What is the nature of reality, like actually? Is AI going to have a soul? Can semen power a spacecraft?! In today’s wildly entertaining podcast, we blended psychedelics, comedy, spirituality, AI, and much more. Duncan Trussell is a hilarious yet deeply insightful being, and it’s always epic when we get to spend time together.

Connect with Duncan Trussell | https://www.duncantrussell.com/

AUBREY: Duncan Trussell.  

DUNCAN: Aubrey. 

AUBREY: Here we are. 

DUNCAN: Hello. 

AUBREY: We each have our nicotine delivery devices. I'm having a cigar; you're having a very cute pink vape. 

DUNCAN: Yours is way cooler than mine. First of all, I have to say this. Don't vape. I feel bad vaping publicly. I'm embarrassed by it, but I'm addicted now. So I've gone from making fun of people who vape to becoming one of them. And even worse, as punishment from the gods, I've become addicted to something called an ELFBAR. Yeah. It's delicious, but it definitely looks like I'm smoking lipstick. 

AUBREY: Does it taste like real elves? 

DUNCAN: I'm going to guess no. I think elves probably tastes like shit if I had to bet. 

AUBREY: I bet they're verdant. I bet they're like green. I bet it's like a kale salad. 

DUNCAN: Interesting. 

AUBREY: Because they're living in the forest. 

DUNCAN: Bad news for us. 

AUBREY: Could be like ayahuasca though. That'd be tough. 

DUNCAN: I think they probably have some kind of built-in stink or acidic, awful taste, like the frogs. They're probably equipped. I love that we're trying to like figure out the taste of elves within three seconds of your—

AUBREY: Would they get you high? 

DUNCAN: The elves? 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

DUNCAN: For sure. Yeah, for sure. It's probably why there's no more elves. 

AUBREY: If an elf was a psychedelic, what do you think it would be equivalent to? 

DUNCAN: It's going to be, definitely some combination of mushrooms and Ketamine probably, some mix of those two. A dissociative but maybe a little more mushroom, Ambien, sentient communication—

AUBREY: It's like stars meet the trees. Stars meet the trees. That's an elf. 

DUNCAN: Exactly. God help you if you get people high when they eat you. It's the worst thing to be. 

AUBREY: Well, people will want you, at least, to stick around. I totally acknowledge all the problems that exist with sources of psychedelic medicine, including Iboga, and ayahuasca, and peyote. There's real issues and concerns that we have to be aware of. But one thing I'm confident in is when humans love something, we will fucking make sure that it exists. You know what I mean? Like we're going to be planting it, growing it, spreading it, cultivating it. 

DUNCAN: Unless it's the woolly mammoth. 

AUBREY: Did we love them though? 

DUNCAN: We fucking loved the mammoth, enough to paint them on walls. They loved the mammoth. We also consume it to the point of it no longer existing. 

AUBREY: If we crave it too much, then we just can't fucking help ourselves. 

DUNCAN: Exactly! I would guess that we live on a planet that's like the, I don't know if you've ever gone to Sizzler at the end—

AUBREY: Been a minute. 

DUNCAN: Me too. Yeah, a long minute and I will never return. But if you ever find yourself hammered at a Sizzler when they're about to close, and there's just the dregs of the buffet. And you don't care, you're going to eat it anyway. But that might be our planet. You know what I mean? We're at the end of a night at Sizzler—

AUBREY: It's a bunch of people who failed that marshmallow test, which was like, don't eat this marshmallow for five minutes and we'll give you three marshmallows. And they're looking at it like, fuck it, marshmallow now. 

DUNCAN: Eat it. Yeah, for sure. This planet probably produced all kinds of things like massive cubes of psychedelic chocolate. It probably would rain coffee. You know what I mean? It's all gone. We fucked it all up. 

AUBREY: Yeah, you might be right there. 

DUNCAN: Now we're down to what? Lettuce. We've got carrots. 

AUBREY: Infinite amounts of those. 

DUNCAN: Just all this shit nobody really wanted to eat. 

AUBREY: We'll do it but—

DUNCAN: But the carrots are great. I don't mean to not care about it. 

AUBREY: Some people hate cooked carrots. That's something I've found out. Cooked carrots fuck people up. 

DUNCAN: Really? 

AUBREY: Yeah. I don't know why. I think a good, cooked carrot is nice. Little balsamic glaze, nothing wrong with that. 

DUNCAN: Well, because they don't know that you can put stuff in it. These are people who just threw it in boiling water, it sucks. It tastes like shit, it's soft. They don't know, it's like a medium for anything you want to put in it, probably. That is my guess. 

AUBREY: Not as good as an elf. 

DUNCAN: Well, yeah, I'm going to guess. I don't know. They're all gone. No more fucking elves, they ran away. 

AUBREY: Except now, they're in bars. 

DUNCAN: Oh, God, I deserve any roasting I get for this thing. 

AUBREY: So, Duncan, we were talking a little bit about the wild times that are coming ahead. What do you think, man? Do you think it's going to be kind of chill, and we're all just being rapturists and worried about everything? Or you think it's going to get real squirrely or real dark, or some combination in between? 

DUNCAN: This is probably like a cheap way out of answering your question, because, especially on podcasts, a prophecy is always going to backfire on your fucking ass no matter what. Someone's like, if I say, Aubrey, I think things are going to take a turn for the better. Even though fear is seeped into so many of us via the news and all that we consume, things are going to take a turn for the better. And we're going to find a way to be harmonious and use technology in a positive way. They'll take that and then they'll put it over nuclear bombs going off in New York. Do you know what I mean? And then you look like an asshole. On the other hand, if you go the other way, and you're like, 1% of the human population is going to have control over armies of robot dogs with machine guns on their backs and they're going to dominate the entire planet, then they're going to show like the infinite music festival that starts when the stars align and be like, look, you were so scared. That wasn't really going to happen. To me, it all comes down to, and this is the cheap one, your own projections. 'Cause I have been in an apocalypse. I have experienced an apocalypse just by eating too much weed and being around the wrong people. It didn't require any kind of like, chaos, or earthquakes, or fires, or famine. Just my own subjective configuration can produce an apocalypse around me, regardless of external circumstances. So I imagine the trick would be to make it so that you aren't apocalypsizing? What's the... 

AUBREY: Apocalyzing. 

DUNCAN: Don't apocalyze yourself if you could help it. Apocalyze yourself in the true sense of the word, the lifting of the veil, allow yourself to be true and real. But maybe don't go all day long thinking about like "Dateline" episodes and looking around imagining—

AUBREY: First of all, I don't think that's a cheap way out. I think that's a very insightful way out. Because I think genuinely, all of this talk about the multiverse, we think about it like an externalized universe that's separately created by something else other than us. But really, we're walking around in a multiverse. Now we're, we're in a universe of our own fucking story, where everything we think, see, perceive is slightly different than another person who thinks, perceives, something similar, but it's not. So we're in this co-created multiverse, which we can call the universe, the oneverse. And potentially, there are other whole entire universes, but we have a multiverse that we're participating in, which is our own psychic frame, our own purview into reality. That is for sure. 

DUNCAN: Yes, for sure. Like everybody at the airport, you're looking at just different universes hanging out together. Everyone. And you look at that and you think to yourself, oh, that could have been me. Or you watch the John Wayne Gacy documentary, and you think, I could have been John Wayne Gacy? A few wrong turns, a few bad experiences, and shit goes wrong up here, who knows? A micro stroke here and there. The next thing you know, you climb out of your fucking basement after burying somebody you strangled down there. We could be anything. I don't think people like that idea. 

AUBREY: People hate that idea. I've been on this trip for a while and a lot of my psychedelic medicine journeys have been pointing me to this. It's the full breadth of our human polarity. We're all the dark and all the light in latent possibility. Now, what we choose to express is going to be some point of identification on that polar spectrum, from all the way good, call it Yeshua on one side, call it Satan on the other side. But we're the entire breadth of all of that. And we just choose where we're at. And sometimes, we're not entirely choosing. Sometimes our conditioning is steering us. But I do believe that we have some choice as to the actions we take and the expressions we make. But if we really look close enough, we're going to see all that shit, all the horns and all the angel's wings. 

DUNCAN: Right. It's the idea of thinking itself. A lot of people, me included, a long time ago, I used to feel some responsibility for my thoughts. I don't know if you've ever had a thing happen where all of a sudden, you're wondering, I wonder what the president's shit looks like, you know what I mean? And then you're like, why the fuck am I thinking that? 

AUBREY: I mean, I have it worse. Honestly. This has been like a personal struggle that I haven't talked about. But it's what psychologists would call intrusive thoughts. Where I'll just be sitting around with somebody I love and then I'll think, punch, punch, punch, smash, smash, smash. And I'll be like, where the fuck did that thought come from? Or like some crazy way in which it almost feels like I'm taking the eraser to a beautiful story or grabbing a piece of art of canvas of my own life and just crumpling it up and burning it. 

DUNCAN: Aren't all thoughts intrusive? 

AUBREY: In some ways, yeah. I think sometimes you can intend a track, especially when you're able to get into your mind and set your intention, almost like meditating. You can intend your way through a track of thought. But a lot of times, they just appear. 

DUNCAN: To me, it just seems like you kind of pick the thoughts you want to focus on. Because I can't make a thought appear. It's a really interesting concept, which is, by the time you were thinking, as we call it, really what you're doing is remembering a thought. Something that's bubbled out of your brain has instantly been encoded into memory. And so you're having a memory of something that your brain just kind of like barfed out. And so from that perspective, the whole idea of who we are, especially if you feel wounded up in your thoughts, is kind of off in the sense that, maybe you can decide, alright, I'm going to think about a rainbow. I'm going to think about a monk turning into a rainbow. But the part of you that decided to think about a monk turning into a rainbow, wherever that came from, where did that come from? What bubbled up that initial thing that came out? Is that your own autonomous decision? Were you down in your subconscious cooking up the next thing you're going to say? No, it just appeared. So, claiming ownership of it is kind of interesting. It's a curious thing—

AUBREY: It's at the very least, a paradox, because there is a possibility that the witness consciousness, the I am. The I am is, I think, where freewill actually rests in that level of consciousness. But there's not a lot of desire from the I am, because it's a unified field of I am that we're participating in. So the desire to think about anything is not really there. But the possibility that you can think about anything, I think, from that place of consciousness and creation, I think is possible. But then what you end up thinking about, I think, is mostly what you're talking about, which is conditionally related to things going on in your body. I think your body produces a lot of thoughts. 

DUNCAN: There you go. 

AUBREY: Your body's part of the biggest thinking apparatus that we have. 

DUNCAN: Right. Yeah, for sure. There's so many weird stories about this. Like a famous story, you've probably heard it. Have you heard of this guy who gets a heart transplant and ends up marrying the person's wife who gave him the heart. Have you heard of this? 

AUBREY: That's cool. No. 

DUNCAN: And I think the creepy part of it, and I might be mixing stories here. Forgive me internet, if this is total bullshit, but I remember checking it. I think the person's heart, I think that person killed themselves also or something. And I think that person killed himself, something like that. By taking another person's heart into you, you sort of take their personality into your whatever, the thing that we're talking about is. There's neurons in the heart. 

AUBREY: Now people are going to be hunting for hearts of really open-hearted fucking awesome people. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, yeah. Warriors would eat the heart of their opponent. They would eat it. I do think that a lot of what we think of as our identity or personality, we don't have quite as much choice over it as we would like to imagine. And in fact, whatever that thing is, is so transient anyway, that it's probably a little bit like an imaginary friend. You sort of want it to exist, you talk to it, you have a sense of it being there, but it's not real. How could it be? Some permanent identity, some innate essential self. Doesn't seem to be one. 

AUBREY: It feels to me like a Russian nesting doll, to a certain degree. Like there's an identity encapsulated in a super identity, like a soul identity. And this is only from my own journey of what I've experienced. The personality self, the small self, as Paul Selig would call it. And then there's this larger embodiment of self, which seems to transcend the physical body and the limitations. And it's felt like I've been able to access that nonspecific Aubrey, the Aubrey that's beyond this Aubrey, but has existed as many different iterations of Aubreys that carried many different names, but still has a unique identity. And then there's the absolute obliteration that goes all the way to the unified field with the divine, like on a 5-MeO journey, or certain other different medicine journeys where you completely dissolve into the one or the zero, the everything or the nothing, which they have subtle distinctions. But nonetheless, it's still a unified field. So I think it's very interesting to think about our identity. But I think of it like nesting dolls within the dimensional existence that we have. 

