Duncan Horst discusses his work with Fifth Wall Productions, an interactive theater company aimed at breaking the distinction between actor and audience to foster a sense of community and combat nihilism. He explained the concept of the "fifth wall," which involves audience members actively participating in performances. Horst also delved into the importance of neuro convergence, integrating neurodiverse individuals into a unified framework, and emphasized the role of sexual practices and financial management in personal growth. He highlighted the need for trust and shared frameworks to create meaningful connections and enhance cognitive and creative capacities.

Transcript:

Adam Lamb 0:02

Welcome Duncan,

Duncan Horst 0:05

thank you, Adam.

Adam Lamb 0:07

I've followed your work for some time through our Facebook connection. I just spent the last half hour listening to your album that came out in late last year, and I have so much curiosity about you as a person. I will start by asking, What are you up to now? What lights you up in your your work in the world?

Duncan Horst 0:40

Well, there are a couple of different things that feel really germane to this conversation. They're all ultimately connected. It's kind of like a higher IQ version of like the Marvel Avengers arc, where they set up with like 23 different movies that all joined together to defeat Thanos. And in this case, like Thanos or Thanatos, like the ultimate Thanatos is not like a risk of death, but it's the risk of nihilism within a matter modern context. The two biggest ventures that I'm actively engaged in that combat nihilism are fifth wall productions, which is an interactive theater and event company that aspires to break the fifth wall so it's breaking the distinction between actor and audience, breaking The distinction between people who come in to consume entertainment to people who come in and create from the moment so creating, you know, clan size to tribe size gatherings where the identity structure is re knit from passive observer to active co creator within a meta, mythic lens that incorporates a lot of improvisation in order to get people to interact with and enact the archetypes as they're applied to the present moment. Is something that I feel is a plausible answer. It's a plausible answer like, is it the answer, no, but what it can do is it can create identity at the tribal level that is sufficient to modern nervous systems to begin to embody what is necessary in order to remain human.

Adam Lamb 2:41

I'm gonna slow you down, just not at the risk of infantilizing my audience or whoever happens across this recording, I want to back up and like I found that what you just said is I absolutely agree, and I find it very fascinating and interesting, and I want to unpack some of the language. So when you you talk about the fifth wall, and then you you mentioned a few dichotomies that you're breaking apart like, or rather fusing together the audience and the spectator, and being one of them. Can you give some background, perhaps, to this phrase the fifth wall is that something that already exists, or is that a something you made up?

Duncan Horst 3:31

Yes. So I have, like I have my own special little neuro convergent lens on things, the breaking the fourth wall is an established theater term. It's like in house of cards or Shakespeare, when an audience, when an actor, like breaks out of the thing and like does a whispered aside to the audience. Isn't this person ridiculous? And that's my secret plan, like, you know, to get people copacetic your the fourth wall is between what is on the stage and a stage. All theater is implicitly religious theater. You know, all acting started as a way for polities like Athens Greece to honor the local gods and create cultural unity so they could defend themselves against the Persians, or so that they could make sure that their own identity was safe against the barbarians, which are literally, it's a Greek word, meaning the people who speak blah blah, the blah blah, rien barbarians, blah blah, I did not Know that the blah blah people, basically, people who didn't speak Greek but who didn't speak the mythic language of the Greeks were the blah blah people. Okay, so it's like making sure that there's a shared cultural language.

Adam Lamb 4:54

So you're saying that theater reinforces the culture, which is. Necessary to defend the culture against intruders like the blah blah people. That's

Duncan Horst 5:04

right. I mean, it it separates in groups and out groups, but it also creates the shared framework that people can use to connect with one another and connect more deeply. Without that shared framework interactions tend to be shallow and more head based. So it creates a set of, you know, security protocols, essentially, yeah, you know, you're that the system can't be hacked by rogue thought forms, or rogue, you know, Thanatos, aka nihilism, is what stalks the land. You know, a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of nihilism, right? A Specter is haunting meta modernity, the specter of the destroyed belief in any cohesive framework in the past, like whether that was like Protestant Christianity that united the robber barons, or that, or the Metropolitan Opera, you know, a whole bunch of people focusing on one world class display in the same place at the same time. Carnegie might hate like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and but their wives made them go to these premieres and support these things, and that created the social register, right?

Adam Lamb 6:25

So going back to the fifth wall, if we understand the fourth wall is, is the players in the production reaching out to the audience. What's the fifth wall?

Duncan Horst 6:36

The fifth wall is it can start as easily like people start to break the fifth wall when you have plants in the audience, so people who are who are actors, who are posing as audience people, and breaking that dynamic to be wild, but that's that's just like that's edging the fifth wall. Breaking the fifth wall is when you actually have story concepts that are brought in by unknown people taking the story in an unknown direction and elevating somebody in the audience to the role of performer, so enhancing their verb structure, they now have another thing that they can Do in public, and there are geniuses in private who may not see themselves as clan based, you know, like 15 to 20 people, or tribe based, 50 to 150 people, leaders, in this way, shamanic leaders who are changing the energy and moving it when you get somebody stepping up in that and these are different structures in the brain, right? One on One clan, tribe like you can know something amazingly at the one on one level, and still need to be initiated into a larger level to gain access to that verb form and identity structure within the self to move that level of energy. So the more people you get into holding those roles, the more unique energies pass through them and transmit from them to an audience. When you're breaking the fifth wall, essentially, you're breaking the separation between actor and audience, actor and participant. You're stepping into the role of your life within the stage of community. So you're actually you didn't know it, but you're an essential part of the play,

Adam Lamb 8:29

and how much is the audience's awareness of that dynamic important to the fifth wallness? Like do if people come like, I have a judgment about drama, drama kids and people that love to perform, and they'll, like, basically make a performance out of themselves everywhere that they go. These are the people that love to get involved in a hoot and holler, and they at a comic, you know, comedy thing, and they're like, favorite thing is to, like, get a response from the comedian. And they come with the intention of inserting themselves into the production, whether or not that they're invited, yeah, yeah.

Duncan Horst 9:08

I mean, that's, that's a little bit rapey, but Right? It's a trauma response, and you it's distasteful to everybody, to an extent. That's why, like the theater kid monitor comes out, but it's distasteful to you because of your background, you can so clearly say it like see it as a trauma response in those people to fulfill unmet childhood needs and unmet needs for belonging. So that is a that's a structure that must be worked around in any kind of immersive theater environment. Sleep No More. At the mckisch Hotel does this with the elevator. Everybody is wearing masks, so there's a there's a displacement of identity with that. And then they let one person off at the ninth floor, and everybody else has to go to the the sixth floor. And like I. The way to that higher floor initiation is like violently blocked. So it establishes very quickly and very clearly that you're in an alternate space with alternate rules. So there's, there's an absolute need to establish, like a threshold ritual before bringing people into this in order to assure the theater kids that you know you've got to listen before you can speak, you

Adam Lamb 10:28

can't come in here with an intention and be able to wrest control from the the elders and the the guides.

Duncan Horst 10:36

That's right. There's a reason why it's called stealing a scene or stealing the show. Yeah, yeah, right. Like you're no one there, and it's a welcome it's honestly a welcome addition as well. That's either quality control at the at the onset. But like such, people are looking for boundaries. They're they're asking for barriers they're testing to see if the container is worthy of shutting them up

Adam Lamb 11:05

right. Hence why we love it. Like Steve Hofstetter, I don't know if you follow his work, but like the reason he's so popular is how he totally owns hecklers people that maybe come in with the intention of destroying him, and he universally does the reverse move. You'd mentioned meta modernism and something that's foundational in that philosophy. It's funny today I just, I just got off a call with one of the the halves of Hanzi frynack. We had a nice, long conversation. But Graham, no, it's Emil. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, we're talking about some plans for later in the year. But he I've taken some of their courses and read almost all of their books, and they something that's foundational to that philosophy is a healthy hierarchy, which is very much sounds like very necessary in the in the type of fifth wall production that you're talking about,

Duncan Horst 12:11

yeah, but you it's also an emergent hierarchy, you know, nearly would quote Jordan Peterson's competence based hierarchy, rather than a dominance based but even in these you need to have space for the the emergent neophyte. So like in a in a production I'm doing for April Fool's Day, we just found the holy fool, like I met him, like four days ago, and we're going to have him as, like the initiatory center of the production, like bringing, bringing that kind of sacred foolishness back into culture. And he's a meta modernist who just moved to Boulder. He has worked on, like aI theories and everything like that, and studied with, like, a really high up out of Vedanta Buddhist teacher in the area who were trying to convince to come to the production as well. And he just shared a really, really beautiful dance with me, and I was like, oh, okay, this is the kind of energy that wants to emerge, like I deliberately keep important roles open until the last minute to see who and what wants to fill them as there always needs to be a stand in for the broader audience as well, somebody who is ready for a threshold change in the verb that they're holding, somebody who is new enough about it to not be cynical, for there to be enough willingness and enough fear to resonate with the nervous systems of other people who have that nervousness and fear and willingness to express so you're using and the person has to, you know, be comfortable enough in their seat to not freak out or dissociate or shut down during the process. So if you get somebody going through this kind of a ritual, they're opened up, and it opens up everybody else, whereas if you have one of those seasoned performers at the center who's pulling the attention and the energy to themselves, it doesn't circulate. So ultimately, what you're looking for, and this can this can bridge to the other topic of neuro convergence. Ultimately, what you are looking for is a group of people who can open up their consciousness to create, you know, for a temporary period of time, a collective consciousness, a group field energy, a shared body for the stated purposes of the gathering that then has a residue of enhanced cognition and enhanced capacity and generative creativity. So I like to sculpt events that do that, that actually form a group body, and I. Find like the mystic Gurdjieff, you know, the the way of the sly man is preferable to going through the front door. If you go to a sound healing, right, with an established sound healer, the parts of you that get in the room are the parts that know they need healing. So you're gonna, you're gonna amplify those parts, but the parts that resist it, the parts that don't feel welcome, the the shadow does not feel welcome. So the shadow will not show up. By and large, you'll get some residue, like the bulkheads of the Titanic. Like some of the light will spill into a shadow compartment and emulsify it. You might like, be able to work with a small or large amount of shadow that gets displaced by that during or after the event, but you're not giving it a voice. It's not it's not permitted. And the shadow isn't always just like, the dark. Like, yeah, I want to kill and rape people, you know, like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please don't use these out of context. Kanye on it, right? Sometimes the shadow is dissociation, sometimes, oftentimes the shadow is apathy. Oftentimes the shadow is I'm just a person in a both healthy and unhealthy sense,

Adam Lamb 16:14

yeah, or, like, I am not honest about my taxes, like you can be perfectly mundane, or I waste water, or something,

Duncan Horst 16:25

yeah, so that, I mean, that's the primary thing. And then the secondary driver is how you beat yourself up with that data, right,

Adam Lamb 16:34

right, right, right. And then, if you're familiar with, like, existential kink, have you delved into that, that world of that concept, yep,

Duncan Horst 16:43

yep. I've had, I've had friends who are students of hers too. So I it's all there because we love it, right? It serves a purpose. It's like, yeah,

Adam Lamb 16:52

you beat yourself up with that, and you kind of like it, which is why you keep coming back to it. Which is why it takes a kind of backdoor psycho technology, such as the one you're proposing, to get people to actually grow and develop here's my question is, like, what makes, in short, if, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but in no small part, what you're describing here is a spiritual community, and They're using this technology and like this, this theater to to develop, to get to know themselves better, discover their blind spots and be more in alignment with their their life purpose. I'm adding a lot in there is that, does that ring true?

Duncan Horst 17:35

Um, it does ring true. I think that I, I really do prefer I like the show. Don't tell. And that's a slower burn, you know, yeah? Because if it's too obvious, then you get interpreted by the mind, oh, yeah,

Adam Lamb 17:52

as I just did. So my question to you, Duncan, is, where do you go for that? Who are the WHO ARE THE like you're you're very much in a facilitator role. I imagine you still have insights, you still have growth and development in that role. But what are your growth edges and what communities and thought leaders and people are you currently studying with, or just in a discovery of their leading you into your shadow and getting you to know more about yourself.

