Duncan Trussell Family Hour - EMIL AMOS IN "GARDEN OF NIPPLES"
Episode Date: May 19, 2016The great Emil Amos (Holy Sons) returns to the DTFH and the DTFH returns from a 2 week Hiatus.  We talk about the verdant opulence inherent in all things and NIPPLES!!! It's NIPPLE TIME!  THIS EPIS...ODE BROUGHT TO YOU BY CASPER.COM  go to casper.com/family hour and use offer code family hour to get $50 off of your brand new mattress!! EMIL ON TWITTER Emil's new ALBUM "The Fall Of Man" Decline of the west volume 1 & 2
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Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now.
You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music.
Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now.
New album and tour date coming this summer.
This episode of the Duggar Trussell Family Hour podcast
is brought to you by Casper.com.
Go to Casper.com forward slash family hour
and use offer code Family Hour to get $50 off
of that beautiful brand new mattress.
Rising from the ashes like some dusty parakeet
emerging from a doomed Chewray and coal mine.
The Duggar Trussell Family Hour has returned.
It's time to rip your gaze from the crucified babies
that dot the mountains of your subjective hell-round
reality tunnel and gaze upon the gently breathing breasts
of Mother Earth.
Bring your cracked, dry lips down upon Earth,
pulsating, throbbing, fertile nipples
and suckle at that eternal nectar
which gives birth to mountains.
Suckle as I watch.
Suckle as I watch.
Hello, sweet friends.
We're back.
Thank you guys for being so patient with me.
I've been away for a month.
As many of you know, I was on a month-long tour
and then right after that, I went to a...
I've got a lot of snot in my nose right now.
Very unprofessional.
Oh, God.
Jesus Christ.
What's happening?
Oh!
Excuse me, pals.
I think I caught something over there
at that meditation retreat.
But we're back and I am very happy about this episode,
which I am about to upload.
So I'm not gonna spend any time
in an opening rant or anything like that.
I love you guys and we're back.
I'm back in town for the entire summer now.
So podcasts will return to their semi-regular schedule
and thank you for hanging in there.
We're gonna jump right into this podcast
with my pal, Emil, but first, some very quick business.
Today's episode of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast
is brought to you by the mighty sleep lords
over at casper.com.
Go to casper.com forward slash family hour
and use offer code family hour to receive $50 off
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Who's gonna sleep on a twin?
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Comparing that to industry averages,
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Okay, so that's what I have to say,
but here's the real pitch.
I sleep on a Casper mattress.
The mattress that I lay my fleshy, freshly fattened body
down upon is a Casper mattress.
Last night, I slept on a Casper mattress
and had a terrible dream where someone told me
that my mother's phone number is also the number
of mothers that have died on earth.
So that was a fun dream that I had.
I don't blame it on the Casper mattress in a way.
I think it's a fantastic dream
because it tells you that when it gives you something
to think about, whenever you call your sweet mother,
call your mother, but first order a Casper mattress.
What are you doing to yourself?
P.S., if you wanna go buy a mattress at some mattress store,
oh God, you might as well take a fish hook
and shove it into your juggler vein
and attach it to some backwood son of a bitch's pickup truck
and let him rip your throat out
and go to a mattress store where a hypnotic mattress man
or woman will trick you into paying way too much
for a mattress that you don't need.
Try a Casper first.
If you don't like it, if your sweet, dainty prince
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Go to a mattress store in order a mattress filled
with some kind of chemically softened diamonds
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Oh, great king of the earth.
But if you're one of us and you just want a nice mattress
that isn't gonna send you into the poor house,
and let me tell you, I just visited a poor house recently
because I left my phone there
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all of them with different stories
of getting hoodwinked by a mattress crook.
Babies, you don't wanna do that.
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Are you seriously going to let your ancestors
in the afterlife gaze upon you
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Let's get a new mattress today.
Thank you, Casper, for sponsoring this podcast.
We're also brought to you by amazon.com.
If you go into the comments section
of any of these episodes,
you will notice a beautifully designed icon,
a weird thing with breasts that's our Amazon portal.
You click on that Amazon portal
and you will get sucked in to amazon.com
and anything that you purchase there,
and they sell everything, anything you purchase,
they give us a very small percentage of
and it costs you nothing.
It's a wonderful way to support this podcast
while preventing yourself from going out into the world,
the world, I don't mean the world,
the world is a wonderful place,
where there's forests and the little rabbits
that dance and the dandelion groves
and the mystical parts of whatever town you happen to live in.
These are wonderful rabbits and I highly recommend
spending your time climbing or driving
or doing whatever it takes to get there
because if the rabbits like you,
then they will give you a special wish granting ruby
that will allow you to summon an alien
that will take you to a planet
where he will remove your spine and replace it
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Don't spend your time driving to some noxious target
where you're more than likely going to get berated
by some kind of lunatic fundamentalist Christian
who is completely obsessed with genitals
and cannot deal with the fact
that the times they are a-changing.
Do you really want to deal with the howlings
of some genital obsessed apocalyptic psychotic pseudo Christian
when you're trying to buy toilet paper?
Hell no.
Get it at amazon.com.
They have every kind of paper that you desire,
not just toilet paper, they've got printer paper,
they've got wrapping paper.
You name it, it's there, but you don't need to risk.
This is just the beginning of it, friends.
It's not gonna be too much longer
before one of these lunatic psychotic pseudo Christians
drags one of these target clerks
and in the middle of the store
composes some kind of terrible pyre
made of old board games and playstations
and ignites the damn thing.
I would highly recommend avoiding all stores in general.
There's really no reason to do that.
Spend your free time basking in the glorious photons
that blast from the beautiful sun above our wonderful planet.
Don't spend it basking in the sneeze viruses
ejected from the pestulent bodies of quivering babies
recently infected with unknown viruses
when they traveled to Key West.
Go to amazon.com, go through our portal
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while fulfilling that innate need
for us to order things covered in plastic
and made of plastic.
It really is just what you need as a human being.
Amazon.com, go through the portal.
I love you.
Thank you for putting up with this.
Oh shit, also you've got a shop
located at DuncanTrussell.com
and that shop is about to have brand new shirts,
very limited edition shirts from the tour.
We're only gonna sell, I think,
I don't know how many we're gonna sell,
but it's a limited edition run.
So the t-shirt company that's making those
says it's gonna be the middle of the month,
which were three days past it.
So go to the store, the shirts are gonna be there.
These are the You Are God tour t-shirts.
So those are gonna be at the shop.
I hope you'll visit it.
And thank you to all of you who continue to donate.
Some of you have signed up for a monthly PayPal subscription
plan and that is an amazing gift
that you give the podcast.
And thank you guys for that.
I thank you just for listening.
I thank you just for tuning in to this thing.
And I thank you, all of those who came to the shows.
Okay, there we go.
That's the intro.
I love you all.
And now please, everyone, open up those glorious
third eye nodules that contain within them
some quantum flake of gold and allow the astral ejecta,
which explodes from the souls of all sacred men and women
to go zinging through whatever metaphysical circuitry
makes up the universe that we currently exist in
and to fill the heart of my best friend in the world,
Emil Amos.
Emil Amos has been on the show several times before
and we inevitably have my favorite conversations
of all time.
So now, and I have to apologize,
I'm using a different computer
so I don't have the theme song right now.
So he's gonna come up cold.
Everybody, please welcome to the Dunkin' Trussell
Family Hour podcast, the wonderful, the beautiful,
the amazing, all links to find them
will be in the comment section of this episode.
Emil Amos.
Dear God, Emil, how wonderful this is to have you
as my first guest after the two and a half week hiatus.
I've been on a break for two and a half weeks.
I think it's the longest I've ever gone
without releasing a podcast.
Well, you were on tour before that too, right?
I managed to get some out while I was on tour,
but then I got really tired
and just passed out for two weeks, but it's cool.
I'm just great.
I'm glad to be back.
It's great to see you.
I can't believe we're doing this.
I don't even think people know what we're doing.
Well, you were on tour.
You went to Maui afterwards, right?
Yes.
And now, literally a day later, I flew in
and we're gonna generate a lot of content.
We're content generating.
Emil and I sat down with a couple of Hollywood types.
They analyzed our brands
and we basically made the decision
that we're gonna merge our brands temporarily
and try to create content based
on what we think our audience will like the most.
We're gonna start with a sandal, designing a sandal.
Yeah.
And it's the one we're working on right now, guys,
is one of the most beautiful beach sandals I've ever seen.
It's not like normal sandals
where they get celebrity lines
and the guy has nothing to do with how it's designed.
Now, this is hands-on.
Yeah.
We had a lot of ideas to bring to the table.
We're using bio-sustainable materials.
We're actually using,
I live right next to JPL and Jet Propulsion Laboratories
and they do a lot of animal experimentation over there.
Cool.
They'll do a lot of high-altitude mice experiments.
So they put mice into high-altitude weather balloons.
They send them up into the stratosphere.
And so right around my house,
it's very common for right around the mid-afternoon,
it starts raining mice carcasses.