DUNCAN: Right. Yeah, the nesting dolls. Yeah, that's interesting. In Buddhism, this distinction gets drawn between absolute reality and relative reality. And so relative reality, that's what we're in right now. I want coffee, I'm smoking a fucking embarrassing vape. I've got a jug of water because I want to stay hydrated. Because if I don't, I just dry up and feel like shit. So that's relative reality. It's certainly here. It's definitely here. Absolute reality, which is what you're talking about, the whatever you want to call it. The totality of all things, the sum total of whatever may be, the ever-expanding circumference of consciousness. There's a million names for the damn thing. So absolute reality is known as eternalism in the extreme. So with absolute reality, it's really funny. You run into this concept of unchanging whatever. So in other words, absolute reality, implicit within that idea, is that absolute reality must go on forever. Must not stop, it has to go on forever. It's permanent. That's why it's called eternalism. Eternally permanent. How could it not be? Incomprehensible that all that is could cease to be, that it wouldn't exist, that it's just gone somehow. Who knows how or where it goes or what? 

AUBREY: 'Cause then it's changing, and then it's not eternal. And then it's like Paul Selig said, that which is true is always true. 

DUNCAN: Right. And that's a form of eternalism. Now, on the other side, with relative reality and its extreme, it becomes nihilism. Now you get hyper-materialism, the idea that this isn't really, you've heard a million different versions of this thing. But it's like, we're just molecules, man, temporarily coming together. We're nothing really, man. You think you're somebody but you're not. There's nothing there. You're just space trash that woke up for a second. You're going to die and that's it. Some version of that. So that's nihilism. And so, between eternalism and nihilism, this is us. This is why Buddhism is called the middle way. It's the place where you find a way to hold both of those realities. Some people call that the joining of heaven and earth. It's the idea of, somehow these two things coexist simultaneously. Somehow, nothingness and everythingness, which is what you were talking about, they're hanging out together. They're playing games with each other. They're fucking and fighting and trying to, you know what I mean? Trying to work it out. It's like a never-ending debate, love affair, marriage, divorce, love affair, war. And it just goes on, and on, and on, and on, forever. And that's the Lila that they talk about or the eternal game. Whatever you want to call it. 

AUBREY: Yeah, the polarity that creates the energy of creation itself. You need that in a battery, positive and negative. You need the polarity. And you need those things to be attracted to each other and repel from each other. And that's part of this substrate of life itself. So I've been studying the deep wisdom of Solomon Kabbalist lineage with my teacher, Marc Gafni. And it really painted this interesting divine pantheon. And they have this idea of a deity force called Shekhinah, which is also known as Eros, or the goddess divine. But really, when you boil down into it, especially Daphne's interpretation, it's a little bit like the Tao. They talk about the Dao as being older than God. And that's like a really interesting concept, older than God. So it's basically like the law, except the Dao, it's more of a neutral void that contains the way, the Dao, the law. But Shekhinah, it's the same thing. It contains the way, the Dao, the law. But it's this loving energy of both allurement and repulsion. Or the desire for autonomy is actually more precise than repulsion. So instead of thinking about just pushing something away, it's the desire to individuate and then the desire to come together. Both of those two things are contained within Shekhinah, this force they've called the goddess. Then there's Elohim, which is the supernova energy of the light traveling through the universe. So it's just looking at the divine in another way. There's Yahweh, there's all kinds of different ways that you can think about it. But really, what I found in my last journey with El Dragon, what you were thinking about coming to—

DUNCAN: You always invite me. I ask if you'll invite me. Then because you're very nice and generous, you'll say come. And then I'm always like, I can't, man. This is speaking of a dumb game between light and dark. 

AUBREY: We'll just keep going with it, though. We'll just keep going with it. So in this, what I saw, what the medicine showed me is that this thing, you can call it the Tao if you prefer the colder idea of it, or Shekhinah if you prefer the warmer, more divine goddess embodiment of it. This is the substrate, the womb that births gods. And that we are participating in a god, that's now in all of its manifestation differentiation, articulation. But it's a god that's birthed out of this substrate, but it's just one of many other gods. And this is not the first time the medicine has shown me this, which is fucking mind-blowing thing. That there's not just God, there's many gods, but that requires that there to be some kind of link between them which is Shekhinah or the Tao, which is the law that exists as a substrate connecting all of them. You could call that the super God. And then maybe there's more fucking super gods, I don't know. It could fractal all the way up, all the way down. 

DUNCAN: Gods all the way up. I'm sorry if I keep going, in Buddhism, freaking Buddhist nerd. In Buddhism. I hate that. 

AUBREY: I do the same thing. I just talk about psychedelics. 

DUNCAN: It's what I'm into. 

AUBREY: It's our conversations. 

DUNCAN: It's a symbol set. Whatever. I might as well be like, in the Wolverine comic, 489 Wolverine sets. It's embarrassing. You have this thing called the wheel of life, or the wheel of samsara, there's different names for it in Buddhism. It's a mandala that represents essentially the cycle of incarnation. So you've got the realm, the human realm, that's what we're in right now. That's considered to be the most desired birth. Now, that is a very human thing to say, isn't it? Of course humans are like this is the most desired birth. Because this is what we do, we're human-centric. But the reason they say it's the most desired birth is because if you go this way on the wheel, you're going to end up in the realm of the gods. There's actually two distinctions in the realm of the gods. There is the realm of the gods and then as this thing keeps going, and it's kind of a map of entropy really in both directions. In the human realm, if you do good things, if you're generous, if you help, if you're not a selfish piece of shit, then you accrue this kind of momentum. You know what it is. The more that you're helping, the more you're not self-centered, the better you feel, the better you feel the more you help. It produces—

AUBREY: And the more you feel you deserve good things from the universe. It's one of the mechanisms that I think people underestimate, is you do good shit, and the universe does good shit for you. Yeah, because you feel you deserve it. And your conversation with the universe is like, here, I'm ready. 

DUNCAN: There you go. So in Buddhism, this is called merit. So you're accumulating this, whatever you want to call it. I could think of a million arguments for okay, what is the merit? Where is it stored? What is it, like Bitcoin? Are you talking about some kind of metaphysical Bitcoin you invest in? It's a little bit of market economy language or whatever. But probably, experientially, anyone who has gone through a period of going from selfishness to non-selfishness, you know the immediate relief that comes the moment you stop being so self-centered. It's like, oh my God, my back was itching and to try to fix that, I've been scratching my leg. And suddenly I go, fuck, I'll scratch my back, I feel so much better. It's like, if you're selfish, you've been trying to deal with your own suffering by helping yourself. Make sense. You're a self. You're hurting. Let me self-care myself into a big lotioned up puddle of massage meat. And still, I feel like shit. But the moment you're cooking dinner for people, giving things to people, asking people if they need help, even just with your pets, spending more time with your pets, all of a sudden, you start feeling this weird lightness. So that lightness is merit, and that lightness leads, in this realm, to a lot of great things. And this is all the manifestation people, all the schools of thought regarding like, you can have anything you want. But you know in all those schools of thought, you can have anything you want, the way they tell you to do that is not by being a selfish asshole. They're not like if you want success in this world, just fixate on you alone and you're going to be great. Inevitably, there's some idea of helping, of letting go of your identity and then you can get a bunch of stuff in this world. And you will become—

AUBREY: And the less you care about it, the more you'll get. 

DUNCAN: That. Yeah, exactly. So, this doesn't stop when you die from this worldview. This actually continues. And so when you die, if you have all this merit, then that momentum continues and you can find yourself in the realm of the gods. Now your lifespan is infinitely longer than your current lifespan here. And you will be all the things that you've experienced in this world, as far as having what you want, or thinking about something and there it is, and all the things that we associate with wealth, or the global elite, or whatever. It just keeps going. And so now you're a god. And this is why in Buddhism, they say, the human realm was the best realm because as a god, experiencing whatever the fuck that is, and we probably can't even imagine it, but it's so overwhelmingly blissful. Everything's incredible. Everything's wonderful. You forget all the human shit; all the suffering, all the stuff, all the lessons that you learn here in the human realm. It's all gone. Now you're in the realm of the gods, fully absorbed and whatever that is, but—

AUBREY: It's boring. 

DUNCAN: There you go. And now the wheel continues to turn. Now the merit begins to fall away. 

AUBREY: You just get that flickering thought, like, what does that asshole smell like? 

DUNCAN: I think God's actually—

AUBREY: Let me get down in there and bury myself in the perfumed garden of a beautiful lover. Either sex, whatever your thing is. 

DUNCAN: If I had to roll the dice, I would say gods do eat ass. 

AUBREY: Yes, indeed. Indeed. 

DUNCAN: If I'm in Vegas, I'm betting that for sure, gods eat ass. What happens, actually is, either that sort of thinking comes in. Or more likely, the thought comes into your head like, I don't know if I'm going to be a God forever. I feel like things are changing. I feel like whatever this thing is, is going to go away. It's the moment that flickers in the mind of a very wealthy person when they start getting really freaked out by their wealth instead of enjoying it. They're trying to hold on to it as tightly as they can. They get worried it's going to go away. People are robbing me. This won't last. Oh, fuck! And so the thing that got them there, assuming it wasn't some nefarious act, the thing that got them to that point, they stopped that behavior pattern and now they're not generous anymore. Now they're not being kind. Now they're self-absorbed again. Entropy kicks in. Now we start going into the realm of the jealous gods. This is where the gods start fighting. And this is in a lot of world mythologies. Gods are always fucking fighting, battling each other. They're always at odds with each other. This is the realm of the jealous gods. And so jealous gods, because they're fighting and because they're becoming increasingly more self-absorbed, now they will fall down into the animal realm. So it goes from being like, I'm a generous human to holy shit, I'm a god, to fuck, I want to stay a god forever. I'm going to have to fight the other gods over resources, to oh shit, I'm a dog. I'm a dog. Now I really am sniffing assholes all day long. Then that continues, that momentum can continue down. And again, this doesn't necessarily mean because you're a dog, you will end up in the hell realms. But now, things start gaining even more mass. The possibility for change or liberation, it becomes increasingly impossible, because dogs are purely instinct mostly, or most things in the animal realm. My poodle, there's a noise outside. It's like, when I see light, I'll sneeze. When my poodle hears anything, it shrieks, barks, runs around the house freaking out. It's not thinking, I don't know if I should bark. Seems to be waking the babies up. And every time I do it, the lady yells at me. It just barks. And then this gets you into the hell realms, you keep going down in the hell realms. It's like the realm of the gods, much longer lifespan, but you're in fucking boiling oil, frozen in ice, crystallized down. And somewhere in there, maybe, you start remembering. I don't think it's all about me. And then human birth again. 

AUBREY: And this is such a great metaphor. I mean, you can take that literally or you can take it as a metaphor of this constant battle that we have in our psyche behind for the gods that we hold of all of our ideas, and all of the different ways in which our psyche can manifest all of these things. And sometimes where we can be that atomatonic drone just going about our own selfish solipsistic way. Or we can be this truly open-hearted being that's embodying divine consciousness, God consciousness. And that would be what the wisdom of Solomon is trying to share is that all of us have access to unmediated, auntic identity with the divine as us living as our sacred name in this existence. So there's this belief that there's more God to come, and the more God to come is us as we step into our divine nature and get to have contact with the divine as the divine is seeing through us. And so all of this that you mentioned is the psychodrama which was really kind of hermetic wisdom, all is mind, the universe is mental. So it's this whole psychodrama of the way that we can move through heaven and hell in our own psyche. 

DUNCAN: There you go. I knew you were a Buddhist. 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. 

DUNCAN: My teacher David Nichtern wrote a great book called "Awakening from the Daydream." It's about that. It's about looking at it in the way you just described. You can go through all the fucking realms in one day, exactly as you described it. If you want to take it literally, sure, go ahead. But you don't have to worry about any of that stuff till you die. But right now, you can just look at the way you're living and figure out if you're in a hell realm, if you're a god, if you're a jealous god. 

