at something and jerking off is fucking up your brain. It's impacting you neurologically, even though you're not taking acid or ecstasy or whatever, you're still getting hangovers from it. It's impacting your relationships. It's a drug.
Starting point is 00:15:54 It's an epidemic. I imagine at some point, maybe not. Maybe we're going to the cyberpunk where we're all going to have those tubes are literally going to be wired into our brains, but to me yet the the the internet is become the ultimate Unacknowledged drug that all of society is getting blasted on every fucking day. It's a psychedelic it's can expand your consciousness it can terrify you and I don't think most people wandering around realize you are like a late stage addict.
Starting point is 00:16:30 As an addict myself, I know what it looks like. And that people are just, just anytime you look at your phone, imagine you're snorting ketamine. Yeah. You know, like you would be like, fuck man, I am really, really, I really have a ketamine problem.
Starting point is 00:16:48 Yeah, you think a K-hole is bad, the TikTok hole is even worse because it never ends. You can't get out. So, but I do think though there's some part of us, yes, it's a drug, yes, it's an inherent, there is an inherent negativity, but I also think in some ways it's like, it's an inherent, there is an inherent negativity. But I also think in some ways it's like, it's because of our age, like we're not capable. Like you look at your parents age and they're really not capable of looking at the internet and understanding that there's a differentiation
Starting point is 00:17:18 between the reality in online and reality in the analog world. Because they have these like, you know, my parents like they have this feeling that if something's in print, that means like Walter Cronkite wrote it and it is true. Like I read it, therefore somebody vetted it, therefore it's true. And like people our age know that a little bit
Starting point is 00:17:36 are a little bit more savvy. I think of it like, you know, if you brought a machine gun to like ancient druids, well they would probably shoot everybody around them. They'd just be like, oh my god, this is amazing, right? So probably our kids, or our kids' kids, will be able to use the internet in a way that feels more organic and healthy.
Starting point is 00:17:56 We're right now in this time travelers sort of disease where they brought processed meats to an aboriginal people and they didn't have the ability to process it in a healthy way. But in a hundred years, they will have, their bodies will have figured out a way to build up their tolerance for such thing. At least I hope, I hope that like my kids or my kids kids will figure out a way to use this and not feel like it's constantly poison? What of all of your, including like the chemicals you took, what do you think was the most dangerous addiction
Starting point is 00:18:36 you've had in your life? The most dangerous addiction I had in my life, I would say that the thing that put me at most direct peril, more even than actually being a teenage drug addict, was like my desire to be seen by other people as like good enough or tough enough or badass enough. Those are the things that actually put me into physical peril. You know, those are the things, there was a girl that once pulled a shotgun on me
Starting point is 00:19:11 and my friends and I was in this like gangster rap phase like, ain't no broad gonna pull a gun on me and I ran toward her and thank God at the last second she like ran back into her house and I didn't get a whole blast in my stomach that day. But that kind of like ego, I really ego. It's ego I would say is the thing that has pushed me closer to the edge than anything else.
Starting point is 00:19:32 Wow, yeah right, that is the, I just saw this very like absurd, tragic video. Some Indian tech, I don't know if he's a billionaire I assume they all are but very successful techie decided to like at some company event descent you see this he descends from like I don't know a set he's trying to like I don't know what he was doing, like trying to fly or do some kind of, just some insane shit.
Starting point is 00:20:10 The rig broke, he falls to his death. And, you know, I'm looking at, and I'm thinking the same thing that probably made him a billionaire killed him. Like, you know, that risk taking and megalomania and I have to be the center of everything and everyone fucking look at me. You know, it can disguise itself in your life as something sort of annoying and innocuous, but in the right conditions, it kills you.
Starting point is 00:20:38 So I know what you're saying. This This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by BetterHelp. Did you watch your parents relationship melt down in front of your eyes when your brain was still developing? Are you one of the infinite number of people out there who got to experience the incredible madness of going through a divorce. Did you experience what it was like when love songs would come on the radio post-divorce and your mom would start taking sharp turns when she was driving to drop you off at the YMCA? Then you might not have the greatest
Starting point is 00:21:40 relationship skills and these are skills. It's something you have to learn, which is where therapy comes in. And yet I know what you're thinking. It's embarrassing maybe it's an embarrassing thing to go to relationship counseling with somebody. But my God, it is the best if you're somebody like me. If you are essentially illiterate when it comes to actually communicating feelings to your partner in a normal way. Maybe you're like me and you just swell up with stuff that you keep inside like some horrific boil on the back of a goblin. Like one of those things in the descent and then it explodes all over your life from time to time.
Starting point is 00:22:27 This is why therapy is incredible. And it certainly helped me reduce the inflammation on the back of the goblin in the terrible example that I just used. Better help is where you want to go if you're thinking of starting therapy. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just follow the brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, switch
Starting point is 00:22:53 therapists any time for no additional charge. Become your own soulmate, whether you're looking for one or not. Visit betterhelp.com slash Duncan today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help. My brother was once at a deli and he was sitting with a group of friends and he took a bite of a pastrami sandwich or something and he started to choke and he was like, I can't breathe. I am in that situation where I'm choking on my food. And he told me that his first reaction was, I have to get out of here. This is embarrassing.
Starting point is 00:23:51 And he stood up and walked out of the restaurant by himself rather than tap his friend and say, can you help me? He walked out of the restaurant, lest these people see him do something humiliating. Thank God he was able to like cough the thing up. But I thought about that all the time. And I think men are worse about this than women are. We will die rather than look like a fool, rather than look weak. Like literally, physically, we will die.
Starting point is 00:24:16 And that is so scary. Yeah, I mean, if you look up suicide statistics right now, men are just killing themselves left and right look up like suicide statistics right now, like men are just killing themselves left and right. Men are killing it right now. The, the, do you ever, and I kind of asked you about this at your book release, because I recognize in your book. These are incarnations like there's no other way to put it like the difference between
Starting point is 00:24:50 Drug addict Moshe sober Moshe rave Moshe is It might as well be you know different incarnations, but this Quality in people your brother's embarrassment, your egoic desire to demonstrate some masculine power, fearlessness, that Indian tech billionaires, megalomania, my fucking anger. These things follow you through not just this life but past lives. Whatever that particular issue that you're dealing with, it's been sort of the sand and
Starting point is 00:25:31 the oyster of your life for millennia. Just as bugs, as bees, as slugs, some small fractal of that thing appears and fucks you up every single time. So is that the through line in all of these incarnations in your book? Is it some coming to terms with your desire to be viewed in a certain way versus being authentically yourself regardless of what people think?