Duncan Horst 18:26

I mean, you're no stranger to sex, drugs and rock and roll, like, if you look at the quality Research Institute's paper on neural annealing, like the ways to generate neuroplasticity and threshold changes in initiation are, you know, meditation, psychedelics and various shamanic rhythmic methods, of which, like music and the arts and tantric sex and breath work and all of that can can classify and qualify or bridge the gap between, you know, Meditation and rhythm, in the case of pranayama, or certain forms of like sexual rhythmic transfer, which also, you know, love is the greatest psychedelic by far. You know, psychedelics are most effective when they actually trigger you to open the heart and override the control mechanisms of the mind. You can, you can get there through love. For sure, sexual love has the advantage or disadvantage of blasting open the lower chakras as well and the mind's control over those so you get a huge amount of physical Eros energy blossoming the vessel through. So it's like relationship will always be that, but I've had to be quite careful with that, because, like, with the amount of energy that I like to run and with like the definition of identity that I bring, it can lead to too much bonding, too quickly, too much energy, too quickly, too much attachment, too quickly. Even. Though, the attachment and the love that can follow attachment is stronger than any psychedelic somatically, but also potentially psychosomatically and visions and all of that. As far as rock and roll, ecstatic dance is within the right community is a very good vector for it's just like, you know, party in the front, wizard in the back, there are a lot of people with very developed charism, laying on of hands, moving of energy, who know how to get consent to move massive amounts of energy on the dance floor. So I get met there, either sober or in an amplified state. And when I'm in my practice, I can just like, contact high off of other people's drugs. So I pay less of a tax that way. You know, it's like, thanks for doing MDMA for me, Burning Man. Really appreciate that, because your intention, when you have so much raw energy flying around like the few people who can pattern it, have an outsized impact on the field. So if you're playing and it's better to play in an acknowledged role, it's safer with that, because then you know that you're alchemizing other people's energy, and you can differentiate from what energy is your own and what is from others, but circulating and cycling that has always been a source of insight and just requires some karma laundering afterwards to integrate those energies into your system so that you can be sure that all your thoughts and feelings or your own afterwards and not be blown like a leaf in the wind. There, there are, and there have been teachers in my life who have been very important as far as like a guiding, overriding philosophy, Kashmiri, Shaivite, tantruism is the strongest integral and post integral, like we're talking, we're talking turquoise and whatever yellow figure that's there. I like, I like that in the sheets, and like different Taoist practices in the streets. I think the Chinese medicine and the Daoist energy techniques like Qigong especially, are the strongest for just being grounded with your Woo and pursuing health and pursuing enhanced capacity, although I will say I have been a bit disillusioned by the power of energy. Psychic energy alone to enact change. Powerful individuals, like in my own life, like without a guiding philosophy or regular practice, outsized energetic capacities can devolve into hedonism and then from there, nihilism, unless architected in the service of a larger collective that is also growing and sufficient out performance relative to everybody else in your peer circle is not healthy. That leads to cult formation, that leads to asymmetries that are inherently violent when when you have too much asymmetry and power levels in ordinary relationships like that, brings up inadequacies, it brings up insecurities, it brings up fear, and that requires a huge amount of skillful means to prevent that from metastasizing into a kind of social cancer that has to be operated on. So this is why a lot of sages like retreated to the wilderness. Like, if you, if you keep yourself in those relationships with asymmetries, it creates counter forces to fight against you and keep you at a certain level. Like, it prevents you from getting high enough. And what that is saying, It's not saying, like, Hey, if you're sufficiently spiritual head for the hills, it's like you actually do to be with other people. You actually have to be in service of their growth and development in order for it to be healthy for you and to prevent the pitchforks and torches from coming out of the woodwork and cutting you down to size, yeah, which those torches and pitchforks are just unhealed trauma that is looking for a plausible reason why they're not feeling great. And you know, nobody wants to be a student these days unless they really trust the teacher. Trust is the currency of the 21st century, because trust gates Attention. Attention gates action. So you have to have a very high trust.

Adam Lamb 24:51

There's something about that, that there's a knot in there for me when you say trust gates attention, I'm thinking about the. The social media technologies that have captured our attention. How have they captured our trust?

Duncan Horst 25:10

Well, that's that's not it. It's that we've distrusted interacting with each other, with one another. We're no longer sourcing our archetypes, our endorphins are dopamine from one on one interactions, and thus, you know, fallen for the lie of like the lurid and the colorful and the sound bites and all of that, which is ultimately a displacement of trust in the self.

Adam Lamb 25:36

Yeah. So it's the lowest common denominator, like of connection and absent any more meaningful offering, like the one that you're proposing with this theater, and I'm sure many other any other things you're cooking up absent those people just kind of default to scrolling on the colorful screen.

Duncan Horst 25:57

I mean, it takes, it takes a lot, right? Emily Dickinson, my favorite poem of hers, the heart asks pleasure first, and then escape from pain, and then those little anodynes that deaden suffering, and then to go to sleep. And then, if it should be, the will of its Inquisitor, the liberty to die. So the the general structure that I've learned is like, there's a false personality on top of a layer of numbness. Underneath that numbness is anger at the numbness that like is not acceptable in society. Underneath the anger is sadness. Underneath the sadness is like manic joy. That's like the last temptation. And then underneath that is like happy, integrated love in the service of all. And if you fail to make it through any of those, you get shot back up to the the more protective layer, yeah, you know, like, anger is better than depression. But a lot of depression is not feeling your sadness. Most depression numbs itself, and so the social media is just on top of a layer of numbness. I

Adam Lamb 27:07

have a question, which is, if you consider the things on offer, like I have a high resonance with what you are proposing with the fifth wall production, and I am lucky to live in New York City that has a lot of very unique, really wild and creative offerings. But if you if you just pull back and consider the things that are on offer in a mid sized city, there's there's meditation on offer, there's maybe some comedy classes, some improv classes, there's some dance classes, there's painting, there's probably naked yoga, if you just think about the things that are on offer, and you speak to a man, I'm just saying man, because that's that's the audience I've been working with most lately, who's disaffected, who's feeling nihilistic, what would be the highest leverage point of participation for him to re engage and to re light that fire.

Duncan Horst 28:09

I mean, the highest, the absolute highest leverage, would be sexual submillination practices for a man, I would say, like Montauk Chia sexual secrets for men, or multi orgasmic man, because you're combining, you're combining orgasm or ejaculation denial. So you're building up a pressure that cuts through the numbness. It gets to a layer of frustration that's very good. And then you're not just doing a no fap like Arch Christian thing. You're learning to recirculate and reinvest those energies within your body that builds vitality, it forces you to learn new subtle systems that are being activated as those build up, because it'll either be dispelled or you have to reinvest it in your own body. You're learning pranayama and breath work to move the energies you're learning how that energy can move up your spine, and eventually that energy sublimates into creative life force and expression, because the upper mouth and the lower mouth, I mean, certainly in women, but also in men, like fifth chakra and second chakra have a bypass link In the alchemical spiral, like if you're not expressing, if you're not ejaculating too much of your life force out through the lower gates, you're expressing it through the higher gates. So that that gives the arsenal to get through the fear and the established traumas for the expression of your will, fed ideally from the heart, and when you speak that word that creates your actual reality, that creates a magnetic resonator for us, the male magnetism, when it's not discharged as like the static electricity of your standard ejaculation. And your standard ejaculation, I'm. Going to take that quite broadly. Any words that are not felt are wasted seeds. That's an ejaculation. Blah, blah, blah, the blah, blah speakers, yep, the barbarians, you know, so guarding your gates. This just like starting with the most dramatic gate and then getting subtler from there, it's so much more effective than I think, starting with any of these subtler means that are less core, you know, you start at the bottom, you work your way up rather than just giving we're all schizophrenic now, right? We're all ADHD. We're all schizophrenic. We're all facing these temptations and either succeeding day to day or not, so having a cardinal core level practice that's dramatic, that also improves your sex life, improves your vitality, and gives you a stockpile of self belief and energy if you get through it, that can change challenge these like robotic and lobotomized narratives of like what you are. You are a product. You are a you are a machine. You are like machine consciousness wants everybody to ordinate themselves as machines. Okay, cool. Well, then take the machine seriously. Optimize the f**k out of the performance of that machine. Give yourself an arsenal of free energy that can operate within the interlocked Gears of consciousness in society. And then let's talk okay, like, if you haven't ticked that box and you're still feeling meaningless, it's like, get that as a standardized technology that other people can connect in and cohere with and be like, if you're not doing this, your machine is not functioning properly to sense make, yeah, and you know, because like these, these fill in the gaps. Narratives take advantage of that lack of cohesion.

Adam Lamb 31:57

Yeah, I just literally yesterday, read through the chapter of the Way of the Superior Man, David data, where he was talking about sexual practices. And it's the first time I'd ever come across this notion of breathing down the front and expanding and having a loose and open front body and then exhaling up the spine. And I just that, that little seed thought planted in my head. And I later that night, I'm making love with my my woman, and I'm just doing this practice throughout, and she's having these multiple orgasms. And I'm by the end, I was like, I don't want to come. I just, I feel so full. I feel good. I feel great. So that, as a side note, I 100% agree to that my question was more around I

Duncan Horst 32:46

know, like I was going from point A to point D there. That's

Adam Lamb 32:50

all right. I'm you do your thing. I'm here to rein it in. And I have my intentions here, and the my main intention is to take conversations like this, and distill them down into actionable practices. So seminal retention, not of the nofap variety sounds like is, and if, if you put a name on that again, the book is multi orgasmic. Man, what would another Is this like a Taoist sexual practice?

Duncan Horst 33:18

Yeah, I think, I think Montauk Chia again, Montauk Shia in the streets, Kashmiri, shaivaite, tantruism in the sheets.

Unknown Speaker 33:26

How do you spell Montauk,

Duncan Horst 33:29

M, a, n, T, A, K, Shia C, H, I, a, like the pet.

Adam Lamb 33:33

Okay, got it so that for anyone listening. And then to back it up, another click, because,

Duncan Horst 33:41

oh yeah. And then Dow is secrets of love. Cultivating male sexual energy was the one that got me started with it.

Adam Lamb 33:48

Love, that's my growth edge, by the way. It's something I recently just actually, not too long ago, I was thinking, I don't know if I'll ever get there of being able to have non ejaculative orgasms and these sexual practices, and then it literally just that one exercise on the train yesterday. I was like, Holy s**t, I think I can do this on the train. Absolutely, yeah. But then, to back it up, my question really was, and maybe I'll disagree with the premise here is of the offerings, yoga, meditation, dance, blah, blah, blah, like in person, not not mediated through a screen, and with the understanding that a lot of men are not keen on picking up books, what in person, practices or exercises or groups or communities? Would you recommend for someone that that's reasonable, someone who lives within a medium sized city, like within driving distance.

Duncan Horst 34:44

Oh my, you know, I'd say, like authentic relating and circling is, like the it's a really good interpersonal intro thing, like, if people are to. To, you know, we're all autism pilled in one way or another, like breaking that and getting that back into a somatic, relational reality where people are paying attention to feelings and collective feelings. That's an amazing practice of collection attention. It's just like, don't stand in the doorway. So keep keep going through and keep moving through. I don't know where practices like Tong Len meditation, which is a rather advanced meditative practice from Tibetan Buddhists. I think the Dalai Lama does it for the world in general, for a couple hours every morning, at 4am but it's an advanced practice, because in the way that I practice it, it you're you're building Qigong and Reiki at the same time to breathe in somebody's suffering and breathe out your joy directly into their hearts. And you know, I've gotten it to a bit of a science in some of my events, where I can guide people to that with like three concurrent exercises and get them there within half an hour, where people are able to very quickly release the armor of their own hearts and join a shared heart ecosystem. And there are certain traumas that are around that betrayal, loss of relationship, all of that can cause subtle blockages to the hearts and driving people to the head. So you need a sufficiently prepared space like set, and setting is 50% of a psychedelic journey as it is with energetic body. De armoring, yeah, you know. And it's not just a sexual de armoring. You're de armoring the heart, you're de armoring the mind, and you need, you need a lot of trust in a leader and in a group in there, so that you're not inviting takers to open something up and then, like ransack the pantry. You know, having enough givers is really important. Having

Adam Lamb 36:55

enough givers, you said, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. On that note, I feel like women tend to be more giving in social spaces, and a lot more inclined to show up for social spaces, and a lot more inclined towards personal development in the in the sense that I think we both understand it, and that's been a big curiosity of mine, someone that's worked in as a sex worker for a decade, and more recently, in the last few years, in the work of developing healthy masculinity, I just in the last like year or so, started diving headlong into this notion of polarity and integrating the I always forget which wave, second, third wave feminism, idea of women having equal access to employment, and all of these, you know, voting and all these good things that I, I believe are morally justified, but while also not throwing the baby out with the bathwater around polarity, and that men in general tend to be quite different than women, and that that's okay, and we can acknowledge that, while also building a society where people can be supported in being not that, and breaking those, those generalities. Can you speak to the the work particularly, you'll notice a theme here. I keep coming back to men. Can you, can you speak to the the work of these technologies and these things that that are developmental as they relate to men, and in what way does men's psychology, particularly around like porn addiction and the need for kind of constant variety, and the Power games that the competition aspect of like dating apps and things like that propose that appeal to, in my opinion, that appeal to a male psyche. In short, how do you get men to do this work?