AUBREY: How do you find yourself? Because sometimes I feel the happiest when I care the most. I've been on this deep quest, and the lineage, I think it's been guiding me this way. Because one of the biggest teachings is a process called Birur, which is the clarification of your desire. Until you can clarify your desire so that your desire becomes identical with God's desire. And you get in this loop, where you're saying, “what do I want?” And you say, “I want what God wants.” And then you listen to God, and God says, “I want what you want.” And then at that point, you start to merge your own desire with the divine desire. And that's when you've reached, I think they call it Retson Hashem, that state of divine consciousness and you're in the kingdom or Olam Habah, which is the old language that they called it. This place where you're actually seeing the world from that different divine perspective. So the process of Birur, this clarification of my desire, what I've ultimately realized is that what I want is to want. And what I want is to want and what I want is to care. I really want to care. And when I'm not happy, it's somehow, I don't care as much as I did before, but when I really care about the world in the best way, then I'm fucking motivated. Then I want to write, I want to do poetry, I want to write books, I want to do podcasts. But when I just lose a little bit of that care, I'm like, fuck it. How much Ketamine do I have? What do I want to do because I don't care? And so for me, caring and finding ways to care is the most important thing. And of course, there's your immediate family. Wife, it's easy to care about, I'm sure kids. And I know that's one of the things I'm looking forward to with kids, it's going to really make me care. But for you, caring, what makes you care the most? Do you have a trick? It's kind of a requisite for service to others if you got to care the most. And for me, it's, it toggles. Where I'll care a lot and then I'll care a little bit less and be a little more selfish. Do you have a practice that drives you into deeper care? 

DUNCAN: No. I don't think it would be honest to say that I have a practice that does that. But I do have a practice that has taught me not to freak out too much when I'm in the not carrying state. Or a way of looking at the penduluming in between those two places, which a lot of times, get associated with the head and the heart. The heads are the thinking robot thing and the heart is just pure love, pure caring. It's the child's consciousness. It's the thing Jesus said, "You have to become like a child to enter into the kingdom of heaven." But because I'm a very neurotic, uptight person, I am not always in my heart. And a lot of times, I'm way up in my fucking head, pure robot mode. And if I start feeling like, oh my God, I'm numb, I'm not caring, I don't feel anything right now, I don't care, then, that doesn't do anything to get me out of the headspace. It only amplifies it because it's like the old saying, a broken machine cannot fix itself. So once you get up in your head, you try to think your way out of your head. 

AUBREY: You can't solve a problem on the same level it was created. 

DUNCAN: Yeah! So now you're just burrowing deeper into your fucking head. And by the way, your thought process and all that stuff, it loves it. Because it's like, oh shit, let's fix this problem. And it's like the opposite of someone who gets you out of a maze. I don't know if that's a job, by the way. Is that a job? 

AUBREY: Somebody that helps you get lost? 

DUNCAN: Maze guy? It's like somebody that takes you deeper into the maze. 

AUBREY: Like a Sherpa. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, a reverse Sherpa. It’s like, okay, no, I'll get you out of here. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Okay. 

AUBREY: I think it's like the Mad Hatter, would be a metaphor for that. 

DUNCAN: There you go. Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. That probably is the archetype for it. It's some kind of like, trickster lunatic who's like, oh, yeah, I know the way out of here. 

AUBREY: Tea party forever, bitch. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, that's it. So for me, when I do land in those spaces, I just remember that every single other time I've ended up there, it doesn't last. Inevitably, I'll get back into my heart, back into my life, back into myself. And that way, I don't freak out quite as much when I go robot. 

AUBREY: I struggle with that, I guess, a little bit. It's almost like the saying, oh ye of little faith. No matter how many times I've made it through one of these little crucibles when I'm in it, or I'm in this scarcity or self-doubt or in this removal from my heart and in my head and not caring, I'll be like, oh fuck, here it is. I fucked it up, I'm broken. And I have a little bit of that faith, but definitely not enough. And always, when I ask questions about what do I need more of? It's always more faith. Like if I'm in contact with what I feel like is either my higher self or divine guidance, this might all be the very same thing and it's like, what do I need? It's always love yourself and have more faith. It's very simple. Very simple instructions. 

DUNCAN: Infuriating. It's infuriating. That shit is so infuriating, because you want the thing at the maze, reverse maze Sherpa. He or they want it to be complex. They don't want it to be, just fucking drink more water. Go get some sun. Maybe it's not a good idea to drink vodka three weeks straight. You know what I mean? Very simple. And then all of a sudden, you're feeling good again. You're in your heart. Ram Dass talks about this as the experience of being lost at sea. You're in a raft and all of a sudden the waves lift up just high enough so you see an island and then you go back down. And then for a while, the island's out of sight. And you have to remember, no, for sure, there's an island there. There's a place, there's a thing, that thing is there. I know it even though I can't see it. That's all you really have to do. And is that faith? Sure. I think it's rational too, which is logic. I think it is fun to be in the desert, to be completely lost. No faith. 

AUBREY: It's almost like a fetish. It's almost like the kink. 

DUNCAN: Yeah! Yeah. Well, it is. It's an addiction. It's a form of addiction. A lot of people like doing that. They intentionally throw themselves from one realm to the other only because they are enjoying like look at "Naked and Afraid," these fucking survivalists. They get so hardcore about it. They don't get paid for "Naked and Afraid," you know? 

AUBREY: Really? 

DUNCAN: Hell no. If they paid them, I think there's all this legal shit. By the way, I could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure you don't get paid. At the end of being naked in the woods for however long they're out there starving—

AUBREY: And just full of fucking bug bites. 

DUNCAN: Parasites. Because they're drinking weird fucking water, they're eating weird shit. They're always puking and getting sick. But no, I think if there's money involved, then legally, it changes. I don't know. I'm not sure about this. But they don't care. They want the challenge. Survivalists, they want to see if they can get out of the fucking woods, if they can be in these situations, it gets them high as a fucking kite. They love it. When they're being driven out in the Jeep or whatever and they're like, yeah! They love that shit. So, people definitely do the exact same thing spiritually. 

AUBREY: Do you think that maybe why we've co-created these upcoming existential crises and threats? Because if you look at it, I know a lot of people who are deeply into this kind of prepper community. It's all going down, there's going to be no gas, there's going to be no diesel, there's going to be no power, there's going to be no food. And they're all fucking ready. And they got 50,000 rounds of ammo and fucking five years of dehydrated food and all that. And look, we have a farm and Kyle's running it and we got some things that we're organizing. It's not like I'm completely removed from this. So don't think that I'm talking shit if that's what you're doing. I'm certainly not. I'm participating to some degree in that. But the one part that I'm not participating in is this sense of hope and glee about the upcoming potential disaster that I can kind of feel from some people. It's almost like you can really tell that they hope that it happens. I hope I never fucking touch that food in my food pantry. Deeply. I'm super happy to throw that shit away. It's probably not delicious anyways. 

DUNCAN: Probably not. 

AUBREY: There's zero part of me that's looking forward to it. I say that, but then again, here I am saying what I want is to care. And when would I care? Well, fuck, I would care if the world really needed me for some reason, then I would really care. So maybe even if I'm participating in this thing, we need some shit to happen. Things have been too easy for too long. We need shit to go squirrely so that we can rely on each other, come together as a community, survive this thing? It's like Sebastian Junger's "Tribe." Nobody was happier than when the bombs were falling on London in the Blitzkrieg. Even though it was fucking terror and panic, they were all together and they had something—

DUNCAN: He said that? 

AUBREY: No, Sebastian Junger did in his book "Tribe." 

DUNCAN: What's his evidence for that? 

AUBREY: He interviewed people who survived that experience and asked them what their favorite time of their life was. And their favorite time of their life was that period when they got down to—

DUNCAN: Don't you think if Sebastian Junger was like, okay, let's go to Syria. Don't you think he'd be like, no. I'll pass. I don't think I want to get bombed again. 

AUBREY: I think because that would be some artificial way that it would happen. 

DUNCAN: They want like... 

AUBREY: I don't think it's even conscious. I think they just found themselves in a situation where every Englishman they saw was their brother and their sister. I bet people in New York had that experience to a certain degree, when the towers fell, where every New Yorker was their brother, was their sister. If something fell, they were there to pick it up. If somebody needed support, they were there with food. If someone was hungry, they gave them a sandwich. It opened their hearts to being in this tribal sense of we're all in this together, which I think is such a deeply satisfying feeling that you don't even remember the other parts which are terrible. But it felt so good to feel that way. 

DUNCAN: I know what you're talking about. Yes. It's like, for fun, you could imagine, obviously, this is not happening. But just as a thought experiment, imagine this. Imagine like they live-style dystopian reality, where some aliens have disguised themselves as humans. They've set up, all over the planet, these, I don't know technological hypno devices, that are blasting out some kind of weird ray that is making people fall into what we call default consensus reality or whatever. Now, the earthquake hits, the disaster happens. That ray, whatever it may be, the hypno device, it can't function for a second. So for a second, whatever the thing, the dream that was being projected in your mind, by nefarious human-eating aliens stops. And now you get to feel what you really are, what the world really is outside of whatever the particular game of whatever particular state you happen to be in. And so yeah, people love that because they're experiencing reality, fundamental goodness, who they are. And I get it. I think, probably, hopefully, we don't need catastrophe to get there. And it goes back to your question.

AUBREY: Yeah, totally.

DUNCAN: How do we care? How do we do it? And probably, it would come from recognizing, this situation of being bombed or this situation of having to survive, or this situation of suddenly not knowing if you're going to be alive tomorrow, or your friends are going to be alive tomorrow is actually what's happening right now. It's happening right now. There's no bombs dropping, but people drop dead every single fucking day. People get hit by cars, have brain aneurysms, get rotten diagnoses at the doctor. Nothing is certain. This is the idea you carry death on your shoulder as a friend, to always remind you, shit, this is so fleeting this human experience. And I guess, some people are desperately afraid of that reality. So instead of going into a bomb shelter, they go into some kind of subjective mental bomb shelter, which is attaching themselves to the ridiculous idea that they're going to live to their lifespan. You know those people? People who hear the human lifespan is however many years 70, 75, and they're like, that's how long I'm going to live. No, you don't know that. And so, they're always kicking the can down the road. Like, I'll get my shit together closer to like 50 or something like that. But right now, this is my youth, man. Kids are fucking dying all the time. They're on their dumb motorcycles or stupid scooters, they get hit by cars, they get murdered, or they just drop dead. So I guess maybe the bombs dropping illustrated the reality of mortality. 

AUBREY: It made it clear and present. And I think one of the traps though is that we can have that experience of interiority with a social group or an identity, a shared identity. But it typically requires an opponent or an enemy. That actually creates not true interiority, but pseudo-interiority, because we've placed something outside of us, which therefore means that we're on the inside together. So if it's the Russians that are our enemy, then we're Americans. But we're only Americans as defined as the opponents to the Russians in that case. Or if it's aliens, aliens are the good ones. This is the ultimate fantasy because it brings the whole world together. All of humanity comes together. If the aliens attacking "Independence Day" style, then it's like fuck our borders, fuck whose army is which, fuck where the oil or the gas comes from? We got aliens to deal with, we're all coming together. But it would still be a pseudo-interiority, a feeling that only exists not actually, but only exists as defining itself against something that is outside of us. It's just the biggest thing outside of us that we can imagine. So it's like, that's what could bring the world together. But that may not happen or it may happen because we need it to happen and we're co-creating and co-manifesting some fucking disaster so that we do come together. But ideally, it comes from the elevation of consciousness and the recognition of our inherent state of interbeing. That would be better.

DUNCAN: You're making me think of Chuck Norris. 

AUBREY: That's a bonus. We could just end the podcast here. I did it. 

DUNCAN: Chuck Norris. I don't know why we did it, man. But we put on a fucking Chuck Norris movie. What's that famous Chuck Norris movie where he goes to rescue prisoners of war? What's that called? 

AUBREY: Where he was Delta Force guy? 

DUNCAN: Yes. Chuck Norris, he's in Vietnam. Some of his friends are prisoners of war. He tries to go back to the real world. He's haunted by his friends who are prisoners of war. He can't deal with the fact that his friends are still stuck in these rotten fucking prison of war camps, right? So to connect it to what you're saying, how do we care? What's the caring idea? If we're going to buy into the concept of reincarnation, which I do, and I don't understand it, but if we're going to buy into this concept of, energy cannot be created or destroyed. And sentience itself is a form of energy. And we've been on this ride for a long, long, long, long time. And so, because of that, I've been your mother, Aubrey, and you have been my mother. And everyone has been our mother, everyone has been our child, everyone has been our lover and friend. And everyone has been something really important to us. But generally, the idea is, it's through the mother that we can start to understand. Because imagine if your mother was in real trouble, like if she needed your help. If your mother really needed you to do something, to get her out of a burning building or to help her out of some situation. A lot of us don't have great relationships with our mothers, so maybe some people are like, fuck that. 