Starting point is 00:25:58 Well, I think that what I have realized, having written this book, is when I started writing this book, I didn't really understand what the through line was between these like really disparate universes that I've lived in. You know the six worlds that I examine in the book are as you said AA, raves, Burning Man, stand up comedy, Hasidic Judaism and deafness. And these are all worlds that I am intimately connected to in different ways, all worlds that I've lived in
Starting point is 00:26:28 that have shaped me. And I started to like, you know, I just didn't know what the thesis of the book was. I knew that it was compelling because there were these different worlds that were inherently, to me anyway, interesting. And then if I did a comedic history of each of these worlds, people would learn something.
Starting point is 00:26:41 And if I told the story of my time in those worlds, it could be funny and it could be like a memoir that was a bit of a concept memoir and I was like but what is the connection and I came to like a really obvious realization that you know it seems very clear but that the connection is like me the connection is my body and is my experience in the universe and is the That's very obvious but it but it I mean it on a kind of a deeper level that like each person in the world is a product of these kind of Pinball slaps of the the path that life will take you down like if you happen to meet a bad boy
Starting point is 00:27:19 And you date that bad boy then bam You're in prison because you guys did a murder suicide plot and killed his parents. If you happen to meet a good boy then all of a sudden you're a church elder and you went to law school and you became an immigration lawyer like life is this kind of feeling of being slapped randomly from place to place. The big question which you're kind of asking is like well why were these the worlds that I responded to so deeply? And I think that I have to start with the worlds that I didn't volunteer for. Like the worlds that I was born into that shaped me and set me on this sometimes tragic, sometimes like magnificent path, which are the world of deafness, my whole family's deaf,
Starting point is 00:28:02 my mother, my father, my half-sister, my mother, my father, my half-sister, my half-brother, my step-sister, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, everybody's deaf. I spent 15 years as a sign language interpreter. I signed before I could talk. That's the world that I was born into. And then the world of Judaism and Hasidic Judaism, when my mom left my dad when I was nine months old and moved us to Oakland, my dad in the kind of detonated absence of his family unit went backwards in time and abandoned his life as a beatnik abstract impressionist painter and married a woman in the most extreme subsect of Hasidic Judaism and became a born-again Hasidic Jew. And I would go there on summer vacations and kind of like cosplay as Tevye the milkman from Fiddler on the Roof for six weeks a year and like these
Starting point is 00:28:49 universes like they set me up in this way to feel Simultaneously like what a secret I've been led in on and also what a fraud I am no one's telling me I'm a fraud but that was the information that I was gleaned is like I don't really belong in any of the Worlds that I'm of when I'm in New York for the summer I'm the only kid in the synagogue with an English prayer book when I'm in the deaf world I mean there's an obvious fraudulentness to that. It's like I'm of this world, but I'm but I'm also the enemy I say like and like I equate it to being born white in Wakanda.
Starting point is 00:29:25 They're like, yeah, we'll give you a passport, but you can't wear the Panther suit. You know what I mean? Right. And then I'm in Oakland at that whole time. I'm in Oakland public schools and I'm one of the few white kids in the whole school and white kids are dorks and the black kids are cool.
Starting point is 00:29:39 And so I had this kind of feeling of like disingenuousness. It was self manifested, but it was something that I kind of, that I consumed, like I'm fake, I'm not real, I don't belong. And then I found the bad kids at the back of the school and got high with them for the first time. And it was like, Oh, you know, I found belonging. I found a destruction of the self in drugs. And as we know, drugs can be this super powerful tool, but if you do them in the wrong way, or specifically if you do them, in my case,
Starting point is 00:30:15 in young enough, you don't have enough self built up, especially if you have an identity crisis going in 15 different directions at once like I did. You don't have enough self-built up to say, I'm going to do this in a healthy way, in a thoughtful way, in a meaningful and intentional way. And so by the time I was 15, I'd already lost control. And then I started looking in these other worlds
Starting point is 00:30:38 for an expression of myself or a destruction of myself that was healthy and meaningful. And that's where I started that path of like searching. Yeah, yeah, you, you know, the like, that sort of drug user you are when you were 15, you would, you know, as a drug user when I was 15, LSD, weed, the classics, you would cross paths with drug users like you.
Starting point is 00:31:10 Every once in a while, it's some weird party or something. And it was a different breed. Like you are like, this is the, well, when we were doing, and I think probably when you are doing it, it was, you were still kind of war on drugs, right? It was still like, okay. So these days, you know, especially psychedelic use, but drugs in general, it's still somewhat taboo, but sort of trendy.
Starting point is 00:31:32 And when we were doing it, it was fucked up. We were like, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs, all drugs are the same, you're frying your brain. So even people like me, or taking acid as much as we possibly could, would see people like you and be like, mother fuck, have you not seen the brain on drugs commercial? You are, what, do you, who, what, you, you, because you are doing, you are doing all drugs, uninhibited madness, just insane.
Starting point is 00:32:04 There was a kid, I remember, I was 15, 16. He was throwing up blood for him. He was such a late stage alcoholic at 15 that he had already reached a point where he's vomiting blood and treating that as, oh, it's nothing, you know, just blood. It's like, dude, you're fucking hemorrhaging or something, man, that's not nothing.
Starting point is 00:32:29 So that's to me, like, to start off the trajectory of your life pretty much in a hell realm. I mean, that place you were in, I don't know of another way to describe the drug addict's existence, but it's hell on earth. It's weird to me because you know when you describe that like I don't know for sure Duncan now that I'm 44 years old and looking back on it. I don't know for sure that you and I were using I mean I didn't know you then obviously but like that you and I were using drugs in a qualitatively different way. I was not hemorrhaging blood. I have had to grapple with this question as a grown-up looking back on this insane childhood that I had.