And I've been gathering them up,
saving them in the freezer
and we're using mice skin
to create the straps of these sandals.
Do you wear sandals?
I don't like them.
Flip flops.
Does that count?
It counts.
Yeah, it counts.
If I'm at the beach, I'm gonna wear my flops.
There's a war on flops.
There's a big war on flops.
I remember when I first came to LA,
comedian Eleanor Kerrigan
saw that I was wearing flip flops
and she's like, what are you doing?
She was so disgusted.
I don't blame her.
I'm nasty feet.
Still do.
Nothing changed.
Probably worse than when she gazed upon them.
But yeah, this fucking flip flop war is sad.
Sandals are great.
You just pop them on whenever you want.
You take them off.
You don't have to go through the whole sock process.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I don't really want to take a side.
And insult the, you know.
Take a side.
Fleets of sandal supporters.
Don't be a fence rider.
I don't understand why people
have such strong opinions about things like that.
Well, because either you love feet or you hate them.
Feet haters.
Some people just don't want to fucking deal
with disgusting, I don't, but man,
my feet are not aging well.
They're not.
They're like curling in.
I had a list of things to talk about.
And this was, I was just,
I didn't mean to start off on this direction.
It's like the aging process has started in my feet.
And I think it's, I'm not that I'm not aging other places,
but it seems like it's going to move up
as the years progress.
My calves are going to become eroded.
It's going to get up into my legs.
My cock's going to shrivel in even more.
And then it's just, that's aging, man.
You looked at, you just see this spacesuit start popping leaks.
Usually it's me that says all the negative stuff.
I don't think that's a negative.
That's a problem, man.
It ain't negative.
You know, like the real problem is,
cause you know, we have, you talk about the conspiracy,
the great conspiracy about like shit
you can't talk about politically.
You don't want to talk about the JFK assassination.
You want to talk about September 11th.
You don't want to point out these things that we know are fishy,
but really the real conspiracy is that
whenever you talk about aging or dying,
people are like, God damn man,
do you have to be so fucking heavy?
Because their idea of it is that it's unnatural
and they look at it as an abomination.
I mean, Christ, God forbid you should be a 40 year old woman
who wants to do a music video.
Look at those YouTube comments.
She might as well.
There was like, I was watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
and one of these like housewives did a music video
and I thought it was funny.
So I went on YouTube to try to catch the whole thing
cause the whole music video was her going like,
fuck you, you don't like it, you can fuck you.
And I put the middle finger up, fuck you,
kind of do what I want.
And I said, fuck you, I put the middle finger up.
It's just this weird like,
she's just telling everybody to fuck up.
It's really silly, you know?
Cause she feels oppressed, I guess.
Like someone's trying to inhibit her and she's fighting back.
But the comments, she might as well have been tap dancing
on freshly born kittens with stiletto heels.
The comments are just like, you putrid mass.
Look at you, you fucking ancient old hag.
And it's like, just cause she's old.
And then like someone, you know, in the comments section
is like, you know, anyone posting about her being old
that you are also will get old.
FYI.
That's funny.
This is gonna seem like a bit of a digression,
but when I was growing up and I was entering the concept
of like, I'm gonna make records.
That's what I'm gonna do with my life.
I would record myself and give you a tape and you'd go,
this is cool, you know, whatever.
But eventually I started to notice certain friends
or certain people being like saying it was kind of,
you know, it's like bummer music.
You know, it's like negative music.
I'm sure I said that.
But even more than that, like I think,
I thought it was kind of like a form of radical honesty
just to like be yourself.
I mean, I didn't even, when I was young,
I didn't really narrate it.
I didn't really think a lot about it,
but I liked music where someone was being super raw
and there wasn't like a big wall between them and you.
But that shouldn't even really be like
a big distinguishing factor, really.
That's just like, I guess that's a type of music.
I've had people in Columbus, when we did that show,
a girl came up to me next time I was there
and she was like, what kind of music was that?
Which I thought was like a really interesting question
because I was, you know, I'm just,
I have an acoustic guitar.
It's like, this is just the John Lennon thing.
This is just you pick up acoustic guitar
and you just like sing something
that's vaguely confessional.
I thought that was pretty mainstream, you know?
Right, well, that's what I've,
over the course of my little career or whatever,
I find myself
exotically trying to study this,
I guess, mainstream value system
that I'm rubbing up against as I play music
and because I don't intrinsically understand it.
So I'm meeting up with this entity
or this segment of the population.
It's like, your music's really like, it's really,
it's really low energy or like, it's really like,
you know, kind of sad or this or that, you know?
But all these descriptive terms that like,
obviously it doesn't jump out at them and grab them.
And so as an artist, you think like,
well, how can I do that more?
You know, how can I,
how can I speak to you or articulate better?
And then, you know, I mean, you can say something punk,
like why would you ever fucking care?
Or why would you, why would you change anything?
But it's more like you were,
you're thinking of it as a challenge, you know?
But I find it so strange in some way
that I'll never understand what they're talking about.
You know, I'll never know.
Because I don't care and I don't know
and I just want to hear what I want to hear.
And like you, maybe they categorize that as like
a raw form of, you know, organic stuff
or something that's hard to digest.
But I never thought it, I never categorized it.
I just thought that was fucking the Beatles or something.
Well, they differentiate in a really specific way,
which is a very sad thing to do
because you end up cutting a lot of nutrients
out of your diet that way.
This is a thing that keeps coming on my brain
is something Terrence McKenna said
about shamanic ecstasy.
And he said shamanic ecstasy encompasses all feeling tones.
There's, it's not, whenever,
because before I heard him say that,
I always thought of ecstasy as being only related to bliss
or versions of blissfulness.
But what he's saying is actually there's ecstatic sorrow,
ecstatic loneliness, ecstatic grief
that these all emotions can fall into
the exact same category of true actualization of the self
because you're sad is not an indication of a mistake
because you're talking about or singing about
your inevitable extinction or pointlessness
or whatever it may be.
That is just as much a prayer to the universe
as some upbeat fucking like Pharrell Anthem.
I'm so happy.
Oh, so.
But clearly we live in a time
or maybe it's always been like this
where that's almost an occult belief, right?
Like that's such an obscure school of thought
to think that it's all completely off limits
and you should just be yourself.
It's like this radical belief.
Yeah, sub-ec, sub-ec, all one, all one,
all part of the same beautiful thing.
Yeah, that isn't a cult idea.
Sadly, it's not even, you know, it's not,
if you just give yourself the next time you find yourself
in an undesirable state of consciousness,
whatever it may be, if you just give yourself
a couple of seconds of pretending
that what you're experiencing is one of the most incredible
things the universe can produce,
which is the end of 13.7 billion years of evolution
from the Big Bang to now experiencing
whatever it may be experiencing.
It's really beautiful.
Actually, man, when I was talking with Ram Dass
at this Ram Dass retreat,
they'll probably upload it sometime.
The thing he said is,
look upon your predicament as though
you were gazing at a flower.
Oh, look at that.
How beautiful.
Look, there it is.
Look at this incredible life.
That's how you look at yourself.
Look at this life.
Oh, look at the karma.
Look at this poignant, sweet, dramatic predicament
that this being is in, and gaze on it in that way
and then love it instead of looking at it
and being like, why are you depressed today?
Look on it and think, oh, beautiful depression,
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sorrow,
beautiful numbness, beautiful emptiness,
if that is what you happen to be feeling.
And it's really interesting when you start doing that
how really incredible everything begins to seem.
You know, because all the shit you're trying to
pretend to be is just diminishing your experience
of what really is and sucks.
Yeah, isn't that kind of like
what's supposed to happen to you as you get older,
like this mellowing sweetness.
So you're sort of like, you're looking out at the world
and realizing you're gonna leave it sooner or later
and you're looking at a child experiencing something
for the first time, but there's that kind of
that understanding of the fact that it's all fleeting
and it's sad, you're leaving it,
but you're acknowledging all that
and you can see the beauty in its fragility or something.
Yeah, and then add to that if you start
a spiritual practice and you start having contact
with what really might be going on,
which is that it may be that this whole time
that we thought we were in some kind of safe
and comfortable biodome called our human body,
warming our hands on the fires of experience,
surrounded by a howling void of doom and non-existence,
it may be the opposite.
It may very well be that this thing
that we thought was the most important thing
is in fact a terrible jail cell,
a form of solitary confinement turned with the ace
down really low and we're freezing our fucking asses off
in this thing we call human life,
like a little bubble in an ocean of love
and that this whole time we've been battering back
the embrace of the universe in a desperate attempt
to individualize ourselves and then so then instead
of it becoming a sweet sorrow,
you get to the really blasphemous thing
where you start saying, you know,
death might be kind of amazing.
Oh, God forbid you should start saying that.
God forbid you should start talking about like,
ah, this is incredible, I get to die.
That's next on the menu.
I got to have orgasms.
I got to have great food.
I got to enjoy the experience of a career and a job
and falling in love and up next, the bubble pops
and I become part of the, what in this book I'm reading
by Lama Suryadas called Awakening the Buddha Within.
