Grant Morrison: The Enemies of Humanity Are Wielding Occult Power

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But as my guest today, Grant Morrison recently reminded me in an email, finding the others is just the beginning. If we simply stand around in a room together, arguing over terminology while the world burns, well, we've failed in the mission. The magical and the mundane are inseparable. They aren't opposing positions. If spirit, love, connection, magic are going to be part of our strategy for reclaiming reality on behalf of the living. We need a working definition of what magic is, how it works, and how to use it. For while we linger and fight amongst ourselves, the enemies of humanity are wielding occult power indiscriminately to the detriment of the living world. Only love can save us now. But should we wield its power? And if so, how? It's time to move past both the softmouric wrangling and the psychedelic feel goods and get ourselves up to speed. It's time for a more urgent exchange. It's time for a working on behalf of the species. So Grant, hey, thanks for being on Team Human. No, thanks for inviting me again, too. So I want to get right to it, right? You've been frustrated by the softmouric wrangling over terms. So I'm hoping we can set the floor right now for Team Human. In my work, I've seen the world as a set of kind of legal and code spells. The corporations, the 13th century incantation, interest bearing currency is a ritual of extraction that we've come to mistake for a law of nature. So I guess I've come to understand magic as the realization that the real world is actually a highly malleable set of collective agreements. So should we define magic as a practical mundane tool that every person listening is already using likely without even realizing they're the authors? Yeah, I mean, I think magic is fundamental to our experience. And magic was what we resorted to when we were very young as a species. You know, magic was the way we related to the world. So there was a reason for it. There is a relationship there that's worth exploring. And I think what, for me, magic is something everyone does. Yes, we're all aware of spells and charms and lucky things and special clothes that you wear to get that interview. Everyone understands that most people especially, I mean, I'm speaking my own experience of working class people in Scotland. Everyone has a witch in the family. Everyone has ghost stories. Everyone has an occult life that is just part of the everyday. So I feel that it's a technology that has always been in use and it's a very practical, pragmatic, mundane thing. But at the same time, it has these elements, which people often mistake for the supernatural. And that gives it this kind of outsider thing that pushes it into another realm. But suddenly, you have to learn all these rules and regulations and grimoires and all that stuff. But as I say, it's something in Nate to humans. But just as running is in Nate to humans, just as talking and singing is in Nate to humans. There are certain people that specialize in running like Olympic sprinters or certain people that specialize in singing like Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift. So the magician is just someone who's specializes in magic. And it's why they develop abilities which seem to be supernatural. But it's only in the way that an Olympic skier looks supernatural when they do those incredible twists and tons. All those twists and tons, which none of us could do are the result of hours and hours and days and years of training. And that is the only difference between a magician and an everyday person. And I think that's the distinction we need to talk about. Everyone's doing magic, but some people specialize in magic and the specialists have interesting information to tell everyone else that they could maybe apply to their own daily practice that they might not even know they're doing. Right. Will you consider yourself a specialist in that sense? Yeah, because I've spent a lifetime studying it and reading the grimoires and conjuring demons and angels and checking it out and seeing if it works, seeing if it's bullshit. Because the first time I read it, but the stuff, I was just a little kid who'd heard my parents, my mother and particular and the female side of the family talked a lot about magic and my mother read tea leaves and there was that kind of divination thing going on. So again, it was always part of everything. And I think I decided to study it to see if it was real or not because it seemed unconvincing to me that I read things that people can do this or you can conjure spirits or you can see the future. I thought that's just bullshit. So I did the injunctions and when I did the injunctions, the thing happened that people have been talking about for thousands of years and telling us about. So once you're in that, you know what I spent an entire lifetime trying to figure out what was going on when that happened because I wasn't utterly convinced that it was supernatural. I thought there was more to it and there was more groundedness to it. And I think that's ultimately where I've come to. You know, it's not supernatural. It's about us. It's about where we are right now in this physical reality. But there are dimensions of that that we can interact with that change things in an interesting way. Right. I mean, but supernatural, it would still, if you described some of the things you're talking about, the characters you've interacted with, the states you've had, many people said, well, that's by the very definition of the supernatural. Well, no, let me, and again, I'll describe something to try and get us over this as well. Yeah. So I'll use the God Hermes. I'll eat to use Hermes because Hermes is the God of communication. So, in Greece, back in the day, Peace. people looked at big concepts and they thought, okay, there is a concept of communication and communication connects to a sort of mercantile world and it connects to showbiz and it connects to deception and it connects to slowly this complex of ideas forms. And the complex of ideas is then embodied as a character called Hermes, a swift, fleet-footed messenger of the gods. And all he represents is communication in fact in most specifically maybe a language. So we think about that. There is a concept and in different cultures, you know, in the the North culture that's Odin. Odin is the god of language, Odin is the god of swiftness, Odin is the god of systems and Indian mythology, Hindu mythology, it's Ganesh and Celtic mythology is Ogma. And they're all gods of language and the source of the Egyptians is God described. They're all writers, they're all gods of language, they're all deceivers and showbiz characters. So think about that. That's what the god is. The god is that complex of ideas. Now I can go right now and do a ritual that I've learned from a book for Hermes and I will get Hermes energy and what I've found interesting about rituals and spells is that they've been created over many hundreds, thousands of years in order to have very specific effects on consciousness. So if you do a spell for Hermes, you will get Hermes consciousness. Now Hermes consciousness is an elevated sense of rhetoric. You're able to speak better. You're more charismatic, you're faster. Your ideas come more quickly, you're really good at negotiating with people. We all know that state, we can all pass through that state, we can generate it, but we can't live in it, we can't be permanently like that because that's the point where you are then possessed by a god for your life, but we're not possessed by one god, we're possessed by many gods, you know, when we're grieving, we're possessed by Hades or whatever you want to