Starting point is 00:33:18 What was true about the things that I believed. Like the first thing that you have to understand to contextualize me is that my mother got out of her abusive relationship with my father through psychotherapy. And psychotherapy became the religion, my West Coast religion. My mother growing up was so worshipful of therapy that we would be engaged in in a conversation like my mom would look at the sky, you know, and say,
Starting point is 00:33:49 oh look, the sky's green, and we'd say no mom, I mean this isn't literally true, but this was the kind of vibe. We'd say no mom, the sky's blue, she'd go, nope, it's green, that's a green sky, we go mom, it's fucking blue, look, I mean it's a classic color for the sky, blue, she'd say, nope, green sky, and then we go to family therapy and go, doctor, mommy says the sky's green and the doctor would say B the sky's blue and my mom would look at us go okay it's blue so it became this like third parent it became this like the source of truth and the minute right that I toggled into into behavioral hicc. My mom started sending us the therapy.
Starting point is 00:34:26 I started therapy when I was four. I was in therapy at four years old, and I was in therapy unrelentingly until I was 16 years old. Oh my God. By the time I finally got sober, I was in therapy eight times a week. Eight times a week.
Starting point is 00:34:40 That's more times than they make days. So my mom looked at my addiction, or my drug use I should say, and it was immediately like shunted down this clinical path. And it was the 90s, so that was already like fertile ground because of war on drugs and everybody sending them to rehab. And so I don't even know the answer anymore.
Starting point is 00:35:01 If I was just a juvenile delinquent that accepted the moniker of teenage drug addict, or if I was a teenage drug addict that was getting help from therapy, or if the therapy made me think I was diseased and then therefore I was able to go harder with drugs and alcohol, like I don't know how to untangle that biographical knot, but I do think I know for sure that I was on a path that would have led me into death or into jail. I don't know for sure what was going on with me as a teenager these days. Nothing else is the same about me as I was back then. Well, it's a past life. It's foggy. It's a past life.
Starting point is 00:35:43 It's a past life. And remembering your past likes is mean, it's a past life and remembering your past likes is, well, I don't know. I've never really remembered my, I mean, I fantasize that I am, but I'm highly skeptical. But you know, they say like if you can't, the first step and like if you did wanna, for some reason add to your guilt and neurosis, another fucking life, then the way that you
Starting point is 00:36:07 would sort of start deconstructing to get there is sort of what you did in your book. First you have to get a really from looking at the trajectory of your life, the recurring patterns, you can kind of start doing a reverse engineering sort of thing and maybe from that figure out what how you got how you shows that as your mother at least from the cosmology that I'm speaking about. And by the way, I wanted to ask you, what are your views on these mystical things? I mean, the Hasidic Jews are mystical Jews. I've looked into it man. That is some heavy shit It's not like you know, I don't think anyone like or most of people most of us don't know what's going on there. We see the
Starting point is 00:36:55 clothes that they wear and it seems very insular it is and impenetrable to some degree But when you look into it, holy shit man, that is some powerful stuff. I'm actually surprised that you weren't, I think if that happened to me, I would have been grabbed by fully. I'm surprised you felt like you were cosplaying
Starting point is 00:37:21 and get just completely pulled in. Well, I would say the problem with the mysticism that is at the core of Hasidic Judaism, and you're totally right, the actual spiritual core of Hasidic Judaism is what they were attempting to do when the Hasid started. This guy named the Bal Shem Tov was the first Hasidic to do. They were attempting to do a mission very similar to what Martin Luther was doing in the Protestant Reformation, what Christ was doing. That is his last name, right? It's Christ. What Jesus was doing in the ancient temple, it was a very similar thing, which is that they looked at what had become this kind of perfunctory hierarchical sort of lifeless spiritual tradition and reform it in a way that was mystical and in a way
Starting point is 00:38:12 that was revolutionary. And the spiritual core of ascetic Judaism is it's wild, you know, it's no less wild than, you know than Hindu cosmology. There's this belief that the world is these shattered points of light and that the mission of the person on earth is to grab one of those points of light and put it back into like the grand web. That is the Takuna Olam in the Hasidic world. It's not.
Starting point is 00:38:41 It's not. They don't not believe that it's what Martin Luther King did, right, which is the civil rights movement or hugging your neighbor. They believe in that too, but there was like an actual like sort of mystical and metaphysical tycoon olam that could take place as well. And part of the way that they did that was by acting in these strange ways, right? They would dress weird. They would dress like sort of circus performers. They would dance. They used to turn their hats inside out
Starting point is 00:39:09 and wear their hats inside out. It was all about this like, I'm going to push again. It's very similar to what Hindu aesthetics do, where they're putting their arm up for 40 years or they're like, you know, not eating. They're making themselves physically, forcing themselves into a physical other realm. The problem is with Hasidic Judaism, in
Starting point is 00:39:31 terms of your and other people's ability to understand that mysticism within it, is that then they lived in Europe for 300 years, and they were prodded by Cossack Spears and Bayonet points and then eventually the Holocaust And it created this like this shrinking and this defensive shrinking until finally the post-holocaust Society of Hasidic Judaism is one that is really opaque and difficult to access because they built a wall around their little Society right and said if the world wants to kill us, we'll hide behind the wall and not let anybody in and we'll just stay in this universe and be holy here because we can't count on the holiness
Starting point is 00:40:15 of the world around us. Oh, that is so sad. That is so fucked up and sad. I didn't know about turning the hats and set out, but there is a parallel in your book actually, because anyone, when we were going to the raves, who encountered the rave scene, even though it is, once you were in, it was very inclusive.