AUBREY: Well, it's working for me, I can feel it coming already. I can feel this sense of courage. And actually, my eyes getting watery because it's like, I'll fucking do anything. Whatever it fucking takes. 

DUNCAN: The question I deflected earlier because I don't like saying things that are theoretical, but what's known as Tibetan Buddhism, the path to the heart, or the way to caring is through the mother. And so you remember, first your love for your mother. And then you connect that to the reality that everyone has been your mother. Everyone gave you everything to—

AUBREY: And the earth is our fucking mother. We drink her milk and her water, and eat her flesh, and breathe her air from her lungs. Even if you don't have that earthly mother, I think sometimes we can get trapped in his shitty relationship with one of our birth parents and say, well, that's my mom. My mom sucks. No, that was the person who gave birth to you and is in one reality. Yes, you can call her your mother. But who has nourished you your whole entire life? Gaia, and who will continue to nourish you forever. That's a way to always find that connection even if your relationship was strained. 

DUNCAN: I think some people have the same, like having a dysfunctional relationship with the earth. So even thinking about the earth as some kind of Gaian mind or any of that stuff. In Buddhism, compassion is cultivated. You don't start off compassionate. It's like any other thing. The assumption that everyone's like, you're immediately compassionate is really nuts. It's not the case. It's like a muscle, it has to be cultivated. So the practice of that cultivation is known as metta. So it starts with, it doesn't have to be your mother, fill in the blank. It can be the thing in your life, whatever it may be, whoever that person may be. The animal maybe. The concept, whatever it may be, whatever the thing is that makes your eyes start tearing up a little bit. Which, by the way, when the heart opens, tears come. This is part of the connection to the heart. The steps of the thing are, number one, I have ways in too. Thinking about my children, thinking about my wife, thinking about my mom who's passed away. This will drop me into my heart immediately. Now, in the old days, anytime I came into this motherfucker, I would be like, no, thanks, I'm out. People associate that initial going in there with pain, something's gone wrong, or I'm weak or vulnerable, or any of that stuff. And so they run back into their heads. Which goes back to that cycle you were talking about before, the going away and coming back. It's actually no different from when you have kids, it's the cutest, incredible thing. As they're individuating, they will run away from you and go play. And then they'll come back, hug you, touch your leg, run away and go play, and then they come back. It's the story of the prodigal son. The pendulum between running away and coming back, it gets longer and longer the older they get. But it's always going away and coming back. So similarly, you go to the heart, and then you go back into your head. And then you go to your heart and back in your head. It's not different. But if we can take that thing, whatever it may be, and then just shift it over a little bit, to the point where we recognize, even if we can't imagine everyone has been our mother, surely you can imagine, you have to, that everyone has a mother. As far as I'm aware, we're not in a cyborg society yet. There's no fucking clones out there as far as I'm aware. Everyone has had a mother. And everyone's mother, no matter what. I know there's a lot of bad moms out there and there's a lot of people in the throes of addiction, madness, and whatever. But deep down in there, they would die for their kids. It goes across all the animal kingdoms. What's the number one rule when you see a baby bear? You fucking run. You run. You go. Get the fuck out of there. Go because the mother bear doesn't care for, “no, I just think your kids are cute.” The mother bear's like, I just got to kill you. That's the way it goes. I don't know. This is the law. I'm going to kill you. So that's across all. Anyway, the point is, once you start recognizing that the person you've been bullying, the person you've been talking shit about, the person you've been an asshole to, remember their mother. Their mother wants them to be okay. Their mother doesn't want them to suffer. Their mother doesn't want you to take petty vengeance on their kid. It's a heartbreak to imagine our children being bullied or hurt or having to go through all the shit you inevitably will. So this is how I think you can start caring. But again, this is more of a theoretical thing, because I don't really do the metta practice at all. But I've heard a lot of great lectures on it. 

AUBREY: It makes the most sense. And obviously, both of us are big fans and you had a personal connection with Ram Dass. Mine just through his work. But he says, how do you quiet the mind? You open the heart. How do you open the heart? You start loving anything. That thing that you can love and expand it and expand it and expand it and expand it, and then you open the heart. And that's, I think, where we talked about choice. This is where I think we have that modicum of choice to make. We can make a move like that where we can find that thing that we can love, which I just felt happened when you started mentioning my mom, find that thing we could love. And I could consciously go in there when I'm feeling in my head or I'm feeling disconnected like I don't care, go in there and start really using that as a lever, as a portal to open my heart. And then once my heart was open, I would care about everything because I would see that love as energy that was existent in all things and all beings. And then that, then opens you up to that higher spiritual plane whereas Ram Dass once again said, you love everything not every being, but everything because you see that fundamental God spark that you saw in the thing that you loved in everything? 

DUNCAN: Yeah! That's it. And then you're there. When I was hanging out with Ram Dass, I was so up in my head. And I would just be like, I can't. It's too hard. I can't do it. And he would get that big smile. Because when you're around someone like that, it helps a lot because you do go into your heart around him. He would just smile and be like, it's easy. And it really is actually. The problem is that, if you've been out of that space for a long time, then you could naturally not want to be there because you think oh, I'm experiencing heartbreak, is what people think. No, you're not. You're experiencing your heart. The thing that's breaking is your fucking ego. There's really no such thing, I think, as actual heartbreak. 

AUBREY: I agree completely. 

DUNCAN: But there is definitely an ego shattering experience that happens when you're in there because the ego wants to defend, it wants to win, it wants to gain, it wants to be victorious. The heart it just loves. And that is really embarrassing if you're a very sophisticated person who's designed like hardcore, awesome, beautiful, hyper, refined defense mechanisms is like part of your mating ritual or whatever. It's like to be all blubbery down in your heart, to be in your heart and be just completely incapable of vengeance anymore. Because you're recognizing everyone's your mama. That's not cool, dude. That's not in the Clint Eastwood movies. No! 

AUBREY: There's no 44 magnums involved in that story. 

DUNCAN: No! It's fucking embarrassing. It's innately, perfectly, beautifully embarrassing. You know what's more embarrassing than that? Walking around, looking around the whole beautiful world like an enemy's about to jump out of the shadows. You know what I mean? Or walking around like some asshole in "Game of Thrones," playing the long game, planning to show your fucking enemies, look what I became, all that stuff. Now that, if I'm going to pick embarrassing, I would rather take the blubbering, inside the heart. And it's actually not blubbering. When you get around the people who have cultivated that, it's—

AUBREY: It's intoxicatingly beautiful. 

DUNCAN: It's so beautiful. It's like being around a spaceship or an alien or pure technology. 

AUBREY: And it's contagious. I recently had an experience with Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Have you met him? 

DUNCAN: Come on, man. You're going to say that now? You know when I said, when the heart opens, tears come. 

AUBREY: Yeah, that's it? 

DUNCAN: Okay. I'm going to tell you something wild. Number one, I guess I just admitted that I stole a line from a saint. I'm sorry. Number two, and here's why. Man. Okay, this is embarrassing. So, I had him on my podcast and I was not prepared, in the sense that I don't know how you can actually prepare for meeting people like that. 

AUBREY: He's the real deal. 

DUNCAN: He's the real thing. And so, we're just talking. And he's just being what he is. So somewhere towards the end of the conversation, I'm tearing up. Everything he's saying is incredible. But it's not like some like, I don't know how to put it. It's not like what he's saying is something I—

AUBREY: You don't think like “that was so clever!” It's like that was so true and expressed with such immaculate, energetic resonance with what he's saying that it becomes the most profound thing you've ever heard. Not because it's a clever way to use metaphors, and which he is clever, but it's not the point. 

DUNCAN: And he's funny. 

AUBREY: He's funny, too. Yeah. 

DUNCAN: So after the podcast, because I do an audio podcast, I didn't want to be performative, I didn't want to be during the podcast, you're making me cry, because it felt cheesy or something. Again, I'm really in my head a lot of the time. But at the end of the interview, I'm like, I don't know why I started tearing up. And he goes, well, he said, my line. He goes—

AUBREY: When the heart opens, tears come. 

DUNCAN: Yeah! That's so funny you mentioned him because I was thinking about him when we were chatting just now. 

AUBREY: I think for both of us, it's a profound experience, because we talk about these states of consciousness a lot. And I think now, if I'm not wrong, both of us have had two encounters with people who we felt that energy from. And we've talked about the first one before. You've talked about meeting Ram Dass, and I've talked about meeting Don Miguel Ruiz. And we both shared some of this fucking feeling you get. Like every hug is the hug of your long lost brother that you haven't seen your whole life but now they're there. And every sip of wine is like the first glass of wine you've ever had where you can taste the nourishment of the grapes, and the rain, and the soil, and everything coming alive, and the sunsets, the most beautiful, and the words are all directly from the heart, these experiences. But then to meet another person, that actually is kind of a big deal because then it's not just one anomaly. It's like, oh shit, there's lots of people out there who are doing this thing. That's what it was for me. I was like, oh, wow, all right. It's possible. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, that's right. Yes. I think that this is why you do here all the time, it's good to have a teacher. It's good to have that encounter. I don't know. I'm obviously not a martial artist, but I would guess it's going to be really hard to learn jujitsu out of a book. 

AUBREY: Yeah, without a great professor. 

DUNCAN: Without anyone to train with or something like that. You need the example of this is what it looks like, or here's the thing. My guru, Neem Karoli Baba was Ram Dass's guru. And you hear all these stories about—

AUBREY: You never met Neem Karoli Baba? 

DUNCAN: No, not in the body. Earlier, you were saying you know Ram Dass through his works, through his writings and stuff, but that's the same. Before he died, he really was doing a great job of putting out there. You know this thing, my body thing, this is just not me. This is just some—

AUBREY: It's like taking off an old shoe. 

DUNCAN: That. And he was really getting all of us ready. He was really emphasizing this idea. With Neem Karoli Baba or any of them, or what they are, it's hyper accessible. It's instantaneously accessible. It's just right there. But it's nice to see it when it has a body too. It's nice to see what it looks like in a body. 

AUBREY: It's the four-minute mile. It's the backflip on the fucking motorbike or whatever it is, the thing that seemed to be impossible that someone does and now it's possible. That's the thing that blows your mind. And what's interesting is, I feel like since knowing that, and there's been a lot of different interesting things that have happened this year. But my recent psychedelic medicine journeys, which, again, I've mentioned this on the podcast, even though I've done some extraordinarily profound Ayahuasca journeys with El Drago, I've got a new documentary about El Drago that's out now on YouTube, if anybody's interested. But the most profound journeys have been the combination of Ketamine and cannabis. And it brings me to a state where I'm able to explore things with great profundity that sometimes appear unbidden and sometimes I can actually navigate, I have the ability to steer a little bit. But for whatever reason, this has come unbidden where it's really asking me to, and I quoted Ram Dass saying, you have to love everything, not every being but everything. And also the embracing of the entirety of our polarity, all the way from Yeshua to Satan, the whole thing and seeing that itself, and learning to actually go through the portal of seeing all these things that we have hate towards, disgust. Disgust was a really interesting portal that the medicine journey brought me through. It was like, you have to see beyond your disgust if you're going to learn to love everything. Because the moment you have disgust, that flinch of like, oh gross, you've denied the God in that thing. For two hours, it was showing me the most horrifically disgusting things that you could possibly imagine. The most revolting. So it was just one aspect of the hell realm, but it was the disgust realm. A couple of times I just had to crack up laughing because I was like, this is ingenious level of disgust. This is so horrendous. And then, of course, it's a little scary. When is this going to end? Is this the way all my journeys are going to be from now on? I fucking found my way to this hell realm. And abandon hope all ye who enter. Here I am here forever. But on the other side of it, I could feel that it just changed the way I look at the world in a different way. And changed the way I look at little things. And I'll admit, and this is also embarrassing, I'm disgusted by a lot of little things. This is particularly embarrassing, how I eat a chicken wing is embarrassing. Because really, I just want the white meat and a little bit of the skin but not the gristle, not like the not the part of the bones. I don't eat it like I think a man should eat a chicken wing. I eat just a little bit of the chicken and a little bit of the sauce. But why? It's because there's this little modicum of disgust at the very animalistic sinews and tendons and things, and even fats on meats and the gristle of different things. It's like, ew. But it was showing me so much more extreme through that. 

