Formulas Against the False Self: Mitch Horowitz on Left-Hand Path Magic

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So if you're on team human in one of those places, I'm looking to find the others, go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman, use the code teamhuman for half off the first month. And even if you're not looking for team human others, fill out the form and see who the curators find for you. That's mygroucho.club/teamhuman. You're on team human conscious intervention in the machine, we hear you're on team human conscious intervention in the machine, we have one of the greatest conscious interveners of all time, our most frequent guest on team human. He's been on once a year, maybe even more. My friend, author, occultist, historian, and just a genius nice guy, Mitch Harlitz, with his brand new book, yes another book, since the last new book, since the last last new book, this one's called "S-O-Terika" and all you really need to know is it is formulas against the false self. By far, the most challenging Mitch Harlitz book, not because it's hard to read, but because it's hard to accept. I'm fucked up, I hope you are too. Thanks for being here Mitch. Pleasure my man, good to see you. Good to see you. You look healthy, you look good. Especially because I knew you were up, you were doing coast to coast or whatever, just an hour ago. How was it go? How was it go? Welcome to the truckers about S-O-Terika. We had two truckers call in as a matter of fact. And I have a gift for schedule and coast whenever there's shit to do the next morning. So I stay up until 3 a.m. and then the alarm starts going off in what feels like 15 minutes and here I am. Welcome, well good. I'm ready to be here. I'm ready to get you in a slightly some ambulance state. So I wish I've learned to abuse. It's better than that. Right, I was trying to write what this is and I was like, it's like self-help philosophy hybrid rooted in Western esotericism, like her metacism, occultism, cabala. And what I finally understand and I read the book of Gora, the left-handed path and I didn't understand what the left-handed path was until this. But it's written with genuine intellectual muscle and what I'm hoping is deliberate provocation. It is deliberate, right? I'm provoked. Without question. Okay, good. Not as an end to itself, but as an unwillingness to self-sensor. No one can come away from this book saying, oh, Horowitz is not being transparent with us. You might like less transparency. Right. It's the obfuscatory, Mitch. This book for me is a psychological grimoire and what you just said is tonic to my heart, which is that you never really understood what the left hand path is until this book. It's a left hand path manifesto. And the left hand path, of course, has its roots in Vedism, Tantra Buddhism, but as we use it colloquially in the modern West, it is a philosophy. I suppose you could say of radical individualism applied, nichinism, a spirituality that believes in the protean or prometian will of the individual. Right. And that would be music to the ears of many of the dudes that I've been having problems with. It can, it can veer toward this sort of uber-imension, Peter Tio, zero to one specialness. Well, I have a question there. I don't spend a lot of time around movers and shakers in the billionaire tech world. I have gone to Peter's conferences. I have spoken it. I know you got there. I have spoken it, Peter's conferences. I am a person who stands on conduct and relationships. I don't have a libertine, go it alone, do whatever you want, a throw consequence to the wind point of view. And I know so many people in our world, in the world of the spiritual search and letters whose behavior is appalling. Yeah. You talk a game of love and light and do not know how to water a house plan. Right. Who talk a game of, oh, I don't like those billionaire tech guys who are digging their tunnels to out-survive the rest of us, but who cannot be depended upon to pay a debt. And I come from a world where talk replaces conduct. In this book, conduct replaces talk. Right. Right. Right. Right. The subtitle of this book, formulas against the false self, is, and we'll get into it. It's really the spine of this thing. And it could have been the title of this book. I mean, I love it. It really, because that's just what you say what it's about. If you're doing the subtitles of a book, remember, the subtitle should be explicit, not occluded. Tell us what the fuck it is. The title be creative as you want. But if you're going to do something, just say it. Just say it. What did a book is about? Just say it. Um, aside. Because people are always showing me and asking me about their subtitle. I'm just fucking say it. Just fucking say it. And also, if I may second you, having worked in publishing for 27 years, I cannot emphasize the importance of title, title, title, title. Either go basic. I'm looking at a book behind you, Steve Jobs. Good. I know what that's about. Thank you, Walter Isaacson, or go outrageous, like Douglas Rushkov, survival of the richest, but one way or another, say what you mean, whether it be basic, whether it be outrageous, and tell the fucking truth about what's inside. Right. Right. As clearly as you can. And because there's people who don't know and don't have time in the bookstore to sit and parse your fucking metaphor. So what you essentially start by arguing is that most spiritual culture is, is consolation and performance. And what you want to replace it with is agency and power and what you call the fineness of being. Yeah. Yeah. I think that we subject ourselves, first of all, to far too many relationships. Many of these relationships are steeped in sorrow and unhappiness and we maintain them out of peer pressure or a kind of orthodoxy that we have internalized that dictates what I'm supposed to do, how I'm supposed to move through life. And I have never seen so much performative bullshit as I have an hour alternative spiritual culture where the sole measure that I bring to the table is does this person keep his or her word adjunct to that? Does this person pay debts? Does this person look upon their colleagues and their collaborators, not as figures to take advantage of and ring every possible advantage out of or to make a stand against on social media in some sort of, "Oh, look at me, bid for negative attention." But to really engage with people in a constructive way, which sometimes means engaging with fewer people. I don't just want to replace platitudes. I want to take a hammer to platitudes and hold people to account on the question of if you describe yourself as a person who wants a world that is based on some ethic of cooperation, let's say, are you giving time and money to other people? And I want to stop, full stop, full stop right there. Are you giving time and money to other people? And perfumery is stripped away and it ought to be stripped away. That's what really matters in life of another person. That's what the working parent needs. That's what the friend who is. in need of help, like moving his apartment in a rainstorm at four in the afternoon needs. Let's be basically, let's be simple. Let's give ourselves no place to hide. Right. And then it seems to me, and to many, maybe even, or some viewers, it may not even, that the way to honor that is to be sometimes prickly. In other words, you don't like the premature consolation and agreement and the platitude is like, "Oh, because we're trying to reach premature agreement in order to have a superficial agreement rather than genuine intimacy, which is, oh no, I have a problem with this. I'm confused by this." And, you know what I mean? The genuine encounter is there's friction, there's friction. And above all, my wish is for there to be transparency. I try to practice a lot of transparency in this book, including about my own weaknesses. I talk about my own excess use of substances, for example, which I really had to pull back on for health reasons recently. And that was a long time coming. I feel that within the spiritual culture, there is a real lack of transparency so that, and you've experienced this, you've done panels and talks with people who are household names, new age superstars. And one realizes very quickly, after being immersed in that world, that what the public is seeing and what fans and readers are seeing are stage personas. I don't show people a stage persona, or at least I certainly hope I don't. What a person is seeing on microphone