Starting point is 00:40:38 And as you mentioned in your book, like suddenly you go from that sort of heavy costume of being some sort of gangster like juvenile kid to what hopefully happened to lots of us there which is all of that stuff drops away and there's love but also there is, there was hierarchy there. There was a wall around it and it was mystical and they also wore their fucking weird hats and shit in giant pants. And it was a similar sort of pushback against default reality,
Starting point is 00:41:17 but obviously it would far less philosophy behind it. But in yet, it says sort of a reflection of that. far less philosophy behind it. But in yet, it's sort of a reflection of that. And I think it brings us into the world we forgot to talk about in Austin at the book people is Burning Man. I mean, they literally at Burning Man call the place we came from the default world. And people go there in this kind of transgressive
Starting point is 00:41:45 costume. It's like, I'm going to come here, I'm going to dress like a freak, I'm going to, you know, light things on fire, I'm going to drive around in a car that doesn't look like a car. I mean, all of these things, you can look at them on the surface level and say, okay, these are just like rich druggies, like acting like idiots and thinking they're on like a Mad Max spring break. But you can look kind of beneath the surface and go, oh, like the world is filled with this kind of poisonous banality. And it feels so spiritually dead sometimes to like go to work and try to strive and make a living and just be in this universe that when you find a kind of, you know, a portal to another world, you dress in this agitated way, you drive in a vehicle that's
Starting point is 00:42:28 agitated and you're literally trying to physically force yourself into another dimension. You're trying to, and it's what psychedelics do. It's like that's the classic sort of praising and critique of psychedelics. It's like, you know You take psychedelics and all of a sudden you're on this like water slide to The the the higher vibrations of reality like okay, that's a cheat but also okay. Wow, that's deep powerful medicine Yeah, that's all we're trying to do
Starting point is 00:42:58 I think at Burning Man and it raves and the Hasidic Jews as well is like shake this world in such a way that you can have an experience that feels immediate and fundamental and spiritual and different so that you don't feel bored or tired or longing for something deeper. And but you know, this is, I can't, I can't count how many times I've thought about something you said to me. I think it was that burning man. Maybe my first burning man, I'm not sure. But I was in the utopian like, oh, my God, this is paradise.
Starting point is 00:43:35 This is the potential of humanity. This is what we could be. And I said to you something along those lines, and you were, I'm like, what if it was longer? And you're like, they would start killing each other. And it was such a brilliant thing to say and so true, and really pop the balloon that I was inflating which is the balloon that you know the people inflate you get into cults and you get into utopian societies and you get into anything outside of
Starting point is 00:44:15 default reality with the idea like this is gonna be the one that works this is the one that will last and spread around the world and bring world peace. This is it and they always fail Well, you know, maybe that's what's actually powerful if anything about Burning Man is that it's all by the way my comment to you is such a Stereotypically grizzled burning burner who's been going for two decades thing to say to a person that's having like their ecstatic experience Do you think I didn't- I loved it. No, but you think I didn't go up to somebody with the same kind of spirit at my second burn or whatever and just go like, this could be it. And then they said something like that, like you fool.
Starting point is 00:44:55 You just come for a few more years and you'll see the whole thing break down. But like Burning Man was always meant to be temporary. And it was always meant to be, in fact, at the first Burning Man ever, this guy, Danger Ranger, who still works for the organization today, Michael Michael, really interesting guy. In fact, he sent me, your viewers won't see it, but I used to be on his mailing list and he would send these like weird, like just bizarre clip, press clippings and strange messaging. It's very old school Burning Man thing to do to like have a mailing list where you'd analog send people weird stuff But he had he sent me this Ticket to Burning Man 96 and he didn't know that that this is the first year I went this was wow
Starting point is 00:45:35 This might might as well have been my ticket and this is like one of my my sort of prized possessions but but he said That that when they first got to the Black Rock Desert, he drew a line in the sand. And he said to the people that had gathered there, to walk across this line, you are entering into a temporary autonomous zone, the T-A-Z. And to me, there is something powerful about the idea
Starting point is 00:46:04 that Burning Man knows it's not really a utopia. It knows that it is, if it knows anything, it knows that it is an experiment in temporary autonomy. It's like a, you know, in Narnia, I think a lot about Narnia with this book because my experience of the world, a lot of the time has been that of the Narnia kids and Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker Yeah, it's just like feeling like you're this weak
Starting point is 00:46:27 Friendless sort of coward that lives alone and has no hope and then one day a man in a robe taps you on the shoulder and goes if You walk through this doorway There's another universe you didn't know existed and not only are your people in there, but you're powerful there too You've got superpowers inside of this universe. But even in Narnia, you know, Aslan, who I think his last name is Christ too, Aslan says, he says like, you can't stay here. Like this isn't for, you can't be in Narnia forever. Your job is to take the kind of magic that you got here and bring it back to the non-magical world and see in what ways it has changed you. And I think like maybe that's the power of Burning Man is like you go, you have this
Starting point is 00:47:09 magical utopic experience and you see back when you go to the regular world, the banal world, and I think psychedelics do this too. Can I bring any of the fairy dust that I found in that universe and make it permanent and make it and sprinkle and maybe that's what the hustles were doing too. Can I grab one of these points of light and like sprinkle it into the real analog world? Can I bring holiness to the profane? Yeah, yeah, I think yes. I think so. I think that that is definitely like a positive effect of Burning Man. I think also there's a destabilizing effect for people who've really rooted themselves in the default reality and they go into a place like that.
Starting point is 00:47:52 And yes, it's temporary. And I think Hakeem Bey who came up with temporary autonomous zones had almost a mathematical principle behind it based on energy. Like you can't sustain the the energy it would require to keep Burning Man a utopia exceeds the energy. It's not it's not possible like you know because like for that to continue someone has to bring food and and water and we get to drive our art cars and dance and have awesome conversations while what?
Starting point is 00:48:29 Robots farm for us and drones fly food in. So it's a temporary emergence. And then here we are in this place, which probably at some point looked like a temporary situation too. Right? Like default reality itself, go back 100 years and bring someone here, it's fucking burning man.
Starting point is 00:48:51 Like this would blow their minds. I mean, and also, but it is possible in a way to bring that permanent utopia in within. I mean, the guy sitting behind you, Ram Dass, he's just some guy who's a regular square at Harvard and takes acid and then becomes this spiritual leader. Did he stay in the acid realm? Of course not, but he was shift and you too, right Duncan and me too. Like the first time I did acid, I emerged from that experience even though I didn't do it in the way that I wish I had. I used to just drop acid and sit in a bart parking lot and stare at cars.
Starting point is 00:49:29 I never listened to a psychedelic song or looked at a tree. Me too! That was me! Go to the mall, sit on a bench and watch people walk through the mall on acid. Look at the tiles, the way they would breathe. Man, that was me. Yeah, the whole like, adding something else to that. I never got into that.
Starting point is 00:49:51 Going to like a laser light show or something. I wish I had. And that's the thing that tempts me now as an adult is like, I would love to have a psychedelic experience that was meaningful and intentional. And I was sitting in a room with a guide or, you know, it somehow was doing more than just like tagging on the walls of Oakland in the 90s.