Duncan Horst 38:54

Well, I mean getting them to take an honest look of what their life and their dopamine cycles look like their relationships with themselves and with friends, with their continually depleting themselves, like it's it's an honestly and then getting fast food relationships. It's so sad to be disappointing a woman, and to know it, you almost want to numb yourself out to the fact that you're disappointing because you've depleted a sufficient amount of your energy in this context. And you know, dating apps are what Kurt Vonnegut called a grand faune in player piano, a false collection, no, no, a false collection of souls. Like you're you're going out and assembling something based on the characteristics that your mind thinks at once, or your cock has been programmed to want rather than meeting somebody in the wild around a social group of people that you love, or a verb that you're really into is that poetry is that verb? Volleyball is that verb? Political debate? Mm. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 40:02

verb is not strip club,

Duncan Horst 40:04

no, but some people's is, and that's awesome. If it is, then you're bonding over strip club. And, like, I've seen a lot of like, finance Bros and strippers, because, you know, finance bro is stripping with your brain, kind of like, there, there. There are people who have these natural resonances with each other, and then, like the dating app experience is creating, it's starting with an artificial resonance and building techniques to do a natural resonance. Or like you're you're creating APIs, you're creating these weird connectors for people in live fire. And so there's also suspicion or and, and this is you can get into this in the spiritual world, like I learned how to bridge the gap with just about everybody. Cool, No, you shouldn't be doing that, because I could create a whole bunch of like, artificially deep and rapidly resonant connections with other people using spiritual techniques that weren't organic, that I would have to keep maintaining with my own energy, that would lead to too fast bonding, you know, and then disappointment. So slow cooking is always best, because sharing sexual energy is is it's just so magically potent. It's so transformative. It affects the choices you make. It affects the quality of the inspiration that comes to your life and the we moments, which then has cascade effect on the thoughts you do, the business opportunities you choose, the creative projects that you move towards. It's really important not to disappoint a sexual partner in these ways, and not to choose somebody who's a disappointment to you, and to hold that it's foundationally important to be with somebody who you can truly communicate with, because that subtle communication, verbally, physically, energetically, determines your communication with life itself, like over determines it. And without that level of communication, then we're left with the like autism build social media, communicating to us and and for us and with us. I feel like I've half answered your question. As far as that communication, it's a warriors practice, but like, if people are disappointed with their lives, it's because they're not holding enough. Men are jars, right? We've got one mouth, so our intent, we have integrity based on what we can hold and deliver, how much we're filled up and where we can pour it, what we choose to nourish, what we choose to water. Like, that's Aquarius, the water barrier, holding the SAT urn. It's a Saturnian sign. So the soft urn, the urn of truth. Like, how do we hold our truth? Does it leak out? What garden are we watering? Women have two mouths. So they are tubes. They're flowing with nature muscles. They're the water. They're the overflow. They're looking for something that can hold them. The most powerful women are almost like a little bit psycho with like, how much energy they have and how frustrated they are about finding a man who can hold it. That's a natural trauma, you know. And I've been positioned to hold some of these women, and I've, like, failed at holding some and been initiated by that. You know, I'm drawn, you might say I'm drawn to chaos or to challenges. No, I'm drawn to somebody who matches my capacity at holding reality. And that's really challenging for some of these women, too. Because, you know, third wave, fourth wave, Fifth Wave, feminism, which I don't know because it hasn't been invented yet. It's probably something psychic or psychedelic or whatever, but like that is women dealing with the chaos and apocalypse of their newly emergent power and the anger about not finding a man who can hold it without leaking out. Porn addiction is a really simple leak out. You know, I'm not fully opposed to porn as a discovery mechanism. You can you can see new things that you never knew were there and real. You gotta cleanse yourself afterwards, because, you know, not every one of those people who's working there is doing it purely voluntarily, and you get that energy and intention wrapped into it, you know, there's some dark kinks out there. There are some dark fantasies that like you might not even realize aren't fully your own after opening your gates to that. So it's not just the depletion of the ejaculation, it's also the reprogramming of the media into the deep couples of your like, of your psyche, you know, and 80% of most people's magic is defending themselves against the idea that magic and energy is reveal, and most of the other 15 to 20% is spent with sexual fantasies, power fantasies, money. Disease. So that's the stuff where it gets in on the edges, if you don't have a real practice, you know, like you're and even if you're in partnership, you're creating an energetic double of your partner based on your inverse, your anima or your Animus. Like this is way technical, but no,

Adam Lamb 45:19

it's great. I love it. I'm, I'm, you, you, you go far afield, and I, I distill it and with your blessing. So the question was, how do we get men to do this work? And if I could distill your your response to a pithy statement, it's, it's this notion of Happy wife, half happy life, and something that I've been been reading David data, he says, in effect, it's not, it's not a bad thing for your spiritual practice to be guided by the prospect of being in a Happy relationship with a

Duncan Horst 45:59

woman. Oh, hugely not, especially on like, the tantric scale, or Tibetan Buddhist so

Adam Lamb 46:06

in that, yeah, so in that, like triumvirate you mentioned earlier of sex, drugs and rock and roll, for men that are wondering, of like, where where to begin, or women that are wondering how to motivate their men to gain more spiritual depth. The sex connection really is a high leverage point for most men, probably especially a very polar masculine men that want to be in relationship with women who are very feminine, oh, 100%

Duncan Horst 46:39

like that is that is by far the highest leverage point. And having having your theory as well. And that's where the Tantra, the actual Shiva, Shakti, psychology and energetic dynamics. That's a successful blueprint that allows and knowing your energetic system intimately, by building up the energy within and by trial and error, shaking that out gives you a structure to hold that energy, which is incredibly pleasurable and generates incredible magnetism, in romance, in business, in life. Ultimately, it's out performance, okay, like if we cannot evolve out performance around the people who are abusing these systems, then we don't deserve to be persuasive

Adam Lamb 47:25

and you just define outperformance in this context being more successful. And what would evolving outperformance look like,

Duncan Horst 47:36

holding carving out the space within yourself to hold more Shakti, more energy, more creative impulse, more intuition, more discernment of what actions will cultivate and return, more energy versus which ones will deplete that energy, scanning that for relationships as well as business opportunities like cultivating that within the system, there are a lot of quote, unquote, unspiritual people who are just natural CEOs who just must have done this in another lifetime, because their energy allocation is so INTEGRIS and so natural that they're doing, you know, a lot of there are a lot of wounded healers within the spiritual space who are just like not doing these things, that people who have done it for generations and generations of transmission, mother to daughter, father to son, like have baked into their psyches. A lot of the spiritual journey is taking a spiritual parent or a set of teachings to integrate within the nervous system and the psyche that thing that unhealthy culture would have transmitted through the parents and the peer groups, which we don't do in school, maybe a few private schools or private tutors for the Ultra Rich, which we generally don't do parent to child, because both parents are working. Or, you know, whatever fucked up Cold War dynamics of like, okay, US is going to be hyper capitalist as contrast to these old aristocratic or Soviet systems? Yeah, we lost a lot there deliberately, when, when governance shifted from the Freemasons to the CIA like, after World War Two, it's like we lost the weird honoring of some of these traditions. Like, and this isn't a conspiracy, this is just, this is just super, super, super super, super, super, super factual. And I can, I can pretty much list all of those, those shift points when you have, when you have cold war mentality and hyper capitalism dominating culture. We are a bit of a lost generation as far as parent to child transmission on average, and so we are having to re parent ourselves and actually choose to live in a society. Yeah.

Adam Lamb 49:56

Do you? I get the sense, and this is like wishful thinking. And it's very much on this notion of generational trauma, not that you said that. I'll fill that in. But like, 3050, years ago, it was the case that, like, everybody smoked, and then people are smoking on the airplane or just smoking in the restaurant, and no one really thought too much about it. They were just smoking everywhere in the car windows rolled up. Babies f**k them. You know, we're just smoking and in, I guess maybe starting in the 90s, like I remember doing some anti tobacco programs when I was in school, and then now, very few people combust tobacco, and of my peers, and yeah, I'm kind of hoping, kind of praying, that in 2030, years, or hopefully even sooner, we'll have that same kind of trajectory with social media, and this attention capture will will be like, Oh my God, look at all these photos from the early, you know, our mid, mid 2000s and onwards, and everyone's f*****g glued to their phones. And didn't these idiots realize how bad this was for you, and now we're we're so conscious about connecting with people in 3d space and being more mindful about our screen time, etc. Is that something that you see alongside this trajectory of sort of generational spiritual growth?

Duncan Horst 51:19

Well, we need to have a social community within ourselves and the people who are connected to us that is supportive, in order to have a constructive reframe of that and honestly, we need to be outperforming in our own lives for our everyday to be more compelling than scrolling. And that doesn't happen without real love, bonds, in flesh, in community, in communion. Ecstatic dance is a great way to do that. Circling is a great way to do that. And like, just knock off and rip off some of the shells to get that. But then there's, there's, like, a greater, there's a greater responsibility here, because this is, this isn't a cultural This isn't being amplified culturally the social media companies control, like a lot of the reach, right? You have to create that meaning for yourself. And like this will outperform if the people to adhere to it can actually do the work together. Create those peer groups, men's groups, what have you that encourage abundance, that encourage creativity, that encourage responsibility, that encourage strength, and then that will be visible to others when, when people who are adhering to other systems are getting plowed under the dirt, and the people Who are adhering to these like life giving systems are hosting. The parties are getting, the rewards are getting, the promotions are getting, the money are getting the energy that they're redirecting. Because if you redirect energy and it creates more energy, you're given more energy to advance, yeah, and everybody else is like, one of those, like creatures at the bottom of Ursula cave. Like, what the

Speaker 1 53:04

like, I gave my sense of self to this, like, distributor network, and now I'm a strange seaweed creature. Like,

Duncan Horst 53:11

yeah, but like, here are a few tools and techniques that you can go if you apply them for like, a month, two months, religiously devotedly, your life will completely change. Are you desperate enough to make that like at some point the quiet desperation gets louder than the numbing great, and at that point it's really important, really important to have a super high trust person or system there. So you're the events that I like to do, cause the disruptions, right? The disruption to the numbness. And then you gotta have a system that has stood the test of time, that is relevant to the present day, that people can go to develop themselves. They project the sense of authority to that system. And then there's an off ramp of reclaiming that authority at the end in a beneficial way, to reintegrate that into the self. And that journey should take years.

Unknown Speaker 54:10

How many?

Duncan Horst 54:14

Everything, everything, everywhere, all at once. So there is some time compression, like in Tibetan Buddhism and Tantra, it typically took 12 years. There's this phrase like seven years to apprenticeship, 12 years to mastery. So the seven years you can hang your own shingle and make a living doing the thing after you practice it for that after 12 years, you're you can if, if it's good enough authentic practice, you can actually be a master in the field and creating texts that successfully transmit that field that can be cross checked by other masters, etc. You know this. This probably given that we have access to all the world's wisdom teachers and mind expanding substances that you. Either rapidly derail somebody's journey or can rapidly accelerate it. That could be as little as like four to six years, like it might be in 1/3 or one half, like having the process three to five, four to six years with perfect practice and perfect teachers without getting derailed. But there's always, there's a price for that acceleration, and that price is destruction, so you have to be really, really good at it. And the second you start really cultivating a little bit of energy from these practices, there will be temptations that will show up in your life. Mine was like a finance job. I got a finance job from absolutely nothing after two and a half years of tantric practice, and then got a mid six figure hedge fund analyst position out of the deal. And then my practices suffered, and then I made some sexual errors or mistakes for just like, because there was so much attention. I was just like, broke, random, dude, suddenly I'm like, hot tantric finance, bro, you know? And that was a lesson. That's an initiation, and now it's like, somewhere somewhere middle out, somewhere middle age, somewhere middle out. The residue of those practices is there. The capacities are there, but like deliberately de powering certain aspects of myself, to receive the power of others and to receive the power of the women in my life, and not just override by localized out performance. That's a few steps down the road of most people, right? I

Adam Lamb 56:37

want to talk about the very first step, and something that I suspect to be there or very near, the first step is not about what we do. It's more about undoing what we're doing, what we've already been doing. It's like kind of a via negativa practice that was recently for me, inspired by this philosopher, Andrew Taggart. He has this book money rules for simple living, and it's blowing my mind. He talks about how you can't really have a good relationship with money until you've lived for quite some time at what he calls enough that's enough shelter, that's enough food, that's enough clothing and enough healthcare, I think those are his four categories. And it's, it's really inspired me as I'm kind of now in that hedge fund Tantra position you just described, where I'm coming in, coming into my own. I'm starting to be able to monetize my offerings. And I'm like, Wait, do I need this f*****g apartment? Do I need this car? Do I need this and just seeing the ways in which I've allowed my lifestyle to inflate with my income, and how that, in a way, is kind of the system calling me back into it and clawing by all the obligations associated with these, this over, over spending. And, you know, we talked about sex, and I wonder how much money management is, is foundational for for one's growth and and at what point one needs to take a very strong look at their relationship with consumption in general, but especially how they spend their

Duncan Horst 58:17

money. I mean, it's very important. It's, you know, if you if you have a persistent physical pain, your attention will continue to be drawn back to that pain to fix it, and feelings of like legitimate feelings of scarcity or insecurity cause and anxiety to get people to address that fear, especially in a society that doesn't have collective clan style identity groups or tribal hunting or whatever that is, where it's everyone for themselves, it puts you in the naked state of nature, rather than in a tribal security group like we were evolved to be in so shifting the onus to everybody to creatively generate resource produces more anxiety and more creativity as a civilization. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does. But the difficulty of this is that anxiety triggers the sympathetic nervous system that shuts off creativity.