It's called, oh God, it's the base luminescence
is how it's described in Buddhism
as a kind of clear light that is all things.
The base is a clear light and that's what you transform
back into a kind of formless orgasmic field
that is somehow still aware of itself.
The great relief, the final fucking orgasm,
this whole life was just a hand job
and death is the money shot as you blast your soul
all over the face of eternity, as the Buddha said.
Yeah, I mean, it would be nice to have a release from,
there's a certain part of your consciousness
that accepts that life, that you are an idiot.
There's a feeling, there's a deathbed realization
that you would look back on your life and be like,
oh my God, I ran over here and then I went over there
and I worked so hard to sort of run up this mountain
and build this totem pole to my own ego
and I was such a fucking fool.
And I wasted the time I had on earth.
But then in that realization in your hospital bed too,
you're like, but I'm not, I can't transcend that idiocy.
I'm still that idiot.
I would do it all again, I'd fuck it all up again.
So death would be a kind of a welcome release
of that idiocy.
Well yeah, two things in what you're saying there.
One of them is based on the concept of limitation.
So in one version, it's like, God,
this whole precious life, I blew it.
And then the other thing is that it's like,
when a child brings you a drawing,
you don't look at the drawing and say to the child,
you fucking idiot.
Did you?
But you want to.
Usually you're like, it's sweet.
That's all.
The baby drew a picture.
And usually the picture, what you call this false idol,
what did you call it to your ego?
Like a erroneous totem pole or something.
Yeah, usually the little drawing that the kid made
is an erroneous expression of mommy, daddy, I love you.
And you look at it and you think, oh, that's sweet, man.
That's sweet.
So in the same way, if you're trapped in your identity
in any phase of your life, that's where you will be like,
you fucking moron.
Did you picture the most cruel, wise,
like father figure just like patting the kid on the back
and sending him off to play and being like,
you'll never learn anything, you idiot.
Good luck in the world.
But how sweet is that?
That is so sweet.
I mean, the problem is, well, the problem
is it's probably all very sweet.
And everything you're dreading, you should be looking forward to.
And when, or really not looking forward,
I mean, you should just be in the moment and know.
Because really, it's like, OK, when a person has no money
and they get money, they get an artificial enlightenment.
So you have no money and you get money.
It's very similar to getting artificial milk versus breast
milk.
So you get this pseudo feeling of, OK, now I'm all right.
I can relax now.
You might have that for a few seconds.
Then you got to get more money because it always runs off.
So in the same way, there's wisdom
that you can start cultivating where you realize
that you always have enough, no matter what.
And that this is not a thing that is trapped in your body.
And that crazy idea is the song of the mystic.
And when you hear it, it sounds like bullshit
until you start experiencing it.
And then all of a sudden, all of these weird tendencies
to denigrate yourself or to look at what you're doing
is this foolish series of dumb things, which it is.
It is from one level.
When you see kids playing make believe,
if you look at it from one perspective,
it's like, you fucking idiots, you're not cops.
You're not bandits.
You're not Indians.
Oh, you really think you're an astronaut?
You're not.
You're wearing a fucking bed sheet moron.
Wake up.
On one level, it's like that.
But on another level, it's like you're just playing around.
And this is why it's so funny to me, man.
I love the more I start thinking in this line,
you always get these amazingly upset essays by people debating
over whether God is good.
And it's always like, how could a God that loved us
do so many terrible, terrible things to us?
How could a God that loved allow these awful things
to happen in the world?
And that is from the perspective of a very limited, temporal
understanding of what it is to be a human being
and the conceptualization that your identity is
based on having a body.
But the moment all of that kind of evaporates
and you realize this just seems to be a bit of spiritual,
amphibious acrobatics as we explode from some unknown realm
into this one, then it no longer seems like you're an asshole
because you tried to do a couple of flips
before you fell back into the sea.
It's just like, yeah, that makes sense.
I see why you did that.
And that's when you start treating yourself in that way.
Oh, fuck.
Everything sweetens up, man.
It's like everything.
And people who formerly seemed like absolute assholes
just start seeming like they're caught in a dumb game
of make-believe.
And I like that POV.
And you know what?
If it's wrong, who cares?
You texted me from Maui and you sent a picture of you
kind of lying in the sand or something.
And you said, being down here is really surreal.
It's so calm and it magnifies how crazy I really am.
Oh, yeah.
What is that kind of an extension of a little bit
of what we're talking about, that the howling specter of all
the troubles of the world are really just
like inside our psychology and the world itself.
Maui is this picture of the benevolent graceful force
of our environment, but the problems are within us.
Yes, for sure.
Because you're surrounded by beauty.
We spend a few days in the fucking four seasons.
And that place is just like you really
are being treated like some kind of sultan at that place.
They've got it all fine-tuned, man.
And so there's a pool at the Four Seasons in Maui called
the Serenity Pool.
And it's funny that they call it that.
So I've been eating marijuana.
And I think when I texted you, I was experiencing that terrible
ramp up when you realize that you have ingested way more
than you thought you have.
So the roller coaster hill is a lot higher
that you're going up than you expected to go up.
And what I was experiencing was the end result of months
and months and months of freaking out over this tour
I had to do in that momentum still pushing me.
So my poor fucking brain having nothing to do
was now coming up with ridiculous things for me to do.
Like, oh, you better get some sunscreen.
Should we go get another margarita?
I don't know.
Shit, maybe I should get up and get in the hot tub.
I hope I'm making the most of this.
Am I making the most of this?
I think I am.
I've got to relax.
You're not making the most of it.
You're not relaxed at all.
Look at you.
Look at you.
You're a wild spring.
You'll never relax again.
You think you're going to relax?
You're not going to fucking relax.
If you can relax here, how are you ever going to fucking relax?
You're going to be freaked out for the rest of your life.
So that's all the mind.
That's getting caught up in the mind.
And the moment you drop out of that down into the heart,
everything's like, ah, this is fucking great.
But then you pop back into the mind.
So yeah, that was what I was experiencing
is I was like making a kind of weird, erratic, frenetic series
of rounds in the serenity pool from the hot tub
to pool to fucking thing and fucking get the fucking thing.
And oh, should we put the umbrella up?
I think we're getting burnt.
Am I getting burnt?
Doesn't seem like it.
That's when I'm like, oh, this is insanity.
You're fucking insane.
But it's always going to be there, man.
So does that mean that, to some extent,
like life is you sit somewhere on the spectrum
and you slide back and forth in life
where you're distracting yourself with enough stuff
that you are not focusing on the confusion of all
these kind of schizophrenic voices.
And so you feel really productive or you
drop out of that productivity and that distraction
and you start to be haunted by the sort of void behind it all.
Yeah, but it's a yeah, but you get a yeah, but.
So it's like what'll happen is you'll float into the,
really the clear light is a pretty great way to describe it.
There's a field of love.
It sounds so crazy, but there is.
And it's endless.
And when you tune into it, everything's fine,
no matter what's going on.
And as long as you stay tuned into it, things are incredible.
Like you're like, my god, this is the best day of my life.
Nothing really needs to be going on.
It could be anywhere.
It could happen in traffic.
It could happen in Hawaii.
It could happen right after you have a great meal.
It can happen when you're hungry.
You tune into this thing and it's like, oh, shit.
It's the undiscovered country.
Shambhala, the fountain of youth, the city of gold,
the Ark of the Covenant, the Grail Cup, the thing
they all talk about.
And you find it and you're there and you're like, oh, this is it.
This is the most revolutionary state of consciousness.
It transcends all economies.
It transcends all power structures, all governments.
Nothing can control it.
It can't be moderated, can't be metered out,
can't be bought, can't be sold.
You experience it and then, yeah, but my fucking back hurts.
Yeah, but, yeah, but remember what that guy fucking did to me?
Yeah, but I'm dying.
Yeah, but I'm getting old.
Yeah, but I'm balding.
Yeah, but I'm whatever it may be.
Whatever your particular little anchor that's holding you
to suffering is, comes in.
So that pulls you out of it.
You get caught up in a mind spiral.
You stay in the mind spiral for as long as you
happen to get floated through the goddamn thing
and then you'll find yourself right back at that place again.
Oh, shit, there's that place again.
Wait a minute.
Oh, shit.
And then, so it's like these places
you could almost look at as punctuation marks
in the novel of your life.
They're like punctuation marks in paragraphs of sorrow
that you're writing about your life story
and every once in a while you'll end in.
Now a lot of people don't even know they're doing it.
They'll just be all of a sudden like, what a day.
This is great.
And they don't even know they're enlightened in that moment.
And then they're like, ah, fuck.
Are you fucking shitting me?
And then they're gone again.
It's so cool though.
And I think the practice you could say
is to extend those, to one, become aware of when you're there.
And two, become aware when you're not there.
And then start extending that being there longer
than the not being there.
And that's the game, I guess.
Yeah, I take rollin' the clock back.
I remember I've been thinking about since I got here
and I picked up this little interview you did
and somebody's asking you about the world being
a perfect place or something like that,
which takes me right back to 1997 and 98,
all the conversations we were having right then.