right now from me is exactly what you'll see when we're off the cameras in an hour and 15 minutes or what have you. And I'm trying to get to a place where spiritual figures are held accountable, not for what they say life ought to be in books and talks, but where their failures are because they run riot. And I know they run riot, having worked in spiritual publishing myself for 27 years, and published or worked or collaborated with many of the household names. Their failures are tonic to the search because they show the onlooker, the audience member, the reader, were in the same boat, not as some truism, but as psychological fact, were in the same boat. And if an onlooker and audience member, a searcher could appreciate the vastness of the odds that defeat even the people who make their living as spiritual communicators, that might provide a fertile place to search. So it's transparency that I'm really after. In part, that would that would explain, and not to be to dead horse, but that would explain the popularity of a Trump in an age of a Hillary, right, where you had the sort of the left mainstream Democrats pretending to somehow be free of sin, and you had a Donald Trump come in who was refreshingly, seemingly refreshingly transparent about his own flaws. It's an interesting observation. I wonder, and I read about this in the book, why some people will commit a transgression and they're canceled for it. And they can never get out from under it and it's going to go in the first paragraph of their obituary. And then other people commit serial transgressions and their followers don't care. And I think it's somewhat like how we as a human community regarded the ancient gods. We recognize because gods and celebrities are very much interwoven, I think, from the prime evil mind right up through the modern era. Our celebrities are demigods of a kind. And it depends what kind of character we attribute to them. And if they commit transgressions that are within that character, within that mold, they're forgiven or their followers forgive them. Whereas other people, if they commit transgressions that seem to go outside of the mold that they've set up for themselves, they get clobbered. They get completely slaughtered. And it's not fair. It's not fair. But in antiquity, well, it's understood. Zeus is unfaithful to his wife. So yeah, we get that about Zeus. Mercury, he can be slippery with the truth. We get that about Mercury. But you can't have Athena, the warrior goddess run from a battle. If Athena runs from a battle, that's it. She's not Athena. Right, she's not Athena anymore. You can't have hercules turn and run from a fight. But you can have Loki maybe do that. And it's like, well, we get it because he can be a little bit slippery. Right. No, they are exactly. They are interesting that way. I don't usually do this, but I usually the team human so much about me meeting the other person and all that. But since we know each other, I want to bring, and since I just got through the book, I want to bring your agenda to my agenda and just do this like this. See what it's odd. It's like, I know you well enough to actually do the almost a more formal conversation, but it's for the sake of time. So the book's central argument, as I get it, is that the false self is largely produced by conformity and automaticity. And that maps directly onto my territory. You're saying essentially the same thing I say about media and technology producing managed flattened selves, but you're arriving at it from occultism rather than a media theory. Yes. I think that's very fair. And it takes people to that flat place. So then we go to your chapter, anti-serenity and the left-handed path, right, and that framing. And it's provocative. You're explicitly rejecting the acceptance and surrender model of most Western spirituality in favor of will and attainment. And there's a real tension between that and I just did this monologue on my first Bufo experience. My first Bufo experience was just die. And a beautiful way. In other words, I was looking at the things that he genders on my life. I could still work on that. I could try to get more achievements or I could purge. I could weep or just die. And it seems that you have more of a change what you cannot accept ethos. Change what you cannot accept. I mean, I guess that's one side of the serenity, Perry, to know the different, to change what I can change. Let go what I can't and know the difference. But for me, it's been realizing that 95% is metabolized this rather than try to change it. And it feels like you're kind of moving the other direction. There's a whole lot more that we have agency over than we have realized. That is my outlook. That is my contention. I feel that we are by nature, agentic beings. We are power-seeking beings by which I don't mean trying to behave with force over another individual. I don't mean that at all. I mean, power as some capacity and agency to see through one's wishes in the world as above so below or as it's put in Western Scripture, God created man in his own image. As we were created, you find this within her metasism, you find this within the early Abrahamic faiths. So are we intended to create, and that's the place where we feel happiest and most fulfilled. Broadly defined. I think a great deal of the low-grade anxiety and depression and on we through which we move through life and which situates us sometimes in a therapist's office or bothering our friends with the same root issues over and over and over very often results from a positive of creativity, broadly defined. And I think that what the individual wants to see established in the world is always there, creating out from us, whether or not we're saying the serenity prayer or thy will be done or talking about service or in some way brandishing a thousand different truisms that are drawn from translations of translations of translations of ancient literature, some of which are lost in the originals, almost all of which are read in language that's passed through enormous filters across centuries. And we think of these things as ideas or wisdom, they are automaticity, they are reciting. And my literally reciting, literally reciting. And my wish is to ask the individual or suggest the individual within the private confines of your own psyche, not issuing some manifesto or belaboring it. to somebody else, what do you wish for with just absolute unembarassed, unconditioned, stark self-honesty? Don't tell anyone. Don't tell your shrink, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your spouse. But no, even if it can't be acted on, no, because that wish is irradiating out of us emotionally, whether acknowledged or not, and my suggestion is to acknowledge it. I didn't think I'd like getting sponsors for Team Human, but turns out the ones who actually want to sponsor us totally get whereabouts, like Groucho, which uses technology as an antidote to social isolation, handling all the logistics for twice monthly gatherings between you and a hand-curated cohort of collaborators. This is if Groucho were informed by the ideas we share on this show, from face-to-face interaction, to bottom-up community, to localism, to the value of eccentricity over conformity. Groucho curates people as if they were being selected for an artist's colony, not clones, but compliments and contrasts, ingredients for a collaborative stew. They also take care of all the logistics from dinner reservations to conversation starters. Let's go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman for half-off the first month. Answer some questions about yourself in your own time and let the humans at Groucho do the rest. Use the code "teamhuman" for half-off the first month and enjoy your dinner and new friends. I mean, it's almost like a. With you know, Stanislavsky would kind of call your super motivation. I think that's beautifully put. Because we don't know what that is. To that, I don't tell people who the fuck am I. That expression is one of the worst things that's ever happened to humanity. Because we all repeat it. We repeat these things. They belong on coffee mugs, like with my water, you know, ascentia. What's my essence? Know thyself. All these truisms, which mean things, which really do mean things. If we understood the barriers that occupy a dictum, a principle like know thyself or to they know itself be tru, and understood the mechanicality that we face, and the limited retinue of choices within that mechanicality, we would fall