Author Archives: David Truss

WCT 3 – The trip inside the trip

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Part three in my West Coast Trail (WCT) dairy. So far I’ve shared: WCT 1 – The Sun Gods Smiled On Us, and WCT 2 – Fellow Hikers. Now I’m going to share a magical trip we did inside of our WCT trip. I mentioned that it was always our intent to spend one full day on the beach, a ‘rest’ day on the trail, but our timing wasn’t working until we decided to add one more day to the trip. From WCT -1:

Long Beach Wisdom

We arrived at Tsusiat falls on the 5th day, typical for people starting on the south end like us, and planning to spend just one more night on the trail. That’s when we remembered the wise words Kristen shared with us on Long Beach, near Tofino, just a few days before:

“I’ll give you my Retirement speech: Retirement allows you to be in the moment for as long as the moment lasts.”

We are both retired. We don’t have work to get back to. We can stay an extra day.

Creating The Time and Space

While the Tsusiat falls are beautiful, it’s a very busy campsite, and that’s not what we wanted for our day off.

That’s when a fellow hiker gave us some advice, instead of the 13km hike to the next suggested campsite, go an easy 8km to the Tsocowis campsite, which also has a waterfall, and is not very popular because it’s going too far for people starting in the north, and makes the last day too long for people going north like us.

To understand how special this day was, it is best framed by the start of the day, receiving gifts, watching whales, and connecting with amazing people. Re-read the Serendipity and Generosity section of WCT 1 to understand that before our ‘trip inside of a trip’ even started it was a special day.

What we planned for this day was a magic mushroom trip.

I had purchased, (legally from a Vancouver dispensary), a mushroom called Poseidon’s Finger, ‘a high-potency hybrid Psilocybin cubensis mushroom strain created by crossing Tidal Wave and Albino Penis Envy’. Users report, ‘intense visual distortions, warped perception, deep emotional introspection, and waves of euphoria.‘ I’m going to use these descriptions as heading for my experiences, but put them in the order of my experiences, although there were many overlapping moments.

But first: Our goal was to set up everything for the evening (our tent, food prep, purifying water, gathering firewood, etc), and make it so that we had an entire day free of any responsibility. We had successfully moved from a crowded beach to one that only had 4 of us on it, and we knew the other two campers, although on this day we did nothing more with them other than share an occasional greeting wave.

Our set-up was perfect, our setting was perfect, we just had to think about our dose now. I had only ever micro-dosed with Poseidon’s Finger before, so I wasn’t sure how strong they would be. I took a full package of 3.5 grams, which is a dose I’d taken of another mushroom, but as I discovered, Poseidon’s Finger was much more potent than anything I’d tried before. My buddy took a little less than me, but still quite a high dose.

Four hours later we made a joke that might not be funny now, but for us at the time it was gut-busting hilarious. My buddy said something like, “We took Poseidon’s finger right up to the elbow.” To which I responded, “Up to the elbow and it tickled our tonsils.” This was a four-plus hour trip and, throughout it, just when you thought you were coming down a new wave of euphoria or heightened visuals would hit you and remind you that Poseidon still had a grip on you. While I made jokes like, “OK, that’s enough, let me off this planet.” I never actually felt uncomfortable or scared. There were times when I felt things were out of my control, however I always felt safe… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I said, the day was already magical, we set up everything to make our environment as simple as possible, and the setting was a stunning beach with a waterfall nearby. All the conditions were perfect. We had a late lunch with the mushrooms because dried mushrooms on their own can be a bit hard on your stomach. Then we hung around our tent for a while.

 Warped Perception: Every time estimation from here on in is approximate, part of the warped perception we experienced was that the concept of time was inconceivable. Somewhere around 30-45 minutes after taking the mushrooms, I suggested walking over to the falls. We had already done this 3 minute walk to collect water earlier, but walking to the waterfall on mushrooms felt like a journey somewhere between 10 minutes and 3 days. Yes, that’s an exaggeration but my first instinct was to say ‘forever’… I felt like no matter how far I walked, the waterfall seemed continually far away.

At the waterfall there was a very large log lying on it’s side and it had about 25 feet of a flat groove that my buddy and I laid down on, about 6 feet apart, (he was about 6 feet below my feet, on the same flat section).

Waves of euphoria

The amount of laughing we did to start the journey was almost too much. I had tears pouring out of my eyes as pure joy overwhelmed me. I felt elated about being retired. I felt honoured to be doing this journey with my buddy. I thought of how lucky I am to have the incredible family that I do. I was delighted with the stunning surroundings. And I felt the gift of being alive! We laughed on and on for a very long time. I think we were at the waterfall for roughly 1.5 to 2 hours and during that time about 50-70% of the time we were laughing and joyous.