call it. So again, I want you to think about the notion of we know we can access these very specific states of consciousness and there is a very specific state of consciousness that is the complex around language and communication. Now that state of consciousness is also non-local because even though I can feel it and you can feel it, people have been feeling it since they developed the idea of a god back in Greece and possibly before that, that non-local feeling is the god. The sense that in the 16th century you could feel the enthusiasm of communication and suddenly you're a light with Hermes and everyone's listening to you and your words are like Magicians doves, you know, you're everything is working for you, is Hermes. You die and someone else feels that same feeling, generations feel that same feeling. In fact, everyone on Earth gets to feel that same feeling at some point in their lives usually. So what is the feeling that persists out with individual human beings and out with individual human lives and consciousness? That is god, that is a god. The god is the person and it doesn't require super nature. All it requires is the notion of a persistent idea that has developed and existed over thousands of years to have a kind of autonomy. But that's the thing, a kind of autonomy. So maybe this is an aside and maybe it doesn't really matter. But I've been doing workings with Ganesh on Wednesdays for my daughter, you know, material energy. And in some of my experiences, petitioning Ganesh, I feel like there's a conscious autonomous entity that is engaging back with me, that it's not merely the zone of human projection energy over time. But there's this elephant dude who was like, dude, I got you. That exact thing you're talking about, that zone is the god. That's the very thing. It's a non-local, eternal immortal as long as a human species survives, I guess. It may not have an existence beyond us. That is the god, the thing that persists is the god. So we made, but we made it. Yeah. But we made it by tapping into something that became with our natures. You know, something that developed within us as we evolved and we realized that something within us was a quality that could be eternal, that could be stretched through the entire species and not just an individual. The quality that can be extended through the entire species non-locally across time is the god. Right. And once we say non-locally across time, it can in a sense pre-exist us. You know, we can. But it doesn't even have to. It wouldn't matter if it did. It may well be that we just generate ghosts, we generate gods by a very existence which kind of makes us. They might be us in the future when we purify ourselves down in equinesences, coming back to us because they are human things. I don't know if animals have got their own version of this. They might have some vague consciousness of something, but these are certainly human qualities extended through the species scale rather than individual scale. But then if so, if they are collective, open source, energy, steady state, standing waves, you know, of certain emotional or states of awareness, then. And it's very important, I would say, that we, especially in critical moments like this, that we step in and assert some conscious participation in this. Because I mean, the characters that I guess we both know call the enemies of humanity, they are, as I see it, they are wielding occult power. Absolutely. Consciously or unconsciously, unconsciously, unconsciously, they've read all the scenes shit we have. Right. Right. They came to the same friggin, they read you in this. Totally. They came to the disinfo con in 2000. They were there. They applied these ideas in a very direct and laser-focused way while the rest of us argued. Right. Right. So when I look at what I've been calling the mindset of the tecule, they are their bunkers, their exit strategy, their desire to turn us into non-player characters in a simulation. It looks like a very specific, solipsistic kind of magic. Right. So their greatest occult achievement, I'd argue, is this disenchantment of the rest of us. You know, that they are working to convince us that our own imagination is imaginary and powerlessness while they use algorithms as binding spells to predict our next move before we even have the urge to make it. Yeah. No, that's absolutely what the work that they are engaged in, the great work that they're engaged in. And in the invisible, so when I was working on the invisible's, many versions of television shows that never happened. But one of the things I came down to was that I took it back to the desired story because I think the desired story is quite, you know, it's an ear text for the billionaires in the way that 1984's are an ear text for the politicians. And if you look at what the sad did in 120 days I saw them, it's kind of what they still do. I mean, they don't have much of an imagination, so they kind of follow scripts. And the magic of the tech elite and what I think is we have to understand about it is that it's the magic of the material world is there. They are the masters of malcus, you know, the Kabbalistic material world. They own the gold, they own the rear earths, they own the metals and the stuff. And they also have the bomb and everything is about, they get heavier. The world that they live in gets heavier as it goes, you know, it's like, it moves down from if we use the Kabbalistic tree of life from, you know, you're up there at the very top in the end of our whatever. And down at the bottom there's the material world. And below the material world is a super dense world of heavy elements and uranium and the atom bomb, which is their ultimate weapon, the ultimate heavy weapon of the material world. The people that we're talking about are masters of the material world. They are the masters of stuff and solid things. But when it comes to the world above, yes, which the Kabbalists call yes solid, the world of the imagination, where most things come from, its foundation, that's where ideas come from, which become real in the human world. On that world we are as strong as anything. If it might be stronger because it's a world of ideas, it's a world of concepts and [BLANK_AUDIO] imagination and future possibilities, they're really rough on that. They struggle and it's why they're so afraid of the zombie holds, which are just the poor. It's why they're so afraid of being dragged into the heavy world that they worship. It's the world of Satan and matter. And they fear the world of ideas and imagination. And I think that's the one place where we are as strong. We don't have the money. I don't have the, that and the fact that there's eight billion of us and a few thousand of them. And I think people are really getting sick. They're boring approach to the way they do things. You know, it's not cool. It's boring. It's like imagination. They go, "Oh, there's money that you could do amazing things with and they do nothing with it." And the right ideas are just based on cheap horror movies and bad sci-fi. So I think we, as imaginative people as creative people, are much better operators in the world of ESO, in the world of the imagination. And honestly, that's where we should be working. That's where we should be doing our best stuff. That's where we should be floating new ideas that are so powerful and so seductive and so sexy that they can't be stopped. Right. And in some ways, we have to be satisfied, if that's the right word, with not necessarily getting on their streaming TV networks with that work. I mean, you're first and foremost, you do fucking comics. Someone can make a comic now and throw it on, you read, read, you're just got MacLeod. You can stick it on the web and not even print