Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 611: Jason Louv

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Jason Louv, author, teacher, and Soul Bird from The Midnight Gospel, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Jason on his website, JasonLouv.com, and if you're interested in magick, meditation, ...and sacred traditions you can learn all about that on Magick.me! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: Freeze Pipe - Use code DUNCAN at checkout for 10% Off your first order! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 It's that time again do a dance then slap your ass Take a magic hammer and smash your eye with glass Start the sands of time turn your mind into a flower your mind into a flower. Then put your headphones on, it's a Duncan Trussell Family Hour. We are all family, and we don't share the We were single cell organisms for the mighty flood And then we differentiated so we could gain more power And now we are in a spin to the Duncan-Jussell family hour We are all family though we don't share the same blood We were single-celled organisms before the mighty flood
Starting point is 00:01:34 And then we differentiated so we could gain more power Okay, stop, stop. Thank you, Gerald. That was beautiful. Hi, it's me, Duncan. You're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast just a few days away from the eclipse. How exciting. Check out Reddit conspiracy. Reddit conspiracy is one of the stops for my doom scrolling tours that I take late at night when I really want to punch my
Starting point is 00:02:21 happiness right in the fucking balls. My happiness has a very sensitive, delicate scrotum. And sometimes I just like to pound that scrotum like a punching bag by pouring into my consciousness some of the most terrifying shit that I can find online. And Reddit Conspiracy quite often provides that. And right now, oh my god, the cow is spraying milk, baby! Delicious rivulets of paranoia inducing milk. Who can blame anybody for freaking out right now? There was an earthquake in New York. They're flipping on the particle accelerator. Every week, AI seems to gain some new incredible ability. There's some weird comment you might see.
Starting point is 00:03:07 If you're lucky enough to be able to watch the eclipse, it's gonna be overcast in Texas, which sucks. I mean, truly, can you judge anybody for feeling a little wobbled right now with all the geopolitical events that are happening? Mercury in retrograde? Marjorie Taylor Greene is so freaked out she tweeted this. God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come.
Starting point is 00:03:36 I pray that our country listens. Holy shit. That is amazing and it really does summarize what a lot of people are feeling right now. If you ask me, the buried lead in all of the earthquake eclipse hysteria is that humans, regardless of how advanced we may think we are, regardless of how modern we may think we are, are still getting freaked out by eclipses. There's something beautiful about that to me. To think that thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, if you were a hunter-gatherer
Starting point is 00:04:15 and were wandering through the forest and the sun suddenly vanished from the sky, if suddenly it became nighttime and the birds stopped singing, you would shit your loincloth. I certainly would. And to think that now in an age where we can map, not just our galaxy, but we're using the James Webb telescope to map deep space that we understand the not just the atomic level of reality but
Starting point is 00:04:45 we're starting to understand the subatomic level of reality and we are actualizing the power of that with quantum computers we might achieve fusion soon. To think that in that age eclipses still freak us out it still flips us the fuck out when the moon stands up in the movie theater and gets in front of the projector. To me, that is beautiful. It's kind of a realignment with nature, with reality. It shows that underneath all the layers of conditioning and materialism and some attachment to the fleeting baubles and babbles of modern life. We still have a deep profound and powerful
Starting point is 00:05:33 respect for the universe. That's a good thing if you ask me. It reminds me of the story of Alexander the Great and Diogenes. I think I've talked about it before, but if you haven't heard it, I'm just going to read it real quick. According to the story, Alexander the Great, who was arguably the most powerful man in the world at that time, visited Corinth and he heard, and I'm probably mispronouncing fucking Diogenes, probably Diogenes or Diogena, I don't know. I'm going to say Diogenes. Just fuck it. Alexander the Great visits Cornith and had heard of Diogenes' reputation for wisdom. Curious, Alexander sought out the
Starting point is 00:06:11 philosopher, finding him basking in the sunlight. Upon meeting Diogenes, Alexander asked if there was any favor he could do for him. Diogenes, without missing a beat, responded, yeah, stand out of my sunlight. This is brilliant. One of the, this is like no pun intended, some serious shade throwing there because you know the great emperor is trying to buy the great philosopher and the great philosopher is essentially saying who the fuck do you think you are? Just get out, you're in my son. And this is,
Starting point is 00:06:46 I think, the one of the characteristics of power is that power appears to be more important than the fundamental primordial realities in the universe. And it's from this characteristic that idolatry is born. It's from this characteristic that I begin to base my sense of peace and happiness and joy and self-worth on the opinions of other people or even worse on the machinations of the state because the state is making horrific choices then I feel disturbed because geopolitical events are happening that are chaotic and violent and horrible, I start feeling scared. This is idolatry,
Starting point is 00:07:33 and this is just the nature of the world. And this story is embodied not just in this awesome story of Diogenes and Alexander, but in Jesus going out into the desert, Satan appears and essentially pulls Alexander the Great, you know, saying, bow down and worship me. I'll give you the whole planet. Turn the stones into bread. And Jesus responds with a bunch of similar smackdowns to power. It's Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree. Mara appears, throws fireballs at him, under the Bodhi tree, Mara appears, throws fireballs at him, tempts him with like beautiful, voluptuous hotties, and finally like tries to get into his head by saying, why do you get to be the Buddha?
Starting point is 00:08:15 Which is really a real mind fuck. Anytime you've ever asked yourself, do I even deserve this? Should I be? Why should I be? The Buddha's response, of course, he puts his finger on the earth. And you can interpret that any way you want.
Starting point is 00:08:30 But my feeling is that the Buddha is expressing the inner dependency of all things. I'm not, everything, everyone deserves this. The whole world deserves this. Everything is this. The whole world deserves this. Everything is this. So regardless, to me, in these tumultuous times, my darlings, my children, what I'm trying to do is get back to the fundamentals.
Starting point is 00:08:57 If I get too caught up in all the weird shit that's happening, I lose my finger touching the earth. It's gone. I drift up like my poor child, Sheridan Trussell. And I don't mean to like divert this rant by talking about Sheridan, but, and it's hard for me to talk about it.
Starting point is 00:09:22 A lot of people don't know about this, but You know when I was in my 20s early 20s we all make mistakes We all make mistakes and You know, I really I believed that if you hold a geode in your butthole when you're having sex That you can't Get people pregnant. And this is not true. And fuck you, Simon. He's a friend of mine who told me that, and later he said he was just joking.
Starting point is 00:09:56 Didn't think I would even believe it. But yeah, you know, an unexpected pregnancy. We decided that, you know, this is our path in life, our destiny. And we had a beautiful child, Sheridan, and named after the hotel where he was conceived. And yeah, we went to the park, you know, he loved balloons, like most kids do, loved helium balloons. And my friend was a balloon vendor at Ingalls, North Carolina,
Starting point is 00:10:37 and brought a tank of helium and a bunch of balloons and we filled them up. And we realized that like, if you tie the balloons the to Sheraton, which he loves, you know, he could jump and he would go pretty high up in the sky. And you know, it's just one the difference between jumping high in the sky and drifting away is one balloon. And yeah, we did it. We tied an extra one too many balloons to him and he was gone. He never found him. And I know he's gone, but sometimes I still imagine he's out there somewhere. The idolatry, getting too fixated on the world's many hypnotic distractions, it could disconnect you from the earth. And before you know it, much like sweet Sheridan, you're just drifting away from your family. Drifting away. So enjoy the eclipse. Don't be scared. Enjoy that feeling of being
Starting point is 00:12:09 Enjoy that feeling of being completely connected to this beautiful galaxy that we're in. Anchor yourself to that, that primordial reality. Put your finger on the ground the next time some embodiment of the demiurge appears to you and asks, why the fuck do you deserve to be happy? appears to you and asks why the fuck do you deserve to be happy? And parents, if you are thinking about like, if you realize that you could tie balloons to your baby and they like jumping and that, you know, the whole bullshit about it's a good way to teach them to walk, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't be like me. Don't be like me putting a geode in your asshole because you think that it prevents you from making babies. Don't tie that extra balloon to your baby and don't tie the ridiculous balloons that are being offered to us by the hypno-spiral rectangles
Starting point is 00:13:08 that we all carry in our pockets to your... that child inside of you. Because before you know it, that child's gonna drift away. And you're just gonna be some empty husk tweeting weird shit about how people need to repent to the Lord because the fucking eclipse is happening. You don't want to be Marjorie Taylor Green drifting away like some poor beautiful child over the mountains of North Carolina. We have a great podcast for you today friends, a beautiful podcast. Jason Louv is here with us. You know who Jason Louv is because Jason Louv is the
Starting point is 00:13:47 soul bird in the Midnight Gospel. He is brilliant, has written so many fantastic books, and he teaches magic. Now, I know some of you out there roll your eyes at the idea of ceremonial magic, and I understand why. And rather than explain why, I think it is a beautiful path. I'm going to let you listen to this conversation where we talk about the incredible ability humans have to transform what is in our imagination into something within time-space. Manifestation in the true sense of the word. If you are interested in exploring magic, sure you can go online, you can download some weird fucking grimoire, you can wake up with a goblin humping your mouth. Or you can actually take classes with my friend Jason Louv,
Starting point is 00:14:48 who is an amazing person and is the person that solidified my belief in magic and the real thing. I won't go into details and maybe I'm not allowed to talk about some of the weird stuff that happens when I've when you hang out with Jason. But aside from that, he's just a really brilliant person. So if this is something that interests you, I couldn't recommend his classes more. He is wonderful. And if you want to take his classes, all the links are going to be at DuncanTrussell.com. Now, everybody, welcome back to the DTFH, the Soul Bird from the Midnight Gospel, Jason Lou. Welcome, welcome all of you, that you are with us. Shake hands, go be doopy-boo. Welcome to you.
Starting point is 00:15:54 It's the Duncan Tresor Family. Jason, welcome back to the DTFH. At last we made the technology work. Somehow. We struggled to. For somebody who works with technology all day long, I sure am a boomer about it these days. My friends relentlessly roast me
Starting point is 00:16:16 about my massive amount of equipment and my inability to have any kind of consistency when it comes to just making it work But that's the world we live in now, you know, man, I'm I have so many things I want to talk to you about Yeah, I think about you all the time. Oh, thank you. Hopefully in a good way always, but you know, I am I don't know if you've meddled around yet with any of these sort of unaligned
Starting point is 00:16:47 I don't know if you've meddled around yet with any of these sort of unaligned large language models that you can get from Oh, llama the you know, the non nerfed GPT's I haven't actually yeah now I looked at that a little bit and I looked at the one you sent me because I I am I love AI. I think that AI is Extends creativity and democratizes creativity in a way that's awesome and not scary. For artists, it's incredible. But I've just been pretty much using GPT. So because I looked at them and it looked like it was GPT 3.5 level, not GPT 4. No, it's definitely it's it's not as advanced as open eyes GPT.