And without giving too much history behind it,
I remember lying on the top of a car at night out
on the farm at the college with three different guys
that you knew.
And they were kind of just talking
about their various frustrations
in a very normal way, nothing heavy or anything.
And I remember just kind of interrupting one of them
looking at the sky.
And this was in my religious period
where I was on fire and preaching this gospel.
And I just said something like, would there
be anything that stops you from thinking the world is
a perfect place?
Like, look at it, it's perfect, right?
It was kind of, it sounded a little bit cocky.
It came off a little bit cocky.
But I was trying to be very matter of fact and kind of
playing about it just to see what their reaction would be.
And they essentially all three said,
like, what if we kicked your ass right now?
Hilarious.
They were pretty mad.
They were kind of like, like.
You'll piss people off if you dare
talk about the innate beauty of the universe.
That wasn't my job for a year there.
I was pissing the campus off.
You pissed me off too, man.
I didn't know it back then.
I was like, fuck you.
This world's shit.
Well, that was that's it's funny to me now to like pull
into LA and and come to your house.
And and once again, I feel like this gospel trades back
and forth between us, you know, it's like,
but the central point way more powerful than really anything
the hard Christians were saying or any of the any
of the Buddhist stuff we were playing with seems to be
the central point seems to be the idea
that the world is perfect.
That seems to transcend all these other, you know,
somebody rattling on about some scripture or something.
So does that seem kind of like in a way?
I find it so interesting that somebody was asking you
maybe a little bit about that or maybe even misread it.
But in this interview, but does that seem kind of like really?
Like if you could condense the central tenant or message
that you kind of feel compelled to kind of remind people about,
do you think that is the central tenant?
That is the tenant.
I think that is the tenant.
It's all present moment.
It's like you you you're you are you find a place
and the place is not it doesn't have any GPS coordinates
or temporal coordinates.
It's a and that is the present moment.
And then you find it, you find it, you hear about it first.
You hear people saying, I have found a place
and it's the most beautiful, infinitely replenishing,
infinitely, they call it the fountain of youth, I think,
because it's infinitely young and because when you were young,
you weren't experiencing youth.
You are experiencing the present moment.
And so when people look back fondly on their youth,
it's not so much the elasticity of their body
or the health that they were feeling as much,
even though those two do seem to be related
to staying in the moment.
It was more that they were just there and it feels good.
It's romantic.
It's infinite.
It's never endingly exciting.
It's amazing.
Not that it's always exciting.
I get bored as a kid, but it's like,
even the boredom is great.
And this is the ecstasy that McKenna was talking about.
And that's what everybody's longing for.
So this, and it's really a frustrating thing
to hear, a fucking present moment.
You hear it, people talk about it.
It sounds ridiculous, but it's real.
There's a reason people yap about this all the fucking time.
There's a reason that, but yes, central tenant is
in that place, there's a great place.
It's really fucking cool.
What's better than to get lost and then to be found?
And what's better than when you're the thing
that finds itself?
It's like the greatest predicament to get in
and then get out of.
It is sexual in a weird way.
You're building up tension, releasing the tension,
but even sex is, everything's based on it, you know?
So it's like, everything great is something
that radiates from it as almost a form of echo or imitation.
So everything great is sort of originating from it.
And the thing itself is hilarious.
Always dying, always being reborn.
Every time it dies, there's a sadness.
Every time it's reborn, there's a joy.
And it's an incredible, never-ending cycle
that's pretty and that's just beautiful.
I mean, this is the guru.
The guru becomes that.
So like some people become that they just,
that's all they are is the voice for that.
And they're not, and that's why people get really frustrated
with gurus because they don't follow any rules.
There's no, actually, I was just listening to,
God, I fucking love Christian radio.
I always have it on in my car.
Sometimes it's absolutely insanely idiotic,
but sometimes it's really smart.
So this was a sermon on the law of God.
And boy, it was fucking boring at first
because it was talking about like Old Testament law
versus New Testament law.
It was Jesus, when Jesus came to the world,
did that negate the previous 10 commandment style,
Jehovah law, then we no longer need to follow it
or did it underline it?
Did it, or is Jesus like the fermentation of the thing?
And so they talked about in medieval times,
there was a wonderful debate or a controversy
called Xlex, not Xlex.
That's what I got, Xlex, which is,
is there, does God have to follow the law, right?
If God is the thing creating the law,
does God then have to follow that same law
or is God lawless?
So that's the philosophical debate.
And so the answer is everything God does is the law.
Everything that this, if you wanna use the word God does
is a perfect expression of truth.
And so that is the present moment.
Everything that happens in the present moment
is a perfect expression of truth.
And that is the law.
The present moment is the only law, that's it.
Whatever's happening right now is the law of the land.
It's the law of the universe.
It contains within it all the laws of quantum physics
discovered and undiscovered.
It contains within it all potential energy forms
or all energy forms discovered and undiscovered.
It contains within it every single thing
is completely like a compacted data set
stored within the present moment.
So anytime you're there, you are a flowering of the truth.
And anytime that you find yourself distracted
by the past or the future, then you sin.
You break the law because you're not there anymore.
And what is the fucking punishment for sin, Emil?
What is the punishment for sin, Emil?
Tell me, tell me, Emil.
Wearing uncomfortable sandals.
Yeah.
The punishment for sin is death.
And so when you're not in the present moment, you're dead.
That's the only time you can really die.
When you're not in the present moment,
what the fuck are you?
You're not anywhere.
You're just dead.
You're not living, you're dead.
When you're not drinking from the fountain, you're dead.
And that's it.
And so it's really beautiful when you realize
all the people yapping about God
were just talking about the present moment.
Yeah, I think, I mean, the darkest corners of our,
our little crises that we've had in our lives
don't seem so bad, so idiotic, or so
regretful, but the thing that really frustrates me the most
is if I really wasted any time struggling with them.
It's like, you know, you're basically saying
and affirming that like the hardest times of our life
weren't bad.
That's right.
You know, so having a crisis, like a religious crisis,
or some sort of nervous breakdown, you know,
where you hide away and can't function,
can't eat or something for months.
You know, you are malfunctioning, basically.
Your body and your mind are malfunctioning.
On a God's eye view, you're not malfunctioning.
It's just part of this hero's journey that, you know,
it's just a crucial part of it, a very important part.
But there are elements of the struggling against it
that appear to waste time.
And that's what frustrates me the most.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, struggling against it.
Yeah.
So there's in Buddhism, there's three poisons.
And I can remember two right now, but attachment, of course,
but the other poison is aversion.
That's a poison.
So that feeling of resistance to what's happening
is poisoning your experience of what's happening.
So you're fighting against, you're just fighting.
You sing about this sometimes.
Some of your songs, man, it's like that great song.
Why did you try to control something
that's pointless to try to control?
While the universe, what is it?
While the universe tries to expand,
it won't do what you want, meet your demands.
That's such a great line, man.
And that sums it up.
That sums it up.
It's like, it's pointless.
Your struggle against what's happening
is as ridiculous as a baby trying to touch the moon.
Like you can't do it, man.
It's not gonna, but you can.
You can go ahead and do, have the tantrum.
We're just talking about a tantrum.
Like when you see the kid with the good parents
who let the kid have the tantrum,
who just let the kid do the thing,
let the kid go down in the sand,
let the kid roll around, let the kid scream,
let the kid convulse, let the kid seize up,
let the kid relax, let the kid sleep,
let the kid wake up and then hold that baby and kiss it.
And it's great.
And that's it.
That's what happens to us.
Those nervous breakdowns you're talking about
are so important and so wonderful in retrospect.
But dude, check this out.
One of the teachers at this retreat
said something that really stuck with me.
They actually sang a song as these Hawaiian women
who sang a song about how
Leo, a writer, is her name.
But she said in the song,
she's like, whatever's happening right now,
you're gonna forget it.
You're mostly just forgetting it.
So you're living in a forgotten dream.
You're living in a forgotten memory right now.
So all the stuff that you think is so important,
you won't remember 99% of it anyway.
So that's the whole beautiful truth
of what's really going down here
is it's like all this importance, play the game.
It's not an invitation to become an apathetic,
disconnected being.
You can play the game.
It's just, you don't have to be in sorrow
the whole time that you're playing the game.
You don't have to.
And what's interesting too, when you're talking about it,
worrying about the times you struggled,
the moment you worry about the times you struggled,
you're struggling still.
Yeah.
I think it is, I mean, to be fair though,
I think it is there's something to be said for learning
and processing and being able to apply
having learned from knowing what is a waste of time.
True that.
You know, I mean that, it's like in record digging,
I've learned it the hard way.
You start out and you're in Prague
and you're like flipping through these records.
You're like, I'm never gonna see these again.
I'm never gonna see them ever again.
And so you spend all this money and you get home
and you immediately experience this weird wave
of humiliation as you're putting them on.
You're like, what did I see in this one?
And the next one, what did I like about this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so you have this strange process of the seduction
and then the let down.
You know, and so as time years go by,
the more you've made these mistakes,
you learn to like look at something that seduces you
and go, I don't need that.