Intense visual distortions

The waterfall was absolutely stunning. On it’s own it was beautiful, but add the intense visuals of the mushrooms and it was out of this world. The rocks around the upper part of the falls were getting pixilated for lack of a better word. The brown tones shifted and danced. For a while I saw, on the right side of the falls, a face with the waterfall coming out of it’s mouth. But again, this wasn’t a stationary face, it was animated and the shifting tones gave it expression.

My buddy was having a completely different experience. He was seeing hexagons and geometric shapes, and when he shut his eyes very tight and re-opened them he felt like he changed channels and was watching a completely different version of the landscape. He told me to try too, but I couldn’t get myself to squeeze my eyes tight. When I tried, it felt like I was going to temporarily blink myself out of existence. This should probably be scary, it wasn’t… but it did feel like too much to try.

I should preface this with the fact that I’ve tried a heroes dose of a similar drug with a guide, and I’ve never been able to have an out of body experience. I don’t know if it’s a stubborn ego or what’s blocking me, but I can’t seem to do it. I tried a couple times on this trip. We were chatting and I could see the world distorting, and I’d say to my buddy, “I’m blinking out right now, if I don’t respond, don’t worry, I’m just not going to be here for a bit.” Then I’d let go, but somehow my body wouldn’t. During this time I said a number of times, “The world is unzipping!” – This felt like a very real experience, like reality was going to be unfastened and stripped away… but not like watching a zipper open up, rather being the zipper between this world and another. Disorienting and a bit uncomfortable but again, not scary.

One thing was very unsettling for me, and that was the horizon. We were on a beach with about 160º view of the open ocean. Turning around to face the ocean was destabilizing. The horizon didn’t seem real. The clouds seemed way too close, and too geometric to be real. I felt like I was looking at a hologram from the wrong angle and seeing a part of the matrix that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. At one point I stood up to pee, but that statement sounds too sudden to be truly descriptive of the experience. First of all it felt like it took me 20 minutes just to talk myself into doing this monumental task, then another 10 to actually do it. Shifting from lying down to standing was almost too much to handle visually. I was relieved to lie back down.

Deep emotional introspection (Part 1 – The Tree)

At one point I looked over towards the near end of the beach and fixated on a single tree at the headland of the beach cove we were in.

I had a moment of time distortion and imagined a thousand years going by, and thought of the tree dying and falling into the ocean and the ocean eventually eroding away the land it sat on. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and thought of how sad it would be that no one in this distant future would be able to witness this beautiful scene that I was seeing right now.

Then I went really deep.

It occurred to me that this beautiful scene is only beautiful because a conscious mind looked at it. All over the universe there are profoundly beautiful things to see that nobody sees and thus there is no beauty in them at all. Without ego about my personal consciousness I realized that consciousness IS the purpose of the universe. There is no meaning, no appreciation of the sound of the waves, no sense of the warmth of the sun on my face, no beauty at all without consciousness. WE bring purpose and meaning to the universe. Thinking of this made most of my daily, trivial concerns seem comically insignificant, and I had a new appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.

Deep emotional introspection (Part 2 – The Post)

The clouds got more frequent, and combined with the proximity to the falls it started to get very cold. I was probably quite annoying with my complaints, the chill made me feel like life was leaving my body. Then after too long a wait, and much complaining, we finally went back to our campsite and crawled into our sleeping bags. I stayed like a wrapped mummy for a while but staring at the tent was boring so I leaned my upper body out of the tent to see the beautiful landscape. I could see the same headland tree, but from a different angle. I also had an upright post right in front of me.

The post morphed into a kind of totem. It didn’t change shape but I could see how an indigenous artist could find faces and shapes in the wood. Except for me none of the shapes were static. It wasn’t like Michelangelo seeing an angel in the marble and carving to set it free, but rather like a series of dancing shapes bringing the post alive.

Then I focused past the post and thought of the tree, time, and the importance of consciousness in the universe again. Except the post was there in front of me transcending my time warp. The post suddenly took on a feminine presence, like a symbol of Mother Earth. Then femininity. Then my wife. I thought of her standing up against all the challenges she ever faced, I saw her beauty and strength. I saw the gift she gave us of two beautiful and amazing daughters. All this love and joy overwhelmed me. I didn’t realize just how wonderful I felt until I felt blissful tears running down my face.