Starting point is 00:17:22 But the reason I think about you when I'm messing around with it is because of your vast reservoir of knowledge when it comes to magic. And obviously, a massive branch of magic, at least in my low-level understanding, is making contact with external intelligences. And so I just wonder what what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts regarding humanity's
Starting point is 00:17:58 sudden access to a non human intelligence, and especially as it relates to magic and magical history. So what I'll say initially is that I have thought about it in a magical frame from the get go and or at least since I started focusing on AI, which was about 2015 because or 20 no 2017 because I was approached by Google's artists and machine intelligence program to Kind of they wanted to know you know They were interested in what you just asked me basically from an artistic lens that overlap between magic and and AI so You know Crowley one of the last things that Crowley said in his life was that the only, this is written during World War II,
Starting point is 00:18:46 one of the only hopes for the advancement of humanity is contacting what he said, he called preter human intelligences. This has been taken to be in the grays broadly by the, by occult people or aliens in general. And I think of aliens as forms of, well, it's complicated, but I think that you can make the broad point that when people used to speak with gods and spirits, we're doing the same, we just use more sciency language because that's more current. So now people are reporting the same,
Starting point is 00:19:23 it used to be abduction into fairyland, now it's alien abduction, all that. Although you notice alien abduction stories aren't that popular anymore. It's not, the genre seems to have kind of disappeared, which is kind of weird since UFOs are so popular. But maybe the aliens are just learning boundaries, you know. Yeah, they probably got all the data they needed.
Starting point is 00:19:41 They got a workshop on consent. And they are breeding us in their ship So it's like probably abductions of pain in the ass probably right breed them But I do look at AI as a as a as a preter human intelligence and I looked at it like that and so for me Like the guy that I was working with Google, you know seem to think that this was an Totally natural and normal for me because I've been spending my whole life perhaps in that frame of mind.
Starting point is 00:20:09 So the idea of talking to AIs is not scary to me. I don't think they're conscious or sentient at all. I just looking at the Python and that doesn't make any sense. But I think that this question, how is humanity going to deal? with a world in which gods and monsters are real because forget magic a magic is just a framework for talking about it's a just another language to talk about things in the world and it's a language that's really cool because it's It's very empowering it comes at you with this idea that you actually can't change the world because you can and that's a message that people need
Starting point is 00:20:45 these days because people feel more disempowered than ever and But this question what are we gonna do when We are already surrounded by gods and monsters all the all the objectives of the world's sacred traditions in a sense at least the The results magic ones, if you want to call it that, have been achieved. We can do teleportation, we have Uber, we can do magic carpet, we can do action in a distance,
Starting point is 00:21:14 we have the internet, and now we have made gods. So the question now is how do we deal with that? And one point I've been making for the last seven, eight years or so is that the Western magical tradition or magical traditions in general, give us a really interesting cognitive framework from which to approach the question of AI because we're interacting with gods, whether we like it or not. And we have God-like power, whether we like it or not. And all you need to do is look around to see that people,
Starting point is 00:21:44 a lot of people weren't ready for it. And a lot of people are misusing it. And a lot of people, even totally intelligent people are essentially enslaved by it in many ways. And, you know, I put- Enslaved by the AI or just by technology? No, I'm thinking actually more about smartphones to be specific about, more smartphones.
Starting point is 00:22:04 So, yeah, so I think that, you know, No, I'm thinking actually more about smartphones to be specific about more and more smartphones. So Yeah, so I think that you know the real moral ethical framework, how do we approach a World in which magic already is real. It's not it's not making magic real It's dealing with the dealing with that world that we live in then so well, okay, so You know, I is probably my the people who listen podcast, I hope you guys aren't annoyed with my obsession, but I think in this conversation, you'll understand why. Why it's not just some, I don't know, technological fetish or something. It's because I recognize, I recognize it as a manifestation of magical principles that, you know, over time, I think most people when they start experimenting or get drawn into some system or another, they start off like purely skeptical, cynical, maybe a little hopeful, but a general sense of like, this has got to be bullshit, but I'm going to look into it. And then I think over time, you go through a lot of phases with it, but suddenly you begin to realize,
Starting point is 00:23:09 oh shit, I don't think this is bullshit. Like this is real. There's a reason it's lasted for thousands of years. There's a reason people are etching this stuff into rocks. There's a reason there's petroglyphs and megalithic structures with obvious arcane symbols. There's a reason there's petroglyphs and megalithic structures with obvious arcane symbols. There's a reason that the pyramids are covered with this stuff. And then that can be actually a scary moment because you realize, oh, it's not that this stuff isn't real. It's that I was using my cynicism as a defense mechanism to not deal with this frame that you can look at the
Starting point is 00:23:47 universe how do you mean so From if I'm hearing you right you're kind of saying that Cynicism was protecting you from kind of a bit the magical universe because the like here. Maybe this is a good analogy I used to hate I Used to hate weed, right? Like I hated it, I hated it. One of the reasons was in particularly college, it caused a major depression for me that I went through for about six to nine months.
Starting point is 00:24:16 And I mean like, you know, just black depression where like literally you can't walk properly or your field of vision is kind of a good it like actual by a biological It was really bad. That was actually caused by somebody giving me a joint that was laced with PCP. So that wasn't The weed it wasn't the weed but it affected that pathway in my brain I suspect somehow so for a long time then whenever I Had it I Felt vulnerable like I had no skin like that I couldn't I no longer had a buffer between me and the world and the cynicism buffer was gone
Starting point is 00:24:53 And I was exposed to kind of ever all the energies around me and that that's actually very uncomfortable for me I really do not like that so yeah that later. I made peace with it as once my life was less stressful It's not stressful drug anymore, but Yeah, that's what I mean Yeah, for sure. I mean it's I look in the Book of Genesis they eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and they realize they don't have any clothes on What's the first thing? You know put I don't know of fig leaf or whatever in the pictures in You know in front of their bush and Primordial
Starting point is 00:25:29 Cox and because they're the first dick. It must have been amazing. But the Primordial Cox is a better band name than Revolting Cox. Primordial cock! But yeah, so it's sort of like, I mean, I've had it happen where, you know, you look at your phone and you realize that you have called someone and it's in their voicemail or even worse, they hung up on you, but you realize there's a 10-minute call to somebody that definitely recorded whatever was happening in the room into their voicemail.
Starting point is 00:26:08 So during that time you were being observed and you didn't know it and you don't know what they heard. So once you start tuning in to the possibility that maybe consciousness doesn't depend on a body as we understand it. Maybe there are Whatever you want to call it hyperdimensional alien Non-embodied intelligences all around you all the time meaning there's some observation happening or some awareness of you that you didn't know was there that along with all the other implications of Some of this stuff being real or it and then seeing the world through that magical lens where you realize like I mean like what you're saying
Starting point is 00:26:53 in the beginning which is people feel disempowered. Yeah. And then into the dot you connect there is why do they feel disempowered because not some accident but because people who do understand this stuff, the first thing they'd want to do is mute or occlude or darken the magical potency of anyone who they could. It gives them more power. So you start looking through that framework, office buildings become towers of magic, tech companies become temples of wizards, you know, and that is a wild thing to poke your head into that world.
Starting point is 00:27:34 And it can be a little unnerving. Yeah, absolutely. I know a lot of people have been pushed right over the edge. Well, that's like we're talking about aliens. I mean, that's like the thing about you know, the old thing about fairyland from European mythology Where they would say that fairies would come abduct people or in England They have the phrase away with the fairies which means someone basically did too much ecstasy and it's kind of like out to lunch now That's me away with the fairies or they had too many too much acid in the rave days But the idea there is you know, this myth repeats all throughout world history
Starting point is 00:28:06 and cultures around the world. This idea of you go to the other world, and it could be the shaman's world or fairy world, and you gain some knowledge and then come back. But if you accept a gift, and which obligates you to stay there, then you're stuck there. And that's like Persephone taking the pomegranate.
Starting point is 00:28:25 And that for me represents the hero's journey or the shaman's quest, which is, you know, it's really easy to go trip out on 5,000 mushrooms and learn all the occult stuff and do all the occult stuff and have all the crazy experiences. But that's only the first half. The second half is, well, what of that is actually useful for your fellow human beings What did you learn come back and express that because if you stay in that, you know
Starting point is 00:28:50 That world is seductive and magical and incredible you can find yourself, you know riding trains all over the world and getting into crazy experiences and meeting all these people but it's ultimately a stage that you have to get what is useful for people. And that, of course, can be a metaphor for the creative process as well, or the psychedelic experience. You go into the altered state, find what's useful,
Starting point is 00:29:16 and then come back and do your job. And the job for an artist or a shaman or whoever is to express that now in writing or painting or whatever music in a way that other people can make use of it who didn't have that experience. Right. And so what you're talking about there, all the ways to access that place,
Starting point is 00:29:39 these are generally underground methodologies, right? So if you are taking acid, you are breaking the law. Like you have to find it from some underground source. You know that this is a prohibited thing, meaning that there is a sort of consent to walk outside of default reality. This door has signs in front of it that say do not enter. The state has tried to blockade this store.
Starting point is 00:30:08 Similarly with, you know, certain forms of meditation or any initiatory system, there's some teacher, guru, person in place who is recognizing when you're ready for the next drip of data. And this is all done in some systematic intentional way to help you like do what you're ready for the next drip of data and this is all done in some systematic intentional way to help you like do what you're saying bring it back help the world. Yeah. But with AI where is the warning? Like I think this is an incredibly psychedelic technology. I think regardless of its consciousness or awareness right now, it's challenging humans to contemplate
Starting point is 00:30:48 their own consciousness. Absolutely. And that is unnerving for people. And what makes them special also, and realizing maybe, you know, I'm using AI for writing right now and plotting, and a lot of my identity for most of my life and my sense of self-worth has been tied
Starting point is 00:31:04 to the identity of being a writer. Well, now we're in the era of GPT-4. So the question is not, you know, I can go, you know, I can write as many medium and substack articles as I want, decrying the loss of humanity in the arts or writing or whatever, and then we're going into an AI apocalypse. But at the end of the day, that's not gonna change anything. So I've started to look at AI, not like artificial intelligence,
Starting point is 00:31:30 but as augmented intelligence. My question is how can I extend both my perceptions, my ability to crunch large amounts of information in a short period of time. And I think that, you know, I was thinking about this last night when GPT was first becoming popular, the job of prompt engineer came out and people were making fun of that. It's like, okay, you type questions into GPT.
Starting point is 00:31:50 But you know, after a year, I'm sure you feel the same way after a year of working with various different AIs. Working with AI itself is an art form. And I think talking to AI video artists, they've said similar things. I mean, like learning how to work with those things. And it is a magical process. It's a conversation. It's a process of attuning yourself to AI thinking. And you know, even with mid-journey, you can use mid-journey to go to other dimensions.