to our knees. I like simple things. I like simple dictums and ideas, but I like them only in application. Because when I apply them, that's when profundity appears. But how do we know what we want? I think we know. We just don't admit that we know. I know what I want. I think I've known since I've been four years old. I think that even an adolescent, for example, a sensitive 12-year-old adolescent, I think knows what he or she wants. I think through what I suppose I call the false self and the subtitle or what could be considered the condition self or conformity or internalized conformity, we fight off what we want because we've been taught that it's selfish, it's embarrassing, we perfume it to ourselves. And that's real alienation. Right. Right. I feel, oh man, I know what I want. Of course you know what you want, man. Right. As I receive it, which, I mean, you know, this last year, I've been receiving what I want. And first thing I said to you as I started receiving what I want is, dude, when does the other shoot drop? I don't deserve this. You know, well, you may have paid for it in advance. Right. I do say to people that sometimes you do get what you want. And there is nervousness and you're right to be nervous because you are a finely developed person and you're asking yourself, when is this death going to come to? Maybe, maybe you've paid for it in advance. Right. Or maybe deserve is too strong to work. I was going to say, maybe I deserve this. That's a very Western parental thing. But it's like, maybe this thing I'm manifesting is not a debt at all. You know, maybe getting what I want, which is such a strong way of saying it. But let's use it. Let's, I'll be bold enough and accept that terminology for today. Me getting what I want may be consonant with other people and things and energies getting what they want. I may not be taking from this reality. Yes. I agree with that. I agree with that. It's a struggle. It's a struggle for an ethical person because if one has a wish, their naturally comes to question, is the fulfillment of my wish another person's loss? I'm not so sure that's true in this multiverse in which we live or maybe this simulation in which we live. I think there are enough folds and wrinkles so that there's not just one bushel of apples around, so to speak. And the truth is, and my contention is the following, we're pursuing our wishes anyway. The question is, are we going to pursue them with a kind of self-honesty and self-disclosure, or are we going to pursue them all tangled up with psychologized and obfuscated language that presents a front to myself above all? But my contention is, we're moving towards these wishes anyway, which is why our culture is suffused with terms like passive regression or narcissism or performative or virtue signaling, all these things that we think indicate hypocrisy. There is a lot of hypocrisy and culture. Right. Right. And then for me, it became, oddly enough, it became a codependency. In other words, if you don't really have, and this is the left-handed path, it still scares me, but if you have intentionality, then you are now. You're putting out energy in a way that's not letting everyone else's thing in. Everyone else's needs are in some way either subordinated to or metabolized by your own process. I think that we are warranted to make a measurement of what needs are and are not allowed in. Like for example, I have two sons, one the elder boy Caleb turns 22 today. As we're speaking, he's in DC. We celebrated it on Sunday. And my younger boy Toby is 19 and I am married. My wife, Jacqueline Castell, is someone that you know. I support a household. I know the experience of changing diapers and staying up all night with a kid with strep throat and riding tuition checks and so forth and so on. And the people who have a deep love and closest and claim upon me are welcome in always. I want to be careful and I suggest to others to be careful by not giving themselves over to takers and just unwanted relationships which run riot in our lives. We as 24 century people may very well come into contact with greater numbers of people in the space of a day than our primeval ancestors may have across their lives. Social media has something to do with that. We're not built for it and I urge people to be very careful with that. Right. We're not psychically built for it. I mean, it's interesting. I was going to get into your critique of recessed to wisdom ideas we repeat so often they become premises rather than questions, which is a great way to say it. And it's directly applicable to social media and AI directly directly and it's terrifying. I mean, if you one need only go on to X or choose your poison for minutes each day to see the absolute unreadiness that we as human community have for this connectedness and there's a point pass which I can't keep blaming the algorithm and blaming, you know, Zuck and Elon, that critique is valid. Yeah. That critique is valid. But our civil society has broken down and we're not going to get the regulation or the legislation that maybe they will get in the EU someday. Right. It's going to make any of this better. Our rudder is busted and we as individuals are going to have to behave with a, you know, radically different way of social media. That may be impossible for the mob, but it is possible for the people. Right. Which is why it's interesting when you use the word regulation, I was thinking of it as kind of a spectrum person learning to self-regulate. In other words, regulation and legislation, they're not going to come from out there. So regulation and governance become things that, behavioral alternatives. So me as at least historically overly porous and codependent person who immediately takes on other parts. people's feeling obligated to anyone. It's impossible for me to survive in a world where I'm getting 300 emails a day from people who want something from me. So I have to regulate. I have to. But it's hard for me to do that to do what you're calling the fineness of being is easy to see as sort of aristocratic elitism. The idea that only certain people deserve our attention or perhaps even conscious empathy. Well I would say that the individual has his or her affinities and those affinities are worthy of honoring. I know I have been stuck as I think many people listening to this have been in situations that were the cause of terrible unhappiness, feeling stuck in a community or a neighborhood or a living or a school situation that was all wrong. I get nostalgic about my upbringing in Queens. You know, it feels like. I do too. I mean, sort of all the family and there's certain things that pull at my heartstrings looking back on those days. Those days are also very, very unhappy for me. I was surrounded by a lot of people who gloried in their ignorance, who absolutely reveled in not knowing things. That's a populism that runs very deep in American society. I can't say precisely whether it works that way in this or that place, but the place where I was raised that that reveling of ignorance is very strong. I digress what I'm really trying to say is that finding relationships that are years rather than winning people over or sustaining suffering is vastly superior and I think a person should be greatly unembarassed and realistic about it. I've been in living situations where the only solution was to leave, to move with my feet. I write about this in the book. I had a lake house in upstate New York. I was situated in the wrong place with the wrong people. I hated it. My stomach would go in knots. I moved and it was dramatically helpful to me. It was the only help. Sometimes I think we counsel people, including adolescents, to stick it out. Grit. Verbal Jujitsu. Read this self-help book and some self-help books are great. What we really need to do is acknowledge you are completely wrongly situated and this has to change. And hopefully you have the latitude to make that change. I try to address people who don't have the latitude because I recognize that in terms of livelihood, geography, economy, domesticity, people are fucking stuck sometimes. I won't abandon that person because I think that the very first thing that one has to do in a situation of stuckness is internally, not as some overt declaration, privately and internally, acknowledge that stuckness, the sickness of it, the wrongness of it, vow that you'll get out physically at the first possible opportunity. There's a power in that. I promise whoever is listing there's a