Adam Lamb Adventure Club

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 Righ…

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 meani…

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