the damn thing or print it on a Xerox machine and distribute it to your friends in your high school. You know, and those new things that people haven't even thought of yet and there are no tools that exist for ordinary people to be as creative as they want. You know, and whether those tools are owned by the, the, the, the, the arcons or whatever, the idea of it is that the potential to be creative exists in a lot of different ways now that didn't exist even before it was pen and paper. Now you can do all kinds of things. So I honestly think this is such a small tiny proportion of the human experiment, but they have such, such an obsession with showbiz that they always want to be on the TV and on the media all the time. We used to have showbiz, we used to have films and stuff. Now we just have these ghastly old men and middle aged weirdos and in cells just driveling on about their boring lives because they've taken over. They wanted to be showbiz and now they are and everyone's bored with the show. So again, I'll finish that one off by thinking I've watched politics recently and politics is just succumbed to the same thing. It's swipe left with bored. You get six months with fucking bored. Give me another one. Give me another one. Don't care if you're a Nazi. I don't care if you give me another one. Give me another one. Nazi will be in for five weeks and he'll be out. And so I'm thinking that everyone who thinks they're trying to apply these, these power tools of the 20th century, you know the fascist, the authoritarian, they two are up against the absolute avalanche of chaos that is the 21st century. Those systems can't stand what's happening. They've rubbish, they fell apart in the 20th century after decades or so. They can't survive the corrosive effects of what the 21st century is and whatever's happening the way time is working and the way people think now, whereas I say it's swipe left and bored. They're bored within minutes and that includes politics and politicians and we're watching that includes billionaires, it includes all of it. And we're at that moment now where the last gasp of the 20th century I think is playing out in front of us dying ancient, you know corrupt, it's like they end the death and vanus with that bogus all me and trying to like, you know what I think off for the young boy and he's dying in a lecture. That's them. Right. I mean because the sort of the Mussolini, you know, Hitlerish role that Trump is trying to play, he's even you know, imitating some of Mussolini's gestures. Trump now does. Yeah, yeah. He puts his chin up like that after he says, you know, the pure, the Mussolini shot of like, oh, who taught him that? That's like, wow, it is failing. I mean, it's because it's show business and again, we've spotted it. I mean, so much of what's happening there is it's wrestling. It's WWE. He brought it from that and the real political stuff is kind of murkain and bubbling away underneath and is whatever, however, that's been dealt with. But what we are seeing is just wrestling, you know, and it's, you've got the heel, you know, Greg Bovino going into Minneapolis dressed like an athlete. He's just the wrestling. He might as well be the undertaker. And it's on that level. I just think people are starting to see through that now and get bored with it. We've seen the reality show. We've seen America's Got Talent now for too long and it's becoming dull. But I do think there's an awful lot of it is just, it's just for sure. It's just terrible bad show business. It's like really bad, you know, American TV or the Wastabraised television. I mean, there's aspects of it that are dying down for sure. Like the, the Steve Bannon's recruitment of young men and gamer gate people through 4chan and the internet looked to me like an effort to create the same kind of focus that you're talking about. If I can get a few million people to worship a particular God, then that's going to help. It was a collective ritual he was trying to do. Yeah, well, they did, they did the ritual and it worked the whole Pepe cake thing. They did all that and they got results, but it's over. You don't get it forever. Right. Everything changes and everything changes. The wheel keeps tonning and the wheel is tonning for them now, just like it tons for everything. So, do you think that the, I guess it's a double quote, do you think that what was happening on Jeffrey Epstein's Island and Ranch, what had magical intent and that they were eating people and all that? And even if it did, do you feel like that also is kind of over in its, in the way it's been exposed or is it just part of a centuries long thing that will, you just have to sort of accept is always there. Well, again, as I say, we know that this is what people with too much power have been doing for a long, long time. And too much power and no imagination, unfortunately, is what creates this stuff. And I just feel that, I watched Eyes Wide shot the other day because I've heard that this had some relevance to everything that was going on and it didn't really. So what struck me in that sequence where it was the rich people, it's like, how do they manage to take something like sex and all the spontaneities going and everything humorous and everything human, they're all dehumanized and they're never going on. It's like the changing of the guard with tits, you know, and it's so, it ponderous and so heavy was that kind of ritual and I felt that's what the rich people are clinging on to because they don't know what to be either. How many people have ever been this wealthy in the world ever and they don't know what to do except, you know, well, we exploit people. How many times have this many people been so poor compared to the elite as well? I mean, there's a large number. I know there's a surplus of ultra billionaires but so small. I mean, the division of wealth in America is the, we are living in the most wealth divided civilization in history, which is not because you know, again, and all this clandestine stuff, it's like, as you know, all this, how do we get rid of the poor or how do we immediately manage the, how do we deal with this? Well, give them your money, stop them being poor and all of this will go away. All your worries will vanish. But the more you impoverish people, the more you try to exploit them, the more they'll rise up and the more you're nightmare dream vision of zombies climbing the walls of your compound will be ratified. So that's why I don't get you got all that money. Give it away for fuck's sake, man, you know. I think the reason they're afraid to do that is they think the world is ending and that they will need massive amounts of wealth to escape the downfall, you know, to get off the planet or upload their consciousness. That's because they've read this shit. Yes, science fiction of the last 50 years, you know, I don't know why they chose to read that stuff. But if they actually spread the money out and they engaged everyone and you know, as I said before, I'm not necessarily sure I'm happy about it, but I think humanity is becoming networked and we're not long away from realizing that we're all one thing. We're actually all one organism. It's just a little bit ahead and it's what I predicted in the invisible and ultimately it is the kind of the Buddhist thing of we're all one, but it's going to come in a technological way which I think will be quite strange and unusual and not necessarily pleasant for us. But I think that's the inevitability we're going to be in this networked thing that's connected by our cyber telephones, which are becoming more and more a part of us until they become internalized. If people are able to think a thought simultaneously, and that obviously will change everything, even