Adam Lamb 59:27

So there's maybe a sweet spot between the necessity that bears out creativity and the anxiety that prevents it.

Duncan Horst 59:39

Yes, and that's where breath work, especially because breathing regulates the sympathetic nervous system as much as possible. You combine that with sexuality. It's amazing, but usually, like the right kind of sexuality is often downstream of financial abundance.

Unknown Speaker 59:56

That's a hard truth, yeah,

Duncan Horst 59:59

but there it is. Yes, you know, it's like you you want to have a container that can hold the energy. Yeah, the finances are a sufficient container to hold the energy, to then reinvest it, to build a stronger container to hold more energy. Yeah, it's not money. That's the root of all evil. It's the love of money that is the root of all evil, right? The concentration in it in its lowest common denominator form, in social media terms, that'd be like, likes and views and whatever dopamine inducing content, even myself. It's like, I've got my own it's like, let's check out the Thucydides trap and, like, all of ancient history. So it's like, I've like Wikipedia, hold myself into I am the very model of a moderator general of information, vegetable, animal and mineral. But like that doesn't help build the relationality

Unknown Speaker 1:00:54

through sinities.

Duncan Horst 1:00:57

Thucydides. The Thucydides trap is, is he was a Greek historian, and he theorized that any growing hegemon would eventually weaken and have a rival come up as Athens, as happened with Athens and Sparta. It's being referenced in the present day with America and China. The Thucydides trap is like, how do you prevent a world war between two hegemonic powers? That's just like I I was a history major in college after having gone through literally everything else and had a spiritual crisis. And it's like history was what I could get an A minus on with half of my brain and half of my brain on medication for the two years I was on meds for my brain working faster than reality. You know, it's like I got into spirituality and self regulation and sexual regulation, literally, a metaphysical gun point. You know, it was like I had to use my sexual energy to create the energy I needed to feel in the world, so titrated myself off of psychiatric meds and used these sexual techniques to recreate my entire nervous system. And it was sufficient.

Adam Lamb 1:02:12

Thank God. Thank God you did. I'm happy you're here and happy to see what you're creating in the world. We're coming up on the hour mark. So I want to give an option for you to wrap this up or continue for another 1520 minutes, depending on your your feeling. Um,

Duncan Horst 1:02:27

I do have Hold on one second. Can you pause while I text a friend and say that I'll be 15 minutes late if that's your desire? Yeah, for sure. Well, because I want to talk about neuro convergence, meta modernism with this as well. And I think all these foundational aspects are really solid, and also FYI for you and for them who's curious, like, I'm supporting a couple of friends with their own literally this this spring, it's come back up a couple of friends who are getting into some of these texts and these practices to cultivate this energy. And so I'd really, really happy and honored to include you on that, like Google doc sheet of like, what to read, what to potentially practice, like, what are the pitfalls that can come up? What is the psychological stuff that could stop somebody from continuing those practices? And like, how to, how to actively breathe through that, to create the living energy, and, like, in what steps? Because I've done the stuff that worked for me and I've done the stuff that didn't work for me, so I've, like, been doing that for about 15 years. I'd be really happy to, just like share the library. I

Adam Lamb 1:03:43

would love to receive it. Text Your friend. I'll pause this recording here.

Duncan Horst 1:03:49

Yeah, so I have another 20 minutes here. Great. You can do 1520 but like, the the thing that really lights me up and where I want to be more generous to the whole meta modern movement in general, is the concept of neuro convergence, and it does actually dovetail with fifth wall productions. I believe it dovetails with the sexual work as well, because that creates such a beautiful battery for examining things that most people don't have the energy or constancy to examine and and simply, I really do believe that a lot of this is top down. You know, we're living in the ossified corpse of late modernism, with its snowflake theory, with its hyper capitalistic worship of the individual and the left because it has issued traditional religion, you know, has worshiped the diversification. Of identity structures to the point of its own seeming demise.

Adam Lamb 1:05:06

Can I? Can I translate that into we? We don't know how to use generalities anymore, like we can't say man, woman. We've broken everything down into subcategories and created a lot of emotionality around that

Duncan Horst 1:05:23

created a lot of religious emotionality, and that, like the religious aspect, has has been diverted to the worship of diversity itself, which has a downstream consequence of opposing unity, unless you can find that unity through diversity and not have that exported onto a bureaucracy or a government to enforce it, but in the individual heart, if it comes top down, it doesn't work. So there has to be some kind of a culture that has a somatic will to Union within these diverse people, that completes the Joseph Campbell style hero's journey, right the the journey into the abyss of your own individual psyche. F*****g awesome, because that gets the weird gifts that grow at the the farthest limbs of the tree of life. Then you bring it back to the trunk. How do you bring this weirdness back? How do you integrate your borderline personality or your schizo effective or your hyper autistic genius, or your weird, psychic, intuitive knowing? How do you bring that back to the center of the tree so you can communicate? I mean, one of the hints, obviously, if love is the greatest psychedelic, love is also the Babel fish. It's the universal translator. If you can express something with love, everyone gets it. It's like people Africans were just like, laughing at The Muppet Show at some weird TV and like Chad, you know, and like, they don't get what they say, but they get the vibe that is communicated. It psychically translates this weirdness. It's like you can see and feel me getting animated at this, right? Like this is going to translate a lot better than all the other stuff I was saying, because i i invoked my heart. I'm referencing my heart. I really f*****g care about this. Yeah, this is the kind of energy that brings things together. You call it Riz, cool, whatever, like, a lot of the charisma from top down, or, like Hollywood appointed stars, that's like, that's just life force energy. It's not also with an earned sense of meaning. If you can convey a full real, universal structure of reality to bring neuro, divergent people back together, that's the establishment of superhero teams. That's how you bring all these teams are based on, like the five elements, or like the four directions, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right? Leonardo leads. Donatello does machines. So leadership like the lion the brains. Raphael is cool but rude. Michelangelo Is a party dude, like, if you bring people together, they will naturally self organize in in teams that would also be similar to the C level of a corporation. Some the party guys like marketing, the brains, guys like the CTO. You got like an all purpose, inspiring leader. You have a person, the COO that does something. You have, like the hard work dude, logistics and what but like and these are different neurotypes. What are you? Oh, man, I'm a wild card. I'm I'm definitely my friend who owns the Star House said that more than anybody in her 74 years of experience, I embodied all the major arcana of the Tarot I'm I would say zero to one, so a superposition between fool and magician, like 00, to one would be semi accurate with where I position myself these days. But

Adam Lamb 1:09:16

if there is to distill this into a C suite analogy. Which position would you be? Oh, my,

Duncan Horst 1:09:29

when I'm really, really integrated CEO. Right now, I would say it's a lot more CMO.

Adam Lamb 1:09:37

What's CMO? Marketing? Yeah, all right, right now it's

Duncan Horst 1:09:41

right now. It's marketing with more structure and more practices that moves up to executive

Unknown Speaker 1:09:48

right now in your life, or right now in this podcast.

Unknown Speaker 1:09:52

Oh, in this podcast. CTO,

Adam Lamb 1:09:55

I just meant which? What did you refer which did you mean when you said

Duncan Horst 1:09:59

and. Dropping a lot of, like, technical metaphysics. So this podcast, I'd be CTO and your CEO in my life right now, with a lot of the, you know, I'm doing some consulting for a regenerative fund to, like, put, you know, distill some of my financial stuff and avoid dipping too far into my savings. But the stuff that I'm really passionate about, the the art and the the transmission of metaphysics and these group structures through art, your CEO for a night, but your CMO, your marketing, the concept to actually get people in the door. That's the and you're marketing the concept of like, sustainable and fun group consciousness that does not have to devolve into cult behavior and old school hierarchies dominating and extracting resources and imposing arbitrary metaphysics onto people that constrains their capacity for expression. So it's a dance people. People need a feeling of limitless capacity for expression to distill these traumas of growing up in a constricting system. But they also need a structure. Yeah, you need, like, an like, you're fighting non dual, duals all the time to, like, hold a structure with limitless capacity, but actual guardrails and actual like, it's one size fits all, but it fits everybody. Like, only non dual traditions do that. I think that, like, having sexual recycling for men is really cool because it forces you to learn breath work. It forces you to learn meditation like if you're going to get to the point of multi orgasm, you have to link up all these different systems at the same time and then build up an amount of pressure that can be distilled and refined. It forces you to repurpose the male body, as an alchemical vessel for transmutation and transformation. It's the best metaphor for this. Like it's so immediate, nowhere, nowhere else will you actually get those results within a month or two of practice. It's also potentially the most destructive you're playing with nuclear fuel.

Adam Lamb 1:12:23

You know, I remember five, six years ago, I asked my my yoga teacher about it, and he's like, you'll go crazy. And he was right. At that time in my life, I didn't have the foundation to do it. And whereas yesterday, I was like, wow, f**k. I think I can do this now.

Duncan Horst 1:12:39

Yeah, I mean, they, they saved the study of the Kabbalah in this they used to in Israel for men who had a profession, who had a family and were over the age of 40.

Adam Lamb 1:12:49

Yeah? Makes sense. Like, yeah. I want to come back to this neural convergence idea, and very sensitive to your time here. Did Is there any anything else you wanted to say about that?

Duncan Horst 1:13:02

Yeah. I think it's very, very important. I think 40% of the work, yeah, 40% of the time. Placebo works every time. Or 40% of any cure is the belief that it's effective. It's not 100% it's not even 50% but that's a lot. People need to have an idea that it's worth it to bring their full spectrum back to the center of the tree in service to our peers and ultimately, to humanity. What is like? I find meta modernism to be a good graft, but it has its own traumas. Its chief trauma is dissociated, dissociation into the mental theorizing using one half of one chakra so like 114 of the total system to try and mentally model the whole system and the right functioning of it, out of a fear of being manipulated by energetic psycho spiritual technologies and theories, or, you know, whatever Iowa scaro or psychedelic groups. Or you know that partial exposure of limited relevance within a domain of a specific out performance. Like, if you're a shaman, like you're really good at this one thing, yeah, great. This one thing, how does it expand to the whole? You know, you want to theorize how it expands the whole, but like, if you actually embodied how it expands to the whole, you're living as a psychedelic state, sober golly, that requires a lot of love, a lot of trauma healing to actually be it. And people get f*****g tired, f*****g tired of hearing the people talk about it without providing a roadmap to actually be it. It's less than useless.

Adam Lamb 1:15:00

I love that. I also want to point out that there a great many of the people that talk about it, they're not being it in an obvious way. And part of the reason that I've been following you for a few years, at least since COVID, is just because I I cringe, I cry, I laugh, and I and I loathe on any given time that I interact with whatever you're putting out into the internet, like your your your freestyling, your music videos, your essays, most recently, especially, I'm so moved energetically by you on so many different levels. And I feel like if anybody were the kind of person that was going to create a system like you're proposing here, that's neural convergence, and have it be valid, and not just some another b******t organism of the post COVID Cambrian explosion of f*****g overly philosophical dudes on the internet, it would be you, and so I trust, I really trust you, and I love what you're putting out. I'm very excited to to see its manifestation.

