The Esoteric State of the Union: Magic, Will, and the New Neighborhood with Mitch Horowitz

[MUSIC PLAYING] Acast powers the world's best podcast. Here's a show that we recommend. [MUSIC PLAYING] Chris Jim Bale was preparing for his role in American Psycho, dressing the part, hitting the gym for the first time in his life, even getting his T3 done. There was just one problem. He didn't actually have the part. Leonardo DiCaprio did. Listen to our podcast, What Went Wrong, every week, as we unearth the chaos behind Hollywood's biggest movie flops and most shocking successes, available wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere, acast.com. You're on Team Human, conscious intervention in the machine, an opportunity to put a spell on ourselves, each other, and everyone else for the deepest, purest, and most loving expression of our true will. We may not know what's going to happen, but we have a heck of a lot more power over how it happens than we might suspect. I'm Douglas Rushcough, and I'm on Team Human. Playing for Team Human today, a cult historian, author, and lecturer, Mitch Horowitz. The author of Occult America, Practical Magic, Modern Occultism, and My Favorite, Daydream Believer. Mitch is here for our annual esoteric evaluation of the State of the Union. It's time to intervene on behalf of people and all living things. I'm Douglas Rushcough, and we're all on Team Human. Hey, Mitch. Thanks for being here. Before we start this episode, I want to let people know, we are in the last month or so of our sponsorship by everyone's earthmaker of Kobe dryer sheets and laundry buds, and as a special celebration of them launching us into this wonderful state of being that we're in, we're one celebrating these little fuckers, Kobe Laundry buds, which you chuck in the wash. They're all natural and good and won't make you itch, and they won't hurt the world. Even the bag is biodegradable, so no polyvinyl plastic crap going into the fish and killing our babies and getting in our placenta's. But get this. So I've been telling you all to use this code. I won't even say the code to use this code to get 10% off. And then we get credited, not money, but we get credited as always. See, it came from Team Human. But you've been going to the website, and they have a 30% off on the website. So why would you use a Team Human 10% off code when you can get 30% off there? So I emailed them and talked to them. If you put Team Human in the discount code box at KobeClean.com, you get 31% off. 1% is all it takes to save you 1% more. So go to KobeClean.com, put in Team Human, get 31% and show them in our very last few weeks what a terrific, terrific sponsor E we have been. All right, thanks for that. So Mitch, before we start, I just wanted to light a candle. Both in your honor, it's a pink candle for Anio. All right. It's her day. It's Wednesday or is it Friday, rather, which is a Venusian day in general. I'm going to be able to say, if you want to be a Venusian, what she was doing and put her up in my apartment, start talking to her and then she's like, let me help with your daughter and started to do workings. And I'm like, always a little scared of workings. I don't want to manipulate things whenever I've tried to manipulate things. I kind of made things worse, not better. You know, I don't want to be careful what you wish for. So, but in a really gentle way, she saw who wants to help here and Ganesh, you know, spoke to her in that way and said, and I was like, oh my gosh, Ganesh is, and she's like, oh, he helps everybody. You know, as if it's as sweet, but to me, and then Ania, who's a thankfully old testament, Hebrew Bible, archangel, so I don't feel like I'm betraying my people to help with her health and then the ways that her improving house will help our relationship and then help me in the way I, you know, move on and move in the world myself. And I don't need to get into all the specifics, but it was real. I mean, it's too real. And too many weird coincidences like happen in the middle of the thing. It's like, let's work this. Oh, she says this, ping message comes in from my daughter, from a doctor about that. It's like, oh, what the heck is going on here? Are you get a, you know, someone's doing a working, is like, okay, I'm going to do this working. I feel like there's a block in terms of you getting this medication. Hang on a sec. Bing, pharmacy approves. (laughs) I'm sure it's a proof of the thing. It's like too weird. It's too weird. Yes. Wonderful. First of all, I'm delighted to hear that you're using magic in so constructive a way. And I define magic as causative ritual. And in that vein, a person can approach it from a perspective of metaphysics or extra physicality. A person can approach it from a perspective of psychology. A person can approach it from a perspective of chaos theory. You change one wrinkle and it alters the whole, just as you were saying, you saved that extra 1%. Well, it may not seem significant, but we know from chaos theory that everything is significant. Exactly. And magic can be a malgum. And I believe it isn't a