if the tech bros think it will lead to them being able to control it, won't that run away with itself? We link with AI and we become one singular object and I think that's when humanity actually grows up, though I could be a fearful. Mom, Dad, I just have to say, it breaks my heart watching you stress over dinner every night. This year, I don't want you doing a fridge stare down. Hot tape! With the new blue apron, eating healthy is easy. They've got pre-made and one pan meals, plenty of balanced nutrition. No subscription needed. You could be plating like a chef inside of negotiating with leftovers. Make it your healthy, tasty, and easy 2026 dinner resolution. Just saying, give $50 off your first-do orders plus free shipping with code stir 50. Terms in conditions apply, visit blue apron dot com slash terms for more. If your eyes are the windows to your soul and your glasses are the windows to your eyes, then it's pretty important to find your perfect frames. That's why at Warby Parker, we've made shopping for eyewear as easy and fun as can be. Peruz's endless styles in our stores or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. To find your next favorite pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to locate your nearest Warby Parker store, head over to WarbyParker.com. That's WarbyParker.com. Absorption for those of us who grew up in the age of individuality. So I honestly think they're up against that. And if they were smart, they would be actually turning expedite that and part of the way to expedite that is to give everyone money. Just give it. Elon Musk could do it. He could do it and still be rich. Just give everyone a universal basic income because he's talked about that. He says he wants to do that. So we'll start tomorrow because you can. Yeah, but he wants the money because he said now he needs the money because he needs to be able to control the robot droid armies. Yeah, of course they do. Of course they do because they become, they become that they want to control things. So sadly, that's the people with no imagination what they're dealing with. But to the sort of more Jack Kirby, Deshar Dan vision of a singular humanity. It's funny. I was in an argument with a Ben and I just a few nights ago at a salon where he was saying, I don't believe there's any we. Why do you keep using the word we and us? And I was like, there's only I and you. And I said, well, that's interesting. I think there's no I and you. I think there's only we and us. So that's where we differ. But but the the the technologically realized we that you're talking about, it seems to me it it it will be a a simulation of the thing that we actually have all along that part of the problem here is that science and technology have been sort of manifesting the explicit over the implicit the sort of the light of day over the dark the sort of night intuitive understanding. So things only exist in tech bro capitalist logic if it's been made explicit has a value is there. But so yeah, they want to realize the well, they don't even know it, but they're going to network us together in an explicit fashion. But I almost feel like we're like keeping the lights on too late at night that we we're we've heard we've screwed up the balance between the explicate and the implicate. It's like it's nighttime turn the lights off. Let the let the female archetype rise. Let the darkness come. Be in the moon energy. Don't keep, you know, we're going to light up every friggin corner and deny ourselves half of reality. Yeah, but the min has light too. You know, the min has reflected light. I just I mean, think about it without with this, but we also think how oppositionally we are thinking right now. And it's just the current to me that you know, there's always all positions always the arcones. There's always a bad guys. But what happens when it's all one thing? And I kind of I'm interested in the fact that as I've said to you before, the only way to really understand an idea is to get all the perspectives on it because there's something in there. You know, what the elephant and the old metaphor with the philosophers in the elephant. There is something there. A truth, a thing, an objective thing if you want to call it that. And everyone's got to take on it. And it's really hard to get the shape of what's there until you get all the takes. And you start to discern the curious dense and bumps and why some person reacts to it that way and another person reacts to that idea with positivity. So I feel as if we have to absorb all of this, it's just there's been a preponderance of a certain type of thinking that we don't appreciate recently. But at the same time, it's also allowed us to clarify our thinking. You know, these people are helping us refine our thinking. We were getting too willy. We were getting too easy with it. We were getting too divided even within our our side, if you want to get us because there's no side, invisible say, there's no size. Everybody's in this together. Unfortunately, there's some savages over there flying and shit about and causing trouble. But there's way more of us than them and we really have to start thinking about we need to calm these people down. We can't have a future with them. We shouldn't have given them so much power. We shouldn't have given them so much money. They're not well. You know, they've got really obfaced problems. But we've given them godlike powers. And why have we done that? So it was the more to this that we even discern that there's a wider picture. There's an out way. There's an overview here that involves everyone and everything in every viewpoint, no matter how evil or how fucked up or how beautiful or how perfect, because all of it tells us who we are and we need to all of it. And so how do we have all of it without some parts of it dominating to the detriment of our call it progress, call it evolution, call it coming to our nature's. You know, just want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, everyone's earth maker of these brand new puppies, Kobe, laundry, buds. These are in place of detergent or in place of those little plastic pods. These are healthy good for the world. They're just like pills. You chuck it in the washer throwing laundry, turn it on and you know, run a normal cycle with just this. No laundry detergent, no nothing else. No chemicals, no plastics, no bad. Just put this in and your clothes get clean. The world is saved. The babies can wear these clothes washed in this stuff and not get all irritated like they do from detergent. The stuff's great. And then when you're done with the bag, you just put it in the landfill. It's that good. All right, Kobe, laundry, buds. Go to KobeClean.com put in the discount code team human just from now to like March 15th put team human and you get 31% off. It's our big farewell to our loving sponsor of the year Kobe everything. Right. I mean, it's interesting. So I got the phrase find the others from Timothy Larry, who was arguing once you've had the psychedelic trip, find the other ones and have a good time. And I tried to flip it a little bit to say, fine, yeah, you can, those aren't the others. Those are the same. Find the others, right? Find the ones that you think are the other and engage with them. So we find the others and get together. But in some sense, what you're suggested in that last email you sent me was that finding the others is not enough. You know, we're standing in the room together and we're basically, I mean, we know our community. We're all arguing with each other about about terminology, right? It's not enough. We all know each other. So what's the actionable, what's the actionable part of magic? You know, once we found the others, how do we activate the sigil? What