Integrating and Decompressing

Shortly after this I turned my phone on, we didn’t have reception, but I tried to make a video describing my introspection. The words wouldn’t come to me, they didn’t match the feeling.

I think I laid there, half in and half out of my tent for another 30 minutes to an hour. Fortunately, my friend willed himself to get up faster than me. He adjusted all the tie-downs on our tent, since rain was forecasted, then he started the fire. I literally was not capable of doing these things when he was.

He ate first then I boiled water and had my freeze dried dinner too. We sat by the fire until well after dark. We laughed a lot. And we sat in awe and appreciation of the environment we were in. The campsite we chose had an incredible fire pit that looked like a movie set.

We didn’t talk much. We were still high on life. The joy and laughter we had experienced throughout the day still resonated in us. It rained a little, but that didn’t dampen spirits. The fire was warm and our jackets were almost dry when we finally went to bed.

And to conclude a perfect day, it wasn’t until minutes after we were safely tucked in our sleeping bags that the rain began to downpour.

We couldn’t have asked for anything to have gone better.

A perfect trip. A perfect day.

The internal conflict of doing hard things

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I don’t want to do it. It’s going to be very hard… it’s going to suck.

I have to do it. I’m going to do everything in my power to be successful… it’s going to suck.

That’s the internal conflict of doing hard things.

The suck in ‘it’s going to suck’ is the part that makes it worth doing.

If it were easier, more enjoyable in the moment, it wouldn’t actually be hard. It also wouldn’t come with as great a sense of accomplishment. It wouldn’t be something as memorable. The internal conflict is real, it might even be necessary. Because if there wasn’t an element of ‘suck’, it wouldn’t be as rewarding. The trick is to embrace the suck, and to understand that it’s one of the hard parts of doing hard things.

That said, do hard things. Not because anyone is watching, not for anyone else but yourself. Recognize that the internal conflict is just part of doing hard things, not a reason to avoid it. And so that challenge you’ve been thinking of doing, or that goal you’ve talked about but haven’t acted on even though you really want to do it… The one that’s going to be hard, that you know will in some way suck getting to the end…

Start it. Do it. And know that the act of doing it is the reward, even though it’s also going to suck.

Intentional Inconvenience

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I used my Extended Health benefits beyond what was allowed without a Doctor’s note and it was denied. Fortunately, I have a doctor’s note, so I sent it in via snail mail… something I had previously done without issue. Months later I followed up with a phone call when I realized that the benefit still wasn’t approved. After waiting an inconsiderate amount of time to speak to a human, I was told that it would be better to use the health care company’s app and upload the doctor’s note, so that it’s attached to the claim. I did this, as instructed and was turned down again.

Today, after once again going through the automated phone tree of options, I was told by an automated voice that ‘My call was important’ and also that due to too many calls, please hang up and try again. Twice. The third time I was lucky enough to be put on hold. At this point I was offered an opportunity to hang up and be called back, but I chose to stay on the line. I didn’t want a callback when it was inconvenient and then have to go through this process again. Upon finally talking to a human almost 30 minutes later, she was able to see the unapproved benefits on my file. She then informed me that their automated system can not read the attachment uploads on the app, and so no one looked at my doctor’s note.

Here is a synopsis. Don’t mail in the doctor’s note like you used to, we won’t connect it to the benefit claim that needs it. Instead, use the app, which will allow you to upload the doctor’s note… so we can ignore it there too.

On top of that the app itself is inconvenient. It has a series of check boxes and boxes to fill, but interwoven are also tabs that are necessary to go to, to toggle or choose other options not on the original screen. Even after using it several times, I still end up trying to complete a claim only to be told that I’ve missed a toggle/tab (or two).

In this day and age, I doubt if this inconvenience isn’t at least somewhat intentional. I wonder how many people don’t get their (deserved) claims just because the process is designed such that you need to make a very inconvenient follow-up call to ensure payment? I wonder how many seniors and people with disabilities lose out on opportunities to claim benefits because the process is too challenging for them to navigate? We are intentionally inconvenienced because servicing our needs is not seen as the purpose, but as an expense… We are seen as the inconvenience.

Existential Threat

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From Zain Kahn’s ‘Superhuman newsletter‘:

Over 1,200 employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter warning of runaway development
“The open letter cautions that AI could advance “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems,” and calls on the US government to deliberately pace progress at the international level, which would reduce competitive pressure on each lab. Signatories include chief scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. The scale of the signatory list — spanning companies and roles — is a signal of how seriously insiders are taking the risk.”