power in that. Right. Rather than thinking necessarily, oh, because the universe has me here, it must be right. Or just feeling that you have to settle for it. You may have to settle for it as a tactile reality for the time being, but there will come a time in a place where physical separation is possible. And hold that within yourself. Don't confront people. I'm not asking anybody to go off on a Jag and do something that's just going to make them a victim one more time, but know within, know within. Right. At the same time, there is, you would still acknowledge that very often in our lives, our shadow is our teacher. Our enemy is a Buddha. You know that they're, they're ways to engage with the thing that's awful also. Yes. And it becomes fuel. They couldn't agree more. To which I would add only worthy opposition. And I think that I have, and probably most people listening have had the experience of refinement coming out of suffering, suffering being a goat to something greater. That doesn't mean the individual has to hang on to it because again, as we have limitless bushels of apples in our society at the present time, there will be limitless opportunity to experience friction. Oh my gosh. I know. Don't worry, but it's slipping away. We've been here, it'll come. Life will supply that. Yeah. And of course, it does, it does fortify. I talk in the book about abiding versus forgiving because sometimes I think forgiving can tear the person apart, place the person in a natural situation. Whereas abiding can help serve as a goat to something greater, some place that you want to go or something that you want to produce from within. Right. Right. Alright. So, so in summary, I'm currently focusing on being a, a, to use Spinoza, a be affected guy. Right. I'm aware of the effect I have, right? Because I got my podcast. I got my 25 books. I've affected. And my, my lesson now is learning how to be affected in a healthy way, right? Rather than just succumb to the will of everyone else and, and live in pain. How do I, how do I be affected? How do I engage in porousness in, in acceptedness and, and acceptance? How do I metabolize the energy of others? And for me, it's learning, and I use the word gently, kind of surrender as a path. And you certainly in, in this book available at a store near you, your, your portraying yourself as kind of a will and attainment guy, the left hand path, change what you cannot accept and, and, and, and, and, and move toward this is the sort of the fineness of being as a selective rather than a universal posture, right? I got there through media theory and end up with Spinoza and shamanism. You get there through occultism and end up with an almost aristocratic self-savirant ity, right? But neither, I mean, even coming at it from those two places, both of us end up kind of rejecting therapeutic culture, rejecting sentimental liberalism. But I can reject therapeutic culture and sentimental liberalism and still somehow hold up team human and all of us make it or none of us make it at the same time, right? Well, the thing that I see in your work and that I hope people will detect in mind, although I think it's harder to see in mind, is belief in human polity. I don't just believe in leaving people to their own devices. I am smitten with the protean self creation that I and Rand engaged in. I am not smitten with her economic ideas. I am not smitten with her ideas of strict materialism of disbelief and the mystical or the spiritual, which I stand right directly against. Rand cultivated an economic philosophy that from my perspective became suffocating because it allows for absolutely no flexibility. And I reject that. I would like to see a society characterized quite frankly by a kind of frumpy social democracy, circa 1950s. I think there's a lot of good that has been introduced into the world by creating the kinds of Keynesian social safety nets that we call Social Security or Medicaid or whatever. The economics are damn closer to Bernie Sanders than they are to Iron Rand. Right. Well, so was FDRs. So was FDRs. Yes. But I look upon Iron Rand and FDR for that matter and Madam H.P. Lovatsky for that matter. And lots of figures who were in this book as people who self-crafted their personas. There's a kind of greatness in that. In fact, I think the greatest work Iron Rand ever did was the creation of her own persona. This adolescent who escapes Stalinist Russia, who comes to America with a bare grasp of the language and becomes a screenwriter in Hollywood and people who say, you know, why don't like her books or what it is. Like, okay, let's just pay attention to the persona for a second because that's her greatest work. Same thing with Madam H.P. Lovatsky. That was her greatest work. FDR crafted his persona. Nehru crafted his persona. Gandhi crafted his persona. There's a greatness in that. And it shouldn't be dispensed with because I don't like this or that detail or follow through. And does everyone have a persona or is persona more of a public performance? It's an interesting question as above so below. Right. I felt at age four a sense of persona. I felt that at age four and I cultivated it and held onto it like a candle in a rainstorm as I got older as I aged. I remember, "Oh man, I must have been, I don't know, 17 years old, something like that." Maybe a little older when Jesse Jackson spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1984, brought me to tears. He said to an album, I would listen to it over and over to hear the cadences of how he spoke and so forth. That persona was still private, but it became public because it was my wish. I encouraged people to think back to their earliest, cognized memories, maybe even going back to age three. Because it's a very precious time because it predates that peer pressure, getting its cause in us, that internalized peer pressure, which I think has hold of us by around age nine. I think has hold of us just around that time, roughly speaking. But if you can strip back and those memories are there, what were your wishes, what were your fantasies, what were your dreams at age three and four? They're there. That sense of self contains a certain truth. But the interesting thing, that sense of self is not, it's not persona as mask, which is how we normally think or the word can be your social mask. It's persona as "A.G.'s word like essence." But for me, a lot of the experiences I've been through lately, I felt the emergence of a part of me, an essential part of me, that I knew it's three, that I was scared of by the time I was nine or ten because of my own homophobia. It was a part of me that the words I would understand it with as a young person was it sort of feminine or fairy or something. And finally, at 60, whatever, being willing to open to whatever it is, I start experiencing it and doing, you know, it's like exercises and dancing with it and all and go, "Oh, this isn't about sexuality at all. This is about a kind of pocketish, fairy, pan-falute, liberty." Yeah. There's this, that's who I was at three. It's this kind of, and I fuck, man, to spend all that time having suppressed it because I think it's something that I'm afraid of and whatever. And then I can even try, you know, which I didn't college whenever, around try doing gay things. I was like, "Well, that's not it." But still keep it down. It's like, "Oh, there's this persona." Right? And the persona is something that I've compensated for. I mean, I'm probably unsuccessfully by trying to see a little more masculine or, you know, be a good Jewish father or make some money, make that proud. So it's through life. And it's like, you let that go. Right? I let that go a year or two ago and all of a sudden it's like, "Well, now women like me." Now it's like, wait a minute. This wasn't supposed to work. But it's like so much more lined up with my own eros and my own power and all that. Finding oneself is, um, dang, but it seems that. It's like that your persona, it's not your performance. Although it ends up in performance. It's really embracing the energy of who you are and letting that play out. Is power? It is. And it can be so surprising the way it comes out. It can be so surprising the way that it gets repressed. But by self, internalized peer pressure, peer pressure from without, every one of us is an admixture of the masculine and the feminine. And those things have to be allowed to breathe, including the masculine. You know, I think that within the world that we may occupy, there is a sometimes