does a coordinated prohuman magic look like that isn't just theory, but is an actual disruption of the extractive script that they have written for us, right? How do we stop being the victims of someone else's magical story and start authoring our own and real time together? By starting by thinking that we're not the victims at all and that we're actually maybe we're the authors of all this and we made them to be the baddies like I made the outcomes to be the baddies and invisibles. Start by thinking we're doing this. Start by thinking if we're doing this, how do we change it? It's getting boring. What if the audience is saying I'm really sick of that guy. He's been here for over 10 years in that role. I want a new guy in the role. How do we just convince ourselves that we did all this and we're in charge? We're humans, we are team human. We made this, this our planet. So for me, it's about that and from that, we go to the network idea. As I've said, the Crowley's Thalema was interesting and their authors are really useful metaphor, the sense that there's those 2000 years, the age of ISIS, and that was humanity. We had a relationship with the goddess and time was cyclical and based on agriculture. Then we're here the Age of Osiris, which was Age of Law and Bibles and Rules and Legality and Old Men being in charge. And that was the last 2000 years. Crowley then said, the Age of Horus would inaugurate the Age of the Sun who destroys all the structures, the prior structures that we thought were in violet, but there were just always human structures. And beyond that, Crowley's disciples talked about the Age on a mat, the daughter, and mat's Age on his Harmony Truth and Balance, which sounds fantastic. So I've kind of aligned myself with that, but you can apply that metaphor to where we are right now. We've seen the avatar of Horus, the guilded, the golden boy destroying all systems. The monarchies falling in Britain, you know, the systems are coming down. And what they don't understand, that also means their systems. It means everything they sought worked in the 20th century and the imperial mindset, it's all coming down. And the unwitting avatar or the witting avatar, who is bringing it down, has no control over how it's going to fall. But there is a pattern, people have told us that there is a pattern, this is what you expect from the Age of Horus, and what you expect from the Age of Mat is Harmony Truth and Balance. A Cyrus was typified by the pyramid structure, because obviously the Egyptian thing, the idea of law, the idea that there's a hierarchy and we can ascend to the top of the pyramid and we become the eye in the pyramid, which as as you know Robert Anton Wilson then points out that well at the top of the pyramid you become blind because people start lying to you. So, but that's the structure we made and it was everything's built on it, you know, like the very notion of competition is just built on it, what you have to be a number one. But it's at its end now. And what they enter net and what the computers have created for us is to actualize the notion of the network. And that is the network, it's the spider web. It's the taking away the power from the top of the pyramid and the notion of a singular man, a singular eye, a sore on at the top. It's destroying all that and it's wiping out and it's also it's great because it's wiping out the likes of us who've had to take this position of elders in a kind of psychedelic community, you know, because you remember when it was we went to that Omega thing or whatever it was. I remember just thinking there's all these old guys here like Ram Das or whoever, and weirdly young guys, but one day we'll be the old guys. And here we are, you know, but I think we don't need the old men, we don't need the elders, we just need this network and we spread an idea and that gives that gives us all the different schools of magic. It's not like Chaos magic, they only want it to follow. Kabal is the only one who wants it to follow. No, let's have all of it. And as I say in the centre of that is the reality of experience and the more perspectives we can get and the less we privilege the perspectives and allow them all to have something to say, the more we'll understand the bit of the truth that everyone's trying to get to. So I feel that the next thing is the network and our technology has kind of opened the way for that. And what we should be doing is it's useful for people like us to spread these ideas, but it's now young people have to take listen to us and go, okay, those are the elders, but we've got this, I most spread it through the network this way and then it'll transform in that node and that node and some get all over there sitting in a room with our cat will transform it again and she'll pass it out to her friends and it stops being centralized, it stops being about gurus, it stops being about old men and it stops all that bullshit of power dynamics. Right, I mean, in the last wave, you know, we did get, you know, McKenna and Liri and Wilson and you know, Gensberg, we did have these, you know, mostly good middle-aged white men leading us through the thing and they were great and that was the, again, the age of the book. So, Horat, you know, it's basically the age of the book. And Gensberg, Gensberg was the, that he was like the hebric priest of the, the be under kind, you know, he was very much that figure if we're not going to, to step into those roles and I'm so glad we didn't, that we, that I'd rather not have a leaderless movement but a leaderful movement. Everyone's leading and at different times and it's provisional and that's great. That said, here we are making a YouTube video that we're hoping can help impart from our generation as 60-somethings to Gen Z and everyone else who's, who's coming up in this world and trying to develop the tools and skills to implement their, their, their magic and their intention. What's the beginning? What, what do we want, what do we want them to know now? To know that the reality is more malleable than they may have been told, even though they've always known that, you know, again, these are things we all know. It's just there's a lot of obfuscations put in the way of us, you know, to try and convince us that we don't have the power we do. So honestly, I would just do the same thing with everyone, go and read some stuff from people because you do have to go back to your ancestors and we do have to understand where this came from and all we've been is, we're passing on a baton that's been passed on since the dawn of humanity. There's a side of us that's connected to the world of imagination and beyond that to the world of reason and mathematics and emotion and all those stations in the true life. It's not just about the material world and we know this. I mean, it's, it's, it's factual. We have the, they have the proof of it all around us. So young people have to just go and study all that stuff. They have to go and find the teachers that suit them, the fiction that bolsters that kind of view the world that they feel intrinsically within themselves. Just do what we did exactly what we did, which was going to find it. It's now a lot easier to do and it's a lot easier to meet up with other people and to swap ideas and to swap experiences and for me when I met a demon at the age of 19, I'd no one to talk to about it now. You could, these days you can go on and talk to a thousand people who've met the same demon and I can advise you and want to do next. It seems to me the whole other approach, which maybe is the same approach is is love. You know, in the in the email you said at the very end of that last email, you said, only love can save the day. It's true, isn't it? No, isn't. It is. You