Right.
You know, and I really think that is something
that you take away from the summation of these failures.
And that is an unappetizing state of being
for a lot of people who want,
who associate being in desire of a thing with being happy
so that people have actually begun to confuse their hunger
with satiation.
And so that's where you really start getting into trouble
is where you started thinking like,
this always needing a thing is the right way to feel.
And that's where you,
that's what I was texting you about being crazy.
It's like in these, in this moment
where everything I need is right there
in the most magnified, garish, almost embarrassing way,
even then I'm not satisfied.
And so this is the, this is the hilarious part
of getting what you want is like,
oh, you wanted all this, here you go.
And that's why there's a hell in Tibetan Buddhism
called the hell of hungry ghosts
where the beings have an insatiable appetite
but really tiny long necks
so that they can't get food down
but there's all the food that they want.
And so it's clearly just a metaphor
to talk about the predicament that people get into
where they start confusing their appetite
with the feeling of being full.
And when they are full, they don't like it
because they think that being hungry
is the best way to be.
And so it's your, you actually find yourself trying to avoid
that sense of sinking into life
because you consider it to be boring.
Yeah, that happens to me daily.
Some people are probably assume
it's like a Western way of thinking
but I think it's just a big part
of how consciousness plays a little trick on you.
Yeah.
So I find myself doing that too.
And the irony is that you texting me
this sort of message of insecurity or something.
I think insecurity is a really profound word.
Yeah.
But like you texting me this message,
it reminded me of myself so much.
It made me feel weirdly good
to know someone else feels that way.
Is out in this perfect environment
and is only, it's brought them closer
to reflecting on like their own flaws or something.
I think that's a really interesting metaphor.
But I've spent so much of my life like,
floating on a raft in a beautiful beach
and just looking out at everything
and wondering if it was real, you know?
And I just, it's,
maybe, you know, maybe there's a truth to that question
and that feeling and that sensation.
Maybe that's not an erroneous state of mind,
you know, to wonder if it's real.
But part of it, the weird shade of sadness over it
is when you're in that situation,
you're looking at it and you're like,
I'm not even enjoying this.
That's a different thing and that sucks.
Well, yeah, I mean, it is,
well, this is why, you know,
one of the things that came up with this retreat
they were talking about is like, why a practice?
Why do you have to fucking meditate?
You know, it's so annoying.
And so the reason is just what we're talking about here.
It's like, the reason they call it a practice
is because you're practicing
for when you're out on that fucking raft.
So the next time you find yourself out on the raft,
you don't have to be like covered
in a psychological aluminum foil
or whatever you've like coated yourself in
that's separating you from the experience.
Because every day, at some point in your day,
you're sitting down and connecting with reality
or at least making the attempt to connect with reality.
And then over time, you can do that
no matter what environment you're in.
But the interesting part of that process
is that the more you do that,
the more you realize the environment
is absolutely meaningless.
And that's why since this retreat,
I've been meditating again and you like right away,
they're, oh fuck, there it is.
Now this, I'm not, how is it that sitting in front
of a picture of Neem Karoli Baba
burning a fucking candle in my house,
I feel more at peace than I do drinking fucking my ties
and some kind of nice fancy dumb, dumb bar in Hawaii.
And it's just what, it's the reason is
because this feeling is not something
that has anything to do with reality.
Reality is running down the feeling
like droplets of water running down a window.
It's, this is the thing behind all things.
And the more you connect with that,
the more that insanity diminishes
in all forms of the insanity,
including regretting the insanity diminish,
all forms diminish when you,
when you all forms of suffering diminish
when you come home.
And that's what they call it, coming home.
This is the story of the prodigal son.
This is the story of the ultimate forgiveness
of the universe.
Cause what happens is the prodigal son returns home
after going out into the world
and fucking and getting sick and being an asshole.
And the father doesn't reject the son,
but it's like, I love you.
You're fine.
You're fine.
You're fine.
I love you.
You're upset over nothing.
You've come home.
I'm glad to see you.
Welcome back.
Let me fucking give you everything now.
You poor fucking thing.
When your dog runs away and comes back,
you're not saying to the dog,
oh, you filthy mongrel.
How dare you leave this house?
You're like, I love you.
You're back.
You're back.
And I think in the same way,
the return to that place is a very similar thing.
And when you're on a mushroom trip,
quite often you'll be faced with the ridiculous predicament
of having the universe anthropomorphized
through the psilocybin,
telling you, I love you.
And you're like, how can you fucking love me?
I'm filthy.
And that's the conversation.
And eventually you've got to do the same thing
any good rescue dog does.
When it's adopted,
you got to stop growling and then sink into that moment.
And it's so blissful and true and real.
And so yeah, that's the practice, man,
is like learning how to accept the love
instead of fight against it.
When in light of like the dichotomy of being at home
and kind of safe and like in kind of a repose,
versus the big tour you were just on,
that being like the biggest tour you've ever been on,
did you, were you out there?
And did you feel some levels of like total comfort
in the fact that that's another form of the same thing?
Like that that's a natural way of being
or was it a natural way of being,
but a natural way of kind of serving the same thing
you would be doing at home kind of in meditating
or did you feel like it was distinctively
a different activity and a different challenge
and something that was very like maybe exhausting?
It was exhausting, but it was also the endless,
I mean, the endless lesson is the pattern of the tour was,
oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, it's coming,
it's coming, it's a month away, it's a fucking month away.
Do I have the material?
Am I gonna be able to do this?
Am I gonna have to do 25 shows in a fucking row?
Are you kidding?
What if they hate me?
What am I gonna do?
I wanna reflect what I've been saying on the podcast.
What if I revert to old shitty stew?
It was like this like fear, terror, terror, fear, fear,
fear, fear, bliss, this is so fun.
Oh my God, oh my God, this is the greatest fucking thing ever.
Oh my God, I love this.
Over, it's over, what?
That whole thing for six months I was dreading is now done.
It's over, like it never happened because it didn't
because there's no time, you know?
And I'm creating these fucking,
I'm creating all of this turbulence
for my attachment or aversion.
And that's the thing that's giving my life a sense of,
that's giving my life a feeling of progression.
That's just a joke.
And so, but yeah, it was beautiful.
The tour was beautiful.
And during the tour, I was experiencing moments of peace
and which was pretty cool
because generally with stand-up,
I have been always freaked out in the day.
But with this all of a sudden, it was just more of like,
okay, you know, we're doing this now, we're doing,
it felt great.
But again, it's not related, I mean,
I don't think it's necessarily related to circumstance.
Though circumstance doesn't hurt.
It's nice to have things lined up
and you don't wanna be a hoarder.
You don't wanna be laying in cat shit or whatever.
But in the same way,
you don't wanna trick yourself into thinking that
it's the fucking nipple theory,
which is you either realize that the entire universe
is a nipple, that you can suck on
and experience the nectar of the divine mother,
or you pretend that there are multiple nipples
broken up into specific configurations of circumstance
that will produce the milk you need to feel happy.
And the former makes you feel great all the time.
The latter makes you a fucking dick
because you're like protecting the nipple.
You're gonna put a fence around the nipple.
You're gonna tell the nipple not to wear that fucking dress
when she goes out.
You're gonna look in the nipples phone.
You're gonna try to get other people who are going,
you know, not just with relationships either.
It's like, you're gonna fucking try to like,
your job, your career,
you're gonna start thinking that everyone's out to get you.
Sure, you know, that's the difference of perspectives
that one leads to a kind of embarrassing joy.
And the other leads to an embarrassing,
hilarious parade of endless humiliations
as you parade around in whatever outfit or uniform
you've decided to wear,
guarding a nipple when you're in a garden of nipples.
It's so funny.
It's like, stay away from this one.
Man, Emil, it's so cool hanging out with you.
We just took a break, everybody.
We're working on this album and it is so cool.
It's so fun to do.
You're a musical genius.
We're close to actually closing it down
so we can kind of, you know, actually manufacture it.
So, well, I guess we'll have some more news on that soon.
It's really cool seeing the process, man.
It's a fascinating thing.
I have no familiarity with.
It's really interesting to see how precise a process it is.
It's kind of a crazy thing to try to do
is to control sound.
Like, why would you do that?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, it's a really weird thing
when you consider like all the stuff.
I'm just like, you're really good at making stuff appear.
You're a manifester.
You're good at bringing stuff out
of the imagination into the world.
I get stuck at that point
where I'll think a bunch of cool shit
but then making it actually happen.
Outside of this podcast, it's really like,
I always get distracted in the process
but you're really focused.
But isn't that your,
isn't that sort of the lifeblood of the podcast
is that your brain just happens to be able to fire
on this super rare frequency where it just, you know,
you're not even thinking about,
oh, I have to fill up all this content or whatever.
It just, that's something that you do.
It's not easy too.
I'm sure people know that it's not so easy to do.
Yeah, I guess that's it, man.
But yeah, I mean, the podcast is awesome.
But shit, spending all this time coming up with chords,
like making music, there's so many things.
There's so many intersecting bits of information
and knowledge you have to have.