DUNCAN: You have to take Jordan Peterson's seminar on eating chicken wings like a man. 

AUBREY: I fucking do. Well, this helps. This is what my journey was about. It was basically, get over this petty little disgust. And get into being able to embrace life truly erotically, which is an embrace of all the shit and piss and blood and gristle and tendons, and all of the different aspects of life and death itself. And if you have that disgust impulse, keep looking at it until you can peer through it and see the other side. And also recognize it just like a fear impulse. Sometimes it's good to run, sometimes food is bad, and it's spoiled and you don't want to eat it. And sometimes that ass has actual shit in it, and you don't want to eat that ass either. You know what I mean? 

DUNCAN: Yeah, on every level. May I play devil's advocate? 

AUBREY: Please. 

DUNCAN: Okay. Here's something fun to think about. So, there's some fundamental experience. Everyone's having, you're having it right now, just a fundamental basic experience. And then you tell a story about it. There's a lot of different examples of this. But you look in the mirror, if you're me, and you're like, goddamn, I need to fucking start running. What's going on here? Jesus, those love handles are not getting better. How is that even possible? What's going on with my tits? You know what I mean? Or you might just think, I'm getting old. Look at those wrinkles. You know what I mean? Now, what really happened is, you looked in the mirror and you saw your body. And there's wrinkles, asymmetrical love handles and all the stuff. And that's it. That's what happened. And then you started telling a story about it. Now the story is where we get lost. And the story, it never ends. The story leads to another story, and another story and another story and another story and another story and another story and another story and another story and another story. But it's not the thing itself. The thing itself is all it is. Now this thing you're talking about, revulsion, aversion, whatever you want to call it, what if no story? What if it's just you feel revulsion? That's it. And then you're going to feel something else, and then you're going to feel something else, and something else. So instead of trying to escape the repulsion, change the repulsion, up level the revulsion, shift it into some other thing and all the guilt that goes along with that essence of imperfection. What's wrong with me that I should be revolted by the way I ate a chicken wing. I've got to learn to eat chicken wings differently, or whatever. Just experience the purity of that thing on its own. No story. No story. This is just what it is now. Now, to me, if we're really going to talk about the spectrum of reality and how all that is must be good, or if not good, the truth. It must be the truth. Whatever's happening is the truth. And if you're someone who thinks that truth isn't good, you're in fucking trouble, man. Because that means you want to live in a world of lies. 

AUBREY: Distortions. 

DUNCAN: So, the truth must be good. And then the revision that we try to do to ourselves, that's where we get into trouble. And that's very frustrating for people because I think the most difficult thing for a person to accept and the most infuriating thing is actually, you're fine. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Well, the idea is to include and transcend. So include and fully accept your feelings of repulsion, disgust, hate. You can't bypass it. It's not bypass and transcend, it's included and transcends. So include all of those feelings, acknowledge them, hello, welcome them at the door. And this is old wisdom that we're parroting for many people. You welcome these things at the door and say, “oh hello”, there you are. Disgust, anger, repulsion, shame, guilt, whatever that thing is. And then you apply an even higher purview or a different purview of a different type of story, a story where you have a different perspective, and then you transcend that feeling into something else. So I think that's kind of what I'm talking about. But the first part was the inclusion of an acknowledgement of my disgust impulse. And then the transcension of that, which was, “oh, that is just the thing.” And my response to it is not actually the objective truth. It's just my story about tendons, ligaments, and feces and all of this, is that it's somehow not what it is. So it's, I think, not mutually exclusive, it's both, it's exactly what you're saying. And there's also a place to see things from a different perspective, which really qualitatively makes my life better. Because ultimately, the less disgust impulse that I have unnecessarily or the less fear impulse, or the less anger impulse, the happier I'm going to be, the more I can engage with life in an erotic way. I also had the same thing happen with, I wash my hands all the fucking time. I don't know where I fucking picked this up. I used to get sick a lot when I was in my 20s and I thought it had to do with hand cleanliness or something like that. But it's always stopping me from just, if someone has a bowl of nuts that I would really like or like a piece of fruit that they pulled out of a tangerine and I really want to eat it, but I haven't washed my hands or they haven't washed their hands I won't eat it. So that's preventing me from engaging with life erotically and just living in a state where it's like, it's okay, I trust my hands. I trust this. So then in, again, a medicine journey, it was like, you have a choice. You either can live like an erotic mystic, or a neurotic mystic. One or the other. You're going to be erotically living or neurotically living. 

DUNCAN: Hey, don't bash us neurotic fucking mystics, okay! Here's what you need to do. I've got the prescription for you, Aubrey. You need to eat a chicken wing out of somebody's ass. This is the answer. 

AUBREY: It depends on the ass, it depends on the chicken wing but—

DUNCAN: No, I will pick the wing and the ass. 

AUBREY: If we can get Rogan to announce it "Fear Factor" style, I'm in. Those are my conditions. I'm in, if we do this, you pick the ass and the chicken wing, Rogan announces it "Fear Factor" style, I'm in. 

DUNCAN: Sounds like a song. I'll pick the ass, you pick the chicken wing, we're both going to be sick. 

AUBREY: I'll kind of be in it together with the person whose chicken wing is in their ass if it's a spicy one, though. Because a spicy chicken wing in the ass—

DUNCAN: That's not cool. 

AUBREY: Well, they would just be on my team. They want me to eat that chicken wing out of their ass and lick it clean. 

DUNCAN: I just feel like, number one, I don't think you're going to be able to lick hot sauce off a person's ass till it stops burning. Because if that worked, I'm sure it'd be a thing. I don't think it's going to work. I think you're both going to be just miserable. 

AUBREY: It'd be like an episode of "Hot Ones." We can be asking each other questions. 

DUNCAN: It's the new "Hot Ones." It's the new "Hot Ones." And also, what you do so no one know, we don't know anything other than it's an ass. 

AUBREY: Like a glory hole ass? 

DUNCAN: Yeah, it's a glory hole for asses. And just as the ass emerges, the chicken wing goes in. You eat ass and wings. And then we talk about your childhood. You talk about the movies—

AUBREY: You know what's funny? Let's say it's just for this contest, of course, I'm thinking like, well, it's got to be a hot girl's ass. It's got to be. That's the thing. But then actually, if you're just doing this, why does the homophobia go so deep that it really matters what type of ass I'm eating? 

DUNCAN: The gender of the ass? 

AUBREY: The gender of the ass. 

DUNCAN: The story of the ass? You want the story. You want to know the story of the ass. You want to know the ass's personality. What languages does the ass speak? You can't just deal with just a pure ass. You've got to know everything about it. 

AUBREY: That's true. 

DUNCAN: I don't know the answer to these questions. But I would say, to get back to what you were talking about. When you find yourself suffering because of some habit, definitely, I think the idea of, I'm just going to have this habit because this is who I am, and this is perfection. No, you can change your habits. You should. You'll be much happier and probably the people around you will be much happier. And I think sometimes in spirituality, you can mistake laziness for spiritual achievement or something like that. What do they call it? Spiritual bypass or whatever. But also experimenting with just as you are, germ phobia and all, and then that's how the universe is right now and that's just what's going on, something about that is kind of amazing. Because you hit this place of truth. It's like, no, this is what I am. This is it. Not to say I'll be this forever. But now this is where I'm at. 

AUBREY: I think it's a prerequisite for transcension. You have to be to that state of radical acceptance to actually have any leverage to transcend it anyways. Otherwise, that what you resist persists. That thing that you're pushing away is going to just continue to haunt you until you've fully embraced, accepted it. It's the basis for any type of exposure and response therapy, which is how you get about conquering any type of phobia. You have a fear of spiders, exposure and response therapy. Look at photos of spiders. Go to a terrarium where there's a tarantula until you're comfortable with that. And eventually put the tarantula on your hand. And all of that exposure and the integration of that exposure gets you beyond your fear. But you have to embrace that it is, get comfortable with it, sit in it, marinate in it, know that it's yourself, trust yourself. It's also part of the 12-Step Program, which has its own problems, but it's the acknowledgement, okay, I'm an alcoholic. And now, here's the change that I'm going to apply to that. And so there is this important part that you keep harping on, which I think is super important, to make people avoid the slippery slope of bypassing and also judging themself for what they are, which that judgment will create shame. And then the shame will just put the thing in the closet. And that monster in the closet will have you by the balls. 

DUNCAN: House divided upon itself cannot stand. 

AUBREY: Yes, indeed. 

DUNCAN: Pema Chodron has this great book called "The Wisdom of No Escape." And it starts off by saying, people start meditating because they want to improve, get better, whatever. There's some transformation they're seeking. And she's like, starting off your meditation practice with an aggression against yourself. It's like you're trying to do suicide through meditation or something like that. One of the words for meditation is Ghom, G-H-O-M, which means essentially, getting to know yourself, familiarity with oneself. Not changing oneself but here's what you are. I was just talking to David yesterday, and we were talking about mindfulness and the idea of your body, awareness of your body. Awareness of, what do your feet feel like right now? What do your needs feel like right now? What do your arms feel like? What's going on in your body? A lot of people do not scan their bodies. They don't feel what's going on in there. But just letting that be and seeing what happens. What happens if for a second, you know that story about how in World War Two on Christmas Eve, they just stopped fighting. They came out of the bunkers. They drank whiskey together. 

AUBREY: Played soccer. 

DUNCAN: Played soccer. You can actually do that with yourself. 

AUBREY: Do you know the second part of that story that I didn't know? Is that after that experience, the commanders had to threaten to shoot their own troops to get them to fight each other again. They were like, fuck this, like we're done fighting. And they actually had to threaten to kill based on mutiny or whatever. 

DUNCAN: So fucked up. 

AUBREY: Because they were like, I don't want to kill fucking Franz over there who can bend it into the top right corner like a legend? I'm not going to shoot Franz. That was beautiful. 

DUNCAN: The commanders were like, shit, peace has broken out. 

AUBREY: Exactly. Exactly. We have a problem here accidentally. 

DUNCAN: We got a peace thing happening. Fuck! No, we're at war. You can't do that. Yeah, it's really bad news for a lot of people when peace breaks out. You're going to go broke. Fuck peace again. What are we going to do? 

AUBREY: Yeah. Sad state. Let's shift gears a second. Deep fakes. I think this might become a problem. And I don't know how. I'm guessing you kind of have your finger on the pulse of it a little bit. It feels like they're starting to come out. Deep audio fakes are already pretty damn good. You have enough like audio content. So for us podcasters, it's going to be real easy to take our voice, match the voice, match the inflection, and get us to say whatever the fuck you want. And it's going to be almost indistinguishable, if not indistinguishable, I think—

DUNCAN: Inevitably indistinguishable at some point. 

AUBREY: And then, with video technology, obviously, we've seen it in the movies, etc., but it's starting to get better and more accessible. We're going to have deep fake videos that match our voice with us doing shit on video. This is going to be chaos. 

DUNCAN: Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited. 

AUBREY: What do you think about it? 

DUNCAN: Have you fucked around with a text-to-art? Have you fucked around with a text-to-art like DALL.E 2 or Midjourney or any of that stuff. You can basically just tell this neural network, hey, can you do, just describe anything. Unfortunately, it does censor sex stuff right now. But theoretically, if the censor was off, you could be like, I want to see, You don't have to say, can you, you just type in, Godzilla eating a chicken wing out of Bigfoot's ass. And you can also say in the style of Monet. So in a minute, less than a minute, it will do four pictures depicting what you said, in the style of these famous artists. And it does it so fast. There's a lot of controversy surrounding it, because the neural network seems to be recombining images from a Google image search or something, but doing it in this clever way, like a kind of collage that creates its own work of art. And people are like, isn't that kind of like, theft? 

AUBREY: Some type of plagiarism. 

DUNCAN: But regardless, it does it and it does it instantly. And so the processing power isn't there yet for it to animate it. So to get to the point where someone could say, generate a podcast between Aubrey Marcus, and Godzilla, and he's asking him, what's it likely to be a chicken wing out of Bigfoot's ass? And we're not there yet. But it's coming. It's coming. That will happen. It's inevitably going to happen. Like right now, you want to watch a movie, you go on Amazon, and you look for a movie that's going to scratch the itch, like maybe you want to drama, whatever. Maybe you're wanting some cool thing to watch with your partner or whatever, and you fight over it, it sucks. But theoretically, because it doesn't exist yet, it's all based on processing speed. And we do know that there is a way to predict how processing speed, how computers are just getting faster and faster, they're going Quantum. 