Duncan Horst 1:16:08

Well, it's, it's, in part, it's the hermetic theory that the opposite cures, and that a lot of things that we think are fundamentally divergent are actually just on the same spectrum, like bipolar, you have depression which has a cure when you're over exuberant, or when there are not enough opportunities in your environment, you go into a depressed state which consumes less resources and keeps your head down from being lopped off. That with bipolar, with mania, you know where it's just like that succeeds very well in a resource rich environment with a lot of opportunities, but needs to be tempered less to overextend itself, you bring those two things together. You create an out performance in the middle schizophrenia and autism, too much dissociation and free association versus like hyper fixation on the right way. You bring the artists and the tech nerds together, you get something very beautiful. They don't all have to wear the same f*****g polo or turtleneck, and like Ikea corporate design, everything could be oscillating 3d cut like flowers of life. Why the f**k do we have these bland white boardrooms. It's like autism maxing. It's like the creative potential of the blanks page. Great. We've had its day. Now it's time to create the Florentine Renaissance. Like the Medicis of this world are here to craft beauty and meta meaning

Adam Lamb 1:17:39

the integration of like boardroom and Burning Man,

Duncan Horst 1:17:43

that's, that's right, but like actual Burning Man,

Unknown Speaker 1:17:46

right, right, not the iterations of it. Well,

Duncan Horst 1:17:50

Burning Man was made. The first Burning Man was, he was making a Wicker Man, which was also himself to burn the residue of his failed relationship out of his heart and start anew. And then that that joined with all the Mad Max like maker space humans, and like the combination and the mating of that pagan druid ritual of The Wicker Man applied to burning away 5% five to 10% of people use Burning Man magically. And whenever I go, I try to do the actual rituals. It's inside a f*****g pentagram. The man is at the center of the pentagram. The Trans fence is a perfect pentagram within a pentagonal mountain range on a planet that replicates the surface of Mars like the Pentagon. The literal Pentagon was built by 33rd degree Freemasons, because the Pentagon is the symbol of Mars, of war, dominating the five point star of Venus, contained within it. Tantric you have the container and you have the energy filling it. You got the sparkle ponies and the tech lords. You got, you got a lot going on. You know, you want to do ketamine on the surface of Mars just go to Burning Man on like, Elon's yacht, like it's, excuse me on this, but like it's, it's, it's a blank canvas too. It's a blank canvas where no animal or human, no animal or vegetable consciousness, can survive. So it's literally a human consciousness acid trip concentrated around Los Alamos, which is where we, you know, crack the secrets of the atom. You have these coherences. We have these neuro convergence of human capital and ideas reminiscent of the Soviet science villages, which is like the only way that a nation with their economic poverty could actually compete with the US space program, get all the people who are dreamers and freaks and weirdos at the same place at the same time, with a common mission.

Adam Lamb 1:19:51

When's the next meeting? Duncan? Where are we getting together?

Duncan Horst 1:19:58

Well, let's see. I'm doing a. And obviously, I'm being a druid for an April Fool's Day gathering on April 1, bringing April Fool's Day back to its pre Catholic roots. Essentially, you know, the the term April Fool was a propaganda campaign by the Catholic Church when they reset the start of the year to be on January 1 rather than the start of spring, because it's just so natural to start the year when you plant seeds and grow. That's why you have your wishes and your intentions for what's going to f*****g grow. It's not at the darkest part of the year

Unknown Speaker 1:20:37

when you want to consume and lay around

Duncan Horst 1:20:40

kiss a stranger and drink cheap spirits and then give up your wish to the church dominated calendar. How about that? That's weird magic. That's actually not cool. It's not a good practice. We're not living in 2025 like this is that's not what year it is, right? It's just like people still think they're living in it.

Adam Lamb 1:21:02

Where, where is this occurring? I doubt that this will get published by then. But just in general, where are you located? And where can people find you? Oh, thank you.

Duncan Horst 1:21:11

Well, getting getting a fifth wall production site up, and we'll have a neuro convergence site up soon. You'll be able to find me there. Otherwise it's still Duncan Horst on Facebook and on Instagram, especially for personal artistic events. I'm also an actor with the Classics Department. We may be doing another show in New York City soon. So coming in for that, at the very least caveat, but maybe something a little bit higher touch and and from there, and just just gratitude for you seeing a spark and fanning a flame here, getting neuro convergence off the ground by the end of this year, I think is there's a lot of heart there. For me, it's, like, really spiritually important. I love doing the creative events, but they're often, you know, I'm not going to say a fart in the wind, but like, they're a cult for one day only. Their culture for one day only. Some people you can turn into artists and feed their artistic journeys with it, 50, even $50 in a wax sealed envelope, goes a long way in people's metaphoric resonance of self, you know. So that's, that's creative. I'm passionate about that, but there's not enough meta structure. There's there's not enough feasible first principles meta structure. Like Elon may have been good at first principles for engineering certain things, but he's not nearly as good as he thinks he is at, like EQ and first principles of like the human vessel. And this is not like the next Buddha is a sangha, right? This cannot be created by any one person, even slash, especially me. You know, we need to fan each other's flames and like seed authority to others areas of outperformance, so long as they are proven to have integrity at managing group, energetic fields, creating a hole that's larger than the size of its parts. People can be tested. They can be retried. They can re audition. You know, it's like, if you're having a bad or traumatic or narcissistic year or whatever it is like, that doesn't mean you can't grow into the capacity to manage these group fields. Well, yeah, but like, this is, this continues to be a new social technology that social media is at loggerheads with, you know? And like, I was getting more serious with that at the edge of COVID, we were living in a weird, demented paradise in New York City in 2019 I was sober, and it felt like I was on drugs every day. It was insane, you know, because there were forces that were gathering, and then COVID happened, and the earth herself was like, Don't touch me. Yeah, hands off. You know, there

Adam Lamb 1:24:21

was some beauty in that for me, because I ended up meeting a lot of really wonderful people on the internet. Yeah, I hadn't even heard of meta modernism, or meeting all the folks in the stoa and other

Duncan Horst 1:24:32

I love them, sort of offshoots of that. Yeah, stoa, stoa, will be a good reach out once I have the neuro convergence site. Yeah, like they, they're, they're definitely willing to amplify signal he is, may his coffee be ever brewed. And I would love to you know, happy to have another chat with you once I have, like, more material up and running. Yeah, and more, like, really appreciate you finding me on a proto share and fanning that flame, because I was, I was like, on the edge of being in love with this one woman, and then flew down to Austin to connect with her, and she just wasn't vibing. So part of that inspiration was me responding to the voice of the feminine to interpret magical texts for her, which then led to a connection with this other gentleman, which then led to me posting the post that you responded to. So it's like my heart up metaphysical erection for this woman who, like, is opening her own like, reclaim your inner feminine goddess school down in Austin, like, that hyper male offering resonated with you, which then caused this to happen, and my heartbreak over being sexually rejected by her in person when we had a romance at a distance, like, hit the pause button on myself as like, my self identity as like, beneficial leader of this thing was driven by the quality of her awareness and attention and me sculpting myself to rise and match that. So I you know, it's not like I was discouraged, but certain channeled messages that are laden with energy really require a lot of tact and care and continuity and just honoring of the forces that inspired them and like a deep prayer that I can hold it without needing that hyper potent external muse, energy driver of it that I can be inspired by reality itself. Yeah, to get that level of energetic transmission that attracts voices like yourself to want to hear more, you know, easy when you're

Adam Lamb 1:27:01

in love, sure, yeah, and surely other voices that want to hear more. So people will find you on Facebook, Instagram, Duncan Horst, any last words.

Duncan Horst 1:27:15

Really love this impulse and in this conversation. And I wish you all the most beneficial benefit, beneficial beneficial neurogenesis, and really happy to be on this journey with you and grateful you reached out. So I hope that everybody just reaches out to the things that inspire them and fans the flames and ask for more in the world, because that's how we get gifted inspiration. It's like offering that gratitude. Gratitude is the key to any and all of this. Finding the things you're grateful for, and like doing the steps to make them more present in the world, is how we evolve the good future.

Adam Lamb 1:27:59

Amen, brother,

Duncan Horst 1:28:03

much love Adam

Mikaal Bates and I discuss men's work, intimacy, rites of passage, masculinity, initiation, brotherhood, sacred theater, acting, self-discovery, community, purpose, combat sports, nudism, political landscape, and tribal societies.Adam 0:02

I'm here with Michael Bates. He is a men's coach and a coach of of intimacy between men and women. I met him in New York right before the pandemic, literally two weeks before the the first news of it, and I had attended a men's circle he held in Brooklyn, and then it was only years later, three years later, that I did my own initiation into men's work. And now I've been paying a lot more attention to what he's been doing, and he's doing some really interesting things. So thank you for being here, Michael,

Mikaal 0:38

it's a pleasure to be here. Adam, thank you for having me. It's good to see you again.

Adam 0:43

Yeah, you too. So, like many of us, myself, I moved to New York coming from a jazz performance area. And you, I understand, are coming from an acting background. I'm I'm curious, like, what was your journey to come to New York and in general, how did your acting inform the work that you're doing?

Mikaal 1:05

Now, it's a great question. I was actually a jazz saxophone player in college, but, uh Oh, wow.

Adam 1:11

Which, which sacks, etc. Nice. I played Alto and Perry Right on man, B

Mikaal 1:18

flat to B flat. You know? It's a nice the nice, big gap, yeah, yeah. Man acting, I mean the arts in general, I would say that you know, so much of the work that I do, especially in the in the rites of passage and initiation space, there is a component of sacred theater to it. There's a component of enacting these rituals, the ritual of masculinity, the ritual of manhood, the transformation of going from one state to another and studying acting in New York at the the Esper studio, which is Meisner technique, was a revelation. It's a spiritual, deep spiritual practice to live or do truthfully under imaginary circumstances. And so it was a huge time for me of self self discovery and learning to use my entire body as an instrument. I had been, as I mentioned, a musician, and I've been an athlete, but there was something about getting to know myself and the instrument of the body so deeply that I could be open to any experience and to take on any experience or role, any any of the vast potentiality of what it means to be human and to be a conduit of that. I honestly don't think there's anything I recommend people do more than go to acting school. It's just such an incredible skill and just an incredible way of getting to know yourself. And so I would say, I use, I use skills that I learned in acting school every day, and the work that I do, literally in the one on one coaching work, and also in the the group, the groups as well. Yeah,

Adam 2:58

the being open to any experience really stood out at me, because in my own experience of men's work, I realized how much, how kind of myopic my my life was, just I'm only operating from my own perspective. So being in, and I imagine this would be group therapy in general, but being in experiences where I'm I'm seeing, in this case, men coming from all walks of life, experiencing all kinds of different issues, and in a way, holding space for that, being a vessel for that, it makes me less judgmental and less reactive to other people's experiences in general.

Mikaal 3:37

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I mean, once you once you meet the entire retinue of human potential, and I think New York is so great for that, you know, just go and go on the subway in New York and just sit and watch. And the whole human spectrum is just there, just laid out in, in, in every single individual and the uniqueness of the individuals there. So it's a beautiful thing. And one of my favorite things about New York to say the least,

Adam 4:04

yeah, so what is men's work? And why does it matter?

Mikaal 4:12

That's a great question. Men's work is a term that's become pretty popular in the last, you know, five to 10 years. I mean, it's, it's the process of men working on themselves. It's the process that once happened to us when we were young men, when we were living in intact tribal societies for hundreds of 1000s of years, regardless of where our genetics come from, if you go back far enough we were living as tribal peoples, and there have been extensive studies done on the peoples of Earth. And one of the beautiful, just unifying aspects of this work is that as teenagers, you and I with the rest of the men of our. Tribe, or the boys of our tribe, would have been taken by the men away from our mothers, away from the comforts of the hearth and the warmth of mother's skirt tails. And we would have been taken out, usually into the dark, into the cold, with the men. And we would get to learn the experience of what it means to be men, the ethos of our tribe, the the mythos, the myths, the stories and we would be literally put through a process of becoming men. And one of the big topics that I love to talk about, we have this idea of patriarchy in the modern world as this pejorative thing that you know, men and the shadows of men, what, has become of us, but when I look at it, I actually think it's something called puerarchy. Puerarchy means rule by boys. And what happens, unfortunately when men are not initiated, is our bodies mature and we become adults. We occupy an adult male body, but our psychologies and our emotional bodies don't just naturally make the transition from boyhood to manhood, and we actually need something to help us do that. And that's what these rituals, these rites of passages, are all about. The idea is that men become men, or boys become men, through a cultural process, through an external process of men putting boys through a process, something that they go through, something hard, something difficult, something challenging. There's this idea that the masculine grows through challenge, whereas our sisters, the menstrual cycle comes for them. It's something that happens, whether they like it or not. Their bodies change as as male bodies do too, but our sisters go through that process and become women, and that happens inside of their bodies. So just the way a female body has sex inside of its body, a male body has sex outside of its body, the rituals and rites of passages are similar. The rituals and rites of passage of womanhood tend to happen inside the body. The rituals and rites of passage of manhood tend to happen outside the body. So what the way I look at our culture right now, our culture is struggling because we live in a society where we have the majority of our adult men in adult male bodies that haven't actually gone through any meaningful transition, any initiation or rite of passage into manhood. And the result of that, I think, is, is the culture that we see, where we don't, we don't have a lot of mature masculine models, role models, or people that are, I would say, occupying a frequency of masculinity that is inspiring, that combines, and I know we're going to talk about this a little bit, but combines what I see as these sort of two, two aspects of masculinity, the sort of strong raw, The sort of stereotypical strong gym going, you know, athletic, Warrior, protector type, and then the soft, sensitive, vulnerable, communicative type as well. And how, how we can join those two elements of the male psyche together, in in in individual, mature men.