an excess of criticism towards the expression of the masculine, which needs to be honored as much as the expression of the feminine. Feminine, you've just described that. I could certainly describe that. I felt that admixture in myself. And the masculine must be allowed. It's due as well. It depends upon the individual, of course. And it seems to me that we live in this age where opinion shaping media is constantly talking about this crisis of masculinity. And I ask myself, is there a crisis of masculinity or does the person employing that viewpoint just not like expressions of masculinity as they may be playing out in the 21st century at this time plays and moment? And I think that's a fair question. Or we don't like colonialism. We don't like slavery. We don't like. Of course. All those things are force. I mean, more cultural expressions of masculinity. And I know that there's huge problems in the so-called manosphere and with looks, maxing, and so on and so forth. But there's also things within that world that are reaches for agency. Like if young people are taking an interest in religion, for example, they're going to take that interest in their own terms. For some of them that might be evangelical. For some that might be Catholic. For some that might be occult. And esoteric and witchcraft oriented. And I can't pick and choose the intrinsic value of what that person is experiencing based on culturally what I like. There are going to be some young people who come to a book like esoteric and they're like, yeah, right on. And then there's going to be others who are involved in Mormonism or seventh-day Adventism. It's going to be a cultural model that's different. Although I tend to actually really get along with those people because they have a search. They have a search. I can't hear about it. Essentially, when you were on, not the last time, a couple of times ago, you talked about, you said, I have very few friends. That's true. Really sweet. But on the one hand, it's like, oh, I have few friends because you can't make that many, but it's not that. You have few friends and that's part of this book. Friendless by choice. Right. No, but you because you don't want to let that many people in. Partly, you don't think they're worth it. But it's part of your discernment practice. It is. And I'm trying to be a little bit gentler with that right now because I run into people, especially as I get older, who I think have a real fineness of being. And I see that they're in need. They're suffering and they're in need. And they might need, usually they need money. And if I can provide them with money, I will provide them with money. That's why I really want to be hard as granite about what people need and what we're willing to let in and what we're willing to really, really do. And I am at this particular juncture trying to be a little more pliable and flexible in terms of letting in people who I think have a real fineness about them who are in need. And fineness, how would you define their sensitive people? They have fine ethics. Ethics come from the emotions. They're good people. They were born with what Gerjief called a magnetic center. There's a question within them. There's a search within them. You meet them everywhere you go in every city, town, borough, they're in the minority. And they are the sensitive few who really hold a question. And these are my people. Right. And once you are very often in this society to end up alcoholics and suffering, you know, to sort of numb this through interrogatory look, look how many people we love who have died from substance abuse. Alan Watts died in alcoholic. Neville Goddard, one of my true heroes, in essence, really drank himself to death died from alcohol related condition of internal bleeding. Bill Wilson, wonderful, wonderful man, but damn near smoked himself to death. Life is hard. Right. But you would say that only people with that fineness really deserve your solidarity and empathy. That's my point of view. I've spent too much time within and around the mob. I was born into it. I've lived within it. I have no wish to be rounded. I feel like I've paid my debt to the mob. Right. I mean, it's funny though. I just spoke with someone who's living in Brazil and relishing carnival. Right. You immerse in the mob and experience its life and love and zest and that's where I'm into different society. It's a different society. I'm not sure. Maybe I get along well there. Maybe I get along poorly. I tend to be a more private individual. Right. Right. You weren't over a rave or well I was definitely into punk and hardcore as a kid and I was shaped by it and then I needed other impressions. Right. I mean, but you know, I find the discernment, the ability and the effort. to limit your empathy to those who deserve it. It's clarifying and also a little heartbreaking. - Well, there's gonna be people who hear it and they're gonna hear, oh my God, Horowitz just wants to leave people to flounder on the rough seas. And I know you're not holding call field. - I sing to catch every child before you. - I do believe in human polity. As we were talking about earlier, I don't think you can have a stable or a good society with radical extremes of wealth. I believe in mildly redistributive taxation policies. I would believe in regulation if we had a civil society that could perform any kind of regulation, but we're really broken right now. And I certainly don't believe that we, do well or will do well in a society of extremes. And with the wealth that exists in this society, we could have a Keynesian social democratic safety net, call it what you wish. And I believe very strongly in that. - Right, I mean, you specifically reject the serenity prayer. - I do. I mean, I don't reject it to the extent that I'm gonna barge into somebody's trust at meeting and insist that they stop reciting it. But I do believe that the individual should, I think the individual has greater power, possibility, agency, over conditions that they don't like. I think acceptance comes too soon. I think we should question it, interrogate it. - But acceptance isn't necessarily giving up, right? Acceptance is the first step toward transforming the thing. I mean, I'm possibly, I wanna make like a mushroom rather than like a sword or something. So I, maybe I'm imagining. So if I'm, if I'm my go man, right? This mushroom superhero, right? Who sees the enemy transforms into a mushroom and through compassion and acceptance transforms them into new life. - Well, I have a different outlook on acceptance. I accept my mechanicality. I mean, I try to, I try to speak of that in more than a rhetorical way. I think there's an automaticity of mechanicality that characterizes human nature. I think we exist in a downward current or a downward octave. These are exercises from within that downward octave. My effort is to see myself. I don't know that through gazing upon another with the compassion that you've described, that transformation is possible. I think that is a, that's a process of exchange. And I think a person feeling seen can work transfer - And then it's a discernment. - And then there's in the person that you're choosing, it's like I could sit with Donald Trump and do that all day and not make a dance. - He's not gonna change. He's not gonna say, you know. - Right, but when someone is ready-- - I do it, finally. - Douglas. - Right, but when someone is ready and there with me, then they're gonna change me and I'm gonna change them. - I think a person feeling seen and feeling appreciated is a tremendously beautiful act. But I think that there has to be a co-selfhood in a sense between people. You know, I've heard what you were just saying. If the person doesn't wanna be seen or doesn't want what you're offering, then it just turns into a mess. - Right. I mean, I guess because I'm a teacher, right? And especially when I have to do undergrad, I'll end up with 50 students in a room, 20 of whom don't wanna be there. And maybe by being persistent and present, I can reach five of them, you know? - Yeah. - Who don't deserve? I mean, but that's the discipline of the classroom is that yes, I'm gonna speak to the ones who don't deserve me. They're paying for a class, they're in this institution, which is there at its best to do that. - Well, I think that's a positive round of suit. I mean, they are paying to be there or somebody's paying for them to be there. And so, listen, you know, having spent nearly three decades in corporate life, I ran into