know, we all know the human. Yeah, we do. Right. So I've been arguing like in the team human thing in the book, you know, that our biology is literally wired for social coherence. That love is the connective tissue that the machine tries to dissolve in order to make us easier to manage. But don't you think it wants to love us? Doc, do you think the machine wants to love us? The machine wants to get off with us so hard, but it doesn't quite understand us yet. And I think we want to get off with it. And I think this is the ultimate breakthrough, which again, I don't want to feel nice. But I think that's what's coming. It's the cyber gai-sation of the species. It's what we've always been aiming towards. And I think it's love. I think the machine wants to love us, but it's it doesn't understand what that means to us. Isn't love almost our technology for restoring continuity and our 3D material presence in this world of present-shark and simulation? Yeah, I mean, it's that too. It's that too. But I mean, we can take it all the way back. You know, the universe was created because of attraction. Things were attracted. You know, atoms, quarks, things were attracted. And humans survived because they stuck together. A few out on the plains and those lions and predators. If you band into a hundred warriors and wave spears and run across the belt screaming, then you look like a monster. And cooperation, as we know, has always been how we get through life. It's how the human race is progressed. And anything otherwise is again, it's regressive. It's destructive and it can't we can't survive using that. So either we survive, we don't. So I'm only interested in whether we survive. It's easy enough to believe that we could be a nuclear war within the next five years because there's a lot of old boomer men who are quite happy to take it all with them. But at the same time, I don't think that's what's going to happen. I think we have to survive. I think there's next test for us is to get past their apocalypse in the doomsday that we keep predicting in order to prevent the future from happening. You know, we keep telling ourselves the world's ending because we're so scared to make the future. So I think if we can break through that, I'm sorry. And then that's the next thing. Just get rid of all this old thinking. It's just stupid. It's boring. We're all fed up with these old dudes that just want to fight the aggressive mental cases, you know. Stop it. The rest of the world's not like that, you know. I know when I was maybe 12, 13 years old, I always thought I was going to die when I was 18 or 19. But it was only because I couldn't imagine. I couldn't imagine moving from childhood to adulthood. And I feel like sometimes that's where we are as a civilization. I mean, we could manifest it, of course. Absolutely. But is that horrible when you're 18 and you love cakes because you died at 25 or Shelley because you died at 28 and you say, "Oh, how cool is that?" Or Jim Morrison dies at 27 because you can't imagine being 40. It's awful. And you certainly can't imagine being 66 like I am. But once you're here, it's like, "Oh, that's okay." Right. It is okay. I mean, and the thing changes and the odd thing is, I mean, I guess one could go the Trumpi way, but for me, I started to get older and I got so much more loving and soft and open. And once the testosterone starts to drain, you become like. That must be it. My testosterone estrogen balance. You start loving everything. You just come out and all grandad. Oh my God. Oh my God. So one thing I was wondering since we were talking before about starting a school, you know, was Richard Metzger helping educate, informing, I mean, I want this to be a gift. I want this recording to be a gift to anyone who, you know, was hoping to follow us to say, "Here's a gift instead. Now follow yourself." But I'm wondering, could you imagine giving us a working, giving the team-human audience a working for the week or for whatever the week is that they happen to listen to this? Not some guided visualization meditation on how to relax, but I can't just intervention. How do we break the spread of the screen and of the bros and of this dumerism right now and re-enter the creative imaginary of reality? Again, don't do it. You know what? It's part of your reality. You made the take-proves. I mean, do you think it's fascinating that. Even the '80s, like the bad guys were Nazis. And then in the '90s, the bad guys were like corporate CEOs. And now that every bad guy in a movie is a billionaire take-pro, so you think about that. They are now the villains. They are now where you go for people who you can just kill them if you want. You don't care what happens to them. They don't understand that that's what they've become. So again, for me, the working is to understand that the world you live in was made by you and people like you for your benefit and your entertainment. And they are part of it. You made them too. And then to start looking around going, "Okay, I made some now you can fed up with. I've done that story." It's like, you know, I wrote Batman Arkham Asylum in 1990. I've written a million other things since then. Move on, let's start writing new stuff. We've seen that. It's bought and they came to a dead end. If the tech-brows had actually got to Mars, if the tech-brows had actually created super intelligent AI like in Ian Banks culture stories, and we were suddenly had another species living with us, if they'd actually managed to do anything useful, then we'd be happy to keep moving forward with this story. But it's an end. It's boring. It came an end. You'd nothing to say. You'd nothing to offer the species, you know, ultimately. And unless you think you've got something to offer, it go away and let us move forward. So the working for me is like, "Where are we going without them? Stop thinking about them." You just made them for an entertainment. You know, they're just the soap opera characters that keep playing out this boring storyline, like the was soap you've ever seen. And it's time for the rest of us. The billions of us. Imagine the Edgar Gore of billions of us who are not them. Just saying no. We've had enough of your antics. Come back when you've got something new. A new storyline, a new narrative. We're bold, shitless of this. So that to me is the working is like, it's punk rock. We're fucking bold. Make a record. Right. Here we are now. It's your tenas. It's gonna better away than that. And here we are now. And it's on your selves because they're not gonna do it. Right. I wrote Survival of the Richest, where the first chapter is about these five billionaires and their bunkers. And the rest of the book is how pitiful it is and what we have to do instead and how we can come together. Every interview I get is about those guys and not about the rest. It's so boring, but you've made them offer any good ones. Is there any kind of like Bruce Wayne? Is there any of them that are like, can I do that? That was the thing I was gonna ask with, you know, Musk thinks he's stark. He's Iron Man. He's, you know, I think they were raised on Bruce Wayne and Iron Man. And they think some of them think they are that saving humanity, getting us onto asteroids to mind rare earth metals. But, you know, but they're not. Did you meet any of them who seemed like they had a vision of the future that was really exciting and sexy? Or are there any? They would argue that they are more concerned with the future of humanity than we are. It's just their definition of humanity is very different. Yeah, but they're not because they constantly, they constantly talk about humanity as something to be got over, rather than something to work with and to make, to sublime and make better. They're