Adam 8:23

Yeah, wow. I love that. Maybe the best description I've ever heard men's work and why it's important. I just anecdote. I maybe a year ago, I put what is men's work into chat GPT, and it, it slapped me on the hand, and said, men's work refers to construction jobs and and heavy, you know, hard labor. And it's, it's a term that is, it stands in opposition to women's work, which is like working in the house, working in the kitchen. And I love that we are. We are owning this phrase. Now, this such a meaningful thing that, to your point, we it just used to happen, and then it fell out of favor, and

Mikaal 9:12

now we're back. That's it, man. And we're in a wild time as everyone living right now knows we're in a moment where we've, we've, been, I think, very necessarily examining what it means to be men and women in the modern world. What is a man? What is a woman? I think it's really useful to be able to take a look at what that actually means and maybe try to redefine that, but without those definitions, without a set sense of what things are. People also struggle. People struggle with their identities and with definitions. And so what does it mean to be a man in the modern world? I mean, I'd love to see what you'd have to say about that. Adam,

Adam 9:53

yeah, well, to your point, just now I believe that. Well. To go back. Part of the reason that these initiation rituals were so important was because we needed warriors. We needed men that could go out into the cold, that could pick up a bow and arrow or a sword and fight to the death. And the tribes that didn't have these rituals were beaten by the tribes that did. And we don't live in such a confronting environment anymore. So we can have cultures of men that don't go through such initiations. They go off and they get their jobs and they, you know, they work for 5060, years and they retire. And so in other words, my answer to that question is one big part of men's work is that it's a choice now to

Mikaal 10:50

work on yourself. Yeah, yeah, and,

Adam 10:54

and I personally really like that about it. And I like that it is inclusive, in, at least in the in the circles I run in, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. But it's inclusive of of trans men and people that that that come from very different expressions of of masculinity. But what one thing that we all have in common is that we have the desire to experience initiation, and we have the desire to be in conversation with this question of what it means to be a man. Absolutely,

Mikaal 11:28

yeah, absolutely. It's it's a critical question, and it is a question that every man has to answer for himself. And that's kind of the beauty of the work, is that part of the legacy of men's work and becoming a man is, yeah, going out into the dark, into the cold, courting death, the idea of of meeting our maker and testing ourselves, testing ourselves against the world, going on the hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell would call it, and being willing to discover what we're actually about, and the value of that, the value of a man who has done that and who has tested himself and again, it doesn't mean that. That means that we test ourselves as warriors to go and kill other people, but the tenacity, the strength of character, the ability to know oneself, to know what one's limits are, and be able to push through those. Those are incredibly valuable. As a father, as a partner, as a businessman, as a you know a bystander on the street and you see a fight break out. It's like having an intact and connected framework within which you are deeply connected, and not just connected to yourself. But the thing I love about men's work is it's work done in the company of other men. And so I think what so many of us are missing, so many of us didn't grow up with, is a band of brothers and not just your friends from high school that you get together with every now and then and get drunk and, you know, cat call at the women walking by, but men who, like you, have been going through this process, and who are going through the process together, of asking difficult questions, of being held accountable, of telling each other the truth, of offering what, what I call iron feedback in my in my circles, which is somebody will share a challenge that they're having, and then it's like, we don't just, Oh, that's nice. I hope you do well, right? It's like we give, we give reflections of positive feedback, but then we also add, you know, room for improvement. Like, where do we see your not living up to your expectation? And I think men need that. I think we really need to not just have smoke blown up our ass. Like, I want to know where I'm failing, where I'm coming up short, where I could be better. And I want to trust that I've got men around me that are ballsy enough and that know me enough, and that we built that camaraderie, that trust with where I can do that for them, and they can do that for me, and that's needed, wanted and embraced.

Adam 13:56

I love that. So I was just about to say the thing about the tribal initiations is they were, it was not optional. In my understanding. I imagine it depended on the tribe. But, like, some cultures have something like a eunuch, you know, maybe you were born with a penis, but you didn't do the initiation. And you're gonna and you're gonna have a different role in society. But I'm thinking of, there's other cultures where the initiation, you know, they sew these ants into a glove, and you have to wear the fire ant glove. And the the question I was going to ask, which you just answered? And I would love to just recap, which is like in our culture today, what are the absolute core necessities of men's work and I, and just from what you just said, is like, is honest feedback. Truth is, is the the willingness to expose himself and be examined by other men and sense of camaraderie with other men. Yeah,

Mikaal 14:59

yeah. And my ex, in my experience, Adam, every man needs a mission, like a real mission. In this world, we talk a lot about purpose and in the work that I've done, you know, my and my own journey as well, I It's such a critical piece doing the work to determine, not just like, where I work, you know, and these, these things that I'm interested in, but like, Why did I, why did I incarnate on this planet? Like, why did I actually come here? And it probably wasn't to push paper for someone else's dream or work at Amazon. And no, no, nothing wrong with working at Amazon, right as a means to an end. But every man has something deep inside of him that he knows he's here to do. And the way you generally know that that's your thing is that it's terrifying and that it not terrifying you're not aiming high enough. And so a big part of what we do and why it's important to have other men to be able to excavate this and go into the process of determining what that is, and then being held by your brothers to the commitment to discover what that is to okay, what's that? I don't know why, but I gotta, I need. I need to climb Denali, you know I gotta. I gotta climb this mountain. Okay, what do you what do you need to do to go about making that happen? And so I think you know, it depends on where a man in his in in where a man is in his life. But you know, for young men especially, we need adventure. We need a call to adventure and to go out and test ourselves in the world.

Adam 16:32

I love that I've never thought of that of mission as being born of terror in a way of, well, it's,

Mikaal 16:39

it's, I have a mentor that that talks about, he calls it the fear compass, and he says that there's generally two directions with fear. Like, if you're walking down the street and you see a crazy homeless man wielding a knife walking towards you, you should run away from that. Like, that's healthy fear. Like, get away from a mountain lion, you know, like an elk charging you in the forest like run from that. But that there's another type of fear that is the type of existential fear that we actually need to steer into, that we actually need to turn towards, to examine and be not be willing to have an assassin just sort of lurking in the corner of your mind, right? It's like, what are the things that scare you? One of the things the things that my coach had me do two years ago was come up with a fear inventory. What, namely, what are the one of the things I'm most afraid of. And what I came up with was the open ocean and sharks was I've read Jaws when I was like, 10s bad ideas. But what I ended up doing was I went and charted a boat off Jupiter, Florida, and we went out into the ocean and chummed the water, and the sharks came, and I got in the water, and I swam with sharks in the open ocean, and going out there was absolutely terrifying, but once I actually got in the water, I was like, wow, this is the thing I've been so afraid of. And I realized that I wasn't really that afraid of it, but it had been this thing that was, like, taking up energy in my CPU. You know, it's like that program running in the background that's like, you don't think it's a big deal, but it's eating up like 12% of your battery. Yeah, it's like that. So part of the work that I do with men is really like confronting like, where what are the things you're afraid of? What are the things that are leaking power in your life? What are the things that are stealing your life force? And as men, right? We, we, I really help men learn how to become more powerful. Does that mean, you know, having the biggest stick or being a jerk? No, absolutely not. It means becoming full of power in your life, full of energy, full of capacity, and what it means to be able to examine where in your life you're losing power, where you have power to be gained, and then working towards whatever it is to acquire that power, put it into your life in service of your purpose, in service of your mission, in service of your family, in service of your community, in service of something greater than yourself, essentially, which is another piece of the sort of higher echelons of men's work. Men really want to be of service. And there's something really beautiful and special about doing something for something or someone beyond yourself. And so the modern world, right? Adam has been, we've been so directed towards individualism. And, you know, gotta get mine, and I gotta do this, and it's about me, and it's about me, it's about me. Once you have something else beyond yourself to work towards, there's a whole other element that starts to come online. And a man in my own experience, and so, yeah, these are, these are some pretty important things, something

Adam 19:46

that I see as taking up a lot of CPU with men, something that they're unconsciously or even consciously afraid of, is how they relate to women. And though I've not had the. Privilege of taking any of your offerings beside that one few hour workshop that was many years ago, something I'm very curious about is this desire on fire. Can you talk more about that? Yeah,

Mikaal 20:14

desire and fire is a women's organization based out of Austin, Texas, my dear, dear friends and collaborators, Amy Bucha and Ellie Montgomery, and they've been running this women's program, a women's empowerment program, for about seven years, very successfully. And I started partnering with them, bringing men into their weekend experiences. We've been co creating something I'd been doing some work called that I was calling sacred union when I met them, and we just sort of, not sort of, we just collaborated with Ellie's husband Rob Montgomery, who's my business partner in the king's code, which is the men's initiatory program that we run down here in Austin. Though it is online, you can, you can be anywhere in the world and do it. We just had our big sacred union men's and women's events. So we had a full weekend, three full days, of about 150 men and women that came in to go into this process. And the thing that we did Adam, is we started a WhatsApp group for everyone coming in, and we told them just to introduce themselves in the thread and then share what their struggles have been with men, with women in relationship. Like, what are we struggling with? What are all the things? We took everyone's answer, we put it into chat GPT, and we said, chat GPT. Summarize this for us. It spit out two sentences. First sentence was this, women don't trust men. Period. Second sentence, men don't trust men. Comma, or themselves period. And I think that really sums up where we are. I think we're in a very interesting place in the relationships between men and women. You know, the the battle of the sexes, as I call it, is is raging and has never been more challenging, I think, than it is right now. We we are very much at odds with each other as men and women, for a lot of I think, good reasons and bad reasons. But, you know, we just did an event last night here in Austin as well these men's and women's circles that I helped lead, and it's just so beautiful because we've just forgotten how to talk to each other. We've forgotten each other. Men and women have forgotten that men and women are different, at least we're similar too, of course, but we're different. We look at things differently. We view things differently. And there's something so special about learning how to talk to each other again, how to love each other again. And, you know, there's, there's this really interesting thing in our culture, Adam that I talk about a lot, which is that, over the last 60 years, both men and women have been taught that men are bad, this idea of patriarchy and toxic masculinity, right? And I really love what it's pointing at, because, again, I'm the son of a second wave feminist. I I really love and appreciate feminism for what it has done. It was an absolutely necessary thing. Women's Equality is, if you argue against that, I just don't know what to tell you. It's just such a such a no brainer for me, in that sense of things. And you know, there's a brilliance and a shadow to every movement, and I think as as someone who grew up very much in the internalization of those ideas, well, wait a second, men are bad. Patriarchy, toxic masculinity. I'm a man, I must be bad. And so my podcast is called remasculation. It's about my own journey into emasculation, into the unconscious, unintended castration and emasculation that I experienced in my family, in my culture, growing up when I did, and that, you know, no one's to blame, truly, no one's to blame, but it's all of our responsibility, I think, right now, to start looking at these patterns. And you know, if, if men are the bad guys, men and women lose, because we either are men or we're interested in men. And so with the women that I work with, the biggest, the biggest impediment that I see to them being in the romantic partnerships with men, with with men that they want to be in, is the way they view men and the ideas that they have about men. And it's tough because a lot of women have had bad experiences with men. A lot of men have had bad experiences with men, but we make the mistake of extending that to all men. Well, this men, this man, treated me bad. All men must be bad. It's just not true. There's so many good men out there, just like there's so many good women. So, yeah, I'm really passionate about this work. It's, it's amazing work. Yeah,

Adam 24:55

I've noticed that when I talk about men's work, like at a party for. Example, women lean in, oh yeah, men that are not familiar with the work, kind of like walk away. Yep, and especially when it comes to the topics of sex and intimacy. And I wonder how much of that is in your workshops like sex and romantic intimacy. It's

Mikaal 25:24

all about intimacy. Man, it's all about intimacy. I mean, intimacy is the thing that we're missing most. It's the thing that I believe is having the biggest impact on us as human beings, because we are social animals. We are social creatures, food, water, shelter, intimacy, that's just, that's just the reality of things, and I think we grossly underestimate that in our culture. And you know, intimacy is being it's revealing yourself to another person. It's revealing and sharing yourself with another person, and building intimacy. And intimacy builds trust, it builds relationship, it builds community. And community, the presence of community implies intimacy. And so again, no one taught us anything about intimacy, relationship, conscious conversation, sex. I mean, no one taught any of us any of the tools to be able to be in right relationship with ourselves, with men, with women, with each other. And we're in this we're in this pocket where, yeah, I mean, over half of the marriages are ending in divorce. No one's having sex. Relationships are on the decline.