all kinds of people who were being paid to be in a place and didn't care and didn't respect the authors, didn't respect the books and didn't care whether Mike gets paid on time even though he submitted his manual six weeks ago. And I would fight for those people. My fight always went in the direction of, God damn it, get this guy paid. God damn it, make sure this guy sees his cover before Thursday, so he has something, sometime if you want to say something about it, you know? That was a battle, that was a battle. So I'm always thinking in terms of the people who I feel deserve. - I'm also interested in this, in your notion of the false self. I have a simplistic understanding of the false self because I've watched people's false self develop through misuse of technology and being abused by technology. And I'll see the classic teenage girl becoming an influencer and creating a false self and only bad will come. There's a more specific kind of false self, I think that you're talking about here, that develops culturally, psychologically, through forms of repression, it's internalized peer pressure, I think above all, internalized peer pressure is what keeps us from even acknowledging we're admitting within who we wish to be, even if that wish may or may not be possible, but the failure of acknowledgement is such a devastating blow, I think to the individual's happiness, capacity for self expression, which is life itself, which is life itself. And I can just think, Douglas, God, I can think of the times where I've watched, say, young middle aged people on the phone with mom or dad in this terrible argument, reverting to a place and a self that belongs to adolescents, and I'm thinking that's prison, that's prison. - Or younger, or younger. - Or younger. - And then their body, and in their language, it's almost as if the dexterity of their fingers decreased, you see there. - Yes. - You know, it's really interesting. - It's terrifying. - Yeah. - And I think of mistakes that I made in life as a young person, feeling that I had to settle for certain communities or family situations that I didn't have to settle for. I was financially independent, more or less, by damn nearby age 17, and I went off to college. I had a few loans. I was part of a work study program, went to a state school where tuition was wildly inexpensive, and I never looked back. And yet emotionally, emotionally, I still maintain ties that were deeply painful to me, even though financially I was independent and proudly so. And I never stopped and thought, this is not necessary. This is truly not in service to anything. And I encourage people to be frank with themselves that way. They may change their mind. They may think, well, I'm gonna say put, and that's legit. But know that there's greater latitude there than you may have been allowed to think. - What are your practical instructions for people who want to create the mental space required to have that conversation? Is it meditation? Is it drugs? Is it encounter groups? What do you do? - Encounter groups. I would stay away from encounter groups. (laughing) I wanted to make sure you. - Remember Michael Murphy, who's one of the founders of the encounter, said to me, and I think that might have been a mistake. (laughing) - Rups? - Yeah. First of all, I encourage people to do a lot of what I am suggesting in total privacy. I'm not asking anybody to be confronted. I'm not asking anybody to be called out. I'm asking people to go to places of exquisite privacy and be starkly unembarassed with yourself about what you really want. And stop yourself when you say that's superficial. That's just some animal desire. That doesn't mean anything. The fuck it doesn't mean anything. It's coming to you. It's yours. It may be who you are. There may be great, great splendor and truth in that thing that you've been conditioned by internalized peer pressure to push off or to dilute with terms like service or adding some sort of conditions to something that really may not be your own. Start there. Or vertically, if you're gonna do something outwardly. Again, without drama, without confrontation, without declaration, get away from cruel people. That is the one message from my work that if nothing else is taken, take that. Get away from cruel people. You will shine. You will blossom. Don't get bogged down in conditions and definitions. You know what I'm talking about. It's the false self that wants to say, how, why, what, what about? - Right. What the cruel person's only being cruel because they're the people. Mom did this. Give Dr. M. Freud a break let him go on vacation and honor what you know right and the cruel person what's gonna happen to them I really don't give a fuck right and I mean powerful to be able to say that the debt of cruelty is that you lose certain company won't lose everybody's company you lose you lose mine big deal you'll find somebody else you know right who maybe be at better at converting your cruelty maybe that'll be a better victim I don't know the thing is you you want to I mean if it's your kid if it's your whatever then you're gonna sit with them and try to help I agree I mean there's different there's debt we have there's suffering there's there's relationship relationship is part of life but it doesn't mean that that that that we just do this without scrutiny according to to some something we heard you think it's as simple as I mean technique wise you're not saying you have to necessarily meditate or do Tai Chi or yoga you just you just sit and think yes I think the psyche which I see as a compactive thought and emotion is enormously powerful in the book my god in the first chapter I give an exercise in wishing just wishing just wishing isn't that at the back of every magical operation at the back of very prayer at the back of every journey into self discovery through whatever avenue it takes is is getting in touch with that that that wish and if there's truth to the psychical world if there's truth to the world we cannot see a gambit that I fully subscribed to with a yes then I think we can strip away liturgy process conditioning and identify the wish not in some childish way but I'm using that word not in connection with entertainment or nursery rhymes but although I don't discount such things right but with with actuality and with adult concreteness identify that wish there's there's power there so now wishing and magic which are maybe seen as the same thing so I've been spending time with with I've been spending time with Alan more lately but because I got to spend an hour so with them online and then I spent a lot of time playing and replaying the conversation that we had and his approach to magic is very much like an old I think it's a mission approach to Torah which is you know in the rabbis the rabbis basically concluded that the highest reason to read Torah is to read Torah you know for its own sake you're not doing it for this or for that and Alan Moore said you know he's kind of a poo poo to bit the chaos magic people because he goes oh they're doing magic for this and for that you should be doing magic for magic you know for magic sake and I feel like you're arguing that that that magic is a causative ritual right if you do magic as change that you want to do something and I've started to experience magic more as a lens I'm trying I did some workings for my daughter but I'm trying not to do workings anymore but but magic is the process through which I perceive the rightness of the universe which sounds like acceptance again rather than magic as to do something I mean are those are those oppositional approaches to magic there's a tension there there's a tension there and I want to wrestle with what Alan said right you know it's a tricky one because on one hand if I can extrapolate from from what I'm hearing he's suggesting that the getting stuff approach to magic is problematic that we do magic as as within rabbinic tradition apropos of Torah for its own sake I'm I feel attention with that sometimes the the getting stuff scenario can be a condition sought I could see a young artist who's not Alan Moore and who who idolizes and loves Alan Moore and hungers to be Alan Moore and works in that direction doing magic to to take steps in that right direction and the getting stuff equation I don't judge people who want to get stuff you know this may sound strange considering that I've self described my book as a manifesto of the left hand path but or maybe to some people it wouldn't sound strange