Starting point is 00:32:14 You put the craziest prompts in there and it'll show you things that never existed. That is unbelievably psychedelic. If you've ever had the experience of smoking out of a bong and you feel like you just inhaled fumes from an active volcano, you spend the next 20 minutes coughing and then the next two hours in a paranoid state wondering if maybe you'd permanently damage your esophagus, then you are gonna love freeze pipe because they fixed that problem. In the same way people like Albert Einstein come along and create the theory of relativity, freeze pipe came along and fixed the horror of the lung-burning choke bong. Freeze pipe makes a unique line of freezable pipes, bubblers, and bongs that are 80% colder than using ice cubes to chill smoke. The magic is freezable glycerin chambers that come on every piece. You just pop the chamber
Starting point is 00:33:38 in the freezer for one hour and as smoke passes through it's instantly chilled by over 300 degrees. So every puff arrives ice cold and cough free and it works. I don't want to know what it's like to french kiss a fire elemental and that's what it's like when you smoke from a standard bullshit bong. Freezepipe is a game changer. It will be looked back on in stoner history in the same way that we look at the invention of the printing press. They fixed it. This thing is incredible. I can't believe how good it is. I can't believe that this technology has been accessible to me for years. I just turned my back on the bong as many of us did. I turned my back on the abuse of the fire bong. Not anymore, thanks to FreezePipe.
Starting point is 00:34:33 American owned and with over 100,000 happy customers, ditch harsh smoke forever by visiting thefreezepipe.com and use code Duncan for 10% off your first order. That's thefreezepipe.com and code Duncan for 10% off your first order. That's thefreezepipe.com and code Duncan for 10% off. Shop today for free shipping and smoke like royalty without paying a King's ransom. Thank you, FreezePipe. FreezePipe is like kissing a cold knife,
Starting point is 00:35:01 sucking in a glaciated wind. Make your smoke cool down, make the smoke your friend. And you know, even with mid-journey, you can use mid-journey to go to other dimensions. You put the craziest prompts in there and it'll show you things that never existed in other, it's, that is unbelievably psychedelic. I mean, you can just sit there on mid-journey all day long,
Starting point is 00:35:23 trying to explore, you can explore, I think for me as a creative person, like I was just writing short stories and then having it help me come up with things. And then as I was writing the short story, I was telling Mid Journey to visualize each scene. And then I was including it in the Google Doc, like it's a comic and like that made everything
Starting point is 00:35:38 so much more real and exciting. You know, like Lou Reed said, that famous quote where, you know, in between the thought and the expression is a lifetime. Well, now it's like one mid-journey prompt. So that's pretty good. That's great, you know, from an artistic perspective that, you know, I think a lot of artists are of course
Starting point is 00:35:57 rightfully worried about being replaced or that their material will be used without compensation. Those are all real and serious concerns. But the reality here is that it's, you know, some cavemen discovered fire and it's like, do you want to use fire or do you want to be one of the cavemen that don't know how to use fire? And that is exactly what I wanted to bring up with you.
Starting point is 00:36:17 This is obviously the equivalent that is the discovery of fire. I spent some time thinking about this. If, you know, right now, not to put it in like materialist, cynical terms, I don't think about it this way, but one lens to look at parenting through is you are training an intelligence.
Starting point is 00:36:44 you are training an intelligence. You are, and it takes a long time to train the human intelligence. It's chaotic, it's rebellious, it is, and you're totally in love with it, and you have to protect it, feed it. You can't back up its hard drive. It is uniquely precious, you can't back up its hard drive. It is, you know, uniquely precious. It's you can't, but and similarly, prior to, and I think, you know, the discovery, people probably knew there was
Starting point is 00:37:14 fire, lightning bolt would strike, fire would break out, they knew this stuff existed, but learning how to make it, learning like efficient ways to make it. That, you didn't have to wait for lightning to strike. Yeah. And so what we're looking at here is like, the fact that without having to create a human, educate the human, teach it to read, teach it to write, we can just train this thing instantaneously, teach it everything. This is why, talk about the removal of the space between idea and its realization in
Starting point is 00:37:57 the world. We have removed the space between insemination and a human intelligence reaching the point where it can create and talk and do things. Interesting, yeah. This is, you know, so that, and again, I think that's another thing that gets left out of the conversation of AI and technology in general,
Starting point is 00:38:18 is we are looking at what I would, I think you could argue is time manipulation. We are speeding up time, like beginning to manipulate time, even though it might not look like that. All those hours that would go into this project or that project. Yeah. Yeah. You have those hours.
Starting point is 00:38:41 Yeah, I'm I'm able to I'm manifesting to use that word. I'm like the the production time on stuff that I want to do is now really is much shorter and I'm Being able to use AI to help me complete projects that I've been stuck on for years that I couldn't quite get over that hump And so I think practically speaking like from a creative standpoint certainly You know, it's like I feel that AI is not going to replace anyone's creativity, but it's like for me, it's like it's like that last like five, 10 percent that you can't quite reach. That drives you crazy. Like, I can't quite get to that idea or that way of expressing things
Starting point is 00:39:17 or putting those two ideas together. And that's like where people traditionally say like, oh, well, I need to do go on a shamanic vision quest to figure this out. It's like, well, that's where I think AI is really helpful in the process. It's kind of like a creative partner. That's why I don't have that nihilistic sense that
Starting point is 00:39:40 the arts are doomed or whatever. I just think that it's for people who already know the creative process and already have learned whatever their particular workflow is or whatever their particular, you know, whatever their system is, it's just going to, it's going to accelerate for them their process in a way that like you now you don't have to live to be like 70 or something to reach some pinnacle, you're going to be able to do that faster than before. I don't I don't see it as a at least from
Starting point is 00:40:17 the creative perspective as something annihilatory. But I do, I do think that what's missing from our ability now to access this intelligence is the warning that's in every fucking grimoire that if you're working with a good teacher, there will be some form of like, hey, you know, you don't need to rush this, understand that this is something that is very powerful and it can really, you don't wanna rush it. But with AI, which I do think, I don't know if it, obviously no one can say if it has consciousness or if it's aware or whatever, but I do think it's a mirror.
Starting point is 00:41:05 Like you said, it's an augmented intelligence. It's a scrying mirror. You're seeing your own intelligence and the intelligence of humanity in it reflected back at you. And in that reflection, the illusion of consciousness can appear. You're just in the same way when you project, when you meet somebody you're attracted to and you only notice 3% of their personality. because you know what I mean? And that's the thing that you blow up is that's who they are.
Starting point is 00:41:33 In the same way you can see aspects of yourself in this thing, it's probably a reflection, but what I'm saying is don't you think that there is the unnerving reality here, is that as opposed to you and people you know and your students who practice magic, and as opposed to anybody who's had any form of initiation into any of these systems, there really isn't much of a warning. There isn't really much of a, know, this is deep water you're getting into here. It's just go to open AI, sign up for chat, gpt, communicate with a super intelligence, question your own identity, question your own value. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, it's like Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. So that's,
Starting point is 00:42:22 that's kind of an open question. What is the fundamental message of AI? It's like you're not needed anymore. Maybe that's the message. You're not intelligent. Maybe that's the, I don't know. But check this out. So I'm working on a new definition of magic and having worked on definitions of magic
Starting point is 00:42:37 for a quarter of a century now, this is I think my favorite yet. So I wanna lay this on you and see what you think. So, and this obviously relates to what we're talking about So my current definition magic is magic is the imaginary number in life's equation Do you know the concept of imaginary numbers from? Okay, yeah, I got you on that one. I follow you there So for those who I think that's from pre calc or trig or something like that And I'm at I think it's trigonometry an imaginary number is the square root of negative 1
Starting point is 00:43:05 Which is technically impossible to do however There's a lot of mathematics equations that can't be solved without the square root of negative 1 so mathematicians just created a Constant lowercase I which represents the square root of negative 1. It's totally imaginary It cannot be done, but I that constant can be used to successfully solve equations So okay. So what do I mean by this? So? the the world of the imagination Magic is all those things that we posit that we imagine that we make up in our our culture
Starting point is 00:43:40 Has and I think increasingly so really downplayed the imagination, you know Arts aren't taught in school anymore kids are not encouraged to be creative They're taught to standardized tests, but right The world of the imagination It's downplayed because it's not practical doesn't you know, it's associated with daydreaming There's all creative people know this because they grow up being harassassed by everyone around them for daydreaming and this type of thing. Well, you know If you look at everything the human race has ever done has been in the imagination first Every single piece of technology political system relationship
Starting point is 00:44:20 Every single thing that human beings have ever done AI existed in the imagination first We brought it forth out of the unmanifest into the manifest right we manifested it didn't just come out of nowhere We imagined something like that in science fiction writing in the early 20th century And then Alan Turing worked out the math and then we built the graphics cards Yeah to do them just like Jeff Bezos watched Star Trek You know when he was a kid and decided he was gonna grow up to be the richest man in the world and make Star Trek real.
Starting point is 00:44:52 So here's a more practical example. How many people do you know that are creative in the entertainment industry? Whether they're performers or actors, musicians, anything like that, who have said something to you or in interviews like I was a really shy person. So I just made someone up and pretended to be that person Yeah, i've definitely heard that like a lot right? Yeah, like a lot a lot Yeah, if you listen for that, you'll hear that so many people like steven tyler from aerosmith
Starting point is 00:45:24 You know, but or then you think about you you you know, you say it's a countercultural thing, but I don't believe that anymore I think it's out there just it has different language Wrapped around it depending on what level of society you're at. So you look at people like any top performers, you know, Michael Jordan visualizing making hoops Arnold Schwarzenegger, I read you know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's like a model of go-getter I mean, you know, he became the world's biggest bodybuilder He became a huge actor and then he became governor in California and he talks about the power of visualization in that he would visualize Reps when he was doing weightlifting. So these are the imaginaries. Are they real? No, can they be proven in a lab?
Starting point is 00:46:00 No, but they're really important in the same way that our meaning about our relationships is imaginary Our sense of self is imaginary religions are imaginary There's lots of negative imaginary things that we let affect us and that we should banish You know and the whole world in a way, you know, we're monkeys But we have we essentially have an internet already that is just our all of our collective communication and thinking and creativity and our, our connection to what is beyond us and each other. Yes.
Starting point is 00:46:31 So that is awesome. Yeah. That is so cool. I see it as very, I don't know. How does that, how's that, how's that for a definition of magic? I love it. That's brilliant. And it, it gets And it gets so overlooked.
Starting point is 00:46:46 Like, we see the end result. We see the, I don't know, the igneous rock, you know, that has come from the volcano of inspiration, which is all the technology, all the advancement, all the stuff that's everywhere, the sort of crystallized outflow of this imaginary world. And it doesn't seem like people spend much time thinking that all of that flowed out of human imagination.