malgum of all those things. And to see its effectiveness is remarkable. People sometimes debate the question of correlation versus causation. But meaningful correlation is where we start paying attention. And the fact that you had results coming quickly and in proximity to your efforts really says something. So I think it's very beautiful. Yeah. And it's also very retro causal, right? The effects of the things-- and I know this sounds like bullshit, but the effects of the things seem to happen before the thing. It's like, I'll talk to this-- I've got this guy helping doing some workings at in California. And he explains what he's going to do the working for. Like in three days, I want to prepare. I want to do some ritual fasting and three days. I'm going to do something for this. And it's like the effects of it start happening. And it's like he hasn't done the thing yet. He's going to. He fully intends to. And he will. But it's like, well, that's interesting. As if-- I mean, you can feel it in a number of ways. Before October 7th happened in Gaza, I felt-- a few days before I was like, oh, wow. I'm grieving here. So there's retro effects. But this was more-- this was genuinely retro-causal of, oh, because he's doing that thing. He's already opened that pathway. And I'm talking to then Arden about that. And she's like, oh, well, you know, like, Archangel's, they're not on the same timeline as us. They don't live in linear time. So don't worry about that. Yes. I think that when we are making an effort to communicate outside of our normal cognitive framework, this brings into play retro-causality. This brings into play the question of non-human intelligences. This brings into play our appeals to an intersection of time or a dimension that is not the ordinary one in which we function. I think it's important for us to remember. And these things are all ponderous. They're all prospects. But let's assume the verity of these things as I do. And I think there's a bund and reason to assume the verity of these things. Once that threshold is crossed, your insight becomes very important, which is that that other world doesn't necessarily communicate with us in matters of time or linearity or language, that we are accustomed to understanding. It reaches us in a kind of translation because these other aspects of being, if I can put it in a way that we can communicate with. put it in the most literal terms. They have their own culture. They have their own states. They have their own framework. And necessarily everything that reaches us just as things do from the ancient past, reaches in translation. I was saying to somebody just the other day that almost all of our biblical accounts in 21st century parlance would be close encounters. And our ancient ancestors didn't speak that way. And our modern ancestors didn't speak that way. Teddy Roosevelt tells a big foot story in one of his books in the late 19th century. He calls it a goblin story. Because he didn't have the term big footer saskwatch and that term will be superseded by something else. And I think in the same way that we communicate across time with different language, we communicate outside of our necessary, but artificial perceptions of linearity and a singularity of experience with that other language. So not only do we have to be patient in that regard, but I often say to people that when you're making an appeal, let's say it's a petitionary appeal to some extra physical intelligence or deity. Be frequent about it. Don't worry about repeating yourself because we have no idea how the other world works. And it could be for whatever reason, whatever moment, suddenly comes a response to that appeal. One just never knows the hour of these things. So be persistent. - It's fascinating. 'Cause I mean, the frame that the people I've been working with have used and so I've adopted it is that these are you know, discrete entities. I mean, I've told the story on this show a few times how I was trying to explain how magic like isn't real to a class of mine. And I was explaining that magic is propaganda and magic is mind control. And all the different sort of NLP ways of understanding magic. And I said, real magic would be, you know, there was a fly flying around the room. Real magic would be if I took my fingers like a gun and shot it at that fly and it fell out of the sky. And when I did that, the fly dropped to the ground. And it survived and flew out, but it freaked everybody out. And the order, Arden said was, oh, it's not that you did this with magic, it's that they were entities present who didn't want the students to learn the wrong thing and wanted to show you what that magic was real. So they possessed the fly or brought the fly down, you know, for control it, you know, and then let it go. So she's got a discrete entities model. So if I'm writing a petition to Ganesh or to Aniel, you know, I write this letter in Bernic-Cano, that it's to her or to him. And they have their wisdom and their own action and will. And the interesting thing is using that frame, I felt their adjustments. - Mm-hmm. - So I make