You don't even realize it, I'm sure.
Do you?
It just seems like a natural thing
because you've been doing it forever.
Yeah, I mean, you take in all this information
when you're a kid, maybe you look from the outside,
you probably look like a slacker,
but you're taking in so much information
about the sound of crickets at night in North Carolina
or something we were going through that we,
it ends up being applicable later.
You know, like with your math teacher always tells you,
like you're gonna have to, you're gonna wanna use this later
and you never do, ever.
But that whole time you weren't listening to her,
you were looking out the window
and you were absorbing all this other stuff
that you did end up using.
Isn't that cool?
That's something I, someone, I can't remember who says it,
someone about comedy.
One of the sayings is, you will use everything.
You will eventually use everything you know.
And I guess it's true for any art that you end up
or anything you do in life.
You do everything that, it's interesting.
Everything that you think is an unimportant thing
quite often is fertilizer from something
that grows out of you later.
Well, it seems especially true for like a writer
or a comedian who their commodity is,
you know, maybe potentially using
the humiliating circumstances of their past.
Right.
You know, this one like has a bit start.
This one time I was going on street, you know, whatever.
It's just all anecdotal,
which I really like about the potential of podcasts.
But I suppose that's the wager you're taking is like,
this will hopefully be interesting to someone else
if it's, if it marked a great turning point
in my life or something.
Yeah, that is the, I think that's kind of
where faith comes in, where you get to make the decision
when whatever happens in your life while it's happening,
you can either decide, this is it.
This is the grenade that I fell on top of
that's going to blow me to smithereens.
Or you could think, this is the thing
that's going to destroy all of the bullshit
and leave what I really am behind.
It's going to be something down the line
that is completely useful for me or for other people.
This is why, like you never hear this story.
You'll never hear this story.
Today, I went to Starbucks and I ordered a latte
and it was an iced latte.
I paid the clerk, got back in my car and drove away.
You'll never hear that fucking story
because who cares?
But you will hear, dude, I went to Starbucks today
and a dude punched me in the fucking face who was on PCP.
You will hear that story because you know what I mean?
Those are the, those moments that,
I guess I'll sum up this podcast.
These moments that we're avoiding
are actually the great moments.
They're every moment's a great moment.
That's the whole point.
Or I guess the point is there aren't multiple moments.
They're just one moment that we're breaking up
into a series of stories that we tell ourselves
to give a feeling of having an identity.
Is that the point?
I don't remember the point.
Yeah, no one ever can.
I mean, seriously, I think sometimes about my friend
who's a bit of, he owns a label I work with and,
you know, he was said once something like,
I heard somewhere that, you know,
the attempt to write the best song
is just the extension of the old world craft of like,
the challenge of who can tell the best story or something,
you know, and whether or not people take anything away
from it, I don't even, like you're implying it.
I'm not even sure exactly what matters, you know?
I think we're just, we're sort of like,
just the feeling of being seduced and pulled into something
that feels like it matters is maybe what's actually important.
I mean, and feeling like you're engaged.
I mean, if we're acknowledging that life is largely
an illusion a lot of the time,
then it seems a little, I don't know,
like there's some hubris to suggesting that like,
everything is this very pointed attempt
to make something that matters, you know?
But if I enjoy the sound of your voice,
it's kind of like my songs is like there, you know,
you can read criticisms of people being like,
I don't know what this is about,
or actually that was an old girlfriend of mine was like,
I don't even know what these songs are about, you know?
Which is a pretty, that's a pretty damning criticism
to a songwriter, that hurts pretty bad, I guess.
But it's hard to say how much that matters when,
you know, these art forms are just reflections
of the sifting through process,
the taking stock process of life.
And unfortunately, although the labelhead might want it
to be about something definitively
and like the product needs to be kind of shaped
into something that looks like a very
sort of focused, cohesive product,
what if none of it really is?
What if it's really just all these unorganized vibrations
that just keep kind of rippling through time
and you just kind of moan for a while and it feels good?
I love it.
It reminds me of that amazing video of that stalker
talking to John Lennon, who's been living in his yard
and John Lennon is like, they're just songs.
And the guy's so disciplined,
it's the most disappointing thing.
Right, right.
Because you want John, you would want someone to say.
He thinks he's found the Wizard of Oz or something.
Yeah, like these are authentic.
Right.
Moats of true God-inspired truth.
These are the 10, every one of my songs
is like one of the 10 commandments, brother.
Yeah, that's what people want.
It's so frustrating.
And again, man, this is the difference, I think,
between wise people and cult leaders
is that a wise person tells you,
not to keep using my nipple symbol,
but a wise person will tell you, man,
this is just, this is not the source.
This is just one of many sources,
an infinite field of sources that you can pick from.
And a fucking cult leader is like, this is it, man.
Yeah, that's where you know that you see the,
the Maharishi or Rajni, you see the red flag go up
is when they kind of give the exclusivity factor.
That's it.
Yeah.
That's where you, the moment you do that,
you have tiptoed into the gardens of Satan.
And you know why they do it?
Because it prays, it's perfect capitalism.
It prays on the ego of the consumer,
because they're like, I, I know.
I found the way.
Yeah.
Only me, I figured it out.
I found the doorway.
I just paid for it.
Yeah, it's the only true path.
Yeah, see, that sucks.
Don't ever do that.
And not only with religion, philosophy, music, with anything,
whenever you're telling someone, you know,
the classic thing, if you're in a fight
and you're breaking up and you're like,
you'll never find another person like me.
It's so, it's like such a wretched thing
to believe or to tell someone,
I'm the only nipple you will ever find
true sustenance from, you will starve.
It's all bad.
And if you tricked yourself into thinking,
a person, place or thing is the only way,
then you're in hell.
Then you have to be in hell.
It's like that guy, oh God,
I just saw this incredible video.
This fucking guy was in an air bubble
in a sunken cruise ship for three days.
And these divers are filming.
And like, you can hear the divers are talking
and he finds, you know, he sees the guy from the waist down.
And of course, you just think it's a body.
He's like, I've got one.
And the guy's like, you got a body?
And he's like, no, he's alive.
And you hear the, whoever's running the show be like,
oh fuck, because they knew the person had been
in this air bubble for three fucking days
in an air bubble in a cruise ship,
thinking that they were just gonna die
because that's the only air.
So in the same way, if you find yourself attached
to the idea that any person, place or thing
is the only source of your happiness,
then you're like a person stuck in a cruise ship air bubble
and you can't fucking enjoy it.
You're gonna be freaking out
because you think the air is gonna eventually run out.
And I think that's like the Bodhisattvas, the teachers,
the gurus, the true ones are the ones
who swim into that little air bubble.
And they're like, here, let me show you something.
I'm gonna take you to the giant fucking air bubble
we call Planet Earth where there's air everywhere.
They take you out of your little minuscule shit air bubble
and they take you into a place where it's like,
oh no, you never had to be afraid.
There's air everywhere.
Yeah, I think it's hard to discern inside the message
and pull apart what's really seductive,
almost too seductive about a really well-delivered message.
And so when the guy is sitting down with John Lennon,
he is, in his hands, the Beatles songs are like,
these permanent, eternal proclamations or something.
But I was just, I'm finishing this book,
one of the greatest Beatles books I've ever read
and I've read a lot of them.
It's called Many Years From Now
and it really diagrams the beginning of the Beatles,
which is something I never really spent
that much time thinking about.
I found myself so fascinated with their pre-London days
before they were really cool
and it explains a lot of their psychology
by letting you understand that coming down from Liverpool,
they always define themselves as just like street kids
and not cool and kind of assimilating
into the coolness of London.
And my point is in the quest to become what they became,
they really came from, not necessarily trying
to be commercial, but there was a jingle,
there was a jingle aspect to how well those songs are written
and how simple they are.
So when you dissect a lot of those early
like McCartney lyrics, they're kind of hollow.
And I'm a massive McCartney fan
and I don't think that's necessarily a really bad thing
to say, but the I wanna hold your hands and stuff,
they're kind of cooked up.
You see what I'm saying?
Like in a Brill building kind of songwriter team way,
they're cooked up to like sell you something a little bit
and that's not because of anything bad.
It's because they loved that kind of music
and that was the period of that coming out of the 50s
as they were trying to slowly build what they became.
That was that period of like great short pop songs.
And so you see the point I'm making is that like
the kid coming into Lennon's house
is having trouble discerning the seductive quality
of the message itself because it's so well delivered.
So these songs are so economically tightly crafted
that they're so fucking good
and there's some sort of really indescribable magic
to the melodicism of them that,
I mean who wouldn't be kind of tricked
into thinking this is the voice of God.
It's like so perfect.
So we start to lust and all young people do lust
after things and cut ourselves in their shape.
You think about how much of life has spent
imitating everything.
Like you are really just a carbon copy of other things.
Yes.
And yeah, that is the funny thing
whenever there's like a Justin Bieber,
there's like legions of dudes who start cutting their hair
like Justin Bieber, it creates these hilarious echoes
through the biosphere, the human part of the biosphere
where it's just all these imitation Bieber's pop up,
all these imitation things go rolling down
from these strong personalities.