Adam 26:37

Yeah, yeah. Something I personally have gotten a lot out of was nudism. In my own work, I had a lot of like, body shame when I was a kid, and so I just sort of to your shark analogy. I dumped I jumped into nudism, and I ended up hosting a bunch of naked events in New York City, and it's one of the things that I appreciated in my men's work, is an opportunity for men to just be with each other nude. And what, what if any role has that played in your own in your own work with men?

Mikaal 27:14

That's a great question. Adam, I mean, homophobia is a big thing in our culture, right? And there's something about being confident enough in yourself to be able to be naked around other men, that is, it's a big step. And it brings up body shame. It brings up, you know, cock size comparison. It brings up all the things that I think men are, that we're faced with, you know, the comparison that men engage in with each other, the competition that happens between men. These are these are normal, natural things. And again, there's a there's a beautiful aspect to healthy competition, and then there's the unhealthy. So I, I've done a number of different men's work modalities where nudity was a part of it, which I actually deeply appreciate. And I'm someone who's very comfortable with that. Again, I had hippie parents, like we kind of grew up. I grew up in a naked house until I was, you know, nine or 10. So for me, it's, it's, it's an easy thing. For me, I also take really good care of my body. So for for men who maybe have body shame, these types of things, I mean, it's, it's, it can be a real challenge. But again, there's something about the examination of the self, the examination of your relationship to yourself, to your body, that yeah, nudism, or any type of practices around that can be really powerful. You know, in the practices that I've done, the invitation was to get naked up to your level of comfort. So some guys that you know, just took the shirt off, some guy that went down to their underwear, some guys went all the way in, and it's just, yeah, it's a very confronting experience, right? And then the the beauty of getting to talk about the experience, the beauty of getting to talk about sex, losing your virginity, of how you feel about yourself physically, how you feel about your cock, size, or these types of things. I mean, these are, these are powerful conversations, not necessarily you know, ones to start someone out with who's never done any work before, but to be able to build up to that, I think it's critical, though. Yeah, I love that you're that you do that.

Adam 29:28

I'm glad that you named that last bit about it being kind of like a medium to an advanced practice for a lot of modern men. Sure. Yeah, speaking of intimacy and bodies. What do you have any thoughts on, like, sacred combat, physical connection, like, whether it's it's it's combat or or dance or movement? Can you talk about the importance of the body and movement and and combat and mentors? Absolutely.

Mikaal 29:59

I. Absolutely, yeah, I ran a i We literally called it sacred combat. We ran a friend of mine, Dan Hochman, who I've had on my podcast. We ran a circle in in Boulder called red circle. And yeah, red circle conscious combat is what it was. And so very much about getting men into the experience of that energy, the warrior energy, and being able to line up and push contests we had, we had foam battling swords that we would, we would get, get a chance to go in and, you know, either have helmets or no head contact, but like, I mean, full on, like, really, like, go at each other. And it's so rare that we get a chance to have that experience. I think that's why you we've seen such a rise in the popularity of combat sports in the last 10 to 20 years. Men need a battlefield. And it's it's good that we are not killing ourselves on battlefields to the same degree that we once were historically. We have sports. We have these other ways that we can simulate that. But there's something about the male experience of of breaking through to the other side, whether it's on a football grid iron, on a on a on a European football pitch, in actual combat, but to be able to test oneself with other men, to get into the body, to have the, not just the theories and the conversations, which are great, but actually getting physical with each other. You know, showing each other your war face is something I like to do with my guys. It's a very healthy and invigorating aspect. And the embodiment piece, you know, being in the body. Being in your body as men, is critical, absolutely critical. What

Adam 31:45

do you think about combat as a means of of resolving differences?

Mikaal 31:51

I love it. I mean, I think again, sacred combat. What's what makes something sacred, right? It's the it's the intention behind it and the attention that you put on it. So if it's truly to resolve something, I mean, most of the fights I've ever seen, you know, unless the cops come afterwards, the guys are buying each other a beer, there's something about combat for men that, once it's done, actually makes you close. There's a it's a form of in a way, it's a form of love, I think. And for so many men who don't have the permission or the safety or the capacity to acknowledge their love for other men, and I mean, in a in a heterosexual way, to just love each other. There's something about beating each other up or hitting each other across a football field, where there's respect, there's honor, there's there's we're testing ourselves against each other. Wow, this guy was a good opponent. Wow, he knocked me on my f*****g ass. Wow, respect. It's like, yeah, I got you, but I love you. Tamir, like, yeah.

Adam 33:00

And it's, to me why it's feels so ugly and so violent when, like in a UFC fight, they don't shake hands after. Or, you know, the because that it leaves it to me, it just leaves it open ended, and it brings up this thoughts of, like, so then what? Now? We go get our our brothers and our homies, and we have an even bigger war, like, that's the, the non sacred version of combat, and it's, to me, important to distinguish the two.

Mikaal 33:28

Yeah, I think, you know, UFC and these combat sports are really, they're, they're, they're incredible mirrors. They're incredible mirrors for where we are. You know, I think it's, it's easy to underestimate what it takes to get in that octagon on television and risk, you know, getting getting your ass kicked publicly and in being on replay, you're you're knockout you getting knocked out is like all time highlight knockout reel. It's like there's something that to go in there, to psych yourself up, to go in there with someone else who is a trained killer and and risk literally your life to get in there. There's something where you have to kind of get hyped and you f**k you, I'm going to f*****g kill you. And you have to kind of go in there and get that. I'd say, yeah, about half the time you see afterwards where there's just, there's no f**k you, bro. And then on other times you do see that. You do see that camaraderie. You see the winner come over and graciously like, make sure that the guy who's got knocked out is okay. You have respect that shared afterwards. But it is, I mean, it's a it is a hierarchy. It is who is the best, and these are the best of the best who train at combat, right? So it's a heck of a thing, but I think you see anyway. So

Adam 34:42

there's a version of men's work that I don't have any personal experience with, but there's it's kind of lampooned on social media, of like, these guys that go out and they roll in the mud and they get kicked in the nuts, and it's like, kind of a military boot camp. And when i i. Sometimes when I tell people what I do in men's work, they their mind goes to that. I'm curious if you know about those organizations, or if you can just speak to the difference between that and kind of what we do. Well, I

Mikaal 35:11

think it's really interesting, because most of most modern men's work came out of MKP, the mankind project. It came about, honestly, it came about as a as a counter movement to the Women's Liberation Movement. Women were getting together and doing their things and like, Why aren't the men doing it? And the men started doing their stuff too. So it was a lot of, I would say, largely liberal men, you know, those who are more progressive, more higher in openness, higher and agreeableness that started to do that work. And on the other side, you had things like the military, right, which is, I mean, certainly a form of men's work. But right now, it's really, it's really fascinating, because I as a as a point of practice. For me, I make sure that i i Watch conservative news. I watch liberal news. I make sure that I have a full picture of what's actually happening. And it's wild, because they're like, conservative, there's a conservative men's work movement happening. And it's amazing. There is a big Christian men's work movement happening. Um, there are, you know, if you, if you don't live, you know, if you live in New York or LA, are these sort of bigger cities, you might not know that. Or if social media feeds being what they are, these echo chambers, right? We don't see what the other side is up to. But yeah, there's, there's definitely a flavor of men's work that is a bit more aggressive. And, you know, there is something about the stereotypes, right? Like yelling at each other's face. And you see the, you know, all the, all the websites for the men's work now, it's like, the kind of like, the guys like, yelling. It's like, oh yeah, they're yelling, okay, yeah, men's work hashtag, haha. And yeah, there are certain generalities in men's work that do kind of work and that are being used pretty widely. You know, something about the wild man, getting getting wild, getting into nature, getting out of your f*****g button down shirt and your your glasses, and getting in the mud and wrestling with other men. That is primal. We all did that as kids. You know, there's something about breaking out of the matrix of, yeah, all of your control and conditioning. And you know, I mean, nothing will put you in the present moment like getting kicked in the nuts, that's for damn sure,

Adam 37:29

right? Yeah, so what I'm hearing you say is that perhaps my observation is coming from my liberal progressive friends making fun of what may be a Christian or a conservative version of men's work that's emerging. Yeah,

Mikaal 37:47

yeah. I mean, it's interesting, because I do, I do this work all over the country, all over the world, and, you know, depending on where I'm at, I would say that if I'm if I'm in a men's group in New York, say, or LA, that I could predict that it's going to be, there's going to be the energy of the group is going to be very different than if I went to one in, say, a church basement in Wyoming or somewhere else, right? There's just going to be, they're going to be doing different things. They're going to be talking about different things. There's nothing bad or wrong about either one. There's just I would say that the again, this is why I love this work, the the prescription that men that lead a little more liberal, so a little more sensitive, focused, a little more vulnerable, a little more accommodating, a little more more heart than sword. Let's say the medicine for them is more sword. It's more sword energy, right? It's more boundaries, it's more directness. So no, no, none of this feeling stuff. What do you actually want to do and what are you going to do about it? That's medicine. Now on the other side of the equation, more sensitivity, more vulnerability, more capacity to share openly from the hearts for the guys that are more like, you know, David Goggins or Jocko will Nick and, you know, rah, rah, masculinity, right? When there's an element of sword in over abundance, the medicine is more heart. So I really use these terms of heart and sword to kind of as as placeholders for the two sides of the equation. And for most men that I work with, it's pretty easy to tell one that every man will have an overabundance of one, usually, and an under abundance of the other. Neither is bad or wrong. It's more of just, how do we find the right balance that allows this man to come fully into his capacity? As a individuated and sovereign man, complete in his ability, yeah, to be to be balanced.

Adam 39:51

I love that. Yeah, the heart and sword is a useful dichotomy, and especially, I. Uh, as someone who now I'm, I'm, uh, you mentioned mankind project. I'm, I'm the area communication steward. So I have this question of, like, how do I get more men into this work? And that proposes an answer, which is, well, there's these two types of men, and we can attract, maybe the men that are more attracted to the sword, but they need more heart. They need to see more sword, you know? They need to be like, Wow, that's cool, that sword stuff. And then we sneak in a little bit of heart. Alternative, I am curious about your experience with the mankind project. You I saw on a Facebook post some exchange we had you'd initiate with them, yeah. What was that like, and was that before the cultural appropriation kerfuffle, and what was and what, what led you to leave, in other words, and start your own thing?

Mikaal 40:58

Yeah? Yeah. I went through my, my new Warrior Training weekend in 2016 I went through in New York. And, yeah, it was, it was an incredible experience. It was right at the beginning of my journey for this. And it was, it was really cool. I was reading iron John. I was reading King, Warrior, magician, lover. I was very much in that men's movement ethos of the 80s and 90s, which is what the mankind project emerged from. Yeah, I really, I really loved it. I got a lot from it. What I came to realize later is that I think, you know, it is, it is an incredible starting place. And the eye groups and all these other things are really, really wonderful. They really are. They're really great. The kerfuffle that you spoke to was frustrating to see, and honestly, pretty confusing, because I, I don't know that. I mean, I've been in a lot of diverse groups, but my MKP weekend was pretty freaking diverse. And so getting to see that organization get devoured by political correctness was really frustrating for me, because of all the organizations in the universe that need political correctness and adjusting, I think they would be the last. I just didn't see the need to put all of the attention on those particular things, given the work they were doing, given the breadth of diversity that was already there in the organization, from what I could see, it was very strange to me and very confusing. And yeah, I really kind of lost that. It just that became, that became the focus versus men's work. And so it was, it was, yeah, kind of part of like, oh, well, I, I'm already looking to go in my own direction with this. Here's a here's an impetus to go ahead and do it on my own as well. So yeah, they were a big influence on me. David data's work was another big influence on me. I'd seen those two streams, those two wisdom streams, were the big two for me. But the work that I do now is a bit of an amalgam, you know, the the king's Code program that I run here, the initiatory program. It's a five month program. You know, the weekend is beautiful, but it's three days, and then you're kind of done, and you're back to the world. And, yeah, there's the I groups and these these things to help. But the program is five months. It's one it's one call a week, two hours for five months. And then we do have an in person retreat as well for three days, which we go through. And then we have, we have ways for people to stay in the organization. So we're getting ready to start battalion two here on March 23 and any man that's gone through the first battalion can join the next the next battalion for for a discount, like for a major discount. Like, once you've gone through, you can keep going through. You can keep staying in the work. We really pride ourselves on the organizational structure and that from the WhatsApp threads to the different forms of communication. Excuse me, the Brotherhood, like the actual brotherhood that exists and gets built, is what is what? Maybe the most important thing of this work, you know, yeah, we dive into purpose. Yeah, we dive into connection to something greater than yourself, but the actual brotherhood. I think most of us just don't understand the unspeakable value of a cohort of brothers that you can absolutely trust, because you've gone through some together, and what that means to have people you can rely on. I mean, we see it in the group all, all the time, someone will post. Man, I'm really going through with my wife. I need, I need help. Man, anybody? Can anybody get on a call and it'll be like, three or four guys like, Yo, I'm here. I got you. And. Like instant, instant, instant. So in our culture, right? We we often don't have that. So many of us were raised by women, so many of us were trained to take our issues to our women. And so we turn our our women into our therapists or our mothers, which is the worst thing we can do if we're interested in sex polarity, those types of things. So yeah, it is, yeah, I'll leave, I'll leave it at that.