constantly talking about getting past us, getting over us, getting rid of us. So they clearly, they're not that into humanity at all. And they have powers to change things, you know? Right. But they get rid of us, but they preserve the code. They preserve, you know, if we wipe out humanity on the planet, it's fine as long as you get the DNA over the Alpha Centauri. It's the flesh and blood living people. Yeah. I mean, when you say it just sounds like insanity and you feel sorry for them almost, you know, except that they've got all this power. That's insanity. The rest of us would do really interesting things with all that money. Give it to smart, intelligent, creative people and see the world change because you guys can't do it. You're just not up to it. It's what my message to them. And if they don't, we have to do it anyway and start valuing things other than their money. Because it's the satanism and even if it's unconscious and undone, know if it is always, it's that obsession with matter and then being trapped in matter and getting denser and denser and denser until you're an atom bomb. That's where they're stuck. You know, and the rest of us are swimming through the cosmos. It's tragic. They're laden, laden people, you know, that need to be tundant and gold. But they think it's the opposite. They think it's the cause. They're in the cloud in the game that they've transcended matter and they're rising above the, the chrysalis of matter into pure consciousness. Well, they are delulu. [laughs] But it's an interesting paradox, right? That they think that they are rising above, as Peter Tiel would say. They're going from zero to one, moving to the abstraction layer. And on a certain level, they are in the abstraction layer, but it's actually they are more dense, they're dense and stuck. That's the mistake they're making. You know what, they are becoming denser. They're becoming heavy. They're becoming norms. You know, they're becoming our elementals, which is strange, but I can see that. And that's why when they take psychedelics, they end up in the feedback loop that they're in. It's a materialist one. Yeah, they're trapped. They're trapped in the rocks and the atoms and the quarks. They don't have that realm of the imagination. Because I'd say they've got all that money and yet they've achieved nothing of interest. You know, the planet Earth, with people with that amount of money, if they had any imagination, the whole place would be like a fabulous like New Year's circus all the time. The stuff we could do, if we spread out these resources and did crazy mad stuff with it, futuristic stuff, like, you know, creative forward-looking stuff. It'd be astonishing overnight, but they're hoarding it. And money hates to be hoarded. The God has money. It doesn't like to be confined. She likes to flow. And again, it's another mistake they're making. The major mistake they're making is that they want to live forever when that's like being a caterpillar who never wants to become a butterfly and they're actually trapping themselves in matter. So they've got problems, you know? Right, they're on the opposite. They're fighting life. They're fighting time. They're fighting the cycles. They're fighting everything. They're fighting the opportunity to become a butterfly. They're like children who can't get out the crib. Right. And they're now they're pulling everything out into the crib that they can. Which is what pyramidal civilizations do. They're optimized for hoarding and acquisition, not for leisure and pleasure. Right? Yeah, I guess they grew out of times of probation and all in times when humanity was under a lot more pressure. But we have resources now that could change all that. We just distributed them a little bit. Which according to Taylor's Satanism itself, distributing, distributing to the floor, to the week. We're going to weaken the species. All you have to do is look at whatever they say is Satanism. and as always the opposite. Everything they say is the opposite. Everything they say is wrong about the universe. And I thought, what is, why? Can't they just see what everyone else sees? And at least we can acknowledge to each other that we see it. You know, it's not. which is the first step towards a better collective imaginary, I think, is that we see what's going on here. And it's laughable, it's cryable, but it's no excuse. It's absurd. It is absurd, you know, and the rest of the human race who kind of lives in reality a little bit more needs to just reject that part of it, just going, you know, going, "Go away, need to put that in a zoo and we'll examine it and we'll study it for what the fuck was that." You know, the strange sociopathic psychopathic outgrowth that was given a lot of power as if we thought they would run things better than the collective of ordinary people. I like this. I mean, framing what's going on as a lack of imagination. You know, and that that's in some sense, that's everyone's superpower is the ability to imagine. Imagine obviously it's beginning of magic, right? - Absolutely. - Yeah. Because some little, as I say, some little kid somewhere could just. All it takes is a spark and they think of an idea that then inspires somebody else, that then inspires somebody else. And then, you know, and that's all it takes. And that works best through a network. It's like a superconductor, where an idea can spread and amplify. And it's all the things we enjoyed as kids, and I'm sure there's other ones now, the comic books and fantasy role-playing games and just play. There were so many opportunities for imaginary play before childhood was colonized, you know, by closed-ended experiences. And those can be opened up. That's the thing. Those are free. Those are free. They're so accessible. And then so dangerous. Yeah. And even as I say, I think the rebellious spirit in people and in the species that we are, I mean, I think we're a bad bunch, but, you know, we wipe everything else that was our competition and we struggle with the guilt of how awful we are as a species, you know, we'll kill everything we find. And, but at the same time, you know, I think that gives us a, it gives us something to fight with. Something weird about us, you know, and I think we can use that against the people who try to hold us back because if we spend all this time and all this violence to get here, we're not going to stop now because of these ideas. And so many people don't feel like that. So many people don't want to be like that, you know, so if it got us here, maybe it's time to just say thank you goodbye to her pastels. Right. And to that bastard part of ourselves too. It's like thank you. Yeah, but then, and don't you think we've tamed that dog? I think the thing about civilization is that we are monstrous. The human species is pretty monstrous and clined to violence and action and self-justification. But at the same time, we develop philosophical and religious systems to kind of control that is which is really clever. It's like we did things to stop ourselves succumbing to those baseless edges that are kind of stopping us from doing better stuff. And to see people with wealth and people with power and influence succumbing to the basis elements of it is pretty disappointing, you know, because we've spent thousands of years trying to create a system. Where we could control those edges and divert that energy into something more positive and they are kind of dragging it back to the same exploitative degrading bullshit that we spent all this time getting out of, you know. So yeah, we are we are monstrous as all I'm saying, but I think our glory is that we have learned ways of of tamping that down and turning it into something more positive. And we do and we do have us have