this petition to Aniel and she's sort of like, don't be so supplicant. Don't, you know, humility is good, but don't overdo it. You know, I can feel like, ooh, she's like a little, a little dom here, a little, come on, you know, provocative or, you know, Ganesh, you know, I'm making this whole thing and he's like, you think this was hard for me? You know, it's like, it's like, all I have to do is breathe on this and it's just like, I feel like they're, I'm experiencing their personalities. Which is really strange. I like the comment about humility. If we stick with an Abrahamic framework, which is where Aniel is from, there's many, many instances in scripture of the patriarchs and matriarchs stepping way outside of humility. They argue with Yahweh. They make demands on Yahweh. They express doubt. They flee like Jonah. They object like Cain and say, that punishment is too severe. They argue like Moses. They Sarah argued with the prospect of childbirth in her elderly years and they bargain. They bargain. Cain said to Yahweh, listen, this punishment that you've given me is too great and Yahweh mends the punishment. So even if one sticks with an Abrahamic framework, there's plenty of arguing, negotiating, transaction that's going on. It's not just supplication. Right. But it's also, and I don't want to use DM DSM-5 classifications, but there is the sense of being an active communication with a personality. So with Aniel, who's sort of a love arc angel, I feel like she's saying, look Doug, kind of man up here. It's okay. It's okay to be in touch with your will and feel like you deserve to be listened to. You know, it's okay. And it's just like, oh wow, it's a bit like I'm being trained by an entity. It's really different than the frame I grew up in, which is God is this abstract thing. Don't worry about it. It's all up there. You're never going to know it. Just stay here. I mean, even to get over the, what felt like a, you know, a Hebrew prohibition on what would be considered sorcery? Well, there are different currents about all this in scripture, of course. Now, there are people who could cite chapter and verse of those prohibitions against sorcery, the witch of Endor and the tragedy of Saul. And that is in scripture. There's no offends or butts about that. But scripture is a curated document. They grew out of a lot of tension. And early Judaism, deep antique Judaism was in fact not exclusively monotheistic. And it's difficult for people to understand this because monotheism seems like the very definition of Judaism. No, but if you do the Hebrew Elohim, we're talking about the gods all the time. Perfectly put. And the prefix L that you just used, which is the suffix in Amiel, L was the Canaanite God. And there were some Hebrews who were down with the Canaanite God. And of course, again, it's difficult for us to wrap our minds around this because we think, well, Judaism is monotheism defined and be got Christianity, be got Islam and so forth. But the truth is that just like in the Roman Empire after Christianity became the official state religion, there were plenty of backwater folks who were derisively called pagans who had not yet heard of the good news. And they were still worshiping in a polytheistic fashion. Well, so were some of the Hebrews. And we know this because of the suffix or prefix L, which they appended to their kids' names, or they appended to the names of certain angels, or even sometimes the name of Yahweh himself. And we can see from this variety of names and specifically drawing upon the Canaanite God, L, that there was not uniformity of practice of belief, of worship. And there was, of course, practice of astrology, for example. I remember once I was shaperoning a group of kids to the Jewish Museum here in New York City. And they have at that museum a floor mosaic of a zodiac wheel from a late ancient synagogue. And the proctor rushed to tell the kids, now this was just decorative and so forth. And that's simply not true. That's a mistake that's being malved to the kids for political reasons. So mama dead say, why does my kid want his bar mitzvah to come inside with a certain astrological date? Well, because his ancient ancestors did. And these religions, all of our religions, they're a lot more gloriously messy than Canaanite's literature, which is a result of tension and a result of curation, let's on. So for me right now, working with these energies, our types, mindsets, with the construction of them as discrete entities is effective for me. And not hurting anybody. And so I'm doing that. Are you basically agnostic about what magic is how it works? Or do you have a kind of a personal understanding of are these entities, or is this physics? What do you think's going on? There's attention in me about that. At this juncture in my search, I do believe in distinct deities and entities. And I do believe in the effectiveness of a petitionary appeal to those beings and the formation of a relationship with them. At the same time, I am also very focused on the idea that the highest form of magic and explore this in daydream believer