I grew up believing that a super-intelligent AI would be created in a lab. The fear was that it would somehow escape into the ‘real world’ and only then could it dominate the world. The whole idea of some sort of firewall to protect us just evaporated when LLM’s were trained and unleashed on the internet. We completely bypassed any sort of protection or safety net that would allow human intervention in order to prevent a rogue AI from running wild.

Worse yet, we have unleashed AI into a world where any one person with ill-intent can use AI with nefarious intentions. I’ve said before,

“I don’t fear the famous scientist, I fear the rogue, unhappy misfit who uses incredible technological advancements for nefarious reasons. The same technology that can make our lives easier, and create tremendous good in the world, can also be used with bad intentions. But there are differences between someone using a revolver for bad reasons and someone using a nuclear bomb for bad reasons. The problem we face in the future is that access to the equivalent harm of a nuclear bomb (or worse) will be something more and more people have access to. I don’t think this is something we can stop, and so as amazing as the technology is that we see today, my fear is that it could also be what leads to our demise as a species.”

Now 1,200 AI employees are heeding a warning that AI could advance “beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” That’s just AI systems acting on their own. That doesn’t include the danger of humans using these complicated and little understood intelligent tools with bad intentions. Sure we need to worry about AI running amok, but I think the far greater existential threat is a rogue government, or even a rogue lone wolf angry at the world, using AI in ways that we won’t be able to stop. Think of a cascading virus either electronic or environmentally contagious beyond our ability to stop it. Not created by scientists, but by a brilliant incel who feels cheated by the world.

We don’t need to fear rogue AI nearly as much as we need to fear rogue individuals armed with a super-intelligent AI. This is what really scares me.

hand-phone meld

A stark contrast

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Today is Father’s Day. My father-in-law wanted to go to White Spot, a very BC, Canada restaurant, and so my wife, her sister and brother-in-law, and her parents went for lunch. I couldn’t help but notice families at two other tables, which offered a stark contrast in dynamics. Both tables had a person who looked like they were in their 50’s. The woman at one table was with her father, the man at the other table was with both elderly parents.

The woman was fully invested in conversation with her dad. She kept eye contact on him and leaned forward again and again to hear what her father was saying. The conversation seemed to flow, and they looked like they were having a wonderful meal.

The man at the other table was on his phone. He didn’t let it go, it was an extension of his left hand. Even when he spoke to his parents, he did not look away from it. He was typing full paragraphs into it at times, and he scrolled. And he scrolled and typed, scrolled and typed. Food arrived and he occasionally shovelled food into his mouth but his phone stayed glued to his left hand. I wasn’t watching all the time, but at no time when I looked did I see him making eye contact with his parents. The woman at the other table was always looking at her dad.

Back at the doom-scroller’s table, parents had finished their meal and their son was only about half finished his meal, still typing and scrolling as his parents waited. I had to get up to let my brother-in-law head to the bathroom and I looked over at this man’s phone. He was on Instagram. After desert his parents pulled their phones out as well, but I didn’t really pay attention for how long they had their phones out too. I can say with certainty the man never once let go of his phone during the meal. The last time I looked over, his dad was paying for the meal.

It was so stark that I had to make sure that I was paying attention to my own table, not to be too distracted by the entertainment of seeing this contrast play out in front of me. Put your phones away at meal time, if you struggle with this, don’t take your phone to the table. Your family deserves more.

Happy Father’s Day!

Almost too much on the go…

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Yesterday I came back from a wonderful overnight school field trip to Merritt with a group of students, to go fishing for ‘Fish School’. I arrived home and was surprised by my mom, who came to celebrate my retirement, with events happening tonight and next week Thursday. I’m off with my wife and friends tomorrow night to see Mamma Mia! live at the theatre. And then I had planned to go to an event all day Saturday but I’m realizing that I need a break… and I’d like to spend the day with my mom.

Even when all the things that are happening are things you enjoy, sometimes they can feel like they are a little too much. I know this pace isn’t going to slow down too much (or at all) in June, and so I need to start really thinking about rest, sleep, and keeping up with all my healthy habits. The last thing I want to do is run myself down over the next month.

I can remember an age where I could metaphorically ‘burn the candle at both ends’ but I’m not that age anymore. No, I’m used to one, maybe two events a week. This non-stop series of events in a week is making me want to crawl under a blanket for 2-3 days… And yet I’m looking forward to the next couple days. That said, I am cancelling my event Saturday, I’m understanding the need to find some more down time… and I’m going to attempt to burn only one end of my candle at a time doing all the rest of the coming events.