maybe it would be speak a fearful symmetry but I'm interested in the televangelist oral Roberts who is now long dead and had a real spiritual journey and oral rights in one of his autobiographies that he was a very poor southern preacher and they would have to embarrass the shit out of themselves returning stuff and the grocery check outline because they didn't have enough money and he knew poverty and a neighbor of his helped him get his hands on a used car Buick and he said that car transformed our lives he was able to get to church on time he was able to pursue pulpits that were off the path of of where the bus is traveled it opened up his existence and he joined hands with his wife and he said Evelyn let us thank God for this car and I could only imagine the cynics who would say ha ha ha let us thank God for this car for this Buick that's everything that's wrong with American spirituality to which I would say that's everything that's that's right what's wrong is the incapacity to see that someone who doesn't have resources someone who doesn't live in relative comfort might experience that bounty in this particular case of a car in some case something else as radically life-changing and for me to judge that for me to judge that is just a matter of taste a matter of preference there's no there's no categorical decision or ethic in my judging that it's just looking at someone else's life and pissing on them for wanting what I may already have so I think we have to be really careful when we get into the anti-stuff critique right that's interesting yeah I mean it's also because I've been in a state of appreciation the last year or so that of course I'm like oh my job is to accept the universe as it is but in some ways that is at certain points that is our job when something I mean the hardest thing for someone like me is not the obstacles and working through them and all that's the way life's supposed to be I'm a you know I'm supposed to suffer I'm going to deal you know what I mean the harder part for me is when it's going well or something is something good happens it's like I deserve this I for me acceptance if they just think they acceptance to me means the the the challenge of acceptance is the acceptance of grace accepting the horror accepting the the other other stuff well that's just that's just life a way I think of expressing gratitude because we do hear about gratitude to the point that it becomes a trope with our within our spiritual culture and the prayers and the same repetition stuff yeah talk about vain repetitions I think there's perhaps another window on gratitude and this is something from the teaching of Gerjeef when you see an object in front of you like this microphone or this table think about all the vast vast different parts and lives that went into the shaping of this thing this plastic water bottle is going to wind up in some kids backyard in the Philippines you know and here I go just knock back another plastic bottle and I know this you know I know this there has to be a certain humility there has to be a certain gratitude in realizing that so many lives went into everything here in front of us just shalacking and standing this table you're using toxic chemicals somebody went through that somebody went through that I am in debt I am in debt to that person who went through that I think there's a certain gratitude in that right because you're you're I mean it gets just one of the things I was going to talk about your your left-handed path and collective responsibility it's like I want this water but that there's a vast chain of relationships my will my getting what I want affects all these other people in terms of what they want yes tremendously and I just look at all the things that just surround us I mean eventually one day of this microphone is going to get thrown out you know where's it because it's going to get replaced because everything is disposable you know where's it going to go who's going to be responsible for taking it there it's going to exist hundreds of years in the earth and and there's probably chemicals from some battery somewhere tucked away in here and I think to be in life is to be in that kind of relationship where people suffer for us people suffer for us and we have to be cognizant of that we're in debt right and if it's not people then it's the animals animals yeah and who knows if plants suffer but you know got to eat where we are living metabolizing yes thanks William James made a wonderful observation I think it's in the book he he made a remark in the 1890s to readers in the nation magazine if you had any idea how many animals had suffered agonizing lives for your uplift, you'd have a whole different measure of your existence. It's really, it's true or today that it was in the 1890s and that observation for me is that's my statement on gratitude. It sounds like a typical author question, but here I hope it's elevated or refined. Who is this book for? On the one hand this path is for everyone, but you have a discernment too because you know a lot of people could take this and go in the direction of many of the Hereticon. You know what I mean? People, it becomes an excuse. Oh, Mitch says I could just get what I want. And it's not that. It's not that. I mean, you can get what you want. There's going to be a price for it. There's a commensurate price for everything in life. And I speak of power as agency, not as force, which dies with its user. I would say the book is for the the sensitive, the book is for people who feel that they are in conditions in life that are not necessarily what they want or what they wish or what they desire. I'm touched by a lot of the early New Thought writers because I think they reached people in small towns and cities across the country and say the early 1900s who were people who had a wish that was being suffocated in a kind of small town, conformist environment or a big city environment for that matter. And I think lettered culture fails to realize the extent to which some of these early New Thought writers reach those people with a real vivifying message of uplift. That's exactly what I'm attempting to do in the 21st century. And we poo poo those people now because their wishes were framed in a almost a primitive form of capitalism. Before people even really understood what capitalism would do and all, it was, you know, win friends, influence people, get what you want, you know, positive thinking and all. But when you see the innocent, the sort of small town Iowa, arm boy, innocent stuff, but it's like, oh no, we should say honey, you can, you know, you can have what you want. You can have a brain. You can have a heart. If the essay is to New York in the New Yorker who would along the lines, you're describing piss on that literature of acquisition. And some of that literature of acquisition was written by socialists and feminists and abolitionists who were in league with that search for liberation that readers received from those books. If that opinion shaping essayist found him or herself in the position of Dorothy back in Kansas back in the day, you're in to find the Yellow brick road. They'd have a whole different estimation of that literature. Right. And today I suppose the, the, the, your mission is is consonant, but not the same. Right. Because we're in a different moment now. Now it's sort of you're, you're, we're retrieving the wish, but with the knowledge of, of what a kind of a, a monocultural selfishness where that, where that leads. We've seen the obesity that can occur. Yes. I, I think that's absolutely true. And I don't counsel a go at a loan approach to life. But I do counsel on approach to life that's more refined, that's more selective, that's more agentic, that is more self-disclosing within. Right. Really ask yourself, where do I want to be? Who am I spending time with as these precious final grains go through the hourglass? Because they're going, they're going. Right. Right. And just because they're going, just because we're necessarily, you know, dying as a civilization, maybe to be reborn as something else, but certainly dying as a civilization. It doesn't mean we have to accept this one-sided understanding of say, Buddhism as acceptance of pain and suffering. Buddha left his freaking house. Buddha went on a very intentional journey and risked a whole lot. There's, there's effort and wish in that. Buddha also came from wealth, of course. Right. And we hear a lot of voices talking about non-attachment who