Adam 45:27

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The thing that I like to pitch men's work as is an important initiation experience. But the most important thing is afterwards, this this communication, this feeling that you're in a in a brotherhood, and that you can call on these men and they will have your back,

Mikaal 45:50

Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, like to actually have that is, I don't think many people have ever had that, and that's what we all used to have. We all used to have. We all used to come from tribe. We used to come from having, you know, we wouldn't just be going out to get ours. It wasn't this individuated siloed thing, where everyone's, you know, working. I gotta work to make money, to bring home the money to support my family. It's like, no, no. You and I and the rest of us would go out hunting together as the warriors of the tribe, bring home an antelope, bring home an elk, bring home whatever it was, and then all of us would be supported. And if you know, you had a bad day hunting, I had a good day. Guess what you eat too, because next time you're you're going to be the one that brings it home, and I'll be supported by you. So these aspects of community that we've lost and being able to be supported by a super structure, the meta, holding containment of a tribe that I think so many of us in the modern world don't have. Why are we depressed? Why are we anxious? Yeah, we're not living a purpose. Yeah, we're not doing what we're meant to do. But we also don't have community. We don't have the thing we always had as human beings that we evolved having, and now we don't have it. Most of us don't know we don't have it, but the not having is the thing that is actually why we're all struggling to the degree that we are. It's truly my belief,

Adam 47:18

yeah, and to that point I remember when COVID first hit, and I had just done your workshop, maybe this was a couple months after you'd made this brilliant Facebook post that really called to me, which was, it was something along the lines of men. This is the moment. This is the moment we have trained for. And I felt this call in my heart, but I had no men, yeah, so I can, I can really relate to to then this emergency and feeling alone, you know, me and my wife and a trapped in an apartment. And then now, frankly, I've been feeling this similar feeling as to my in my judgment, we're maybe heading towards a kind of civil war. The divide is feeling more tenuous than than ever, politically, in our in the US. But I feel like I have my brothers, and I feel like I have a plan. I have I have a action potential. And so I'm curious right now, like, how do you deal with the current political landscape? How does your brotherhood and your sense of masculinity fit into that

Mikaal 48:33

great question? Then, you know, it was funny, because I after the election the day after the election, again, I feel so blessed. I've lived so many places. I grew up in LA New York, raised me, but my family's in Kentucky. I went to high school in Kentucky. I went to college in Florida. I lived in Colorado. I live in Texas now, and so I feel really blessed to have a real, lived understanding of the liberal and conservative realities in this country, and the day after the election, depending on who I was talking to, the world was either ending, like the world is over, like the Nazis are coming in, like it is the end of the f*****g world, that people are losing their minds. And I'm like, Wow, maybe it's the end of the world, maybe this is, this is a horrible thing. And then I'd go to my other friend's page, and it was, like, the best day ever. Like, like, like, the birds are out in the trees again, and the sun is shining again. And like, there's so much hope. And like, you know, RFK is gonna get, you know, get the f*****g crap out of our food. And like it was such a dichotomy between those two realities. I was so struck by that. And so I think that there's regardless of what you believe, regardless of what side of the of the aisle you find yourself on, we need our brothers. It's not, it's not. An option to not have male connection in this world, it's just not because you're going to get older, you're gonna have no friends if you're in a relationship, your relationship is absolutely going to suffer because of it, because you're going to turn your woman into everything. You're going to force her to handle all of your s**t with you, instead of having a band of brothers that you can figure your out with and then keep the relationship polarized. And so, yeah, have a contingency plan. Have friends talk about these things. What's actually there? I think, you know, divide and conquer is the oldest military tactic in the book. I think there's a lot being done right now to actually divide us, but I think we're, we are. We're actually more on the same page than ever before. I really see that. I really feel that, and that I think, you know, there's nothing more important right now in the world than men doing their work, to wake up and to come into their own empowerment and to come into the process of learning how to stand up for themselves, for those they care about and for their communities, and being able to look at the bigger picture, you know, the bigger picture, beyond liberal and conservative. You know, because government needs both to function.

Adam 51:19

It needs its own polarity. Yeah,

Mikaal 51:20

exactly, exactly. Again, like we talked about earlier, the medicine the the prescription that the Conservatives need is a little bit of healthy liberalism, and the prescription that liberalism needs is a little bit of healthy conservatism. And so those things that balance, then let's see what's happening. So, yeah, man, it's a wild time.

Adam 51:41

Yeah, well, we're coming up on an hour. I really appreciate this discussion. You're just so wise, and this is the most I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with you. So thank you. And I'm curious, how can people find you, and what else? Any parting words?

Mikaal 51:59

Yeah, yeah, hang in there. It's things are actually getting better. Don't believe the hype. Don't watch the news. The news is designed to spike your nervous system and induce fear, whether you're watching CNN or Fox, which I watch both, so I can see what everyone is saying. It's like, there's, there's something being done. So take care of yourself. Believe in believe in us. We're going to make it. I do this work. I know we're going to make it. Things are, things are actually a lot better than we think they are. And yeah, you can find my stuff. My name is Michael Bates. My mom is a hippie. So my name is spelled a little uniquely, so it's m, i, k, a, a, l, Bates, B, as in boy, A, T, E, s.com, the Kings code.org is the name of the men's organization that I run here in Austin. And desire and fire is the women's organization that My dear sisters run. And so, yeah, that's men's and women's work. I mean, it's so important, it's so important that we do our work, so that we can actually do the work of being in relationship. Because in traditional societies, you would never, you weren't allowed to date or marry until you'd gone through your men's work, until you've gone through your women's work. So think about that. You know, pleasure to be here with you, brother, but again, sorry, having a bit of an allergy day over here, so I'm a little stuffy, but that's

Adam 53:23

all right, you know, Zoom does a pretty good job of cutting out all the all the sniffles. Well, thanks for being here, brother,

Mikaal 53:30

thanks for having me. I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, okay, bye.

Last month I combined two of my favorite things: extemporaneous discussion and nudity. I was shocked at how many people RSVP’d (nearly 45), then pleasantly surprised when only 14 showed up. Cold feet, maybe?

The event was designed as both a contest (cash prizes woo!) and a workshop. This is how it worked:

* Starting clothed, we held an opening circle to introduce ourselves and say a few words about what we were feeling in that moment

* I asked the audience what does it mean for someone to be a good speaker? And a bad speaker? and wrote the answers on a big white board

* Breaking off into groups of 5, I had each group pull a few cards from the hilariously irreverent and seriously confronting question deck AskHole

* Each person took two minutes to respond to one of the questions

* Each person anonymously ranked the others from most to least resonant (according to the attributes on the board or just vibe), and turned their votes in to me.

* I had a clown come out and do an act (to distract people while I entered their scores).

* I tallied up the scores and did my best to recombine people into groups with even distribution of high/medium/low scores.

* We did four rounds in ninety minutes. It took me about ten minutes to count the votes and recombine people between rounds.

* I invited the 3 highest scoring people up to answer a final question: What are you passionate about, and what measurable action can the people in this room take to help you with that?

* Veela won!

I was happy with the event and hope to make it a regular thing as long as people continue to be interested in it.

For future events:

I could imagine redistributing people in more of a hierarchical way. This would require weighing the high scorers so the last place person in the highest ranked group is not given the same number of points as the last ranked person in the lower groups. But for now this method seemed to work.

In retrospect, the clown was fun but a better use of time would have been to give participants time to give feedback to each other.

I could have prolonged the transition period from clothed to nude. And I could have used less intense question decks in earlier rounds.

Curious? Join us for another NEDx tomorrow February 6th in Brooklyn at 7pm. Register here

We have a men only NEDx coming up (date TBD), to learn about that sign up for my newsletter here.

I interview Claire Berjot about her upcoming course "Thriving in Relationships" 2024. View more details and apply here.

01:15 - What brought you to healing work?
03:30 - What's the connection between inner peace & finding peace in relationships?
08:45 - Why is it sometimes hard to do what is best/healthy?
10:15 - How to broach the subject of therapy with one's partner.
11:50 - Couples waiting too long to go to therapy
14:40 - What are the different struggles between ENM/monogamous couples?
17:45 - What should someone do if they're struggling with difficult, repeating patterns while dating (one night stands, being ghosted, etc)?
22:00 - "Parts Work" skepticism
24:00 - Bridging Differentiation/Attachment models (a unique offering)

Course Details
Dates: Saturdays 12-2pm EST: February 10 & 24, and March 9 & 23
Location: Zoom
Cost: $79 Early bird (before Jan 22nd), $95 General

Learn to thrive in your relationships, starting with the relationship you have with yourself.
Whether you are:
- Struggling with either challenging emotions or behaviors and striving for more inner peace
- Wanting to learn how to “love yourself” but haven’t found the manual
- Looking for a more harmonious relationship with your loved ones
- In (a) relationship(s), wanting to develop depth and intimacy and a more conscious way to relate
- Heartbroken, wanting to understand repetitive patterns and make peace with your past

This class will help you develop skills and a roadmap to bring more consciousness to your relationships.

FAQ:

Do I need to attend all four sessions?

While it is ideal, you do not need to attend all of the sessions. Each one will be recorded for your private use for up to a month following the completion of the course.

Can I join with my partner(s)?

Yes, simply share this form with them and indicate below that you're joining together.

Will this be lecture-style, or interactive?

The course is highly interactive. While you are welcome to opt out at any time, there will be many opportunities to work directly with Claire, in small groups, and 1-1 with other participants.

Can I listen in on the call if I'm unable to attend by video?

We ask that all participants do their best to keep video on. We also ask that participants join the call from a private space with minimum potential for distraction. If you're not able to participate in this manner, please review the recording afterwards and add your voice to the group chat.

Can I join after the course has begun?

We will close registration at 12pm EST on February 9th, 24 hours before the beginning of the course.

About Claire Berjot:

Claire is a psychotherapist and a coach, with a specific interest in how we are in relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us.

This led her to explore modalities such as mindfulness meditation, authentic movement, intuitive voice, altered states of consciousness, NVC (Non Violent Communication) as well as SE’s trauma work (Somatic Experiencing). She then eventually pursued her master's degree in Transpersonal Psychotherapy at Naropa University (Boulder, CO).

She’s completed her relational education with a level 2 PACT training (a Psychobiological Approach to Couple’s Therapy), based on the latest advances in neuroscience, nervous system regulation, and attachment theories. She also trained in IFS (Internal Family Systems) and IFIO (Intimacy from the Inside Out) and loves how parts work naturally weaves in curiosity and compassion for our experiences.

As she holds holistic containers for deep transformation, her work is equally anchored in the experience of the body, mind, and soul.

She feels passionate about transmitting the tools, skills, and psychoeducation we all need to thrive relationally.

Welcome to the Adam Lamb Adventure Club podcast. In this episode I spoke with Om Rupani.

Om is a BDSM educator in the NYC area. I first met him at his workshop “Dating & Dominance for the Modern Man”, held at his home in Jersey City. The workshop profoundly shifted how I relate to women, and paradoxically led to me taking a year off from pursuing them.

Om’s approach, based on two decades of data working with men, women, and couples, was somehow equally heart-felt and confronting. I found that many of his ideas were new to me, particularly in man/woman relating, sub/dom archetypes, and his view that modern feminism is synonymous with a disrespect of men.

After listening to all of his podcast episodes, which I highly recommend, I still had questions. Om was kind enough to give me an hour of his time.In this episode, we discuss: 

• Polarity

  
  



• Agreement

  
  



• Containment

  
  



• The importance of adoration in romance

  
  



• When to end a relationship

  
  



• Developing self-containment through meditation and physical activity 

  
  



• When to take a break from women

  
  



• The importance of men having male friends

  
  



• Porn & masturbation

  
  



• Om’s favorite depiction healthy masculinity in media

  
  



• Men as sex workers for women

  
  



• Feminism

  
  



• Growing up in India

  
  



• The Landmark Forum

  
  



• His path from student to co-facilitator with Laurie Handlers

  
  



• What is love?

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Om's workshops can be found at omrupani.org

  
  

  his online community is at omrupani.com