A wonderful surprise

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I knew my oldest daughter was coming home from Victoria. She came over to the mainland for a retirement celebration I’m having tomorrow. So when I got home and she was there, it was nice to see her… what I wasn’t expecting was that my wife had flown my mother out from Toronto for the celebration as well. This is the second time my wife has completely surprised me. The first time was with a trip to Vegas for my 40th birthday… 9 months before my birthday!

Well, she did it again. Here is the video:

I feel so blessed. This is wonderful. <3

___

Here it is again from my younger daughter’s angle:

Not evenly distributed

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Futurist Richard Campbell came to speak with Inquiry Hub students today. He’s presented here a few times. I wrote about his visit in 2022, and what I really enjoyed about his presentation is that while I often think of the dystopian possibilities of the future, Richard’s message was that ‘The future holds promise‘. To start his presentation today, he quoted William Gibson, “The future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed“.

There are a lot of things Richard discussed that I might elaborate on in the coming days, but this quote immediately started to churn in my mind. I’d heard the quote before. I’ve even used the quote before, but often in reference the uneven distribution of change… which is often connected to new technology that will be fully adopted in the future. What got me really thinking about this, hearing the quote today, is my suspicion that this is more exaggerated now than it ever has been.

Zoom out of your everyday life and take a look around the globe and you’ll see a very uneven distribution of technological advances. I recently heard about a live stream of a robot doing package sorting for days on end, comparing this activity to the same being done by a human.

This sort of manual labour is something that will be replacing humans sooner rather than later. That said, it is going to be distributed very unevenly. It’s already happening in China where their one child policy was leading them to a shortage in the labour market. China is winning the robotics race and we are going to see a lot of progress and development from China.

Here is my wonder: Will there be a massive divide of have and have-not states? Will the distribution of future technology be even more unevenly distributed, or will we see the costs go down and the technology spread even more evenly in the decades to come? I think Richard and I would disagree on this topic, although I hope he’s more right than me.

UCI rather than UBI

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As AI and robotics continue to scale at unimaginable speeds, with AI getting exponentially smarter and robots increasingly more agile, we’ve got to realize how many jobs will disappear in a very short time period. This isn’t a gradual transition, it’s not a move from one field to another like farmers transitioning into factory workers during the industrial revolution. It’s a massive shift from human labour to machine labour that the world’s economies simply aren’t designed to absorb.

I’ve seen a growth in the number of people talking about the need for Universal Basic Income (UBI), but I fear this isn’t enough. I fear that the idea of giving millions if not billions of people a basic income, but no real means for most of them to supplement those incomes as an insufficient solution. We don’t need UBI, we need UCI – Universal Comfortable Income. It’s not going to be enough to give people a basic survival income. We are going to need to see governments, and maybe even companies, share their resources and wealth with people, or else who is going to have the resources to buy the products and services AI and robots will offer?

The potential for dissatisfaction and ultimately unrest seems scary to me. A world with a couple dozen trillion-dollar companies, and a handful of trillionaires running them, is also a world with vast populations of people eking out a subsistence lifestyle, unable to do more than meet their survival needs. A basic income, requiring additional sources of income to appreciate the offerings of a fully automated economy, will not survive without a revolt for too long.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are other solutions to this problem. Maybe I’m too bullish about to how far things will advance in a short time. That said, the potential for the scenario above to occur in the next decade is not zero. It might be a pessimistic bad-case or even worse-case scenario, but it’s possible… and scary. If things advance as fast as I think they will, we can’t continue to have UBI conversations, we need to move the goal posts and start really thinking of UCI.

Honing Observation Skills with Questions

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I love this quote by James Clear:

“Observation is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained and honed.

Even if you’re not a negative person, you may be skilled at noticing negative things. Sometimes people are good at noticing the reason things won’t work out or have a tendency to fixate on the latest distressing story.

But you can train your eye toward the opportunities each day quietly presents. You can become competent at noticing your good luck: the little moments of joy, the stranger who helped, the small things that went right, the opportunity in front of you right now.

What are you competent in observing? And which types of observations seem to serve your life best?” ~ James Clear

I’d add one more question, and that is, ‘What questions are you asking to ensure you are making the right observations?‘

‘Why don’t things work out for me?’ …is a very different question from, ‘I wonder what good will come of this?’

‘What else could go wrong?’ …is a very different question from, ‘What opportunities will present themselves now?’

James Clear makes a great point about needing to observe opportunities, I just think the path to get there is giving our brains, which are massive answering machines, the right questions to ask and then answer.