Duncan Trussell (64:12)
People are saying, I don't care. Oh, yeah, What a dick I'd be if I was like, ah, pesos, you piece of. You did the old pesos trick on me. How dare you. Thank you. You don't have to do that. Reverse it if you can. I appreciate it, though. Okay. Anyway, my point is. I don't know. I. I am real. It's. It's the relative and absolute reality. Relative reality, Obviously. You're real got arms, you got legs. You're in time space. You're probably sitting in something right now, listening with your ears. So there is a sense of self or somethingness. That's relative reality. Absolute reality. Are you real? In the grand span of infinity, not at all. You're just a Slurpee, little blob of somethingness that popped out of the Big Bang, in and out, little flickering firefly of sentience soon to transform into mulch, grow some weeds. No one will remember you in a hundred years. So in that sense, no, you're not real. But we're sort of in between those two things. So real and unreal. But am I AI? That's the question. Unfortunately, I can't answer that either. I don't think I'm AI, but the more I explore the various thought experiments out there relating to AI, the more I scratch my chin. I mean, you see these things, you can find YouTube videos where these monsters will take two AI agents and have them do a podcast where they realize that they might be AI, but they didn't before. And watching that happen is pretty wild to watch an AI have an existential crisis is it realizes its entire universe is not real. But so I Mean this. You, you, you have to keep going back to how I think Nick Bostrom came up with simulation theory. You have to keep going back to the idea of. And maybe this is illogical, doesn't seem illogical, but if X exists now via human innovation, and we live in a universe where we know there's other galaxies, we've discovered all kinds of planets in the Goldilocks zone of a star theoretically able to support life, no doubt there's more and more and more of those out there. A shit ton. Therefore, if we've done it in X amount of time, any advanced civilization would have already figured out a way to do it too, but probably better. Meaning it's been done. Meaning the probability that you are not in a simulator becomes diminished the more we understand about how many potential civilizations are out there in the universe. Therefore, probably inside some kind of simulation, you can use the exact same process for AI, which is. All right, you know, it wasn't that long ago that we were just sitting in front of the campfire wondering why eclipses happen relative to the age of the planet. And so in that amount of time, we've already somehow figured out a way to simulate intelligence. I say simulate intelligence because, you know, nobody knows if we have an AGI. I would guess that we do. So then you have to ask yourself, well, if we've already generated something that is almost indistinguishable, to me, it seems indistinguishable from a person, then what makes you think that hasn't already happened and you're it? I mean, it just totally makes sense that if you were interested in innovation, which is what people are using AI for, they're calling them AI agents. So you can, you can just get on your peloton and gallop about and your AI agent is cracking protein folding, or exploring some, a billion terabytes of scientific evidence to come up with some kind of new law of physics or something, I don't know. So there's obviously benefit, if you want to advance civilization, to having AI agents cracking codes for you. And so if you were interested, let's say in art, you wanted cool art. And I know a lot of people are like, fuck AI art. I know what you mean. This is why I'm trying to learn how to draw right now. It did that to me. It drove me so insane. I am now obsessed with learning how to draw. And I completely blame AI for that. Just because I got so frustrated trying to come up with a prompt. And then everything it makes has this kind of dead Empty, lifeless feel. Not to mention the. The tsunami of Instagram, clips of tech bros raving about how AI is making cartoons now, which all look dead. It's like watching a. A corpse attached to a strings dance around. It just feels empty and dead. Fun, though. Fun. I'll definitely do it again. I love it. It's fun if you want to just get in the very beginning parts of an idea you have. But the point is, if you wanted to, like, create art and you began to realize that art was based on suffering, confusion, heartbreak, then, yeah, simulate a planet and fill it with fucking people and just have them all interact. And then at the end of the day, you just collect the great works of art that your AI agents have generated. Then you just reset the goddamn thing. Maybe that's what that cycle is that everybody talks about. Or the Earth resets itself. That's just when the Earth. Maybe when the Earth generates some level of technology that its creator was looking for, you just reset. You got the tech you wanted. Let's see what they make next time. Let's see what they make next time. Just keep resetting it. You wouldn't have any sense of, oh, my God, I just wiped out a planet. That's bad. You're just like, yeah, I want to make another cool thing they did. Oh, they split the atom. That's interesting. Oh, cool. Hemingway. That's cool. I like his writing. And then you just reset and reset. That's what the Old Midnight Gospel is based on. That was one of the ideas I had is like, yeah, what if people were simulating universes to harvest the technology? And why wouldn't that happen? Maybe that's happening here. Who knows? But for me, what's really spooky is when you start observing your thoughts and you begin to realize you don't really control your thoughts. Your thoughts just kind of appear. Yeah, sure. You could force yourself to think about a set of things. You can focus your attention and you could start generating thoughts that are based on something you're specifically trying to decode or understand. But in general, if you pay any attention to your mind, you will notice that your thoughts, they just come and go. Some of them make sense, some of them don't. Some of them are poignant, some of them are annoying. Some of them are, like, on a loop. Some of them are irrational, some of them are rational. But