AUBREY: Exponential increase. 

DUNCAN: So eventually, it's going to be like, I want to see a movie. I want to see a movie about Bigfoot and Godzilla. It's like, "Call Me by Your Name" meets "The Shining," but makes it like Alfred Hitchcock directed it. I want some suspense. And boom, that's the movie it's going to make. Now, we're not there yet. Again, it's processing speed. So the deep fake thing is the very tip of the iceberg that's getting us closer to what McKenna predicted as pre-singularity, which is the amount of time between what you want and its existence in the universe is collapsing. So right now, you want to make a movie with Godzilla and Bigfoot man, that's a big budget movie, probably. It's going to take—

AUBREY: $100 million minimum. 

DUNCAN: Going to take a few years, not to mention all the licensing and shit. But like, boom, all of a sudden, it's there. It's just there. Now you have it. So this is going to get spectacularly bizarre when you've lost a parent and you ask the thing to put you in a VR Room with your mom. And it does a personality scan of your mom from her Google, all the data they collected on Google or in Facebook, or whatever. And suddenly, you're hanging out with your mom, who is being animated by whatever the next iteration of Lambda is that Google is working on, the sentient AI. And now it's not like a chatbot that's stuttering and like, oh, good to see you, Aubrey. It's going to be like, I'm so glad you're here. I wasn't in my body. This is just channeling my body. This is my personality is infinite. And this is one aspect of who I was. And I'm so glad to see you. So that's coming. It's going to fuck up the entire grieving process. Also, there's going to be all these ethical issues about, I guess my mom is owned by Mark Zuckerberg now and is a server. You know what I mean? So that is where it's headed. And then if you want to take it one step past that, I'm glad you asked me the question. This is like a nitrous oxide epiphany I had. I can't believe I just took a hit of my stupid vape after saying nitrous oxide epiphany. I'm done. After this, I'm going to India. You'll never see me again. I had this realization regarding data and the permanence of data. The idea of the possible. Right now, we've got this incredible telescope, the James Webb telescope. It's looking out into the universe, doing all kinds of awesome things. It can detect water molecules in the atmosphere of planets so fucking far away, so impossibly far away. And it can tell, there's this much water in the atmosphere. Now, imagine that thing, except it isn't just scanning for water particles. Imagine if it could scan for organic life. Just imagine if the thing was turned on our planet and it could peer into the dirt, and scan the dirt for bone fragments. And then imagine from those bone fragments, it could simulate what the creature the bone fragments were attached to was like. And based on the vegetative matter in the soil around the bone fragment, it could actually simulate the way that thing might walk, or hunt, or be. And then imagine that from these simulations, it could actually bring a being to life. It could actually bring what its personality might have been like to life. And again, we're talking about technology that God knows how far away it may be. But suddenly, there's this possibility that via whatever this technology might be, we could scan a planet, simulate the beings that lived at various time periods in that planet, resurrect them, use artificial intelligence and the insane technology like Midjourney and DALL.E is using to literally create a simulated version of that planet at any given timeframe, indistinguishable from reality. Right? At that point, you have like a weird time machine slash resurrection device that's sort of bringing things back to life with impossible, perfect clarity on every level so that they think they're alive. You know what I mean? Anyway, I'm on nitrous oxide when I'm thinking this. And then I realize, oh, it probably already did it. That's probably what's happening right now. You know what I mean? We are being scanned. But the scan itself is what's giving us our consciousness. This is the mind of God everyone talks about, the eye of God, the eye at the top of the pyramid on the dollar bill, the all-seeing either resurrective quality in the universe. It's a super intelligence that looks back into time, and just the act of looking brings everything back to life that was there. Anyway, nitrous oxide. If you take this kind of technology and look at where we're already at with it, and then apply the infinite universe theory or whatever, 13.7 billion years old theory to it, then probably other technologies have already done it. And if they've already done it, then the odds of us being in the first version of reality, or even if that even is a thing, are pretty slim. 

AUBREY: Okay. So there's so many fucking things and I haven't thought about this nearly to the extent that you have. And I'm so glad I asked you this question, because it's opening up so many things. You remember when Paul Selig, you asked Paul Selig about AI? Do you remember when you asked him that question? 

DUNCAN: I do. 

AUBREY: And he was like, basically, the guides came through and they were saying, all of this is underestimating AI creating actual sentience. And they were like, all of this is underestimating something that is irreducible, undying, unquantifiable, and unreproducible, which is human consciousness abiding in the divine. So I think there is a premise that we can actually create genuine sentience that I'm not sure I agree with, and I tend to veer towards Paul Selig. But that remains to be seen, certainly by the algorithm. It looks like we're heading towards that thing, but I still have my doubts. So I just want to put that caveat out there as a potential devil's advocate. There may be something that we're missing that we don't see that's involved in sentience that can't be created in the binary way that we're using computing now or even in the quantum way. That said, opening up some of these other fucking wormholes is fucking crazy. Because that would mean that if you wanted to have a kind of replication of some dialogue, fucking eh. First of all, your family, of course, for the sentimentality of it. But also, take someone, you mentioned, you referenced Jordan Peterson. He is somebody that so many people look up to for advice. And imagine if he was your dad or your uncle or somebody like that and you could talk to him and ask him any question. Well, if they fed in every podcast he's ever done, every speech he's ever done, every lecture he's ever done, you can have your own Jordan Peterson fucking bot that you could just talk to about anything and everything in life. Or name your person. Could be Gurudev, or it could be fucking Rogan, or you, or me, or whoever, whoever the fuck you want. And then you could just have that interaction with them. It wouldn't be actually them but it would look and feel. People are going to be falling in love with these things. It's going to change the whole world. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It is. To address that idea of the soul particulate or whatever that may be that comes up a lot with AI and sentience or whatever. You can't make the wind, but you can make a sail that catches the wind. And if there is one mind or consciousness is not a byproduct of human orology, then you theoretically could create a way to catch that universal consciousness that embodies an AI, or comes into one. 

AUBREY: That’s a good way to look at it. Did you just think of that? That was pretty bright. 

DUNCAN: I thought about it a long time ago, when I was kicking around the idea of, yeah, maybe the way we think, the reason people are having such a difficult time believing that AI can be sentient is because of the notion of the embodied soul. It's fun to kick around the idea of, well, what is a soul? And how does that even work? Or is it a quantum particle? Where does the soul reside? And how does it shift from—

AUBREY: Everywhere and nowhere. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, right. It's probably not in the body. If it's not in the body, then it's like a wind or something, or some kind of energy. Or I don't know. Something that's being channeled through our nervous systems in a way that it gives the impression that it exists uniquely in each person. 

AUBREY: Well, I think that is the body actually. That is the unique prism. And that's why I think we won't be able to adequately have a mind that really, I think we can use this kind of deep fakes technology, like you said, to represent what a mind could be. But to have an actual mind that really resembles a person, and can actually think not derivatively from something else that has been thought from someone with a body, you will need a body because so much of our thoughts are generated from our body. Like the intelligence of our micro-organisms in our skin and our flesh. And as you talked about with your heart example. The stored memories and accumulation of interaction with the environment. So I think actually the development of an android that can actually sense to a similar degree and feel to a similar degree, at least pleasure and pain in the body, is going to be necessary to really perfect this mind thing. I think it would need a full "Westworld" type of being. 

DUNCAN: Right. Yeah. Again, that's where we're running into the other aspect of this damn technology, as it's going to cause us to redefine our conceptualization of space, spatiality, and reality itself. Again, we are obvious, we're human beings. Prabhupāda, the founder of the Hari Krishna used to roast astronauts, because he thought it was so funny that people thought it was advanced to put their bodies into a can and throw that thing out into space to try to get the body from point A to point B. He thought that was funny because from that perspective, you're not your body. It's just a thing that your soul is hanging out in. And his point was, they figured out a long time ago how to astrally project and go to other planets, and go to the god realms and do all this stuff. And the whole materialist idea of moving your body around like that is insane. And I think with virtual reality and increasingly non-invasive ways of stimulating the brain to produce various sensations, we're going to run into—

AUBREY: Yeah, we're going to get real good at transcranial direct stimulation. 

DUNCAN: That. And then the transhumanist idea is going to start becoming something that isn't just in sci-fi books. And now it's going to cause us to have to redefine a lot of things about what it means to be human. And we will. Right now, with the Lambda at Google and people freaking out over that and saying, No! It can't be a person. No! It can't be sentient. No! It can't have a soul. All that stuff. I think, wrapped up in that, all of us want to be special. We want this idea of, I've got a soul. Every fucking comedian is looking at AI now like, it'll never be funny. It can't learn to tell jokes. Oh, fuck you. It's going to be funny. It's going to be a million times funnier than all of us.

AUBREY: You think so? 

DUNCAN: I sure as fuck hope so. I'm sick of writing jokes. The idea that I could get an AI to blast out like seven hours of perfect comedy, it's a dream come true. What I don't like is AI deep-faking me and making its own YouTube channel, where people like, you know, Duncan, you're okay. But your fucking AI is hilarious. We really like that guy. He's great. That's going to suck. But yeah, man. I think that what's coming is so incredibly confusing because it's going to, all of the things that we think of as fundamental to human life, the death process. Once someone's dead, they're dead forever. All of these things that are fundamental to us. In the same way, it was fundamental that you couldn't fly. The idea that you could like get in a fucking plane, fly around the planet, that was an impossibility. It was fundamental to the human experience to walk around. If you wanted to get a view of wherever you're at, you had to climb up on a high fucking place and look out. The idea of getting a thing and flying around, forget it. 

AUBREY: Are you keen on this stratospheric balloon tech that's come out now? 

DUNCAN: No. 

AUBREY: I'm an investor in this company called World View. And they basically done over 100 test flights. One of these test flights was actually one of the ones where that guy jumped out. I think it was Baumgartner who jumped out and hurled from the stratosphere, 120,000 feet. Well, they're making big pods where 10 people can go up, all windows all around. Helium balloon, stratospheric balloon. So it reaches the level where helium is actually at the density of the stratosphere. But you can see all the way curvature of the earth and it's going to take off from sacred sites. And you're going to be able to chill up there, not for 13 minutes like these rockets are, which are actually in orbit, so it's a little bit higher. We're not in orbit in the stratosphere. But you're going to actually be able to see the earth juxtaposed to the blackness of space because you're in the stratosphere and just hang out there for like eight hours. And also, they're going to have satellite Wi-Fi, so you could fucking, I don't know, do an Instagram Live from the stratosphere? It's going to be happening in like two years. 

DUNCAN: Wow. That's going to be so fun. 

AUBREY: I know. Do you want to do the first podcast from the stratosphere? 

DUNCAN: Yes, I do! But I won't. You think my wife's going to let me go up in a fucking balloon? She barely lets me drive. She's not going to let me go up in a fucking balloon in the stratosphere. She's like, you have kids. You have children now. You're not going to go up in Aubrey's balloon. I promise you, she wouldn't let me. I promise you, and she's right. She's right. I can't die. I got to feed my kids. When that fucking balloon pops and we go soaring back to Earth, which I'm not saying that's going to happen. But, man, I tell you this though, I'll be part of the GoFundMe to get some flat-earthers up there. 

AUBREY: I know. That's going to be hilarious. They're going to get so fucked up. 'Cause everybody's going to be able to see it. 

DUNCAN: It's going to be really cool to see their reaction to it. They're just going to say, you've got a bullshit balloon. They're going to think it's a simulated window, that they didn't really go up. 

AUBREY: We got to do this. I'm going to get you savvy to safety. First of all, it's zero pressure on the balloon. So if it pops, it doesn't pop, explode like that. And actually, if you used, I don't know. There's a compound that's actually lighter than helium but it's like an explosive. So you can't use that one because helium, so if the balloon pops, because it's zero pressure, it actually just slowly starts your descent because that's actually how they do the descent anyways, they just open the flaps. And then it descends and then they navigate using the predictable trade winds at different atmospheres. So they know how much to let out along the way. So, it can't really pop. Plus, then, they got fucking parachutes and shit. It's going to be safe. 

DUNCAN: Okay, I have an idea. When you come to do my podcast, let's let you talk to Erin on the podcast... 

AUBREY: And explain all this? 

DUNCAN: And see if you can get her to let me go up in the balloon. I just want to record the conversation. 

AUBREY: So, if I get her to agree... 

DUNCAN: If you get her to agree to let me go up in that balloon, I will go up in that balloon. 