Starting point is 00:50:09 But like, I emerged from those first trips, going, oh, wow, I'm different. I emerged from that first rave, going, oh, I'm a different person. And Burning Man does that. It shifts you a little bit. And I think like that that utopia, yes, cannot be applied systemically, yes, cannot be applied
Starting point is 00:50:26 systemically, but it can be applied individually. And that is actually, hopefully, what psychedelics and spiritual experiences and these universes will do for us is make us emerge from them and go, oh, I'm changed. It's what Jesus did in the desert. He walked back from the desert and was like, I'm a different man now Yeah, and you know that I Love that story so much the you Ramdas or Albert when he goes to India
Starting point is 00:50:57 his goal His goal was not to sober up He was frustrated because he kept coming down. And I think that really says a lot about, you know, because you like hour 11 into an LSD trip, I'm done. Where is this annex? Give me Benzos. This is outrageous. Like I need to sleep. But in those days people like him, they did see some kind of new tropic universal new tropic. This is this is going to shift the consciousness of humanity. But the problem is, no matter what, you're back in your old fucking life. It doesn't matter. You saw
Starting point is 00:51:38 how your DNA connects to the entire universe. You became a black hole. You you held your mother as a baby. You're still back in your fucking hippie apartment. The dishes have roaches on them. This is like one of the term that emerged from there pre, his pre India, and that sort of split off between him and Leary is the question, who does the dishes? Who does the dishes here
Starting point is 00:52:06 in the psychedelic world? You know, and it's an important question this day, man. But I, you know, I think that you will, you know, I remember reading Ram Dass saying something on the lines of like, how you know, through meditation, he's gotten infinitely more high than from a psychedelic and I said, when I read that the first time, I'm like, no fucking way. That is not possible. Like, what are you talking about? But I think there's something there. I think that the commonality in what we're talking about here is transience. All of these phases in your life, transient, they didn't last. You're still a
Starting point is 00:52:52 burner. You still have a DJ equipment over there that I'm really hoping you actually take out into the world and you carry little bits and pieces of it with you. But all those were phases. All of those things have changed shifted over time. Transients and this to me is like the default. If you want to look at like the thread to pull, if you want to really unravel default reality in a benevolent way, it would be like help people recognize the transient nature of default reality in life itself That to me is like you know why someone someone on their deathbed. I don't don't doubt this happens
Starting point is 00:53:36 But if I had to gamble on it better I imagine people on their deathbed are not sending shitty messages to People about their book. Yeah, yeah. I know they're always doing that. I wish I'd trolled one more man. Yeah, he'd die, right? Is there time?
Starting point is 00:53:55 Oh, right? Go on 4chan right now. I don't think I need to post about that. But the, so to me that, what maybe makes Burning Man so magical is everyone there knows this is going to end and it's going to end in a few days. But you know what's not temporary is the traveler, is the you. It's like these worlds that I occupied were incarnations and they were temporary. Some of them I left behind altogether. I haven't been to a rave in a long time.
Starting point is 00:54:28 But the shift that I experienced, that's permanent. Me sitting in the cockpit, emerging different from when I entered the world until when I ended it. And that's what I mean when I say I'm the through line. It's like all of these universes have shifted me in a way that is not temporary. Utopia is not permanent and ecstatic experiences can't be permanent and eventually they would become awful. I feel like, as you said,
Starting point is 00:54:52 hour 11 of the acid trip, year 11 of the spiritual ecstasy might get a little old, but like year 44 of having lived in all of these worlds and been adjusted in a permanent way by all of these experiences I had, that's an experience that feels permanent in a really healthy and additive way. And I'm like so grateful to have had this time
Starting point is 00:55:16 in all of these worlds because they've all had this permanent effect on me. Like it's not utopia, but I'm grateful to be the person I am on the other end of these worlds And I can't I shudder to think about what I would be like had I never experienced any of them yet me too I mean and also thank God you came out of this with your fucking intelligence, man I'm sorry. I'm gonna toot your horn for a second. You are so fucking smart man and like the
Starting point is 00:55:43 Your ability to just sort of flow with this like incredible um god what is it tana smithkin just says he was kind of like you in a different like you know he because he was so steeped in the psychedelic world that was like but he had that ability to just like uh oh yeah this is how we describe DMT I believe a Niagara's of a piffiness beauty who the fuck says that you're like that stuff like flows out of you that's so Amazing man, and it's so you're I I I don't want to be one of these like I love psychedelics I will for the rest of my life, but I'm sorry. I do think that if you are like using the mirror
Starting point is 00:56:26 responsibly over time, it's gonna sort of melt down the part of your brain that's able to do that unless you're like Terrence McKenna unless you're one of the few people who, anyway, there's another point I wanted to make before. Before you make that point, Duncan, the feeling is very mutual. You are also a hyper sharp and clear communicator in a way about topics that are opaque.
Starting point is 00:56:50 And I think that is your great gift is you bring this sort of clarity to these topics that are difficult to wrap your brain around in a way that is so understandable. So I admire you as well. And you, my friend. Well, I did start really paying attention to the word of the day that I signed up for years ago after our conversation, because I'm like, man, you got to get some new fucking Well, I did start really paying attention to the word of the day that I signed up for years ago after our conversation because I'm like, man, you gotta get some new fucking words in your arsenal.
Starting point is 00:57:10 But this is sort of where I'm at right now in my thinking regarding the sort of changing nature of a person's life. And in this conversation, the realization that you're sort of moving through these phases, I don't think there is anything really permanent. I think that the next thing that will happen for you is that you'll realize that the identity itself, the thing itself is actually as transient, temporary, and some in a cosplay as much as all the other things.
Starting point is 00:57:51 The thing that we think is sticking around, what is that thing really? Oh, that's fascinating. You're saying, as I say, the traveler is permanent. If you go far enough, you're gonna be sitting in the passenger seat looking at the traveler you thought was you and going, oh, even that's temporary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. The traveler, like, it's like the traveler starts putting on all these costumes, takes them off, and then at some point the traveler starts taking the traveler costume off and there's nothing underneath and that that that to me is very exciting and have you ever heard the the song The Highwayman?