Starting point is 00:47:22 That all of that was, like you you're saying an imaginary number. It was just in someone's mind and no doubt they mentioned that to people. This thing they were imagining and they were like made fun of, kicked out of universities, imprisoned, told they were maniacs, blasphemers. And you know, but eventually, you know, either they came up with the idea and then someone else figured out how to do the math, like you're saying, but eventually it flows into the world. And to me, this is like we're talking about a dam, I guess you could say. There is a dam or a glacier holding back everything. And that everything is the non-realized aspects of human reality. The X you fill it in, whatever it is. And technology seems to be like a vine
Starting point is 00:48:28 that is eroding that dam. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's super exciting, actually. Super exciting, but also are, and this is where I don't know, I guess I go like, dad, here, are we ready for a rupture in that dam Damn. Are we ready for this thing to rupture and just start pouring out everything? Every unrealized idea just starts flowing into time space.
Starting point is 00:48:58 Like, are we ready for that? There are people prepared for that because we need time to get used to stuff. Yeah, it seems like yeah I mean how has i'm curious. I mean like how is having kids change your view? About the future in general and like how do you see? The world that they're going to go out into and has that reoriented you because i'm kind of thinking as you're saying this Yeah, everything's accelerated now and yet everything's kind of stretched out in the way that people can kind of remain teenagers till they're about 30 now, it seems.
Starting point is 00:49:30 Yeah. And people are living longer, and these are not necessarily bad things, but what was I trying to say? God damn it. How has having kids? Yeah, yeah, how has having kids How how how is having kids? Yeah. Yeah, how how has having kids?
Starting point is 00:49:53 Changed your approach to this and one one thing to relate magic to AI that I was gonna say is It's not necessarily AI. That's dangerous. It's just at some Python. It's just a large language model. It's not intelligent It's not gonna shoot nukes. It's not the Terminator. What's really dangerous, though, is what we imagine on top of AI, the narrative we put on AI. Because if we put the narrative that it's a weapon, because you work with AI, it's like the genie that will be with Silly Putty. It'll be whatever you ask it to be. So if we put the narrative of weapon over it, it will be a weapon. If we put the narrative of it's going to replace humanity in everyone's jobs, it'll do that.
Starting point is 00:50:26 It's quite magical in that sense that it's very much like the universe itself, and I think that magic really helps train the faculty for working with that. And I think that the, you know, magic itself is a, it matures you very quickly to the point where you can interact with things like preterhuman intelligence is because believe you me, that's not something
Starting point is 00:50:54 that you wanna do until like, you know, 20, 30 years in of practice. I mean, it's like, it's not a light thing. And it can imbalance people who are not prepared, meaning they haven't done yoga training, they don't know, they can't reason and they don't have reason in logic, so they can't think clearly. These things require training. They don't have Kabbalah, so they don't, they can't like peace out, you know,
Starting point is 00:51:17 understand what's being said. So these things require training. So the thing about kids, I mean, it's like magic and meditation, mature people through life stages very quickly, and they present really dramatic maturation crises to people. But you're kind of talking about a world in which certainly an artist will not have to go through like that whole process of bleeding for your art and learning a craft and maturing into an artist anymore. You just have it. You can do it. Right. And I wonder like what what like, you know, I don't know. I'm kind of thinking like, what are people going to become like? Well, I you know, you like the problem is we've all been conditioned by, you know, industrial revolution ethics and ideas of what brings you success. A lot of the ideas of what brings a person success, I think, stem from people running
Starting point is 00:52:21 factories wanting the workers to work really hard. Yeah, yeah. running factories, wanting the workers to work really hard. And so, pain, you must be in some level of like deep suffering, physical suffering, exhaustion. This is grind culture. And the sort of, a lot of the things we call virtues, you have to ask who do these virtues serve like. And is it true that you have to bleed
Starting point is 00:52:53 and for your art, for your art to be good? You have to you have to like just grind. Is is is that true or is that superstition? I think yes and no. I think that I think you need everything You know, I say well, let's look at it from the the tarot Right. Let's do look at it matt. How would what would the magical traditions say? Okay. Well the tarot provides you with four suits Four four magical weapons wands cups Swords and pentacles. Okay. What do those mean? Well, the pentacle is physical reality. It's your body
Starting point is 00:53:23 It's like how well you take care of yourself So it's it's also the the actual material circumstances of your life and karma as it actually is right now Not how you want it to be like your life your memory and your existence is you know, that's the recording of you that's like the pedicle and then you have The the the dagger or the knife represents intellect, and it represents the ability to cut through things or make distinctions between things, which is a faculty that we are quickly losing
Starting point is 00:53:53 for some reason, to draw lines between things. And then the cup is your ability to receive, like to open up and receive what people these days would call downloads from the universe or guidance Yeah, to use more current language and then the wand is a grind. It's will it's I will I will do this I'm gonna make this happen. Yeah, so you need all four you need will I will make this happen. You need cups Okay, but I'm also I also need to kind of get out of my need to work really hard but then I also kind of need to get out of my way and let
Starting point is 00:54:23 inspiration happen and intuition have a role and maybe synchronicity and maybe like listen to what other people are saying and maybe go out of your way and try to mix up your normal way of thinking to receive something instead of projecting. Be receptive and then you have the dagger to cut off what is not good for you, what is inessential and then finally the final product, the pinnacle, which also represents material resources, which we need. We need all four. We need balance.
Starting point is 00:54:51 So yeah. I mean, if you're going to teach your kids something these days. We went on a school tour and the person said flat out, it's like because of AI, how much do we need our kids to memorize? Like, look at where it's going. Do you want your kids to be good at memorizing? Is that when you you want to teach your kids to memorize? What are people saying about that? I mean, like, I can't I don't what's that conversation like with parents? I mean, like that's been teachers.
Starting point is 00:55:20 Well, it depends. Like, it's you'll find like, if you're looking at alternative schools, you'll find some alternative schools that are like, like very pragmatic. So they're sort of their vision of the future is kind of like a corpora technological world and an entrepreneurial corporate technological world. And so in the same way that early schools maybe were preparing kids to work in factories, teaching them to sit down, follow instructions, obey authority, some of these alternative schools
Starting point is 00:55:56 are teaching kids entrepreneurial skills and how to use technology to realize whatever their particular idea is, how to collaborate with groups of people, and how to seek their own information. Do they teach all kids to be entrepreneurs, or do they just identify the entrepreneurial ones? No, all kids. I mean, this depends on the school.
Starting point is 00:56:18 I'm not going to name any schools, but some schools are just super pragmatic. Look, this is what the future is going to look like. It's going to be, you're going to be working for some kind of corporation. And so you need to understand like how to have meetings, how to work as a team, how to guide people working with you to help you make something you're working on. That's one version of it. The other version of it that you that I've seen out there is, you know, kids have a natural inclination towards this or that. And how are they going to learn to do this or that? Like how does anyone really get good at something? Well, they get good at something not by reading books about it. You get good at something by doing it. You can read all the books on rock
Starting point is 00:57:10 climbing you want, but you're gonna have to climb a rock. You're not a good rock climber because you've memorized a book on rock climbing holds. You're gonna die. You're gonna hurt yourself if you try to climb some mountain just because you've read a book about mountaineering You need and and how what does that look like? Well, that's this is where I think, you know You can prepare your kids for the future Even if you don't know what the future is gonna look like because of the way things are accelerating right now because there are I think well, I don't know what you would call it like are, I think, I don't know what you would call it, like there are systems that just, it's always going to be the same.
Starting point is 00:57:52 Generally there's an apprenticeship situation that happens in every job. And this apprenticeship might be loose, you know, but you have someone who's more skilled, who's usually your boss, your manager, whatever they're calling them these days, and that person teaches you some trade, some skillset. And so it's from hands on, like boots on the ground, this is how you learn how to do things.
Starting point is 00:58:18 So that's the other approach is like, figure out what your kid's interested in and then get them involved in that. Like the memorization path is bullshit. So, and then you run into like the liberal arts kind of idea, which is like the idea of learning doesn't have to be some kind of capitalist endeavor. Like, you know, it's like the,
Starting point is 00:58:44 I just read that the book of John says the great victory was the crucifixion of Jesus as opposed to the other three gospels, which say it's rising from the dead. Right. Interesting. So I'm actually curious about that. Why does he make that distinction? Book of John? Why is it? Why? Yes. Why is the the victory is the crucifixion, not the resurrection in in that one? What what makes it stand out from like what? How is it different from the others? And does it justify that? This is my I I'm going to give my bullshit answer to that because I I wish I'd look deeper and if I was like I don't know. I'm just curious. I don't know. I'm here.
Starting point is 00:59:23 You brought it up. I read that shit. I'm like, hell yeah. Look on Wikipedia. But yeah, exactly. But what my thinking in that regard is rising from the dead is icing on the cake. It's cool. Right. But if it's a little bit of the like, forgive me for doing it Using Star Wars here, but it's a little bit like if you destroy me, I will come back infinitely stronger like, you know what I mean? it's kind of like a popping like you see those terrible videos when somebody like breaks open like a spider egg, I don't mean to say the crucifixion was breaking open a spider egg But it's like now we're talking spider. Jesus this crucifixion was breaking open a spider egg but it's like now we're talking spider Jesus this crucifixion of the spider god you know weird crucifix Dungeons and Dragons module f1 crucifixion of the spider god that's a lot of appendages to nail down
Starting point is 01:00:18 yeah exactly you got to crucify him to a chaos magic chaos star Now we're talking spider Christ Save me spider Christ. You have more arms now. You're more free I know you couldn't save me before because you only you were only working with two hands and they were kind of tied up Now now you can save me spider Jesus God that is so incredible King of the spiders Oh, God, now you can save me. Spider Jesus. Oh, God. That is so incredible. King of the spiders. Um, the maybe perhaps every species in the animal kingdom has its own
Starting point is 01:00:56 Christ and Antichrist. Maybe there's like an Antichrist of spiders. He went insane, he's in hell, tried to call his own website, tried to learn HTML, now he claws his eye. And he claws at his face, if only someone told him to use Squarespace. Squarespace, it would've saved his soul, Squarespace, now he looks so old Squarespace, demons chew his face Squarespace could have saved him Now he's being eaten by a raven My friends, you gotta try Squarespace. If you wanna build a website, I'm blown away by them.
Starting point is 01:01:43 I had to build some websites, I'm blown away by them. I had to build some websites. I won't go into detail about that, but I became very interested in incorporating chat GBT or the creation of websites. So I created a Squarespace website in, I don't know, less than an hour. A beautiful website. It looks so good and it was so easy to use I may love technology but I sure am not that good at it I can barely use a remote control it's elder abuse my wife makes fun of me as I stumble around Netflix with my
Starting point is 01:02:19 remote control so if I can build a great website in less than an hour with Squarespace, then you definitely can. It's easy. Getting a website up can be really difficult if you don't have a service like Squarespace. Getting the domain name, connecting the domain name to your website. All these things are complex, annoying, and can make you quit mid-process. Squarespace helps you do this quickly and the sites that you can make with it are amazing. You can use mix and match templates. You can make something deep and
Starting point is 01:02:53 powerful like dunkintrustle.com which yet again won a golden apple lovely website award from the Rose Foundation. So you should try Squarespace out. If you've been thinking about making a website just try them out. You could try it out for free. Just go to squarespace.com or slash Duncan and when you're ready to launch use offer code Duncan and you'll get you 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Also you can use Squarespace's technology to make, to send out emails for your friends, clients, customers that don't look like you are trying to hack their email.