would not give up the attainments that they have realized if their lives depended upon it. Right. I think I have a joke about this and it's all too true. In my book Daydream Believer, there was some guy who wrote an essay that appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times op-ed about how we have to get off this concept of winning in our culture. We have to get off this concept. Why was that essay by this high school teacher from Princeton, New Jersey in the New York Times because he won first place in an essay writing contest at the Brooklyn Public Library? You can't make this shit up. Right. You know, would you like to be stripped of your goal and not have your peace reach anybody? Of course you wouldn't. You've probably sweat to get to this point where you could write your essay about non-attachment and non-contest having one first place in something. We have to just be very careful about these things. I want our claims to match our conduct because attainment does matter in life and anybody who thinks it doesn't matter has only to give it up and really come face to face with what that would look like, what that would mean. You know, David Brooks, the calmness wrote one time that, you know, he realized that contest wasn't the way to go in life and his book hit the bestseller list and he felt indifferent and I'm like, really, David, really? You wouldn't want these bylines. You wouldn't want these bestsellers. You wouldn't want to be able to eat at nice restaurants. I'm in your pen house wherever, yeah. Right. You'd be happy just, you know, kind of being a substitute teacher, you know, out somewhere in a town that was, you know, a small place that didn't put you in the center of attention. You wouldn't be happy. Right. No, it's it. And as I see it, saying that is an affront to the appreciation one should manifest or one is the opportunity to manifest when things are happening. That's why I have to ask that people be very careful about judging what is wished for in the life of another person. You know, people used to watch the secret, the constant source of of this drainage for us to piss down on to speak our own seriousness. You know, God knows how old that thing is now, maybe 20 years old. People say, oh, the end of all spirituality shouldn't be the manifestation of a Mercedes-Benz or something like that. Well, there's no Mercedes-Benz in the movie, but how does the person saying that know that in the life of somebody that he's never met? This is sort of reverting back to what I was saying before about, before judging the get-stuff position come to realize that you're standing in front of a vast question that is that other person's life. Right. And then there's also, there's kind of a how-dare you. Yeah. And that. Yeah. Easy for rich folks who are going to throw out this bottle to say, you know, let's save the environment and let's, but you don't see me drinking out of a glass, you know, and we are so suffused with debt, this unacknowledged debt. Right. Right. Which is, I mean, in that debt, there's a bunch of ways to respond to it. I mean, and I think mine over time has tended to be responding to it with guilt, paralysis, and self-denial. Yeah. Rather than it provoking new forms of action agency. And I wish we had those new forms. I'm so sad and that we don't have a civic culture that's capable right now of doing constructive things. It's a massive hole in our society. Right. And, but I would argue the path to it is if we, if we aren't ready to do it, if we're not building that collectively, then we need more self-development to get to the place where we can meet our neighbors and forge that, you know, that social framework. Eventually, I would presume there's some realization. There's some rational self-interest that sets in, although it's possible that that rational self-interest is, is lost. That just may be gone for a generation. It scares the shit out of me. Yeah. I was reading an op-ed piece that the economist Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 and I, I disdain Milton Friedman as a figure. I think he's the walking embodiment of a smirk. Right. I don't, people don't know. Chicago School of Economics and Rational Self-Parenting is, yeah, economists. And I, I deeply dislike him as a man, but we have to learn things. We can learn things from people whom we deplore as, as people perhaps. And Friedman wrote in this op-ed, there is no such thing as corporate responsibility. And what he, what he was saying is, it's a familiar argument. It's the job of the corporations who maximize return for shareholders. What he whispers in the piece and what he should have said as loudly is that it's the job of civic culture to put notches in the scale, to create regulation, to create laws. And, uh, and we're missing that civic culture, of course. Right. Right. Right. That even, exactly, that even Milton Friedman saw business balanced in a car. context of society. He does say that. He doesn't say it loudly enough, but he does say it. And that was a better way of thinking that what's available to us right now. Right. I mean, people like Adam Smith, who were the still dominant economic thinkers by the time Milton Friedman was writing, we're saying it loud. Yes. They were saying it loud. John Maynard Keynes was saying it loud. And our culture was better in that way. Right. There was an acknowledgement, well, of course we need public structures, civic structures to do. Of course. But that's the thing is, and maybe this is where we could leave it off. We've understood the civic governance and civic collective, collective agency as a modulation on individual agency rather than an expression of, of, of mutual agency. I think that's exactly right. And I'm saddened by it here in New York City, where, where, where we live. Right now out at Jacob Rees Park, there's a huge bathhouse that's being remade into some swanky hotel. And that's okay. Maybe I'll go there at some point, but wouldn't it be wonderful to see that huge bathhouse remade into a world-class field house that kids could use to play basketball in the summer heat and so forth and so on? What bathhouse for all of us? Yeah, bathhouse for all of us. Am I that sentimental? Am I that fucked up? I mean, we, we do have things like that in this society and the, the, the, the curbing of those things is really just a mental idea. Right. Right. But I do like that. And I do like the, the, the so-called left or the former left or what's next, what's next after the left. Yeah. understanding that it's not just the libertarians who get the power of will, you know, collective will, you know, and the, the orchestration of collective will. Man, that's power. And it's, it's power and we're hobbled culturally because I think that the former left very often experiences a cleavage with working-class culture and that working-class culture is going to take its own forms and shapes. And if it just has to be let be, it has to be let be. Right. Because there's agency there as well. Right. Better to water it than poo poo it because some, or poo poo it. Well, you know, with nice fertilizer. If that's what you want. Right. Yeah. Right. Esoterica formulas against the false self. You can have this too by going to a store and getting it. You're stealing it. Doing whatever. Do you follow your own true will. I love you, Mitch. Likewise. That's right. I'm so glad you did another book. Thanks for coming. Even in your tiredness, you seemed alive. I'm very happy. Yeah. And I want to do a shout out to fine artist John Newsom who did the cover on that book to the Maestro of Santé Derasio who did the author photo that's on the back. Everything is an effort in which we find helpers who are greater than we are. And I've had that experience with this book. You've found refined people. So thank you. Thanks for being on team human. You can join team human even more than just joining this this broadcast by going to patreon.com/teamhuman become a paying supporter of this team. We will love you more if you do it. That's all I can say. I love this conditional. We love you more. We love everyone. But we will I'm discerning. I'm discerning for the refined person who exercises their wish for this podcast to keep going by becoming a paying member of the team. You'll get ad-free stuff. So with more of your will, less of other people's will. It's all good. I'm Douglas Rushcath. Team Human is produced by Joshua Chaptal and edited by Luke Robert Mason. 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