Starting point is 00:58:38 Are you fucking kidding? I love it! I was a highwayman. I love it. It's one of my favorite songs. That's what you got me thinking about here. It's like you start as a criminal, and then you become a guy that builds dams, and then you become a sailor. And then all of a sudden you're in a spaceship, and now you're a drop of rain or a blade of grass. But you're just like, whatever is permanent
Starting point is 00:58:59 is almost unknowable. And you think every time you iterate, you're like, this. This is it. This is the one. It's like Siddhartha. You know, you're like this, this is the one. This is it. It's like Siddhartha. You know, you think Siddhartha is a story about the guy finally finding enlightenment, but actually it's a story about you couldn't have found enlightenment unless you had fucked
Starting point is 00:59:14 the princess and been the beggar and you had to do all of the things to become the guy under the lotus tree. Absolutely. And that, by the way, is one of the wonderful ideas about karma is that, you know, you know, the Hindus and the Buddhists, they get very, like, mathematical regarding karma, and more than what most Westerners think, which is like, you know, cause and effect. It's much deeper than that. They analyze all these different, you know, the karmic seeds. There's like, what's around you right now. That's the, I think
Starting point is 00:59:46 what in the West, most people, not everybody recognizes karma, who you are with your friends, your, your everything around you, everything that your guru, the commander behind you that you mentioned before we started talking, you're what you're you're wearing your, all of that is karma as in you chose all of that and it's there. But then what really fucking sucks is there's still seeds growing in time space that will flower at some point from maybe a year ago, potentially when you were a kid,
Starting point is 01:00:24 potentially past lives and these things appear. And so in the analysis of karma, you can really come to a sense of sort of determinism almost, not necessarily determinism, but sort of like fuck man, there are so many variables going into what got you into drugs, raves, Burning Man, comedy. And even like if you look at it from a metaphysical perspective, being born into a family where people are deaf, that somewhere in there, the personal autonomy that we all think we have gets diluted in the infinite threads connecting the tapestry
Starting point is 01:01:06 of who you are. And so the selfness really isn't there at all. It's just so many variables colliding together, emerging that somewhere in there, it's like, holy shit, where do I have true autonomy, true control, where am I free in this situation? And that, the answer is, well, in the changing nature of things, you can't stay anything,
Starting point is 01:01:31 even if you wanted to, it's freedom. Well, right, that's why I like that analogy of pinball because you hit the ball, but you have no idea what things it's gonna hit, where it's going to go. Inherent in the story of Siddhartha, and definitely I've seen this in AA and in the psychedelic community everywhere else, but inherent in the story of Siddhartha is like, he could have stayed in the palace. The only reason we're reading Siddhartha is he decided to move on.
Starting point is 01:02:03 We are always able to stop. And I've seen this in AA a lot, where a person comes in very sick and diseased, and they work enough of the AA program to get better enough that they say, I'm good. And then all of a sudden, you know, they're 20, 30 years sober, and they're kind of living like a teenager and like womanizing and, you know, living in this wild way and it's not even to say that's bad but there is more and that person could have
Starting point is 01:02:29 kept going. Yes. And I'm guilty of it too. I'm not like some enlightened being like I but I would like to keep striving. They say in AA if you if you ain't growing you're going and they mean if you don't growing, you're going. And they mean if you don't keep growing, you're not gonna make it here. And I think that's- Wow, fuck, God damn it is cool. It is so hardcore. And by the way, another mystical fucking tradition
Starting point is 01:02:56 that is incredibly inclusive, thank God. But also, I don't think people understand that, like it's It is a mystical path. That is a spiritual path that you know, I think so for people They have adopted it for their own lives like you said I think that's kind of maybe one of the sad things about the philosophy is people think I have to be wrecked on dope or something to I have to be wrecked on dope or something to apply the 12 steps to my life. It's like, no, you don't. You are wrecked on dope.
Starting point is 01:03:29 It might not be drugs, but probably you have some recurring pattern in your life that's fucking you up. I mean- Well, and in fact, the AA's, you know, in the book, each part of the book is one part history. And it's a comedic history, and I think they're fun to read.
Starting point is 01:03:45 But the history of AA is really fascinating in that it didn't start off as an alcohol rehabilitation organization. It started as an offshoot of the Protestant Church, but it was this sort of that. It was called the Oxford Group. And it was this back-to-basics Christian organization. And one of their real big backbones of their philosophy
Starting point is 01:04:04 was, you have to help others. To Koon O'Lam, if you will. Yes. And that helping others was not only good for the other that you're helping, but that it was good for your own soul. That in order for you to heal spiritually from whatever you had, you had to go to another person, tell them about the message that you'd found, and try to help other people.
Starting point is 01:04:23 And it happened through a weird accident of history that one of these converts to the Oxford group, and he was just a new Christian, happened to have been an old drunk. Like that was his wound that he was healing from. This is Bill W. This is Bill W's sponsor who didn't ever get and stay sober forever, but was in and out of AA
Starting point is 01:04:44 for the rest of his life, named Eby Thatcher. Eby Thatcher was a drinking buddy of Bill W. And he found the Oxford group, he stayed sober for, I don't know, two or three weeks and he thought, I know what I need to do to stay sober. Myself, I need to call Bill and tell him about what I found. He called Bill and Bill W and he said,
Starting point is 01:05:02 hey, what's up, I'm Christian. You should be Christian too. It'll help you stop drinking. And of course, Bill W was like, uh, go fuck yourself. Like, as I say in the book, Shakespeare couldn't create a character more annoying than guy who's been sober two weeks has found Christ and his calling to tell you you should find him too. Like Bill was out. Bill was out, right? No interest. But then that night, another accident of Providence,
Starting point is 01:05:30 Bill W. had this kind of like revolutionary, he called it a white light spiritual experience, saying what if this is true? And so he said, OK, it's true. And he stayed sober through that white light spiritual experience. There was this weird spiritual inversion principle, which is the only person that can help me
Starting point is 01:05:48 is a person trying to help themselves. And the only way for me to help myself is to try to help someone else. Like, it didn't quite make sense in a logical framework, right? Why would helping another person stay sober allow me to stay sober one more day? Six months goes by.
Starting point is 01:06:04 Bill W. goes to a conference. He's been goes by. Bill W goes to a conference. He's been sober six months. He goes to a conference. It goes badly. And he walks into the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Ohio, and he's walking to his room depressed and fucked up. And he says, he looks, he sees the bar in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. And he goes, Oh, no, like I'm not going to make it to the elevator. Like the bar is there and circumstances have adjusted to such a point that I'm going into that bar. I know I'll go into that bar. I will power alone, will fail me.