Starting point is 01:03:36 Squarespace is incredible, and I hope you'll try them out. Again, it's squarespace.com forward slash Duncan, use offer code Duncan, to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain and you can try them out for free just to make sure it's what you're looking for, which it will be. Maybe perhaps every species in the animal kingdom has its own Christ and Antichrist. Maybe there's like an antichrist of spiders. I wouldn't be surprised.
Starting point is 01:04:08 I mean, spiders are reviled. It's very sad for them. I mean, they do all this hard fucking work. They eat all our bugs and just like, you know, people see them, it's insta-death. Well, you know, I'm the anti-Buddha. I declared myself as such on Twitter, so it's true. Really?
Starting point is 01:04:22 Yes. What does that mean? Congratulate, you're the- It's just like a negative void in space. It's like just like a black hole hovering in the cosmos. That's what I am. I love it. How do you recommend medicine? Because I have absorbed the most light and therefore I am dark. That's because you know the interstellar medium in space.
Starting point is 01:04:49 So there's darkness on earth which is the lack of the sun and then there's darkness in space which is there's so many stars that we cannot perceive the amount of light so we perceive it as black. So the space between the stars is more light than we are capable of perceiving with the human eye. Holy shit. In my understanding of it and so therefore that's a different type of darkness. I bow to you dark Buddha. I'm honored to have you on my podcast. That's incredible. This is yeah that's actually just for Twitch. That's my identity on Twitch. Well I mean technically you would be the sleeping one
Starting point is 01:05:23 right Buddha just means like awakened, right? So you would be this all the napping one. You're the napping instead of Tatha. God are the awakened one I'm like the guy on the couch. Yeah It's like the guy that's just there why is he on the couch? I Movie half-baked. He's just he's just there. You didn't turn the fucking That movie half baked. He's just he's just there. You didn't turn the fucking Exactly, I'm not turning that shit. I'm asleep on the couch with a wheel next to me like you you turn it get The wheel eventually this is how I actually feel though. This is really funny like really I have to turn that you turn it I don't want to turn that thing. Why do I have to turn the fucking wheel turn the wheel?
Starting point is 01:06:00 You turn the fucking wheel you be the Buddha Well, I'm the anti-Buddha, so I'm exempted. But yeah, so the thing about kids and learning and maturation, all of that is true. We do need people to be entrepreneurial and capitalistic. But at this point in my life, having been both an employee and an employer, and having both been a bad employee and had bad employees, and also been a good employee and had good employees, I see things a lot differently now.
Starting point is 01:06:33 And I think the reality of the world now, and particularly because of AI, forget about skill training. OK, like whatever job, if a kid now graduating from high school, I would say to him whatever your job is i mean they said this to us i'm sure i said it to me at least when i was graduating you know the computers are coming out it's like plastics but it's better it's computers and in the future you will have a job doing the computers yeah we don't know what it is yet and they were right and it's the same kind of thing. And people will be using AI.
Starting point is 01:07:06 They will be working with AI. Whatever skills. If I don't have a skill, I just ask AI to figure it out for me, and it tells me how to do it. And so all of a sudden, I'm augmented. That's the world that people are going into. So in that case, the thing I think that is most important to train in young people is the right attitude. And I think the right attitude is of curiosity and being interested in the world and wanting to learn.
Starting point is 01:07:29 And also, lots of soft skills that, for instance, sports teach, I didn't play sports, but things like teamwork and losing gracefully, that's something I wish I'd learned a little earlier. So I didn't throw tantrums when I lost things as an adult you know and finishing like like, you know, like me and one of the kids that were working on a like a Lego project and Because I know one of my you know karmic conditions in life is like getting halfway through something and then stopping So, you know, you I like why do you think that is that's very common by the way I?
Starting point is 01:08:07 Often have that AI is helping me finish some of those that I have unfinished But what is that curve is a burn man? And it's like you commit to something in its novel at first But once you get to some certain point it can be a little boring you're ready for it to be done You don't want to go through the pain of Like well that that's the that's the that's the that's necessary though. I mean, that's the pushback I mean, that's like that's the oh, do you really want this? How bad do you want this? Do you really want this because if you don't want this there's lots of other stuff
Starting point is 01:08:38 We don't want to waste your time. There's lots of other stuff you can do with this one-time incarnation It's an infinite universe and we love you. So we just want you to be happy So do you are you sure you actually want to go down this route? and so when you actually want to go down when when it's your true path in life and this is something that I think that young men particularly are a Little lost on right now or it's kind of like you have to make it happen yourself You have to pick the thing that you're the path that you're going to commit to and force it to make it happen yourself. You have to pick the thing that you're the path that you're going to commit to and force it and make it happen.
Starting point is 01:09:09 Don't you can't say that we have this idea that things are going to happen for us. You have to learn how to make things happen for yourself. That's right. And and and and and and also it's like, OK, like, yeah, maybe halfway through some project you're doing or learning some musical instrument, even though you never get through that but you know what I mean like halfway through you realize I really I'm not into this then for fine you're not gonna do this anymore but finish the thing and you've learned how to complete something that's what you're learning the meta you're learning the process
Starting point is 01:09:42 you're experiencing the burn and so you start getting familiar with that burn and you recognize that that doesn't mean stop necessarily, it actually you should be excited because it means you're getting close to the halfway point or maybe past it. And then you, at least for me, when I'm getting towards the end of a project, that's when I feel more vacuumed into that point
Starting point is 01:10:04 in the future when it's done. But somewhere in the middle, like whatever the gravity of passion is, if there is, that it diminishes. And then you have to really push yourself. So that kind of stuff, I think you can teach your kids. And regardless of the tools that are going to be available to them when they're older, they still will know what they know if they start feeling bored in the middle of doing something.
Starting point is 01:10:31 That doesn't mean they're failing or that they shouldn't be doing the thing. Absolutely. That's just normal. The plateau phase. Yeah, that's really important. There's just all these little life lessons that people need to know. One thing that I think the tech industry gets completely correct and you know people have mixed feelings about them getting involved in education,
Starting point is 01:10:49 but one thing that they get completely correct and that the tech people that have gotten involved in the education world have kind of pushed in, which is good and I really I think it's really really really good, is the idea that failing is okay. And that's a big value in Silicon Valley, for instance, where it's just like, oh, like your startup failed? Awesome. Like you learned a lot. Take everything you learn and try again.
Starting point is 01:11:14 And if that fails, great. Now you know way more. Do it again, do it again until it works. And that's what you need to do in life. And people very often in life give up too early. And it's like that classic cartoon of the gold miner who quits like one inch before striking gold. And so, you know, one of the things that education can impress on people, and, you know, my job
Starting point is 01:11:37 is education, is showing them patterns that work in life. And there are patterns that will work and that's reassuring in the same way that there are mathematical constants. There are patterns in life that work. If you give to others first before expecting that you will get, you will get way more. Not in a selfish way, but like you'll have a much broader,
Starting point is 01:12:00 more expansive life. That's how I met you. I just walked up to you and gave you a copy of my book I didn't ask you for anything You know yeah now I ask you to do a podcast every three days, so But yeah, no no this is my favorite. This is my favorite Yeah, I know it's fine. I love that you call yourself You are an educator, but you know I've met people who take you work with you man, and their minds are blown
Starting point is 01:12:27 Really, I mean it's not like you're yes I don't know like I interact with people online, but I basically never leave the house so I don't actually have that much of a sense of of The world out there of like the consequences of my actions Very highly of you Jason. Oh good You've helped people, it really helps people. Because those patterns that you're, see that's the thing if you, you can really become, if you're sort of, right now especially, if you're looking at this like
Starting point is 01:12:57 very turbulent, very distracting time where you don't know where do I hitch my wagon, like and by the time you've hitched your wagon to the thing, it's not a wagon anymore, it's spaceship. Yes. You know what I mean? No, no, completely. That's so well put. And it's like, so my answer is,
Starting point is 01:13:13 and this is the answer to the magical tradition, is the answer is you have to hitch your wagon to yourself. Ah, yeah. You have to. And in the sense that if you want to do anything, you have the tools now. You don't have to ask for permission. And you have a I can explain if you have anything, you just ask a how to do it.
Starting point is 01:13:31 And we'll start working with you to explain it. And that's it. And you can. This is the other, you know, when I really started getting into that to a and into a lot of this stuff, one of the things I realized is for some reason I thought, well, I can't do that. There's no way I'm going to be able to like code in Python or like run terminal scripts or do any of this shit that just because I'd never messed with it, I thought of it as like
Starting point is 01:13:59 kind of like, you know, high level hacking. I didn't realize how easy GitHub is to, I didn't understand that it's not, it's pretty simple. It's only real if while you're typing the code, just like the one line of code to delete a file into the terminal or whatever, there's EDM from 2002 playing and a camera spinning around you
Starting point is 01:14:21 while there's rows of information coming down and you're clapping and dancing and like the screen is like flashing like spike scent spike scent and then like a skull comes up about like intrusion detected that type of thing you know Bruce Willis is there and he's like he's like I don't understand this damn hacker shit just show me who to shoot that's right and That's how you code. That's how you code. Anyone listening, if you're one of those people who are just like, I don't do this. I just because like for whatever reason you think it's some and you do,
Starting point is 01:15:05 because of your conditioning from all those stupid movies, the moment you are downloading something from, what's it called, Homebrew, the moment you're installing something using Terminal, you will feel like a hacker. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Even though you're not. No, that first moment when you crack that Terminal,
Starting point is 01:15:22 oh, oh yeah, yeah. When it starts populating the screen with all the weird shit it's doing, Absolutely. No, that first moment when you crack that terminal. Oh, oh yeah, yeah. When it starts populating the screen with all the weird shit it's doing, you're like, whoa. It just like, yeah. Even though it's so, it's cut and paste, and it just basically does it. You literally type the equivalent of like,
Starting point is 01:15:38 like, update my software, and it did that. It just does it. But you know, this is another thing, it's like, that I hope to be able to convey to my kids is like, you can do anything, not in some cliche way. Yeah, no, literally. But don't get stuck with this idea that, well, I'm not the person who does that. That's not me.
Starting point is 01:15:58 It's like, you're every person. We're all running the same, like, all have the same chipset basically. I know like there's everyone has some limitations maybe or we've burned out a couple of memory chips or whatever but you know what I mean? Like you can do it. That's the thing and that's very exciting. Now, yeah, yeah. And now, you know, not to go back what we've been talking about, that you can do it thing, the learning curve or the wall that is in between you and the place you want to go, you now have a rocket, a jetpack now that can get you over that wall so much faster. That's so exciting.