is the wish, is the wish, and that all of our ceremonies and rituals and liturgies and prayers are really efforts, formalized efforts to express the wish. And in my search up to this point, I am working very heavily with that idea. I am working with the idea of whether the focused, passionate wish is enough. That doesn't mean that I have discontinued ceremony, right, ritual prayer, petition. I have not. But I am deeply interested in whether holding that wish very well defined is in itself enough. And that's what we're all kind of going for. And of course, that doesn't compete with metaphysical narratives or efforts. It's just a question of whether all of those narratives and efforts are trafficking towards that point. And so I open, I'm working on a new book right now, and I open with an exercise in wishing, a very seriously felt exercise in wishing. I love and believe in simplicity. And I am trying to strip away liturgy and ceremony and share what I find. But the interesting thing to me is to get that close to one's own wish, which we could call the will. It requires a kind of courage that's daunting. I mean, it's essential. Having helpers helps you define how would she see it? How would he see it? Helps you define the wish, almost like a tarot deck can help you understand elements of it. And it helps you, it helps me anyway, kind of take responsibility for my wish because I have allies. I have a great chorus of allies and archetypes assisting me. But if you remember when I was at your, the party celebrating the UFO TV show, I was weighing a very difficult life moment of, am I allowed to, um, am I allowed to do what I want in this? Am I allowed to take control of my life or express my will? And I was even talking to you about your work in some ways was frightening to me, the extent to which you described the process through which you reclaimed your will. And it was like Buddha, you know, going out of the, you know, leaving his princestum to do. And I was like, I don't know if I can do that. I feel too guilty of it at this or that. And I feel like the fact I did do that and you watched me do that over those next few months with both the horror and the joy that came with it. It was almost as if that those are the preconditions for even supplicating in the first place that there is this requirement of, you know, oddly enough, taking responsibility for yours, for that self, you know, for me, the only way to do it was the stuff called internal family systems work. I'm talking to the seven year old in me and I'm all this, I have all these caretakers taking care of people and the seven year old in me was like, you got all these caretakers, what about caretaking me? It was like I had to see my will as a seven year old in order to go, okay, I'm going to commit to you too. Yes. And it flipped it. But, but this, this, what you're talking about, it feels like to really confront the white light of one's own will is frightening. It is frightening and it is frightening in part because the religions are constructed to condition that will. And those conditions are very sharply felt within Christianity and Islam. They're felt, I would say slightly less so in Judaism, but they're felt there too. And everyone listening probably, a cast powers the world's best podcast. What if you laughed all through your commute or if you heard the funniest story while at the gym? Well, now you can. I'm Jermita Jamil and guests on my new podcast, Wrong Turns, share their most mortifying and hilarious disaster stories. I'm talking people like me Martin, Bob the drag queen, Catherine Ryan, Jake Johnson, Margaret Cho, Simon Pegg, Penn Badgeley and so many more. So listen wherever you get your podcast, Wrong Turns, where dignity goes to die. A cast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcast everywhere. Acast.com. Just thinking that some variation of that expression, careful what you wish for. And it's a valid expression and it's a valid concern. It has ancient roots. It probably has its modern roots in Gertr in his drama of Faust. Emerson interpreted that and somebody interpreted Emerson and we got the modern refrigerator magnet expression, careful what you wish for. You just might get it. And it's true and people wonder about tempering, conditioning, their wishes, their fearful of turning into a Twilight Zone episode. And I understand that. Someone contacted me recently and said, apropos of these concerns, should I condition my wish? And I said, I have conditioned wishes for the very reasons that you are identifying. It is my impression that conditioning slows arrival as with everything in life. Conditioning slows arrival. Is the agony of doing without your wish greater than the agony of receiving it in whatever form? And that's a very private question. And if so, then you may want to dispense with conditioning. It's a risk. I think sometimes critics or skeptics make a categorical error and they assume that magic or the metaphysical, which they don't believe in anyway, but somehow they get angry at us for practicing. No, there is you. But they assume that the magical