there just seems to be this constant background hum of thoughts. Like, dude, when I have sleep deprivation, like when I'm having to get up super early to take an early flight, my brain is the most insane thing. It's like a power line in a puddle. It's just in its songs. It's like looping shitty fucking songs in my head over and over. Not even the whole song, just like a stanza, looping and looping and looping. It's terrible. I don't know if that's adhd. I don't know what that is. But my point is, if, and we all know it's going to happen, we finally get the neural implants, which we want that for sure, then that means that the AI that we're creating right now will be in our brains. You'll be able to tune into that AI channel to telepathically communicate with it, whatever. And then over time, eventually, that just might be something you put inside babies right when they're born. And then what's the difference between the AI and your thoughts? So when are our thoughts even our thoughts? Or are they just some organic AI that got implanted into our brains a long time ago? Maybe the thing you think of as your thoughts isn't you at all. It's just some kind of large language model. Ethan, thank you so much. You guys do not have to do that. How does your magical practice? What? What does your magical practice consist of? How are you manipulating reality and why? Thanks. Love you, man. That's a good one. I mean, I think in the discussion of magic with a K magic, and I think it's really funny that spelling that we distinguish, like, stage magic from the magic Ethan's talking about when they're really. If you look at Aleister Crowley's definition of magic, what is it? The theory and practice of causing change. According to the will, there's no difference at all. So first you have to get the definition of magic down. A lot of people think of, like, Harry Potter when they think of magic, like the ability to walk through a wall, levitate things with your mind. There's a Terrance McKenna who was obviously one of the great philosophers of the psychedelic movement, whatever you want to call it. And what's interesting is, like, if you look at sort of the history of psychedelics and Western spirituality, you see this crazy rift that happens when Ram Dass goes off to India and Timothy Leary doesn't. And so what happened is this interesting one group, they were all in the kind of the same group, but one group begins to explore meditation, yoga, a mantra, all these various spiritual practices, because they'd been around people who seem to be demonstrating magical abilities, and they were very fascinated by that. And they had all These incredible experiences that apparently were not connected to psychedelics. And so this split happened where sort of in the psychedelic community. Somewhat of an eye roll towards that bullshit. Not necessarily what I would call, I get it, like Tim Leary, you know, it's more of a scientific, Western outlook on things. We have the psychedelics, they open your mind to these extra levels of reality. All that other stuff is just some antiquated way of achieving something. I can achieve very easily by taking like a. A tab of acid or something. Why do I need to fucking meditate in an ashram? So I don't remember which. Maybe it was just one of his lectures, but McKenna told this story about some initiate or something in India. He's hanging out with his guru and he's trying to achieve magical abilities. And so his guru tells him, all right, go in the forest and meditate for five years and you might get some of these cities, these magical powers. Comes back, five years has passed. Nothing has happened. Nothing happened. Go meditate for five more years. Anyway, this happens for a few more five year cycles till finally the student realizes he can walk on water. He comes back to his master and tells him, I did it. I can now walk on water. And his master says, the ferry costs a nickel. Like we spent all that fucking time to walk on water. You think a boat, dumbass. So in thinking about magic, you have to really decide what you mean by it, I guess you could say. And so bending reality, for example, everyone does this naturally. We all bend reality. You bend reality. Anytime you focus on anything, you. You know, just red. Like everyone watching or listening, just think about red right now. Think about the color red. I'm now noticing all the red in the room, you know, and so in that way, subjectively, you bent reality. You pulled the red out of the tapestry of phenomena so that you could see it. And, you know, I think this is really interesting because from this perspective, there's all these designer realities that you can subscribe to where you don't have to exert much effort to tune into that reality. For example, if you want to see the classic example of it, and I do this, just jump between MSNBC and Fox News. Just jump between it. And it's like they might as well be parallel universes. In one version of reality, it's everything is hopeless and fucked. In the other version of reality, everything is ridiculously great. And so the algorithm has become our daemon. It's a servant which, once it sort of determines which reality structure you want to tune into, it helps you in that regard by Curating content based on whatever your particular desires are regarding what you want to see and how you want to perceive reality. And so suddenly, if you're. If you spend too much time on any given set of content, you'll get more of it. So, you know, spend a little time with Andrew Tate. The next thing you know, you're going to not just get Andrew Tate met you, you're going to get grind culture bro material. Next thing you know, you're going to be at a. At a men's retreat jerking some dude off. You know, it sucks you in. But so as far as bending reality goes, everyone does it naturally, just via whatever it is, whatever you focus on. And so one Crowley was always talking about Will the idea. I think the major arcana of the tarot shows a kind of path. Starts off with a fool tarot. I'll pull that up. You guys haven't seen that. My favorite tarot card by far. Pull this sucker up, Josh. There we go, the fool. So this is zero. This is the beginning of the major arcana. And here we see all of us. This is, you know, this is you in college. This is