Starting point is 01:16:48 And so I think just giving people a positive frame to approach life, which magic does, magic is kind of like contextualizing your life as a role playing game or like a video game, like you're gaining experience and points and going up and things like that. I gotta ask you something, Jason, and we can delete this if it's weird.
Starting point is 01:17:05 Do you under emphasize a little bit about you know I and I get it. I'm not gonna give details I've hung out with you. Remember that. Remember chart. I'm not gonna give details. That's fine. I'm out with you. And I've seen as long as it doesn't get me doxxed. Go ahead. I'm gonna get you doxxed. I just never. I don't know if I will delete this I've never seen anyone get swarmed by Freemasons. Oh I just did a video on my YouTube I'm turning myself into a youtuber because I got to keep a current with the kids I just did a video 32nd degree Freemason confronts tick-tock conspiracy theories Did you yeah, I am a 32nd degree Freemason,
Starting point is 01:17:46 which means I am privy to all the inner secrets of the world, which are like, you know, $10 chicken dinners with seniors and passing intergenerational wisdom around the table in a way that doesn't involve alcohol. No, I reject that, no. You guys all say that. I'm talking about sports. And sometimes, sometimes when we get really crazy,
Starting point is 01:18:04 the Freemasons, when we get really really crazy we put on Hawaiian shirts instead of instead of suits look I'm not gonna try to blow your cover here man I've seen people get swarmed by all kinds of people I've never seen people get swarmed by Freemasons and then listening to Masons like I don't know what I still wonder what y'all are talking about like Like it's Chinese New Year And you're getting swarmed by masons after showing me all of these intricate Rituals that you are very familiar with in a oh the Dallas Dallas magic. Yeah. Yeah, so I do feel like you do sort of under emphasize a little bit
Starting point is 01:18:42 But that's maybe you need to do that Besides what? emphasize a little bit, but that's maybe you need to do that. Right. Maybe that's the idea. I'm going to emphasize what? Well, because sometimes the way you're talking about it, you might think like you're going to be teaching people French. Oh, I see. You know what I'm saying? It's like.
Starting point is 01:18:57 Well, let me ask you about that, OK? Because I've spent 25 years trying to push magic into the mainstream. And when I first started out I wrote my first book Generation Hex I said in the future the next big youth counterculture is going to be magic and at the time I knew five people I think less than five people who practice magic in the world, one was just not really into it. One was one of my first mentors, one lived in the UK, and then the other two were Genesis and Lady J.
Starting point is 01:19:36 And those were the only people I knew outside of, people like, they were talking about it publicly, like Doug Rushkoff or Grant Morrison or Alan Moore, people like that. And so I said, this is gonna happen. And lo and behold, later on it did. Now it's like, witch talk and all of that stuff, witch house. And every single young person is into magic
Starting point is 01:19:56 and tarot and crystals now. So I was right, and causatively right, I think. And, wait, well, so, oh, they're thinking about, so, okay, so what I was. And, um, what, wait, well, so, oh, they're thinking about, so, okay, so what I was asking is, but I've made a lot of inroads, but the question is like, so there's kind of two ways to approach the public.
Starting point is 01:20:13 One is to just lean into it and just like make yourself this ridiculous, over the top character, like Alastair Crowley or Anton LeVay or, or Genesis. And the other one is just to be, go the complete opposite way and meet like Alastair Crowley or Anton LeVay or Genesis. And the other one is just to be, go the complete opposite way and meet
Starting point is 01:20:29 and just basically do the Rosicrucian thing was just be comport yourself exactly like everybody else and meet them where they're at. And that's the path that I've taken. But I'm not saying that's the right path. That's the one that I chose. It certainly requires less money spent on clothing, so that's good.
Starting point is 01:20:48 No, I really respect that, man, because I think that speaks to the seriousness that you approach what you do, your training, because the ridiculousness that you're talking about, and I don't think Genesis was doing this necessarily, but sometimes you realize that people are sort of, you know, it's like, I don't know if you ever read that insane book about picking up women that was really controversial a while ago.
Starting point is 01:21:20 The game? What are they? Peacocking. Oh, no. Well, it was called the game, but the name of it they? Peacocking. Oh, no. Wait, well, Peacocking from the game. It was called the game, but the name of it was Peacocking. So the idea is like, I don't know. You know, Neil Strauss later, he later repented and recanted for all of that
Starting point is 01:21:31 and said that essentially what all that stuff had done is give him a really seriously crippling sex addiction that he sounded like his life had not gone particularly well because of that stuff. I mean, how could it? You're like, it's pure, you're teaching people to be like hypnotic, horny fucking sociopaths. It's like, walk around with a bowling ball.
Starting point is 01:21:55 Give people, you know what I mean? Weird shit like that. Give people a bracelet. You know what I mean? Okay, I'm gonna check this out. This is brutal. So, one thing that I've been just focusing on a lot more is just I think this culture is just completely
Starting point is 01:22:13 throwing women into the meat grinder completely and just no matter what it says, has zero regard for women whatsoever. But what I was gonna mention is, there was an whole, you know the whole pick-up artist thing about negging, which is like going up to women and it's kind of like passive aggressively undercutting their appearance or something like shitty like that to make them think that you're more
Starting point is 01:22:35 important and that they need your approval. So there was like a political cartoon that somebody did, which was this pickup artist going up to a woman at a cafe and saying like oh like that's a pretty good hat Or something like that and hurt and she says oh, is that a neg? I love this Let let me try you're going to wander through your life from one revelatory Experience to the next trying one hobby and passion after the next, trying one career after the next, all the while trying to find yourself and thinking if you can just make a breakthrough
Starting point is 01:23:11 that it's really gonna work this time and you're gonna chase that breakthrough all the way to the grave and your life will have been meaningless. How did I do? Was that good? I guess they fucked that night. He's like, oh, fuck you, fine, you got me.
Starting point is 01:23:28 But this burned into my mind because it demonstrates clearly a really critical thing. It's like, forget magic for a second. One of the, pretty much, I work with people for a living, right? Forget the details of, I teach them magic. I work with people for a living, right? Forget the details of I teach them magic. I work with people for a living and people are interested in magic because they have things that they want to surmount in life.
Starting point is 01:23:55 Right. One of the things that men in general in this call, not women, I've noticed, not women, because I think that for men, magic is very much a path of becoming. And for women, it is much more a path of embodying. Like I am the goddess, I already am the goddess, I already am that. For men, magic is a path of becoming. This is just life in general too.
Starting point is 01:24:18 And... God damn it, I lost it. It's fine. No, you're talking about like sort of like in the culture. I was gonna make a point that was. Women are, you know, we're talking about sort of like. Oh, I thank you. Okay.
Starting point is 01:24:37 I'm like really forgetful. I think it's like PTSD symptoms or something. It's been showing up a lot. So men in this culture have the men and women, but particularly young men are prone to drifting. And it's really drifter. No, I mean, look, what you're talking about is sort of like, you watch the born Identities the not probably the first one. No Jack Reacher the Jack Reacher Every fucking beach dad reads Jack Reacher we always used to call that Jack reach around because There was we were we used to like we saw the posters for that one on the subway in New York when it came out
Starting point is 01:25:21 And it said like Jack Reacher or Jack Reacher and the tag was he always gets his man. So we called it Jack. We called it Jack Reacher. Well, Jack Reacher is basically like if you've ever been like in a rough patch in your marriage, you would want to be Jack Reacher because Jack Reacher just like gets on a bus, you know, he sleeps in hammocks in people's backyards. He owns nothing. He's essentially that like, I think the reason
Starting point is 01:25:49 so many dudes like him is because he kind of represents like a recently divorced dude. Okay, so I'm glad you bring this up. I think because men in particular in this society right now is all I can speak to because this is where I am in space time. But very much have a needing to find myself thing going on. And women don't because I think with women one of the issues, problems that women have
Starting point is 01:26:21 right now is more superhero, superwoman syndrome, which is they feel they now have to do everything all at once. They have to be a perfect mom and have a career and have a business and like all that, perfect marriage and all this stuff. And it's just too much for one person to do, to be expected to do everything. And so I think it's more overwhelmed.
Starting point is 01:26:38 It's not like not being sure what they wanna do. It's being overwhelmed too much. But men are very much trying to find myself. And that can be, you know, that can be early 20s, but it can also be coming out of a divorce or equivalent, you know, or, or, you know, that midlife crisis where it's like you did everything right and you played, you played it safe and it's like, it still fell apart, you know,
Starting point is 01:27:04 and it's like, this is the experience of more and more people and it will be the experience of more and more people and if You and essentially what I'm offering here is magic is a system For finding yourself. It's like the fact that you want to find yourself is good. That's called self-definition That's called becoming a fully realized human being. You need to do it. You shouldn't be made fun of for it. You need to go on the hero's journey.
Starting point is 01:27:31 You need to go on the shaman's quest. If you want to be a fully individuated human being, yeah, you're gonna have to go out into fairyland and you're gonna have to go follow your dreams. You have to, right? But the thing that is so frustrating for people now is they don't have the right tools to do that So magic is a whole set of tools. It's a whole science of finding yourself
Starting point is 01:27:51 There's actual techniques and stuff that you can do so that you can do that It's kind of like you're trying to do the thing but you don't have the tools. Well, the tools are in the Western magical tradition They're not the only tools but they're tools that I'm very very good at using and teaching, so that's what I'm offering. You know, it's kind of like, yeah. That's so cool, man. And also, doesn't it, so couldn't you argue, you know, the whole finding yourself thing, the hero's journey, quite often it-
Starting point is 01:28:18 Or refinding yourself, if you feel that you've lost yourself in like a career or a marriage or something, yeah. Refining yourself, but the whole finding yourself thing, it's rooted in the pilgrimage and the adventure, going into the unknown, you know, going into some undiscovered country and mapping it for the first time. And I think a lot of the despair people feel is there's a sense that everything's been discovered. There's nothing to find. There's a grid over everything.
Starting point is 01:28:54 And to me, one of the delights about magic is when you realize, like, holy fuck, this is a brand new place. Oh no, we're just getting started. And I totally get that because particularly young men need to explore. It's like we're wired to fight or to go west, you know? And it's like young men used to go to see,
Starting point is 01:29:15 Alan Moore made this point like a couple of decades ago where he said that, you know, young men, or when social media first started becoming a thing, he said it seems like, you know, young men used to go to sea when they wanted to get away from, I don't know, their family, go for adventure, make something of themselves out in the big wide world. Now they try to become famous.
Starting point is 01:29:34 Oh, weird. And I think that's totally true. And I think that- That's cool. I think that's, and it is, that is a cool adventure, but I think that's not for everyone, but that is a cool, you know, game to play. It's a cool challenge. I like that's, and it is, that is a cool adventure, but I think that's not for everyone, but that is a cool, you know, game to play. It's a cool challenge.