appeal or the metaphysical act contains with it corruption. Because there are winners, there have to be losers. And so if there's a hundred people in a room and they all need the same thing and along comes Michoroate's with his positive thinking, he's really taking from those other people. Right. Some zero sum exercise of power over others. Right. And I question that as a categorical error because it assumes that magic brings with it a different trail of concerns than just any other way of getting through life. I could be a strict physicalist. And if I put something out into the world, I want the thing I put out into the world to succeed. I have no interest in seeing Mike, my neighbor, Failor get displaced. I have no way of understanding the various ripples that are going to go out from my event. But if a family member is sick, I want him or her to get better. If I'm putting a project out into the world, whatever it is, I want it to find its audience or constituency. I see magic as one more effort in that framework, not of a different kind per se. So I think that we're right to reflect very heavily on this stuff because there are people's lives who turn into Twilight Zone episodes. Right. That's not a joke. But the more you do and the better things start working out, the more responsibility you have to reflect deeply on this stuff. Because it's like all of a sudden I'm in the role and in some ways, I almost I feel like a traffic cop. Yeah. Because this is the thing, your wishes end up affecting everything and everything. They're not just your wishes. Now, apropos of your experience pointing at the fly and the fly, as you would mention retro causality and retro causality is an idea whose time has come. I won't go into all the stats and figures. I had Eric Warko on the show. Oh, perfect. It was beautiful. You've covered it. Interestingly enough, let me hypothesize. Let's say there's some kid in that room who later in his or her life is going to use the magical appeal when faced with real trouble, when faced with real torment. And that magical appeal may come to that person's rescue because Professor Rushkov pointed at the fly and the fly fell. So who knows what what hidden tendrils of connection there are speaking of retro causality. Your student, whomever sitting in row seven, may remember back to that in middle age and say, yes, I can do this. And that may have been the whole purpose. Just hypothesis. Oh, and those of who were in the room at that moment, I feel like we're bonded in time and space for friggin' ever. You know, it's like we beamed somewhere. Yeah. It was amazing. The interesting thing is what Arden does to. I guess soften the A/A petition as she told me to just add like, or better. So it's like, so you don't get too specific. It's like, I'm not that I'm doing it for like, oh, get me this job. You know, I did it for someone else. You know, I said, you know, get her, let her get that job that she wants or better. Because I don't want to like get her that job and then the job turns out not to be good. You know, so, or better is sort of this nice, all purpose, softening. - I have had episodes as I'm sure everybody listening has where I don't get what I want. I pray for something I don't get it and then sometimes after the fact I say to myself, I am so grateful that I didn't get that. And there are times this could be projection, but it certainly doesn't feel that way. There are times where as a thinking, feeling, mature, experienced, individual, I feel there was intervention and I'm not receiving it. Where receiving that thing, sometimes a relationship, sometimes a job would have been horrible. And there are things that I might have prayed for when I was younger that would have resulted in my not sitting here right now, in my not re-discovering myself as a writer. It's easy to look backwards and cast meaning on things and it's all speculative. Life is composed of maybe's and the physicalist doesn't know any more than I, the metaphysicalist know. I'm literally, we're acting on suppositions. My God, we can't even settle questions of causation and correlation and ordinary reaches of science, much less determined the ultimate sea of life. So my supposition is that sometimes there are interventions that are actually meaningful and that are really dramatically rescuing, in fact, and or resolutions just not yet seen. - It's interesting when you were talking about the path that you're exploring now, which is really the focus on your will, right? Someone who seems to be able to do that without any appeals is our president, Donald Trump. - Yes. - He seems to have, he knows what he wants, he's honed it and he, partly through the Norman Vincent Peel model that he was raised in, whether he's consciously doing it or not, he is doing a form of magic. And it seems, at least in the short run, seems to really work for him. - I agree, I agree. I'm interested in talking about magic, working on magical operations with people who are materialists, but who are willing to engage in ritual. Because some of them will talk about chaos theory, for example, which