Starting point is 01:06:33 And he looked to the left and between the bar and the elevator was a pay phone with a directory of houses of worship in the Akron area. And he remembered, Ebi Thatcher said, to help yourself, you can help someone else. And so he said, I can't make it to the elevator, but I can make it halfway. I can make it to the pay phone
Starting point is 01:06:51 and I can start calling these churches and seeing if there's someone I can help. And that's what he did. He sits down next to a bar, picks up the phone and starts putting nickels in the pay phone and calling churches and saying, hello, I'm an alcoholic and I need another alcoholic. They hang up, they hang up, they hang up. I mean, what would you do if you're in a mom at a mosque and somebody you hear someone call
Starting point is 01:07:12 with like the sound of a sex party happening behind you and you go like, hey, I'm a sex addict. I need it. Can you find me one too? But somebody picked up on the last nickel. Maybe that's apocryphal. On the last nickel, someone picked picked up and he said I'm a drunk and the priest knew about this kind of idea of helping others and he said I'm gonna put you in touch with someone and he put him in touch with Bill with Dr. Bob Dr. Bob Smith and they had a meeting the next day. It was supposed to be 15 minutes. It ended up being hours and somehow that chance encounter got billed a sleep sober that night got bob sober a few months later these two old guys in 1935 stayed sober long enough to find a third person more than a fourth person and then and then a spread from Ohio to New York to uh to the the
Starting point is 01:07:58 Mississippi to California to LA to Oakland to me 35 60 years later at 15 years old walking into the Monday night young people's meeting and saying I need help There happen to be help there waiting for me. It's all a pinball slap man Wow, wow, that is like That's like a you know, that's a moment sober, but once alcoholic time travelers will probably go back to just to watch and make that phone call. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 01:08:34 Like that's like a, you know, in moments like that, when you're doubting yourself, when you're not going to put the nickel in, you have no fucking idea that like so many lives from that moment are gonna be saved from that nickel dropping. Like think of how many, if he hadn't done that, think of how, if he'd run out of nickels,
Starting point is 01:09:00 how many people would just be gutter trunks, dead, fucked in jail, that, fucked, in jail? That's crazy. That's a crazy moment. That's the story of this book. That's the story of this book. It's like, I had no idea that these two guys' meeting would affect my life.
Starting point is 01:09:17 And me stealing a pack of cigarettes at a Lucky's that would allow this other juvenile delinquent to see me smoking and ask for a cigarette and then invite me to the back of the school to smoke blunts with them that would allow this other juvenile delinquent to see me smoking and ask for a cigarette and then invite me to the back of the school to smoke blunts with them. That would then make me go to rehab, which would then make me finally get sober. And then I would eventually find this rave
Starting point is 01:09:34 that would change my life, that would lead me to Burning Man, that would, you know, the spiritual quest that my father put me on would lead me to a semester abroad, which would get canceled, which would make me go to New York for a vacation, which would lead me to call Chelsea Peretti and say what are you up to and her say I do stand up now and me go to a show with her ago oh my god I
Starting point is 01:09:50 never thought about stand up which would then lead me to do stand up myself and create my career and then I meet my wife and then I have my kid and I'm here talking to you like that's everything is a Bill Wilson kind of miracle on small and large scale all the time like if Gandhi got run over as an eight year old, who is there a Pakistan? Is if Martin Luther King, you know, got seduced by Scientology, do we have a civil rights movement?
Starting point is 01:10:15 Like everything is this pin, the spiritual pinball game. Hitler got accepted to fucking art school. That's right. Jesus, all you had to do, surely, surely you could deal with the fucking shitty artists. That's right. Jesus, all you had to do, surely, surely you could deal with the fucking shitty artists for a few years. This is, yeah, I think that that is the, what you just described is karma and that somewhere in there, you realize that it is an incredible miracle that you get to be human, that you're here, that you even exist at all as a human being.
Starting point is 01:10:47 That's the great miracle in that, my God, like everything you just said, it's simultaneously thrilling and a little chilling. Yes, it's chilling. Knowing that who knows what's next for you. Who knows who you're gonna be next. What's gonna happen next for us as a species? My, my God, you know, like this is, but also what you're describing is fusion, I think it's like
Starting point is 01:11:14 what they discovered in this concept of what happens instead of helping myself. I try to help other people doubt myself. That's fusion. That's the in, in, the, and I don't, did you watch Oppenheimer? Yeah. Yes, yeah. It was cool because it was sort of reflecting on our philosophy or it was the splitting of the atom wasn't just happening in science. The versions of that were happening everywhere.
Starting point is 01:11:44 And you know, I don't know if you've been following what they're doing with the fusion reactor right now, but apparently they are closer than they've ever been to creating, you know, fusion, which would create potentially, you know, not soon, free energy for the whole clean free energy for all of us. And I think what you're describing to Kuhn Olam. You got it?
Starting point is 01:12:07 It's fusion. It's like, yes, everyone's so sick of hearing the pundits say, the nation has never been more divided. But it is. And what we were talking about initially, these divisions are being italicized in the way we're treating each other online. It's not connective. Even though we're the technology has the potential to connect all of us in a very positive way.
Starting point is 01:12:35 Somehow it's shattering us even more. And all of these are like the echoes of the splitting of the atom and the destructive power of that. But you know, I think this is my dumb ass hippie still naive, still want Burning Man to go on forever, still want the rave to never end. I wish I didn't come down on MDMA ever. That part of me believes like, dude, like, you're what you're describing, which is just a trajectory of your life, shows, sometimes it doesn't descend into division, chaos, destruction. It somehow evolves itself into something very positive
Starting point is 01:13:15 that helps other people. Like, no doubt your book has and will and your sobriety and your honesty about it. Like, that's what we have to remember. It's also imminently possible that for the planet, somehow things go on a different trajectory. We're right now what planet Earth is in, Moshe, Oakland, Acid,
Starting point is 01:13:40 stealing cars, did you steal cars? I never stole a car. I stole my mom's car. You know, anyway, I'm going on too long. I'm saying, if any one of us can have redemption, then that means it's possible at a planetary level. Right? It is possible.
Starting point is 01:14:00 That's what drives people like us crazy. That's why you're writing back to people when they're talking shit about your book. Because even though it is egoic and messianic, and I'm guilty of it for sure, there's also a part where you're tortured by the imminent utopia that seems to be right around the corner because it happened to you. Well, this gets back to the first thing we were talking about. And this is a point that I feel like I make in the book that I really believe is like, I mean, I'm not a particularly mystical person.