It's really hilarious.
And that is the verse in the Bhagavad Gita,
what a great man does, others will follow.
And so whenever you have that,
yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it?
It does create a crazy imitative ripple through society.
Yeah, and you want,
but the main thing is that yearning, right?
That's the main thing.
You want something to be definitively God.
You want some, whatever it may be.
We are a species that has the inclination
to worship false idols.
It's a hilarious part of our species.
No other species has this tendency that I can think of.
You don't see dolphins constructing,
you know, not that they could,
but you don't see any being,
you don't see monkeys making stone bananas
and worshiping them.
They just eat the fucking bananas.
They're directly connected to nature.
But we want a fucking symbolic grail cup
filled with the essence of God.
And for that to work,
we have to have things that aren't God.
We have to have things that aren't blessed.
To really pull off idolatry,
you need to have things that aren't good
or blasphemous or unclean.
Then you can really get off on your suck,
suckling away at the fucking pseudo-nipple
you've constructed out of the ocean of milk
that you happen to be floating in.
That's the fucking weird fetishy game everybody's playing.
It's hilarious.
It's so funny.
I love looking through all the stuff
that I think I have to have,
I must have to be happy.
Cause guaranteed every single,
almost everything that you're thinking of,
you don't really need,
including your breath.
That was another thing that Lama Suriados
in this great book was saying,
he was, this guy's really fucking cool, man.
He, he's a Tibetan Lama.
He's, I think he's maybe the only American Tibetan Lama,
but when he was a kid,
he went and studied with these,
with a bunch of different teachers
and some of them were these Tibetan Zogchen teachers
and one of the teachers asked him,
how do you meditate?
And he said, well, I focus on my breath going in and out.
And this teacher said,
what will you focus on when there's no more breath?
Is it really cool?
Oh.
Really cool, man.
And that, you know, that, that,
that's the frustrating,
that's the frustration is that you,
you want an imaginary friend.
You want a pacifier,
whether it's in the form of some fucking music
that you think's incredible,
or a religion that you think's incredible,
or a person that you think's incredible.
It's all just pacifiers tricking you,
tricking you, tricking you into believing
that there is, you're not part of everything.
It's a, it's a great game.
It's fun. It's fetishy.
It's fed, it's like having a foot fetish or something.
It's a different form of fetish,
but it's, and fetishes are great.
I love them, but still it's just a fetish.
It's just a game you're playing with yourself to avoid.
Yeah, I don't even know if you,
if it's as deep as like human beings
even needing an answer or like a meaning,
as much as just the temporal scientific law
that, you know, you have to act.
You have to walk in a direction.
You just want a direction to go in, you know?
It's easy to forget that like,
you're just a materialization for a small amount of time,
you know? Right, right, right.
So that materialization, I've walked down the street
every day and think it's like the fundamental stuff
as our teacher used to call it in college,
is like this rushing river of just, you know,
somewhat chaotic just grouping of elements.
And so you just like dip a cup down into this river
of elements and just pull it up.
And that's a person,
just a random materialization of elements.
And that doesn't really mean there's any great meaning
to their existence or anything.
It's just a collection of chemicals exploding
for a time being and then it's gone, you know?
So it just seems kind of like that person
as a waking ego just really needs a direction to walk in.
Some narrative, just something they can believe in
and sort of trust, but it largely seems
like it's a very brief script and then it's gone.
It's not even there, it's barely there, but it is a bubble.
I mean, what you are talking about is for life to exist,
there has to be cells.
Cells are bubbles.
We're just a bunch of bubbles that have congealed together
in the form of a human being.
And when that bubble pops in the form of death,
you do become that river of who knows what?
A quantum flow of energy that our neurology at this moment
is differentiating in the forms of colors, shapes, sounds.
But really when the bubble pops,
it's just back into the luminescence as it's called.
I think clear light is a great word for it.
But when the bubble pops, this is the question, you know?
And everyone's freaking out over.
But yeah, is it the whole meaning game?
I mean, which is a fun game, but meaning is such a drag.
And whenever anything gets a lot of meaning attached to it,
it's always gonna embarrass you.
You know, you're pretty much gonna get embarrassed
by any God.
When I think about that,
I'm trying to think of like, oh God.
Let me go on like a blister in the sun.
Let me go on.
When I first heard that fucking song, I'm like, that is me.
Yeah, that song is me, man.
That sums it up.
Oh, fuck yeah.
When I'm walking, when I'm walking,
I strut my stuff and I'm so strung out.
I'm high as a kite.
Oh, fucking, that is it, man.
That's how I feel.
He's singing about being fucking high.
He's like a blister in the sun.
It's me.
And then you're so into the song.
And then you're like, oh, you know what?
I really like this girl.
I'm gonna put this on the tape I make for her
so that she can hear who I truly am.
And so you put blister in the sun on a tape
that you give to a girl that you like
because you think it sums you up as a being.
And so later down the line,
you're only gonna be embarrassed.
You're like, oh my God.
Blister in the sun is not the synopsis of my life anymore
because there can be no synopsis.
That's the whole thing.
And that's like the goal.
Anytime you're worshiping the golden calf,
you will be embarrassed.
You will be embarrassed.
You must be embarrassed.
Yeah, it makes you feel mean to even realize
that that's going on all the time, all around you.
People identifying their entire realities
with their look or something.
Yeah.
You know, it makes you feel mean to see through it.
And you're like, you're not that.
Yeah, you think you're that,
but you're definitely not that thing.
Like that thing is a stupid thing to,
it doesn't sum you up like your song analogy.
You're not the tattooed dude.
You're not the fucking, you're not the badass lady
who's like not afraid to do whatever the fucking thing it is.
You're not the badass guy who's like,
you're not a fucking astronaut.
You're not a fucking whatever it is.
You're not a president.
Let's face it, man.
You're a bubble in a never ending river,
a phenomena that's temporarily become aware of itself
and convinced itself of some importance.
And you're clinging onto that importance
and that's what's causing all your pain.
The moment you let go of that clinging,
sink into the embarrassment for a little bit.
Let yourself be embarrassed.
Recognize that you just got caught up
in a hypnotic, rhythmic worship of a non-existent God
in the form of whatever symbol structure
you decided to try to congeal around infinity
and then sink into the nothingness
and that's where you find love.
That's the experience of love.
It's that you, you climb out of the biodome,
you've constructed of symbols
and you realize that the thing you thought
you were protecting yourself from
was in fact everything you needed,
everything you could ever possibly need.
And it goes on forever.
This is the sigh of relief.
They say you take your last breath, that final exhalation.
It's a sigh of relief
when you realize you're in a river of love, I think.
Either that or it's just your breath leaving your body
as you go into the void.
But I think that it's a sigh of relief, man.
It's a big, fat sigh of relief.
Shit, I've got my idols.
I wish I still, like when I think of,
or like Ram Dass, Niam Krolibaba,
you know, my friends, my girlfriend, my mom,
I still have motes of phenomena
that I place a great deal of importance into.
I don't think it's anything wrong about it.
No, it's weird to think how much unbridled enthusiasm
has come through those portals of inspiration or whatever
and then, you know, as it happens often,
you meet the person later on.
And not in your case maybe,
but like I could say in some of mine,
and they're not the thing you made them into.
Not that that's in any way some profound realization.
It's exactly the opposite.
You're just like this imagery, this visualization
that I experienced in encountering this art
with stuff going on inside of me maybe,
or that I needed to harness and put into something,
but all that time spent worshiping at the altar
of some imagined icon, it's kind of disgusting, honestly.
Like looking at all the think pieces and articles
about what David Bowie wore,
or like Lou Reed's cool, how to get it, you know?
It's like, fuck you.
Like it's just such a fucking,
it's such a fucking product, you know?
And the fact that people just think that they can put it on,
literally wear something like he once said,
like the clothes make the man or something,
there's like, people really think that shit.
Yeah.
It's frickin' disturbing.
Well, they like to turn themselves into movie screens
for other people's beauty, and that's okay.
I think it's fine.
I don't find it disgusting at all.
I think it's fun.
I think that it's a fun thing to worship somebody
for a little while, but it's even more fun
to get disappointed, but the question is,
when you get disappointed, will you be angry?
And if the answer is yes,
then you still have a lot to fucking learn,
because if when you're disappointed, really,
it's just like, ah, okay, yeah, okay.
That's the great teaching from all of them, man.
I'm trying to think of people
who've severely disappointed me.
That's a long list.
I think that that moment is the birth of an artist, though,
because once you realize that someone didn't provide you
with the thing you were looking for,
that's what gives you the diving board
to start off for yourself and articulate
what it is you wanted.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
That's the big break, historically,
when you've been following a thread
and you're part of this cult, which everybody is,
whether it's a fashion cult or...
Religious cult.
Anything, you know, skateboarding cult or...
Nationalism.
Yeah, right, or Nashville lap steals, you know.
Like that's whatever you're over-focused on,
this thing that you think's giving you all this joy
or whatever, once you experience that break with it,
like a little loss of faith,
and you know you can do something better
or provide something that you weren't getting,
that's the birth of a new artist.