I'm really interested in. And some of them see Trump as a chaos magician. They might see him that way from a secular perspective. And a chaos magician will zig when everybody else zags, will do something that is so outside of expectancy that he confuses, disrupts and throws everything off balance. And Trump is enormously skilled at that. Whether it comes strictly from Norman Vincent Peel or whether he just does it innately, I couldn't say, I don't think he's necessarily sitting around contemplating any of the things that we're talking about. I'm not even sure that Trump read Norman Vincent Peel's book, the power of positive thinking, but he certainly did attend that congregation as an adolescent. It's one of the very, very few influences he talks about from his youth, aside from dad. - And Roy Cohen. - And Roy Cohen. So it, and he was younger at that time. So it has to be paid attention to. So I assume there's something there. Steve Bannon at one point had promised me an interview with Trump, like a 15 minute thing, where I could ask him about all this, but it never happened. And so that was that. These are the things I'd like to ask him about, simply because there's lots of people who are better qualified than me to hammer him on policy. And they should. But I have to work from that which I know best. And so these are questions I had hoped to ask, but never got to ask. He is whether, he's very capable at this. Walter Isaacson wrote a very good biography of Steve Jobs. And Isaacson talked about Jobs capacity for reality disruption. And Trump has that very capacity. - Right. - It's very powerful. - Right, so I guess partly why I bring him up is, you know, we're talking about sort of personal magic and all. And then there's Trump, whose magic or certainly his will is impacting the environment in which we're all living. - Yes. - Do you see a path toward kind of collective magic and what does that look like? I mean, there's the TikTok witches who are doing, witches, I mean, very discreet. You know, God bless them. You're trying to do stuff and spells. But how maybe without even calling something occult, the Jews, when they didn't call Sabbath Jewish, everyone got a day off, right? (laughing) Is there a sort of a, an occult equivalent? Like, so here I am, I'm trying to do team human, right? And team human, well, it had some spiritual origin. It wasn't, you know, occult. I guess are there lessons from the occult for those of us who are trying to collaborate and achieve solidarity and exercise our mutual will? - It's a very difficult question because one of the tenets of occultism is maintaining silence. The idea is that we talk about things to dilute them. If I need advice, if I need to deal with some emotional agony, I talk to a trusted friend or maybe a shrink or something like that. And we all recognize that that has its place. Overdone, it perpetuates the problem. But I was talking about the occult. I was seeing it almost as tributary testimony to, - Oh, and I think that's right. - Do you think I diluted it? - No, no, I don't, because you're not talking about an operation that you're planning to do today at three o'clock in the afternoon or something that you just did. I mean, you're sort of giving a news analysis of what happened back then. You're not talking about your spell work in the present and the here and now, you're not sharing it with somebody who's gonna roll as eyes added or something of that nature. Those are the real dilution points. - I'm more trying to share, sort of like granted, this works. - Oh, I think it makes total sense. - Check it out. - I think that you're giving a report on what occurred. You're not talking about the operation itself. Whereas people wanna do magic that are going to make things better in our world. And it seems to me that the very public declaration of that maybe is diluting the thing that they're after. I remember once upon a time, and you'll remember this, Alan Ginsberg and a band of Mary Pranksters decided they were going to levitate the pentagon. And I love Alan. And I'm glad they make that effort. They made that effort. Apparently it did not work. - And they say it did. - Oh, is that right? - I have a Hoffman afterwards. - No, I have a said a word. - Did he did? - Oh, okay, well good for him. - To the news. I think Paul Crazner probably wrote that it did as well. - Good, I agree with that. - I agree with that. Paul Crazner, he was the only person, well next to my mother, allowed to call me Mitchell. He used to call me Mitchell. And I remember once I was present, I had an award that he was given. And he was not in great health then. - Yeah. - I was a good at the podium and people stood and applauded. And I was one of them and Paul got up to the microphone and with the perfect timing of a cat skills comic, he said, "Why was it everyone standing?" And it was just so him. Anyway, forgive the divergence. The fact is whether or not the pentagon levitated, disclosing magical operations weakens them. And so this presents the publicly engaged witch with a question. And I don't have any answer to that