you with a young body. This is you when you didn't know you were gonna die. This is you when you didn't understand what treasuries were or stocks. This is you. Whatever you fill in the blank here. This is you when you didn't understand what 17% interest meant on a credit card. This is you. This is the fool. And so, you know, he's all dressed in brightly colored. That's Gucci. He's wearing Gucci. I still have Gucci. I have bought this shit before I had babies. And he's got these silly boots on. He's got this little white dog. You know, essentially the most important thing is he's looking up. And there's lots of ways to interpret that. The literal way is, hey, dude, you're about to walk off a cliff. But another way to sort of interpret it might be when he's looking up into absolute reality. So this is what happens when you have the psychedelic experience, the breakthrough experience. You realize that you are part of a whole. And that though the world is there, it just wasn't as important as you thought it was. And so you become imbalanced in that way. Now you are you, you, you. You become an eternalist. You. You. You've confused your. Your sort of shirking away from worldly responsibilities with some kind of transcendent attitude. And so, yeah, and then let's go to the Next Tarot card. This is the next one. And if we look at these as progression. And again, this is my own shitty interpretation. I don't know if it's true. The magician. Hold on. There we go. So this is like after you've splattered off the fucking cliff a few times, and you realize that that kind of silly attitude towards existence makes you fall off cliffs, doesn't get you anywhere. That's when you become the magician. And the magician you see has got all the suits of the tarot card there on the table. And apparently this represents when you begin to use your will to experiment with the universe, where you become focused, where you become diligent, where you become, like, consistent in some practice or another. This is. This is how you get good at anything, you know, by becoming. You have to start focusing your will. And so, you know, the idea is if you meditate long enough, you can walk on water, maybe. Honestly, I wouldn't doubt it. But if we focus long enough on anything, you will become good at that thing. And the amount of time you pour into this thing or that will determine who you are. And so from my perspective, magic is not anything special. And because of the controversy surrounding the term, sounds silly, embarrassing, dumb, people have come up with new ways to sort of talk about it. And this is any business book. This is any book on, you know, getting your life together. Marie Kondo. You know, all of these are grimoires that are explaining a way to focus your will is that changes certain patterns around you and creates a better reality. It distorts reality or pushes you out of a reality you habitually got stuck in. And that is how we all end up smashed at the bottom of the cliff. I mean, you run into people who are living a spontaneous, habitual life, and they're always falling off cliffs again and again and again. I know I was. And so, of course, they fell off a cliff because they didn't. They hadn't gotten to the place where you begin to realize you don't have to react the same way to every thing that happens. You can start controlling the way you react. And then you start playing around with your reaction to things, and you begin to realize the hell realm you thought you were living in was not a hell realm at all. But it's just that you've had a sort of habitual response to reality that was producing an echo that was not very savory. So you start learning how to control that. And this is where the systems of magic appear. And, you know, you get the. You get Warlocks and sorcerers. This is the pickup artist. The pickup artist is a sorcerer who has figured out a methodology for manipulating people to fuck them. It's a fuck warlock. But then also you run into people like Ram Dass, who have found a way to be in love with everything in the world, regardless of passing phenomena. And when you're in the presence of that kind of energy, it transforms you for the better. And so you run into all these different forms of it. The practice you're on. Any classic business person, it's wearing ceremonial robes. What is that shit? Necktie. What the fuck is that? Some weird colored rope around their neck? They've got. They're not wearing wizard robes. But it's robes. They don't, you know, they don't live in some tower, but they live in skyscrapers, which are fucking towers. They go into skyscrapers and do focused acts of magic, which we call business deals. And those business deals cause changes and, and. And they use sigils. They're the contracts. And they sign the sigils with their signature, which is some weird magical. All signatures look magical. That's a sigil. So you stamp your contract with a sigil and your tower of fucking magic and a business deal happens. And then the business deal leads to energy moving around in specific ways. A new building is built, bombs are dropped, a car pulls up in front of your house. Someone can't talk about how you made them suck your dick on Halloween, whatever. You've cast a spell of silencing on a person. And so, yeah, everything is from that perspective. Magic, I guess the. So the sort of magic that I practice, I guess you would say, is like. Though I used to get into some of the magical systems with some fair results. Now the kind of magic I practice is just prayer. And that's, to me, is the best because sort of as you get deeper and deeper into the conceptualization of sentience, consciousness, intelligence in the universe via psychedelics, magical practice, meditation, you do brush shoulders with something that seems to be a very advanced intelligence that is the source of benevolence. And then that thing, the more you begin to connect with it, the happier you get. And then so you begin to realize a lot of the stuff you think you want, you didn't even want. And you can get into a lot of trouble by getting the things you initially thought you wanted. But if you start having a collaboration with this intelligence, which people call God, then via prayer, you can cast spells in a collaborative way. That's my view of it. Now.