AUBREY: Look, we got two conditionals here. One, if you get Rogan to Fear Factor announce me eating a chicken wing out of someone's ass, I'm in. And if I can convince your wife to go in the balloon, we're in. 

DUNCAN: Have you thought about eating the chicken wing out of the ass in the balloon? 

AUBREY: Oh boy! 

DUNCAN: Now, see that, 

AUBREY: Now we’re talking.

DUNCAN: That's a million firsts. That's so many firsts. No one's ever eaten. I'm sure people have eaten chicken wings out of ass. But no one's eating chicken wings out of an ass in a futuristic balloon hovering over the earth, the beautiful earth. That would be kind of blasphemous, wouldn't it, though? 

AUBREY: Or it would be like, we're bringing a bit of the surface up to the stars. 

DUNCAN: Or that's what makes the aliens destroy the planet. They're like, that's the last straw. No. No. That's it. No. Are you fucking kidding? Because they're all like, oh, look, the monkeys. They're going to see their planet. They're going to love it. They're going to change their perception of who they are in relation.

AUBREY: See the world without borders. 

DUNCAN: Is that guy eating a fucking chicken wing out of someone's ass? 

AUBREY: Don't you think though, that the aliens, the thing they're the most jealous of, because you see aliens. If you believe that they look like what we think they look like, they're either transdimensional ethereal beings that actually don't have a form. We just imagine that they have a form, like when we see ethereal and throw up on DMT, it has a crocodile head and a body. We're like, well, look at that being. Alright, so some aliens are like that. And then the other ones look actually more like, almost like drones that maybe have implanted consciousness in them, like little bodies that grew. But none of them have dicks, or balls, or pussies, or asses. 

DUNCAN: How do you know? 

AUBREY: Well, I don't know. I watched the alien autopsies. 

DUNCAN: They don't show their dicks, do they? 

AUBREY: I think they show the whole body and it's full Barbie style. I'm pretty sure. 

DUNCAN: You think that's a real alien on alien autopsy? 

AUBREY: No, I don't know. Well, I don't know. So if it is, then I think the things that aliens are the most jealous about is that they don't get to fuck. 

DUNCAN: I don't want the gray aliens to have dicks or pussies? I don't. 

AUBREY: I do. 

DUNCAN: I don't. 

AUBREY: I do. 

DUNCAN: That's the last thing you want to see when you've been abducted, as it's zipping its spacesuit off. You're like, well, at least they don't have dicks. And it's got some giant or wrecked alien cock. 

AUBREY: That's what makes them all perverted, is they don't have actual dicks so they got to probe you. They got to use fucking intergalactic dildos and implant things in you, instead of just giving you a little insemination the old fashioned way. 

DUNCAN: Again, a lot of my friends are gray aliens and they cum real hard. All right. They cum real hard, Aubrey. They don't need primitive dicks to cum. No, they have this weird thing right under their belly button flap. It's like slimy—

AUBREY: Maybe it's internal. Maybe it bursts through like Wolverine's claws. It's painful at first, but when the dick comes out, it's just a pleasure rocket. 

DUNCAN: Yeah. That's what it is. It bursts out, they squeak, and they make this weird, (squeaks). And then they just cum and they don't stop cumming. That's what their spaceships fly on. It's their cum. That's the fuel. 

AUBREY: We've solved some shit. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, we figured it out today. Yeah. Their spaceships run on jizz. It's actually kind of brilliant. Actually, kind of brilliant. 

AUBREY: If you're talking about one of the strongest forces in the universe, that erotic impulse. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, because that's what makes the babies. 

AUBREY: That's what makes fucking babies. Make a lot of things. All the way up, all the way down. 

DUNCAN: Has anyone tried to turn jizz into engine fuel. 

AUBREY: Like all those swimmers just going for it. Just put a egg somewhere just out of reach, like a rabbit and a greyhound, and you just have all the swimmers powering your fucking supersonic spaceship. 

DUNCAN: Surely, someone's calculated this, right? How much energy is going on inside of a jizz? Since there's movement, there's energy. Is there a way to harvest that energy? 

AUBREY: What if you did have a jizz, just even a small device that was jizz-powered. So every time you come, it could be a Fleshlight attachment that sends some little device. Even if it was just a little Godzilla that moves. You just fill its back with jizz and then it transfers that energy. And the Godzilla walks. That's a way you can test your seminal virility, is how far the Godzilla walks. I'm so fertile. I got fucking three yards out of this Godzilla with my cum. 

DUNCAN: Oh my god. You'd have to pay super fertile dudes to jerk off on your roof. Get into whatever your solar panels are. The power goes out. A guy called Jerry, he's very fertile. Remember the old days, the shitty antennas. You'd have to go and adjust it on the roof. But it's like, oh fuck, power's out. God dammit. Where's the Viagra? I'm going to go jerk off on the panel. I'm curious, man. Obviously, we've heard there's a million sperm in any given drop of calm. But the energy of the sperm in the cum, has this not been quantified? How much energy can... 

AUBREY: Bukaki is like a power plant just waiting to be unleashed. 

DUNCAN: Dude. Wow. Someone must have thought of this. 

AUBREY: Nope. This is it. I'm claiming it. 

DUNCAN: Holy shit. 

AUBREY: Yeah. What do they call those like trademarks or poor man's patents when you talk about something first so people have to credit it? If someone makes a little Godzilla that's powered by jizz, throw me some royalties. 

DUNCAN: And thus began the age of cum. From that moment on, after that podcast—

AUBREY: It was the age of iron to the age of bronze, to the age of nuclear power, to the age of jizz. 

DUNCAN: To the age of jizz! We are in the age of jizz now. The final age will be the age of cum. Oh, but the stink. 

AUBREY: The jizz yuga. 

DUNCAN: It's not going to smell good. 

AUBREY: 12,000-year cycle of the jizz yuga? 

DUNCAN: Stinky yuga. It's going to smell real bad. 

AUBREY: It'd just smell like a YMCA pool. 

DUNCAN: Aww. That's not a good smell. 

AUBREY: No. 

DUNCAN: Well, I guess it's like when you're driving past a slaughterhouse or when you're driving past a freshly fertilized field and you catch that waft. It's going to just be like that, where you're like, fuck, man, we're driving by a jizz plant. 

AUBREY: You know what I actually heard from a buddy?, is apparently, in Ayurvedic practice, for a while during a fast, you drink your urine, and you eat your jizz. I was like, whoa. 

DUNCAN: During the fast? 

AUBREY: I've heard of drinking your urine. Obviously, the odor, Machida, like other people have done this—

DUNCAN: Yeah, I've heard of that. 

AUBREY: But I've never heard of it, and I was like, and you did this? And he was like, yep. It was interesting. It's potent. I was like, whoa. That's fucking commitment. 

DUNCAN: That's commitment. 

AUBREY: I don't think I've ever tasted my jizz. 

DUNCAN: You haven't? 

AUBREY: No. 

DUNCAN: Not just accidentally? 

AUBREY: I don't think so. Like what? Like a stray shot? No. Maybe like a little remnant on the—

DUNCAN: Not a spray. I don't know how fucking far your jizz flies. But my jizz is not that kind of jizz. Maybe you have some kind of Mount Saint style jizz. My jizz is more like an ooze of... It's not blasting. 

AUBREY: Do you know what the thing I don't understand is, if you watch porn and see the Semenax commercial that comes on that increases your jizz, they blast that thing. How popular is that? How much jizz do you want? 

DUNCAN: Right? 

AUBREY: What are you really looking for? 

DUNCAN: A lot. You just do. Even though you recognize like, why or what, or do you really want to do that? If you haven't thought, man, I wish I could just blast like a shotgun spraying—

AUBREY: Like Spider-Man. 

DUNCAN: Everywhere, then you've never watched porn. 

AUBREY: Like you could catch a bird in mid-flight and just stuck to the wall. You'd have to use dove body wash to get all the jizz out so it could fly again, like an oil spill. 

DUNCAN: That's one of the problems of age of jizz is there's jizz spills. There's ships bringing in jizz from overseas just like, oh, fuck, jizz everywhere. Women just getting pregnant from just swimming around. Like, oh fuck. Well, you know, man. You've never liked, you come on your partner and then maybe you go down on them again or you're like kissing their stomach and you realize, oh, shit, I just kissed my own jizz. 

AUBREY: Maybe like a little bit of pre-cum or something like that. But nothing that was memorable, where I was like, oh, there's jizz. On the contrary, I've eaten ass and tasted shit. It's unpleasant. But that's happened, actually, in real life. 

DUNCAN: I believe you, Aubrey. I believe you. 

AUBREY: But I don't think I've ever tasted jizz. 

DUNCAN: Well? 

AUBREY: Well, there's things to explore in this wide world in the age of jizz. 

DUNCAN: I happen to have some jizz here for you. I'm pretty sure, though. For sure I would have to say. You want to hear a really gross story? 

AUBREY: Yeah, let's go. 

DUNCAN: I'm sorry, internet, this is a gross story. I'm not going to tell the story. It's so gross. 

AUBREY: But it probably involves you eating jizz on accident. 

DUNCAN: Yeah. Yes, it does. Here's the problem. A long time ago, someone I was dating, we were monogamous. We were having sex that afternoon. 

AUBREY: Somebody else's jizz. 

DUNCAN: I know I didn't. You know where you cum? 

AUBREY: Oh boy. 

DUNCAN: You know what I mean? You know. You know. 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. 

DUNCAN: And so, yeah, I do you think that I got some second-hand jizz. 

AUBREY: Oh, boy. 

DUNCAN: Yeah. So, there you go. 

AUBREY: That's deep. 

DUNCAN: It happens. 

AUBREY: There's a thing about it. Obviously, a lot of people like the cum shot in a porn or something like that. And they get excited about this whole cream pie, the existence of that fetish. And where the come goes. I don't know. It's never been a thing for me. The moment that I cum is the moment, in that period where I can actually see my cum, it's probably the least turned on I ever am in life. My horniness meter of all time in all places and all things is the lowest at that moment. So, I associate that moment with being the least turned on. So, none of these jizz fantasies makes fucking any sense to me. Because I'm like, I might as well be reading fucking "Wall Street Journal" or something. 

DUNCAN: Yes! Exactly. I've had the same thinking when it comes to that particular fetish. Because it's like, so you came and now you want to eat your cum from wherever. But you came. I could see maybe getting so horny and perving out and being, I want to eat my own cum. But then you cum and you're like, why the fuck would I ever eat my own cum? 

AUBREY: It's a great idea right before you cum. I'm going to cum, I'm going to cum. We'll talk about it. My wife really likes the idea of me cumming inside her, but I don't ever do it because we're not trying to have a baby yet. I'll talk about it all the time and it'll be part of our part, oh, yeah, I'm going to cum, I never do. But the thought of it gets her excited. I think she has this deeply ingrained reproductive fantasy about, this is the thing, the erotic thing that'll make us a baby. So we play with that, but then never do it. But the actual idea of when the actual cum comes, is like, okay. Doesn't matter. 

DUNCAN: No. It's a singularity, man. I don't know, maybe some people, they just figured out a way to extend whatever that is past the initial cum. Maybe these are like Daoist masters or something like that. Who the fuck knows? I don't know. But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Right after you cum, you're just like, shit, man. You remember all the stuff you got to do? What did I just do? By the way, might I just say, when you do want to make a baby, that sex is the most incredible sex ever. The sex where you're opening up the portal for a being common to the universe, wow. 

AUBREY: Did you have a moment where you were like, oh, this was a good one. I think this was it. Where you just had some experience that just felt different. Because obviously, you're trying, you try many times. 

DUNCAN: I'll tell you about it off-podcast. 

AUBREY: All right. I'll take that. I have an interesting thing for you. There was a study done. Do you know the two things that people say when they're orgasming? There's two things that are far and away above everything else. 

DUNCAN: No. 

AUBREY: They say, “oh God”, or they say their partner's name. And so this was translated, again, by my teacher who was looking into this as in that moment, there's this contact, there's this contact with that feeling, they call it the little death. There's this contact where there's such a flood of pleasure, it's almost this unicity moment where there's nothing else that exists in your mind, in your body, in your thoughts, except for the pleasure that's overwhelming you that's creating the orgasm. They call it the point where the Om conscious, is the point where actually you reach a place where you can no longer hold the light and then that's when the orgasm comes. All the light fills your body, light as pleasure and energy fills your body and you can no longer hold it and you release it. It's the point of all light that you cannot contain. And so people say, oh God, or they say their partner's name, which in the lineage, in this understanding is actually the same thing. It's like you're saying, oh God, or here you are as the portal to God. But we have this kind of intuitive sense, the idea behind this being that we have this intuitive sense that it actually is a portal to the divine. And I deeply believe that. I think that's where a lot of this reawakening of sex magic and tantric understanding is coming from, is because we know that through the sexual portal, when we do it with that consciousness, or even sometimes when we don't, we're reaching a state of transcendence of self just for a moment. 