question. - Right. - I do believe that public will asserts things. I think there could be no question of that. And we call it by secular names like Mob Psychology, which is a very negative term, but there are things that are group efforts that of course do make a difference. Any marathon runner could tell you that. And I don't know what the Anguaje witch should do he or she has spells, but as far as broadcasting this stuff, I think it might be better kept in secrecy because when the right wing was engaged in kek worship, and they felt very strongly that that worked for them, and I believe it did, they were quieter about it. So maybe we're on Twitter with it though. - Not so much Twitter in my recollection as like fortune and some of the more undergrant channels. So they didn't have people coming in and saying, fuck you guys, they were trying to get us to see an end saying. - Look, we're using kek against you. It was wink, wink, nudge, nudge, if you're in the nudge. - No. - Very subculture. So my suggestion would be learn perhaps from those tactics and go very deep subculture. Maybe there needs to be a message board or something that's out of sight. Some of the existing ones are just too public and broad, and you're gonna get visitors you don't want. - Right. I mean, they call it a cult. - Exactly. What are we doing, right? Isn't that supposed to be the point? Yeah. We have to be careful not to neglect to learn from people who we may not like. And the kek worshipers probably had something that should be learned from. Right. Learn from certain aspects, avoid it tactically. Be very mindful of the fact that a public profession over TikTok, while it may be effective, I just said before, none of us know how the invisible world works. I can't pronounce this in some cause and effect way, but it's something to think about. Whether the secrecy, the occultism is necessary. Right. I'm just fine. I'm just seeing your sake across. And there's mine. Yeah. When you got one on your shoulder too. That's right. This is an original pin that I believe Genesis designed. Yeah, there's one on you. I'm not sure too. Yeah, this is a patch. Yeah. That's interesting. But what I'm thinking is I've generally not been, and I won't be, the frontman occultist, you know, in a thing. It's like, for now, I'm really happy having a cult expert to help me in the way I'm sort of defining my will rather than being on the, on the thing. And even Jen, I mean, I was in the back with a keyboard watching what Jen was doing, but, you know, and writing like a, you know, a little car in the, in the pole of a truck. But it's, I'm a number two on the anyogram anyways. Well, I, I, I, I will try things that people might say to me or suggest to me. If I think that they are valid and interesting and seem to speak to my current search or wish, I don't care if it's a 20 year old kid somewhere saying, hey, I did this last night and it worked. I might try that very thing that that 20 year old kid did and learn from that person. We have to be really flexible and really willing not to get hung up on badges and insignias and experience and say, God damn it, I am going to learn maybe from someone I don't like. I published plenty of people that I don't personally like and I defend their work ardently and I benefit from it. And we've got to be flexible that way. I remember I was, I guess because of South by I was talking a lot about the original cool Austin of Mike judge and, and, and, you know, fringe wear and those guys. And I mentioned, what's his name? The, the, what's that, disinfo guy, Alex Jones. In the early years, Alex Jones was doing some really interesting work is to info wars and stuff. It was sort of like art bell, but, you know, but aggressive. And someone was like, how could you say, oh my God, he's been so bad. It's like, he, he got distracted by something. He got, you know, he's in a dark place now, but he was doing something freaking interesting. I remember that vividly and one of my kids tells me today that Alex is considered to establishment by the current crop of extremists like Alex, I don't know. And it's just funny, the cycles because there was a counter cultural aspect to Alex early on. And nowadays he's telling me that the current crop of extremists on YouTube and points elsewhere think Alex is just too close to the mainstream. It's kind of very cyclical. Yeah, I mean, it's shame. I mean, we've lost some of the best minds of our generation, you know, and it's interesting. Not to that, but to this to to the sort of, you know, Peter T. O'Bannon crazy. Yeah. Well, I agree. Now and again, you know, one of my kids in particular is into extremist thought. He's not extremist, but he watches this in the same way that some of us watch UFC or hockey games or you name it boxing. It's a kind of it's a social activity to him. And so I've watched a lot of these extremists on YouTube or on Tucker show or what have you some of whom's names you know like Fuentes, a lot of whom are even more obscure and more extreme than Fuentes. And I'm so struck that our lingua franca today is outrageousness extremism