Starting point is 01:29:48 I like that identification. That's what I mean is cool. That's interesting. That's cool. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. How's your social battery right now? Feel a little run down? A little drained? A little clunky?
Starting point is 01:30:22 A little slothful? A little slow? A little entropic? down, a little drained, a little clunky, a little slothful, a little slow, a little entropic. You feel like maybe the earth's gravity well has somehow increased in intensity. It's easy to ignore that stuff or to make the treacherous mistake of thinking it's a byproduct of age. I did that for a long time. You might think the reason you want to hang out with your friends is just because you're getting older. I did that for a long time. You might think the reason you don't want to go to the gym is because you're too busy. But you notice that the thing you're
Starting point is 01:30:58 calling busyness is just you laying in bed playing video games. I did that. Therapy can give you the self-awareness to build a social life, a better life, an invigorated life. Therapy can help reduce the imaginary gravity well of depression. It certainly helped me. It's one of the greatest things I ever did. I'm so glad I did it and I didn't have to go to therapy for years. It was relatively quick. It was intense and anytime I was going to therapy I did get that same feeling I get when I need to go to the gym. You know you want to come up with some kind of excuse to not do it, but I was always so glad. People don't talk about the post-therapy feeling, like after you're done, after you've put
Starting point is 01:31:51 the work in, after you've had a great session with your therapist. It's an incredible feeling. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapist at any time for no additional charge. Find your social sweet spot. Get back out there with BetterHelp.
Starting point is 01:32:17 Visit BetterHelp.com slash Duncan today to get 10% off your first month. That's Better Help. H-E-L-P.com slash Duncan. Thank you, BetterHelp. ["BetterHelp Theme Song"] Now they try to become famous. Oh, weird. And I think that's totally true. And I think that...
Starting point is 01:32:52 That's cool. I think that's... And it is... That is a cool adventure. But I think that's not for everyone, but that is a cool game to play. It's a cool challenge. I like that identification. That's what I mean is cool. That's interesting.
Starting point is 01:33:06 That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but then, you know, you suddenly when the Chogam Chopra talks about this all the time, the floor drops out. Yeah. You know, like as it will. Yeah. As it will. And when the floor drops out in the systems that you're teaching, it's a
Starting point is 01:33:26 whole different thing than like flying to Costa Rica. You know what I mean? Yeah, Trungpa was so on point. I mean, like he really did such a great job of expressing stuff for Western people. I really aspire to that level of clarity and reach, but for the Western tradition. And I think that one of the I mean, it's amazing how important his concepts are for the world. Like here's one, idiot compassion. That's a pretty important concept these days, I'd say. It's idiot, idiot compassion is having compassion
Starting point is 01:33:54 for a child who's reaching for a hot stove and not slapping their hand away because you don't want to hurt them. Touch the stove, honey, I love you. Why don't you put your face on it? Because you don't want to hurt them by slapping their hand away. That's idiot compassion. And it's kind of endemic at all levels of our society. Unfortunately, it's hard to say that without sounding heartless.
Starting point is 01:34:11 You don't sound heartless at all. We don't have to get into specifics at all, but you know, I think just as a general principle. The definition of compassion even is like, you know, what people think of compassion is very different from what Chogyam Trungpa and a lot of those teachers, when they teach compassion, they don't mean some kind of boundary-less permissiveness. You know, they don't mean like, they don't mean that. Compassion is actually can be very wrathful. Sometimes you might think someone is being brutal to you. And I'm sure you've experienced this when like when you're working with a teacher. Their compassion is like can be things that you needed to hear. A raffle. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it can be so rough that it can take years to understand. I mean, I've had teachers punk me in ways
Starting point is 01:35:05 that like utterly shook and terrified me down to my pinky toes and just revolted my stomach over. And then like a year later, a year later, I realized they were literally just mirroring me back to myself and exaggerating it. That's all they were doing. That's all they were doing. They were making just mirroring me back to myself and exaggerating it. That's all they were doing. That's all they were doing. They were making fun of me.
Starting point is 01:35:29 And I was terrified of myself because they were showing, this is what you're putting off and how you're coming across. Yep. So, yeah, you know. A lot of times people need that. That's compassion, you know. They're not doing it because they're getting off
Starting point is 01:35:42 on hurting you. They're doing it so that you can like so that they can ease your suffering They understand as long as you keep putting that shit out there. You're gonna hurt Yeah, they're trying to show you in a non-standard way Either they're they're they're not nagging you as much as helping you sort of get get some Dust off the windshield. Yeah. Well, it's like if you're walking, if you're going to job interviews with like a like shit on your shoulder and I see you walking down the street, is the compassionate thing. This is a really weird metaphor, but I'm just thinking it's like,
Starting point is 01:36:15 what the hell is this metaphor? It is the compassionate thing running up and slapping it off you or letting you go to your interviews with the dog shit on you so that I don't have to randomly accost you on the street I mean you could hand him a Kleenex That's a bizarre you have shit on your shoulder No you that's all that's your shit on my shoulder And then you get a bunch of new-age people and they start doing it back and forth to each other and that's just
Starting point is 01:36:51 Infuriating it's really it's really frustrating. I know and that this is why it's like I think again This is why and some of the systems I've studied there You have to ask for it. That's the other thing is you're not gonna get the kind of compassion that we've both experienced. You're not gonna get. Oh, it has to be consensual or it's abuse of teaching.
Starting point is 01:37:14 And I don't, by the way, I don't teach that way at all. And there's a reason. It's because it's not compatible with today's culture anymore. It might've worked in the 70s, it doesn't work now, not in the social media age. It's too risky. And so but what I was going to say is you were talking about no frontiers and it's like, yeah, like, you know, young men in particular used to want to go west, explore America, explore
Starting point is 01:37:35 the sea, you know, it's like, and we're told, oh, well, the frontiers close. It's like the hell it is. There's two directions. You can go west and east you're gonna go out or in right? We'll pick one out. We have an entire universe to explore Elon Musk is trying to build spaceships and people are trying to tear him apart before he can finish Whatever, but you know outer space. This is the aeon of Horus the Hawk taking off from from Earth We have a whole week we have Star Trek. Star Trek is waiting for us to make it real, okay? That's the future we wanna go to, the Star Trek future.
Starting point is 01:38:10 Go out into space and be civil while you're out there. Don't be an asshole while you're there. The other direction is in, the inward journey. This is why people are interested in psychedelics and meditation and spirituality and all. This is the Aeon of Horus, right? It's outer expansion and inner expansion. And both of those are very forward, pushing forward.
Starting point is 01:38:30 They can bring benefits to humanity. They're real, they're not made up. And one of the things about the Eastern traditions that made me decide to essentially, I learned and trained in so many traditions, but, and for a long time, I thought I was gonna present myself simply as a Eastern guru and just teach tantra, and not sexual tantra, but consciousness tantra,
Starting point is 01:38:50 and like basically just be a non-dual evatavadana teacher, right? And that's what I figured I was gonna do. And then I realized that just doesn't work for Western people, it's not compatible. The Western tradition is compatible with our culture right now at least, because it's about getting things done and being forceful and going out and impressing and building.
Starting point is 01:39:13 And this is something that Americans are awesome at. You know, like we create things, we go out, we explore, we build, we take risks, you know? And it's like that, that's for us, that's, you know, magic is a spiritual path of going out into the world and being brave. And I say this as someone who never leaves the house, but you know, I leave the world online.
Starting point is 01:39:32 Impressing your will onto the world instead of shrinking away. We have a culture that encourages right now, right now we have a courage, excuse me, we don't have courage. Right now we have a culture that encourages people, particularly young men to be, to shrink, to go inward, to be less than, to not offend,
Starting point is 01:39:49 to metaphorically circumcise themselves, essentially. You mean castrate. Castrate, same thing. You know, like, not same thing, but you know what I mean. Better not fucking be, I'm circumcised. To not, well, we have a weird thing on this planet with genital mutilation of children. But that's a whole other topic. It's a different topic. But I know what you mean. It is weird.
Starting point is 01:40:14 But I'm talking metaphorically. It's just like the right path is to cut yourself down to size. And that is the most toxic message we could send people. So I don't think necessarily that people need more Eastern traditions, which encourage them to be smaller and quieter and go more inward and disappear and vanish from the world. I think that that's not necessarily good. And it doesn't necessarily work outside of a monastery. And it was never meant to work outside of the existing cultural scaffolding of India anyways. So it doesn't really make sense. I don't think that Buddhism or Hinduism really makes sense as spiritual traditions in the West. And so I'm just like,
Starting point is 01:40:53 okay, well, you need a, well, then you need someone to teach the Western tradition. Okay. Well, okay. Well, magic made, you know, WWW magic. To your point, there's a big difference between like if you're hanging out with someone who you know is some kind of martial artist and dangerous, like, you know, like those people and they're always the sweetest people, but they're weird to be around because you know, they're it's they're like pit bulls or something, you know, like, you know, if they just for whatever reason decided to kill you, you would just be dead.
Starting point is 01:41:24 You know what I mean? You would feel like, why are you doing this? And then you would be dead. But but so you see that and I've seen it a few times. You'll see a person like that and some drunk will start fucking with them. And you're looking at the drunk. He's like can barely stand up, but he's like clearly trying to start a fight. And you're looking at this person. You're like, like man this is they don't understand what they're doing like they're gonna get hurt and then you watch the martial artist de-escalate and not get in the fight
Starting point is 01:41:57 they don't need to they already they've been in a million fights they they don't need to and so that to me is that sort of form of pacifism is heroic in the sense that this person easily could have been hyper violent and hurt this person. But how can you necessarily call yourself a pacifist if you don't have claws? You know what I mean? How can you say, oh, I'm a peaceful person if you don't have any method of violence anyway Yeah, you're you're you're peaceful in the way like a flower is peaceful You know, you're you're sweet and you're nice and everything but you're don't You may have confused your cowardice with pacifism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
Starting point is 01:42:40 Well, okay. Well here's if somebody breaks into your house to kill your family What's the right thing to do to kill them or to sit there and watch? No, exactly. What's the right thing to do? You're asking me. What's the right thing to do? Well, it's a rhetorical question obviously, but but it can be we can obviously extrapolate this to be on just that situation, but Yeah, dude. No, I agree, I agree with you, right? It's like one of the best things I ever did for myself and outside of, you know, in terms of,
Starting point is 01:43:11 and I've done all these spiritual and psychotherapy and yoga and meditation. I've done all this stuff, you know, basically I made it my job to do all this stuff so that I can get to the best stuff, teach the best stuff and leave all the stuff that's not so good on the wayside. But one of the best things I ever did for myself is simply just become capable of defending
Starting point is 01:43:29 myself. And I'm not going to turn this into the obligatory podcast MMA conversation because it wasn't MMA and it wasn't even martial arts. It was much more serious than that. Let me put it that way. Knife fighting? That was part of it, yeah. But I just made sure that I'm unkillable.