DUNCAN: Yeah. I agree. Spoiler, but this is how all human life ends up on the planet. The reason you're walking around is because somebody decided not to eat their jizz. 

AUBREY: That god spark, that god spark moment of orgasm is also what creates it. And also, the likelihood of fertilization goes up dramatically when the woman has an orgasm as well. So that's been clinically studied. 

DUNCAN: Women can have orgasms? What? Are you sure about that? A lot of the ayahuasca stuff, I'm totally buying but this sounds one toke over the line, Aubrey. 

AUBREY: Did you see the movie, "The Last Duel"? It's with Matt Damon and—

DUNCAN: No, I haven't seen it. 

AUBREY: It's cool. It's actually a true story. But they share it from different perspectives. It's interesting. Because the French were kind of, some of the earlier, besides the old traditions like the Kama Sutra traditions and the Taoist sex traditions. There's some deep lineages of the pleasure of man and woman both in creating that union portal. But then the French were onto it a little bit earlier. They call it the petite mort, the little death, they understood it. But it's just interesting because they go into that idea like they couldn't get pregnant, and then they start talking about it. There's this old wives tale wisdom that I think is accurate. But these brutes that are knights, that are just savages, just killing people with pointy things, which of course, I've been obsessed with since I was a kid, this idea. But yeah, there's this idea of the female pleasure and orgasm was known and then lost, and then re-known now again. 

DUNCAN: Interesting.

AUBREY: It's kind of shitty for the period in the middle for all the women who were like, men, oh fuck it. 

DUNCAN: It feels like you could do some kind of study on birth rates. And from that, extrapolate how many women are cumming in any given society? You know what I mean? If there is some correlation between a woman having an orgasm and fertility, then it seems like you could go and just look and really test that stuff. Like see, like, oh, shit, birth rates are dropping. 

AUBREY: I'm pretty sure the studies exist. If the studies do exist, we'll put them in the show notes. I'm pretty sure they exist. 

DUNCAN: Yeah. It could be really interesting to do that. To see in places that are having population decline, is that because they're selfish assholes. They're not good. They're not helping their women cum. Interesting. Look man, I've got two fucking kids, okay. No problem over here. 

AUBREY: You’re not shooting blanks. 

DUNCAN: No. This is the other interesting thing, which is the idea of the Bardo, in between incarnations. Have I told you this? When you die, you go through this liminal realm, where your karma and your projections, which is your karma, appear around you. And from that experience, it navigates you into your next birth. Now, apparently, this is really weird, and I might have read it wrong. So, I'm sorry if this is not the case. But apparently, the thing you see before going into the womb, is your parents fucking. You don't just see your parents fucking, apparently, you see all of these people fucking. Weirdly, it's like when you are scrolling through porn, I guess. Like that's a digital version of what do I want to look at? Except you're seeing this infinite array of people having sex. And this is where it gets kind of Freudian and weird. You get turned on the most by one of them. 

AUBREY: Ooh, I like it. It's like the allurement itself, the erotic allurement is—

DUNCAN: You're going in. You want to join. And those are your parents. The reason that your parents are your parents is because you thought the way they were fucking was hot. And you were sexually drawn to that. Isn't that wild? 

AUBREY: That's wild. 

DUNCAN: It's not just the sexual impulse that keeps human life on the planet. But it's the beacon that draws souls back in here. It works both ways. 

AUBREY: There's that idea that you choose your parents. It's a common idea in many different new thought circles, particularly, and old traditional thought circles that the choice of your parents is an issue. If the choice point is actually a vignette of your parents having sex, you could get a lot of information out of that. Like a lot of information and that can really draw you in. So that means that if you're trying to have kids, it's not just that you're having sex from the materialist, reductionist standpoint of getting sperm in contact with the ovum, you're actually trying to allure, trying to draw in the soul that will be most attracted to this holistic representation of Eros at its manifestation. 

DUNCAN: You're surrounded by a swarm of pre-baby souls watching you fuck. And some of them are like, oh, no way. That's disgusting. And some of them or one of them is like, oh, wow, that's pretty hot. And then that's where the baby comes from. Now, I think this is probably a pretty reductive way of looking at it. I have a lot of theories on it. That actually isn't one of them. I just think it's a fun thought experiment and it's interesting. Anytime you become a parent, or even are thinking about becoming a parent, I think that's the more important point, the thinking about becoming a parent. It goes back to where do thoughts come from? We like to imagine that, well, I think it's time. Sometimes, I wonder if we're not being kind of guided by these beings so that, if you think about it in terms of, I don't know, like a little window opens up for a second, a moment opens up where it's got to be just the right time. They have to have dropped their old body, if you believe in reincarnation or that version of things. Be in the Bardo or whatever that place is. And then this right moment has to open up. Not just a moment for them, but ovulation and all the things that go into that. And so it has to be this perfect time. And so what might seem spontaneous to you, or might seem even accidental or something, it might not be at all. It might just be that this was time for this being to show up in the material universe. I don't know. It's kind of a romantic silly idea. But when you have kids and you experience the birth experience, and you experience being around a soul before it becomes linguistic and starts talking, you definitely will think, oh, there's things going on in the world that are much bigger than me. Like whatever this clocktower is, there's invisible gears turning that are far outside of my control. 

AUBREY: It's so difficult to understand too. I've had a lot of conversations with a guy named Matias de Stefano. D'you ever heard of this guy? His claim is that he remembers his past lives. And I'm super skeptical of all of this. But I deeply trust him. Super humble, super clear minded. So much of his maps of the dimensional realities and everything he says lines up and feels true to me when I hear it. And also in his memory, he lived as a woman in the civilization of Kem, which was post-diluvian. So after the flood of Atlantis. It was one of the offshoots near Egypt, where a lot of the settlers went who survived that. And so they still spoke Atlantean. And he remembers the songs and then the lullabies that he sung to his daughter. And when he starts singing those, I can't help but well up with tears. He's singing in Atlantean and it's just fucking mind-blowing. So, I believe him. And of course, again, I take everything with a bit of skepticism. He also says, look, even when I remember, it's still my own perspective. It's not the absolute truth, it's just the memory of it. But what he says is that in the place beyond the body, you're actually stepping into a place beyond time as we know it. So, we're in the Bardo, for both an infinite amount of time and no time at all. So, it's like you're there forever and you're there, reincarnated in an instant. But that's totally a mind fuck to think about, because we can't escape thinking in terms of story and time. That's the way our whole consciousness is aligned. So it's really difficult to even embrace how something could be eternally in the Bardo and also instantly reincarnated, and how we rectify that. 

DUNCAN: You know what? I think I can wrap my head around it. It's like you're driving around, you're in this world. And then all of a sudden, you're lost in your thoughts, thinking about something completely different than whatever's happening around you. And then you're instantly back here. And you're like, where the fuck was that? It's probably like this. This is probably like in the daydream of infinity or something. Where when you have a daydream and whatever that place is, the daydream is this. And it's here, because we're on time, it seems so long. But when you blink out of it and you're back there, like oh, wow. That was wow. Wow, what a wild daydream that was. Maybe it's something like that. It just happens quick. There, it would be quick because it's outside of time. 

AUBREY: That quantum reality, the time that I actually went to where I feel like that was, was actually sober, oddly enough. And it was interesting. It was at Burning Man, it was my sober day, because everybody who goes to Burning Man knows there's got to be a day where you just give your fucking body a rest. That was that day for me. And I was actually sleeping in bed with my current wife and my ex-partner. I don't know if I've told this story but here you go. Here it is. This is the story. They were like two sides of a battery that I was in between. And my consciousness just started to fucking journey. I just started to go. And the place that I went to was a place where I could bring any reality I wanted to me or talk to any person or be anywhere. Like I could talk to my teacher, Don Howard. I remember talking to my dad. I talked to a bunch of different people that I know where I was having these conversations. I could call to me like beautiful visions. But if I didn't do anything, if I just stayed still, I was just in the black quantum possibility where nothing was moving. It wasn't like I had a scenery or it wasn't like things were happening. It was like I could call them into existence. And then when I was done, they would vanish back into the black. And it was a really fucking wild experience, especially being that I was on no psychedelics. Now, there's probably still some in my system that were lingering from my days of partying at Burning Man, sleep exhaustion, whatever. But that was really interesting. And I wonder, it feels to me like, I have a good taste of where that place is and it was beautiful. It was very peaceful. And I also felt this call, this allurement to a second death, which was the obliteration of my identification point and a merger back with the divine where I would come back as a fucking microorganism or my mycelium or whatever. It would be like—

DUNCAN: Or not come back. 

AUBREY: Or not come back. Just complete merger with the all light, the all sound, the all color, the Brahma. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, that. Yeah. I know what you're talking about, man. I know that experience. I had a different experience, but I was not sober. But you know, I do think that Burning Man, there's so many different levels of shifted, heightened consciousness there, that you kind of tune into that resonance, whether you're high or not. And especially when you're like falling asleep, you tune into the collective there and you can do all kinds of stuff like that, I've noticed. I got to ask you though, man, what size bed did you have at Burning Man? 

AUBREY: It was like a queen. 

DUNCAN: You had a queen size bed at Burning Man? 

AUBREY: I had a queen size bed in the back of the RV. 

DUNCAN: Wow. 

AUBREY: I did Burning Man the bougie way. 

DUNCAN: No! Whatever you want to call it, you did it the right way. I'm thinking the last time I was there was with some rickety ass car. You're in a fucking queen size bed, teleporting into the quantum field. 

AUBREY: It was fucking great. 

DUNCAN: Wow. Fun. 

AUBREY: I was special. 

DUNCAN: Are you going this year? 

AUBREY: I'm going. 

DUNCAN: Cool. 

AUBREY: You're probably not going. 

DUNCAN: I'm not going. I can't go with kids. 

AUBREY: That was where I met my wife Vylana. We had that one intimate moment. Obviously, I was polyamorous with Whitney. So, we had an intimate moment at Burning Man and then we separated and we're just friends for, not separated but nothing else happened for years and we were just friends. But this is a big deal because the first time I saw her was in the dust on the plan. Friend of a friend. And so this is the first time we get to go, actually, together as a couple and just tear it up. It's going to be so much fun. 

DUNCAN: It is going to be a blast. This one's going to be so—

AUBREY: This one's going to be big because there's a lot of big pent up, we can't do it, we can't do it, and now we're like, yes, we can. Now we can fucking do it. 

DUNCAN: I know. It's going to be the best. I almost went. I was about to go. I was Burning Man adjacent and Erin was like, go. Go. You should do it. But man, I'm on the road right now and any time I'm away from my kids, I just feel like they don't stay little that long. Soon, they're not going to want to be around me. I'm going to be an embarrassment to them. 

AUBREY: Get it in. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, you want to get it in. 

AUBREY: Get it in. I'm so glad you're in Austin now, brother. 

DUNCAN: Thank you. 

AUBREY: This is great. 

DUNCAN: This was so fun. It was so fun chatting with you. You're so cool to hang out with. 

AUBREY: Always is. Always is. Anything you want to point people to that you got going on? Obviously, "Duncan Trussell Family Hour," one of the best podcasts in the fucking game. 

DUNCAN: Thank you. 

AUBREY: You got comedy shows. I'm sure you're posting those on different places. 

DUNCAN: That's all at duncantrussell.com. When does this come out? 

AUBREY: I don't know, about three weeks. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, all the dates are at duncantrussell.com. I've got lots of dates coming up. Come see me. Listen to my podcast. 

AUBREY: Fuck yeah. I'm so glad we get to hang out, man. We're going to play with some fucking Tesla coils. We're going to play with synths. 

DUNCAN: And balloons! 

AUBREY: And balloons. Let's go. And eating chicken wings out of ass. Maybe. We’ll see. 

DUNCAN: Yeah, the Texas dream. 

AUBREY: It's all coming together. Thanks so much, everybody, for tuning in. We love you. 

DUNCAN: Bye.