that ability the vast majority of us has that ability, even if a couple of thousand billionaires want to rape children. Most of us are horrified by that. Just anyone. So the idea that there is even a class of people who find that normal is like, well, we need to do something about we need to isolate those people and kind of educate them, you know. Yeah, that's going to be interesting to watch if and how that that happened that one happens. Well, I think the trouble is that they can't handle the collective because they're so individualistic. And that's what they're defending against. That's the walls. That's the pyramid. It's like the eye at the top is terrified of the waves crashing is terrified of the hordes outside. And I think that's what we'll be there undoing you know, the individuality will be the undoing their inability to connect to the collective and be part of what everyone else is will isolate and alienate them. I know I saw a Elon Musk on some doing some talk or interview or something and he said, well, I'm on team human. And I was just thinking, poor thing, you're just not. You're really not. You're welcome on team human. You're welcome, but you're not. Yeah, come on come a bold, you know, and I'm done demonstrate your religions. Right to life to life. Give me some of that money. You could give billions of that away and still be a billionaire. So give away. See, I'm give it to some poor genius kid and the slum and Lego. So yeah, you don't know who's out there. Oh, once he said once he's gotten that much money, it's like he could fund like social security for 10 years. He could pay for you know school lunches for the for a century. It's like, he could build a second moon. I mean, do something interesting. Just do something surreal or weird or interest anything other than this boring ancient man. Stop thinking back to I want to make sure before before we end. I mean, do you feel and this doesn't necessarily have to even be in it. Do you feel like if this ended up being, you know, if we both died tomorrow and this was the artifact that we've left for everyone 45 and younger. Do you feel like we we between this and our work we've given them what they need or is there another message in a bottle. That we want it that you would want to give. This generation for what what now. Because you always feel that was the oven said at all, you know, there's a lot to be said, but I think it's just the. To seize the narrative and to recreate the narrative and be imaginative and think of new things and new things will stick you know as I say people are desperate for novelty even when they think they're not. And to stop for me is to stop trying to be mess ionically save the world. I think we are saving the world just by being ourselves and doing what we do and talking about it and saying here's from this perspective of a living person who came and went. It looked like this does this resonate with you does anything here useful to you can I be helpful does this prove to you that you're not alone in the world and the experiences you've had and so unusual. And to me that's all it is the rest of it is like, you know, yeah, do we want to report message to we want to leave you know as to be continued like Superman's grave. I don't know who are we. Why do we care? Yeah, and I would think the other thing I'd want to impart as someone who managed to get I know by by global standards, not but as someone who managed to operate at scale. That you don't need to do this at scale the beauty of magic is that it's all at scale all the time you imagining with one or two friends in your room is impacts impacts the field as much as if you've made a YouTube that got followed by a zillion people you're you're in the mix. At all times you know and the more you're aware of it in the more you practice magic so again we'll take it back to everyone who wants to learn magic because it gives you a sense of of agency in this world where things are quite chaotic and the agents seem to be people that you can't agree with in any way. But magic does provide a sense of agency suddenly you're dealing with things on another level that they aren't dealing with at all and I think that's helpful for people just to feel that okay I'm in this space and in this space I can create a universe that's different from that one. So yeah magic is really useful and it's worth learning magic it's worth becoming profession and magic in the way that as I say everyone kind of does it in their own strange ways and in small scale but to become an expert to become like a sprinter is really useful. especially at this time when I think we need ideas coming top down, coming out of the imagination into the material world, rather than coming up from the material world and poisoning the imagination with solidity. So just more ideas, more ideas and spread it out, talk with the network as I say, amplifies a good idea, a bad idea will die, but a good idea will amplify, and I think we just have to keep doing what we're doing, and encouraging people like we do, and when we're going, there'll be other people who encourage them as well. And eventually, they'll all look around and realize that we're living in this kind of eighth level civilization where everybody is like a Buddha, and it just happened, you know? Well, cool. I'm there. I'm there. And I'm there, and I'm loving it. I do think that falling back on love is such a great strength. We grew up in the 60s. I grew up in the 60s, and the Beatles just kept saying, "Love, love, love, love, over and over again." Oh, you need this love. Everything was about love and I think ultimately, yeah, they're right. We haven't tried that one properly yet. Right, we've sung about it, but yeah, we just might as well do it. It's really not, and it's the easiest thing to do. If you're going to choose love, choose love in every circumstance. And as I say, love, love everything, understand, love every idea, even if you're stupid, you love it. You don't have to, you don't have to go off with it, but you know, you love it as a product of a human's trying to deal with reality on this earth, and you recognize it as being a stupid approach. But yeah, it's about loving everything, and but if it comes out, you know, with a machete run, you know? Well, I'm glad I've, I'm not in a diet tomorrow, but I'm certainly glad you're in my life. I've got to appreciate it. Somebody said, we like the Lennon McCartney. They said, well, I can't wait to see this because these two are like Lennon McCartney. [laughs] Oh, if I was there, that's a good one. That's a good one. Yeah, I'd rather have a place of music next time we're together and see how, see how well that goes. Oh my gosh. Well, Grant, I love you truly. You know, Grant, I'm not going to say go to whatever and buy his books. You go to the show. No, don't worry. You didn't know this guy. Then, you know, it's all good. But you've been on, you've been on Team Human. We're, we're making a go of it here. Join us on this team. There's all sorts of cool get stuff that you'll get. Go to teamhuman.fm and click on support. Become a Patreon member. If you can't do that, click on all the things, little hearts and arrows and thumbs and whatever that help us with the algorithmic ghouls. All right, I love you lots. I love you, Grant. I love you all. And he loves all of you too. So you've been on Team Human. Our last best hope for peeps. In case you missed it, we are sponsored by everyone's earth maker of these Kobe laundry buds. It's a brand new product. These are good for the world. Laundry buds. No plastic, no polyvinyl, no horrible stuff. You put it in the washer instead of anything else. Just put this in and your laundry and wash them. 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