Duncan Horst on NeuroConvergence and the Erotic Path to God
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******