Or it's where, or the birth of a lunatic.
It's a, or you could just go insane.
That's, because you hear about this all the time,
this does happen, I've heard about it,
where like someone will have a stalker, right?
And this, or someone will have like an Uber fan,
and the Uber fan will inevitably discover
some kind of contradiction,
something that just doesn't fit into the...
Is this happening to you?
Not to me, yet.
It may be in small ways, it happens.
Sometimes like, you'll get into like,
you'll email somebody who's emailing you
and they'll get really mad, it's something you wrote.
And it's just a pure misunderstanding,
but usually it's because you're not behaving according
to the model that they shoved you into.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean?
You're not playing the game of Maple Leaf, I wanna play.
I want you to play a game of Maple Leaf
where you act like the person that I created
in my mind that you're supposed to be.
I told you about the time in college
where the guy who yelled outside of my window,
up at my window, that's against everything you stand for.
That, that, that, that, that, that, that, that.
That, that is it.
So all of us at some point or another,
maybe not so vocally, will find ourselves yelling up
at someone's window, this is not who you are.
I want my money back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Common, very common.
And it's a people always find themselves in that predicament.
You don't have to be famous to be in that predicament.
Just be a human and someone will yell at your window,
this is not who you are.
And it's a funny situation to get into with people
because it's true, you're right.
Whatever thing I've done to disappoint you, it's real.
I probably fucked up or I did something weird or who knows
but the reality is I am a mall Santa
and anything that you worship, you turned me into a mall Santa.
The moment you made me into a thing
that was going to bring you joy in your life
that you couldn't bring to yourself,
you made me act like a mall Santa.
Now I have to play the part of Santa Claus.
You're forcing this relationship, which is why I've heard
that to put a person on a pedestal
is one of the ultimate forms of aggression
because you're making them fucking act
like they're on a pedestal when there ain't one.
And it's not cool.
You're forcing them to be a thing that just is higher.
It just generally sucks, man.
And it can only be bad.
Cause when the moment the mall Santa's beard comes off,
the baby starts crying.
The moment the mall Santa is like, I'm a lie.
I'm the manifestation of a gigantic fucking lie
perpetrated by corporations to try to sell shit
at the end of the year.
I'm sorry, but that's just what I am.
There's no Santa Claus.
Baby's going to get their heart broken.
In the same way, anyone acting like anything
is putting on a show.
They're putting on a show.
And the real question is what's the intention
behind the show?
Some people, the intention behind the show is malicious.
Some people, the intention behind the show is some form
of wanting the world to be a better place.
That's it, but it's still a show.
And sometimes the intentions are self-centered,
but it's always switching.
Intentions don't stay the same.
The main thing is go through your mind,
think of all the beings that you have decided
are holy beings, all the beings that you are
worshiping and pushing them off that fucking altar.
Let yourself enjoy the incredible, exciting,
exhilarating thrill of realizing that you,
as I just read in this book by Lamasuryadas,
must become a lantern unto yourself.
Ooh, that's a fun place to be.
That's a scary place to be.
It's such an exciting place to be and just hang out there.
No one's going to give you the answer.
People will remind you of this.
This is why I think the spiritual community is so important.
It's not because some person is like an envelope
containing a sacred glitter that you can throw
on your life to make it beautiful.
It's just that some people are really good
at reminding you that you have all the answers
inside of you.
That's why we want these conversations.
That's why we need the sangha, the satsang,
whatever you want to call it.
That's why we need the spiritual community,
group of good, true friends.
It's because they're always going to remind you,
it's you, it's in you, it's you.
Remember, wake up, wake up, wake up.
That's why we do this.
That's it.
Do you ever have to deal with boardroom meetings
or anything?
Do you ever have to go in and talk to,
I'm trying to think of a parallel for me
having to go in and talk to labels and stuff.
Pitching shows.
Yeah, yeah.
You have to pitch shows sometimes
or if you have some idea or you go into write a show
with people or you have to collaborate
on some endeavor like that.
You end up having to translate stuff to people.
Yeah, that's pretty brutal.
That's a brutal, that can be very,
that's why the God blessed the internet and the podcast
because it's reducing the necessity
for those kinds of things.
I only bring it up because in parallel
to what you were just saying,
it's like one of those situations where you kind of,
you sort of glimpse what makes the world go around
in the ugliest way is that you're talking to someone
who's trying to please someone else,
who's trying to please someone else,
who's trying to please someone else.
You know, this endless bureaucratic line
of people trying to appease their boss.
Yeah.
And that boss may not know,
like if you enter the world of the music business,
the one thing I've learned is that
it's just a constant shuffle of turnover of publicists.
Yes.
So you come in one month and the label is like,
we've got Sherry now and she's just amazing.
She's incredible what she's been doing lately.
She's gonna kill it on your project.
And then like clockwork, three months later,
well, we decided Sherry just wasn't,
it just wasn't a good fit.
Yeah, like the emails that you get
where people are like,
I wanted to let you know that I'm moving on
from Warner Brothers,
the person that you're about to like sell a project with.
Yeah, it's a, what do they call it?
It's a fucking rotating, endless parade of executives
going from one job to the next.
Yeah, I mean, you can't really put the blame on any,
like you said, one person or anything,
but it's a systemic.
Yeah, right, right, right.
It's just a very, it's like everything's gotta evolve.
It's an old school structure.
Everything's gotta evolve.
We just don't need it anymore.
We don't need it.
We don't need the artistic priest class.
We don't need it anymore.
We need the artistic congregation.
We need a collaboration with all people,
not someone being the arbiter of what's good or what's bad.
That's an illusion.
It's the myth of the arbiter.
Those don't exist anymore.
The people are the arbiter, really, you know?
And you don't need a bunch of people anymore.
We don't need that.
You only need, you don't need the massive percentages
to be okay if you're producing stuff these days.
Really, you just need to be technologically savvy enough
to produce your own stuff
and a relatively small number of people
to enjoy what you're putting out there and you'll be fine.
You don't need 20 million people to appreciate your thing.
And that's the stress these fucking record labels
and TV companies are operating under.
They need millions and millions and millions of people
to love the very expensive thing they're putting out there.
What a rotten predicament to get at, rotten.
Yeah, there was a time when what you were doing
wasn't real unless it was on the shelf in shrinkwrap and shit.
Yeah, that's right.
And so that concept of making something real has been warped
and it's like melting into some other future thing.
But so maybe it's a good thing that we're waving goodbye
to a lot of that systemic arbitration.
But then, is that a word?
Yeah, sure.
And then, but we're losing something in the process too.
Right.
But you have to give it to the young generation
to have to build a new model of integrity,
which will happen, it's just that...
Well, the model of integrity can't be the boon
from the thing that you've put on a pedestal.
The model of integrity has got to be the feeling you get
when you make something good, that's it.
You make something good, you feel good.
You make something bad, you don't put it out.
That's it.
If it feels bad, don't put it out.
If it feels wrong, don't put it out.
No matter how long you fucking spent working on it,
that is the, that's it.
The paycheck cannot be when you've hit
the exact right configuration of executives
to get somebody to give you a check in a contract
to put a thing out.
The paycheck has got to be that incredible feeling you get
when the fucking universe comes pouring out of you
temporarily, just pours out of you,
like some kind of explosive mystical diarrhea
where you've completely lost control.
Do you know there's, in Buddhism,
sneezing is considered a form of enlightenment
or an example of enlightenment,
that moment when you lose all control,
orgasm and death are the other two.
That moment when you're like,
bleah, and something's coming out of you
and you're done, it comes out of you,
you recognize it, oh shit, I just gave birth
to a cool little thing, you put it out,
let it swim around in the brains of your species
and forget about it, that's the fucking paycheck, man.
And if money comes from that, if success comes from that,
which it generally will, congratulations,
icing on the cake, but let me ask you,
would you rather have green rectangles
covered in masonic symbols,
or would you ever have the experience
of God's throbbing penis ejaculating ideas
out of your heart, because I'll take the latter
any day of the fucking week, or vagina,
whichever one you wanna use.
And cut.
Boom, done.
Hare Krishna.
Wrap it.
Thanks for listening, pals.
That was Emil Amos, all links to find him
will be at dunkatrustle.com.
He's one of my favorite musicians,
and I demand that you download one of his amazing albums
from the band Holy Sons, or Olm, or Grails,
or any of the other bands that he's probably in
that I'm not even aware of.
Thank you, Casper.com for supporting this episode
of the podcast.
You can go to casper.com forward slash family hour
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You won't regret it.
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And thank you all of you who continue
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and do something sweet for your darling mother today.
Even though we're a little past Mother's Day,
every day is Mother's Day.
If you're a sweet child, don't, what am I saying?
Don't forget that part of it.
Just love yourself.
Just be in the moment, and remember how amazing you are.
Because you are.
Okay, pals, I'll see you soon.
Hare Krishna.
Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now.
I'm dirty little angel.
You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music.
Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now.
New album and tour date coming this summer.