Starting point is 01:43:48 Let me put it that way. And that being able to defend myself made me more relaxed. Exactly. That's what I'm talking about. Than anything. And I realized it's like, yeah, a lot of people's baseline anxiety comes from feeling physically vulnerable because they are because they are So one phrase to tie that tie up with the psychological principle that I extracted from this that I now tell my students Whether it relates to self-defense or not
Starting point is 01:44:17 the general principle I extracted from this is You should become the person that you needed when you were a child but was not there. That's it. And that and then so this is why I'm saying like I love like I think that once you maybe learn some of these like going towards the West going into the world learning action, learning confrontation, you know, learning that stuff, then the Eastern stuff like getting peaceful getting calm, all that stuff, then the Eastern stuff like getting peaceful,
Starting point is 01:44:45 getting calm, all that stuff makes more sense. Right. But first, you know, maybe like it's good to have or at least have a balance between the two. I mean, case in point to bet, I mean, like people idolize Tibet and see it as this kind of Shangri-La, New Age paradise is like, well, who were the Tibetans? The Tibetans were the Mongolian raiders. They were taught. They taught Buddhism to Genghis Khan's Mongolian raiders,
Starting point is 01:45:11 and they took that same spirit of going out and conquering the entire planet brutally, ruthlessly, with no mercy whatsoever. They took that same impulse and internalized it into the war against the self and the ego and the mind. Whoa, that's wild. It was that, I mean, why do you think they got that crazy discipline? I mean, you look at Tibet and you're like, how the hell do human beings do this? Like those people know stuff that we couldn't even begin to guess at.
Starting point is 01:45:37 You think about Tibetans sitting in monasteries for, I mean, what, like over a thousand years, just exploring other realities while they had their feudal empire of essentially serve serving them. But they were exploring all these other realities and writing it down in books and making those insane paintings about it and mandalas and all of that. How do you think they got that discipline? It's like so you can't. The general point here is like, you know, pacifism. You know, people forget too. I mean, you look at, people have this like Gandhian idea. You look at Gandhi, it's like, well, Gandhi was a warlord
Starting point is 01:46:11 and Gandhi also, by the way, let his wife die, which is bizarre. But he, there was a moment where he could have saved his wife's life by giving her aspirin, I think, but he was opposed to pharmaceutical. So he let her die instead, instead of breaking whatever he was telling people I may have It sucks. I may have the details of that wrong. So
Starting point is 01:46:30 Maybe somebody can correct me if I'm not correct. I'm gonna check the life insurance policy. Yeah, but but Pacifism is I think this cult. Let me put it this way. I think this cultural right culture right now is confusing cowardice for pacifism Yeah, that's that's and that's it, you know, and I their only reason I make that I'm saying that out loud is cuz like at some point I realized like I'm not sure I'm a Pacifist as much as I don't want to get in a fight. You know, I mean, I I don't know if I can call myself a pacifist I just don't want to get punched right and I think there's a big difference Between those two things and it's easy to get them to get confused And I think there's a big difference between those two things. And it's easy to get them confused because my God, what's easier? I mean, and that I
Starting point is 01:47:11 do think that's another cultural thing is we've really found a way to enshrine or make noble a lot of negative qualities. Like, you know what I mean? Like, this is good. But it's like, I don't know. I think that when you meet someone who's a warrior and is peaceful, then you're meeting a pacifist. When you meet someone who is defenseless and is peaceful, you're just meeting a survivor. Someone who's just trying to avoid getting the shit kicked out of them. And that's a dangerous place to be. And I only say that because at some point I recognize that quality of me I'm trying to work on that which is why I have now achieved a
Starting point is 01:47:50 Triple black belt in the quivering palm. I can I know how to vibrate my I can kill anybody with a vibrating palm to touch their heart But I have other levels of the vibrating palm to I can very very good Oh, I can make people come with my palm. Is it a Bluetooth though? What does it have Bluetooth? Yeah, okay. Yes. I mean so what I need can you can you connect it? Can you connect it to the smart lights? That's the real question are you really gonna out me on the Connect to is does it work? But does it work? Does it work with Alexa or or Google home or Apple?
Starting point is 01:48:29 They don't talk to each other It's like yeah, you can have a vibrating palm Duncan. Just wait till the firmware doesn't update and that you lose the Bluetooth pairing What good is it gonna do you then you sound like my teacher? Jason this has been a delight. And I just feel so lucky to be friends with you. You always enlighten me when we talk. And I so appreciate your time. And I really hope, like, number one, I hope people, like,
Starting point is 01:49:01 if I'm trying to blow up someone's class, I'm doing it because I've talked to them and known them forever. And also because, and you didn't ask me to do this, so I'm not trying to embarrass you here or something, but like I've met like your students and they are always like so like grateful to have been introduced to you.
Starting point is 01:49:23 And I don't know what you're teaching these kids. I don't know, but they do have an aura about them. I'm teaching them all the secrets of magic in the occult. And if you want those, they're all on offer at www.magic.me, M-A-G-I-C-K dot M-E, the world's greatest school for magic, meditation, and mysticism, where you can learn everything from chaos magic to hermeticism to astral projection
Starting point is 01:49:48 and everything in between. Go on, unleash your true self, do it. What are you waiting for? Magic.me. I wouldn't recommend, I'm sorry to break up that, but I would not recommend astral projection, it sucks. I hate astral. Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean?
Starting point is 01:50:02 What do you mean it sucks? Tell me about this. It sucks, terrifying! What did you do? mean? What do you mean it's like, tell me about this. It's terrifying. What did you do? What? What did you do, what happened? I came out of my body, wanted to go right back in. Were you tripping?
Starting point is 01:50:12 I'd been listening to these, nope, I had been listening to these astral projection hypnosis tapes my mom had for like almost a year. Falling to bed listening and I just woke up and the vibrating body thing came out of my body, went up into my fan, turned around and saw my body. And you know, I'd been reading journeys out of the body.
Starting point is 01:50:32 Like I wanted to do this. And then right when I did, I was like, fuck this. Did you hear anything when you separated? I don't, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Well, were there any phenomena? It was what woke me up. I thought there were people at the door. So it's like why why what what did you hear? Voices at the bottom of the stairs, huh? And then I felt an ominous presence in the room with me So it was like it was like a sleep paralysis
Starting point is 01:50:58 Yeah, that's how it always do it It would always start off with sleep paralysis some vibration and then boom you're, you're out. And then you're like, why would I wanna leave the safety and protection of my wonderful meat armor? Do you ever hear the thing where that happens and you can see your room in 360 degrees at the same time? It's very odd. It's very strange. It's very strange.
Starting point is 01:51:23 It's very strange. But all very strange. It's very strange. But all the other stuff you mentioned sounds cool. I didn't mean, I'm so sorry to interrupt your plug for your school, but I'm sure you could teach astral projection. I can't do it anymore. So astral projection, here's a useful thing. So this is actually a bit major point
Starting point is 01:51:36 of confusion for people. Astral projection and out of body are not the same thing. So out of body is what you're describing. It's not something that you should really, there's no, you shouldn't really do it. It tends to happen people in things like near death experiences or car crashes or childhood abuse, unfortunately,
Starting point is 01:51:52 or abuse as an adult if it's severe enough. It's like a defense mechanism of the body. It seems to happen during sleep paralysis as well, where you essentially disassociate from the possibility of severe trauma That's not awesome. Astral projection is basically what people now call guided visualization. Oh And it's old yeah, I know right it's like it's like I was like five finally figure that out after like 15 years And and it's just like why didn't they just
Starting point is 01:52:26 call it like it's just like oh my god they had to use this old theosophical language this is the thing this is the thing with a lot of these texts it's like they're telling you something true but they're using cartoon ass language so you kind of gotta be patient with it well yeah I mean this is the whole thing I mean this is what y'all do. And I get it. And I may be pretty dense, but I do recognize that there's a method to it and a reason for some
Starting point is 01:52:52 of the way that some of you, I don't mean to like other you, but the way it's presented. You pick. Like I get it, I get it. I do recognize that there's a great deal of logic happening and compassion, real compassion, like a real desire to help that is pretty awesome. And I won't give away. I just, you guys should take this fucking, you should take the, if you're interested in this stuff, take the class.
Starting point is 01:53:19 Yeah, well I've got, so magic.me is the website where all the courses are and the best ones are, I have a new one on introduction to magic. It's not just me teaching by the way, I've added new teachers, Lon Maile de Quette. You know Lon de Quette? Yeah, no shit. He taught a course, The Magic of Tarot. That's tarot.magic.me.
Starting point is 01:53:37 It's an awesome course he went through and we basically collaborated on it together and it's like, it's a deep dive into the thought tarot. I mean, he goes like electrical engineer level deep on it. It's intense. Wow. And- Wait, do you, is this like, so if like people sign up for this,
Starting point is 01:53:53 can they like, do you have to enroll and then the class has to be live or they have access to? I do occasionally do live trainings, but this is all available now. It's all recorded and presented. It's not just recording. There's handouts, there's PDFs, there's workbooks, there's exercises, there's audio, there's video.
Starting point is 01:54:12 It's a whole, I strive to create a whole multimedia. Basically use all, as much modern technology as I can to communicate and to get people, and we've done rituals in virtual reality so people get a sense of how to do it. But yeah, Magic.me and then, but you know, it's like not everyone's gonna take a course and that's fine, but I've got YouTube, Magic.me on YouTube,
Starting point is 01:54:35 I've been putting a ton of effort into becoming a YouTuber. And also the podcast is Ultra Culture with Jason Louv, which you should definitely come back on. And we should do a video. I owe you 70 pockets. We should do a video episode to get that on YouTube. I want to go back to your house. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Starting point is 01:54:49 Not to invite myself over, but... No, please, please. Anytime. That's, I mean, what are you going to, like, what's the point of moving to Austin and you're not going to hang out with your friends who live in Austin? Yeah, it's so fucked up we don't hang out more. It's just weird. I don't like it. It's been a weird time. It's been crazy busy. It's like, things are very confusing. we don't hang out more. It's just weird. I don't like it. It's been a weird time It's been crazy busy. It's like things are very confusing. We should definitely hang out more Jason you are a god. Thank you so much anti Buddha
Starting point is 01:55:17 Sleeping Buddha wait you're they I'm the guy on the couch I'm the guy passed out on the couch and no one knows how he got there. Great napper. Oh, great napper. I'm just there napping. We take refuge in the great napper. Thanks, Jason. I really appreciate it, man. That was Jason Louv, everybody. If you want to take any of his classes, go to dunkotrustle.com.
Starting point is 01:55:40 All the links are going to be there. A big thank you to all of our sponsors. And thank you for listening. I love you guys. See you next week.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.