Starting point is 01:14:31 I love conversations like this, but like I do believe that the way that you can, you know, you're a traveler like we talked about, and then eventually you'll become like the observer of the traveler too. There is a way to stop the traveling and it's trauma. It's like there is a way to arrest your journey and it's with undoubt with trauma you get literally arrested. I mean I talk about that make this analogy like when you have a trauma
Starting point is 01:14:58 and you're pinball, you know you got your pinball ball spinning around, you have a trauma, what you generally tend to do is you build a wall over that trauma and you say, what's behind this wall is too sensitive for me to ever examine or touch. So I will send the ball careening away from the wall and most of us can deal with a wall or two or five. But when you start to get bogged down by multiple traumas and you start to be to build these walls that block off the path of your sort of, I don't know,
Starting point is 01:15:31 quote unquote destiny, like then your journey through life becomes not about moving forward, but about avoiding trauma. Wow. And eventually, you become this kind of unwitting participant in a trauma avoidance. And so that's what AA and RAVES and this whole journey of my life has been about for me, especially early on, was about not avoiding the wall, but finding the tools to knock the motherfucker down so that I can travel more freely. And that's part of why I write these books, and that's what I did in the 12 Steps. And that to me, it's what the people with at maps do with PTSD adult soldiers, you know, yes, they, they give them MDMA, not so you can be high and
Starting point is 01:16:13 being high will heal the trauma. It's so that you can approach the wall and go, Oh, this actually isn't as high as I thought it's not as scary as I thought, I can leap over this wall, face the thing, and then realize there realize there's not a wall there any longer at all That to me is the only way to arrest your sort of I guess karmic journey is is to just keep worshiping your trauma and avoiding looking at what happened You are a brilliant human. Thank you so much for giving me Over an hour. I hope I didn't keep you too long.
Starting point is 01:16:45 No, I loved it, Duncan. I love talking to you. I have a treat for you. What? Before we go, I have a treat for you. I don't know if you know this. What do you got? But do you know that the Hasidic Jews
Starting point is 01:16:54 also believe in reincarnation? No, I didn't. They're called Gilgul's. That's a good word, isn't it? Gilgul? Gilgul. It means, I think literally rolled soul, R-O-L-L-E-D like trailers, rolled soul, where the soul rolls from one incarnation
Starting point is 01:17:13 to another. It's not universal like it is in Hinduism. It's more like a soul has a mission, a specific mission and it will roll from person to person in order to fulfill its mission. I thought you'd like that. You know what that's called in Vajranaya Buddhism? They call them tulkus. Same exact idea. When I was in India, I met an anthropologist who was studying the phenomena and he said he rode in a car with a 14 year old and he said it was a 14 year old body
Starting point is 01:17:45 but I was with a 60, it was an adult. That was not a kid. It was an adult and I believed that. I think that that does happen and probably to all of us rolled souls. It also sounds like something you eat now. I love three rolled souls please. I love this takariya.
Starting point is 01:18:10 Subculture vulture, a memoir in six scenes. This book is available everywhere, everybody. As you can see, it's an incredible book. And I don't think we emphasized enough the historical stuff that you bring up in it, which is in somehow you manage to do it organically in this like flowing way that's still like hyper informative. So I that is one of the real treats of reading this book is like simultaneously you're like getting all of these downloads that at least
Starting point is 01:18:46 for me I had no idea like your description of like the race and just now the inception of AA like whoa really cool. As KRS-1 calls it, edutainment. Edutainment! I like it so when when it works, it works. Also, the endless honeymoon podcast, a really funny podcast that Moja does with Natasha Ligiero. And you got any dates coming up? Yeah, I do.
Starting point is 01:19:13 I'll be in, when does this come out? This is this week. So come out this week. Oh, cool. So I'm going to be in Tacoma, Washington, the seventh and eighth of, oh sorry, the first and second, I'll be at Tacoma, Washington, March 14th through 16th, I'll be in Madison, and then as a part of the Netflix as a joke festival on May 12th,
Starting point is 01:19:35 I'll be at the Troubadour in LA. I'll get my book, watch my podcast, and I'll see you at Burning Man hopefully this year, Duncan. I'll go. I'm coming! You want to come? Yes, sir! I will see you a Burning Man, hopefully this year Duncan. I'm coming! You want to come? Yes, sir! I will see you at Burning Man.
Starting point is 01:19:47 I will be there for sure. I worked it out already. Trying to recruit a bunch of comedians. No one will go. They're all there. They'll be like, yeah, I'm going and then they don't respond to my text. But I will be there. Let's make a commitment, Duncan, this year to hang out.
Starting point is 01:20:01 Burning Man is such an easy place to not do that with friends that you've had for years, but this year you and I, we're gonna have an experience. For sure. Thank you, Moshe. Thank you for having me. You're the best man. You too. You know, we have a saying in our family, use sports, don't let sports use you. Hi, it's Jeff Merrick from 32 Thoughts to Podcast. Are you a sports parent? Rep sports, travel sports, whatever you call it. If you're like me, you know that one of the great joys of having your kid or kids play sports is travel. Our families use sports to see different parts of the world, meet new people, and stay in a
Starting point is 01:20:38 number of different places. Recently, we've started usingB. The kids love it because it feels like a sleepover at a new friend's house. While my wife and I enjoy more space, a proper bed, and mostly a washing machine. That really comes in handy for baseball trips. Trust me. In fact, it was on a baseball trip last summer when my wife sent me a text after the first night saying, do you think we could do this? Look, if you've ever stayed at an Airbnb, you've probably wondered the same thing.
Starting point is 01:21:10 Could our place be an Airbnb? And now that our kids have also discovered the joys of skiing, in addition to travel hockey and travel baseball, we're on the move even more. Well, our house just sits there. Why not make a little extra money to cover some costs, right? We have friends who travel south every winter and they Airbnb their place. Why not?
Starting point is 01:21:32 Look, if you want to make a little extra cash and who doesn't need that these days, maybe your home could be the way to make it happen. Find out how at Airbnb.com. That was Moshe Kassur, everybody. Definitely check out his book, Subculture Vulture. A tremendous thank you to all our sponsors. And thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Bye!

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