absolute. I suppose a swearing off of any sense of social polity or what is owed to my neighbor and yet they can have very consistent philosophies themselves. And they are razor smart. I think it's the spaces that they're in operate differently from the spaces I've been exploring. Spaces that they're in have no friction, no genuine social fabric to to mitigate, govern, dampen the effect. It's like you do something in the magical realm. It's not like ice skating. It's like it's my silly it's like there's so many considerations and things and impacts and everything you do is modified by the field. Whereas the stuff that's going out that this is so unmodified undigested spew and it reaches everywhere without any you know what I mean is like there's no atmosphere to neutralize anything. There's no atmosphere to neutralize it. And I think it's being received by people who don't necessarily have significant relationships in their lives. I mean 90% of these problems would get solved if these dudes who are watching this stuff and it is largely dudes had a significant other who could say cut that shit out you know tonight's bowling night or what have you. And I mourn that because people will talk about the despair and the rage and the on we in our culture. It is mitigated it seems to me and maybe the only thing that communicated or relationships close relationships and I I wish for some of these people that they find significant others so they can have intimate relationships because I think that would help with a lot of them. Let me do so I had an idea for a while to a spell to get a sense. I want to do a retro causal ad. So this is a this is a magic trick. This is a t-shirt. It's a team human t-shirt. It's size large and I'm going to give to Mitch. If in the future 10 team human listeners go to Kobe clean dot com. Type in team human and get 30% off on these Kobe clean laundry buds. It's like you know those pots you throw in except they're not poison not plastic not bad they're good. I have it now it makes my skin feel good not bad like detergent does so go to Kobe clean dot com put in team human in the discount code get 31% off. And if 10 of you are doing it in the future then Mitch is going to get this t-shirt now. All right so let's feel eight nine ten ten people did it. All right there you go my t-shirt thank you. I'm excited. Thank you. I love this t-shirt and I love that you're using this soft nice fit it. It is nice. Oh it's beautiful if it's too small then. No I'm mostly a guy who wears dark colors but I can't wait to wear this. Oh good and I'll give you a dark color jersey later. Oh sweet. Yeah. Okay I'm excited. Thank you. There you go. That's a new way to do it. Yeah. For setting the circumstances that allow me to have this t-shirt. I really appreciate it and I trust you guys have all enjoyed your laundry pots. Beautiful. Yeah. All right so the other thing. This is a whole other topic I wanted to get into. You did a show. Was it not renewed the UFO show? Was not renewed. All right because it was cool. It was a cool UFO show that he did where people who had these experience came in there. He reported it and then he and his cohort did all the scientific and actual research to see and they would say you had a weird you want a real experience or actually there was a satellite flying just over there. So it was great. A great way to do it. Kind of like Ripley's believe it or not. Yes no verdict. It was good. Now that you've been through that and all this new kind of UAP government CIA MIT Stanford stuff. I mean coming out what do you think is going on with the resurgence of sort of UAP activity and conversation. Do you think as some of my friends do all the governments trying to ready us to release the real thing or do you think because we're at a we're at a moment of novelty where we're at a moment of novelty where we're at it starts to happen. Oh it's so interesting. I don't have the same degree of faith that some of our conspiracy friends do and the government's capacity to snooker us with all these. - The media realities, I mean my God, there may be certain times in places where such intel operations are possible, but on mass I'm not so sure. Information is so wild and dispersed. I'm really not so sure. I think that we are in a phase of one step forward, one step back with a lot of UFO disclosure. There are precious, precious pieces of evidence that have not been explained by any mundane terms and that I have no expectation or get to be explained by any mundane terms. And then there were mistakes where the community thinks, maybe this is something that's gonna stand up and it doesn't stand up. We're in a very tough spot right now. It seems to me that there are five Epic-apardon three possibilities facing the truly unexplained cases. One is that there are secret weapon systems, which is sort of the most ordinary one and that probably does cover some basis. The other is that we're being visited by ETs and the other is the interdimensionality thesis which I have the greatest sympathy for because I think that as we're reckoning right now with retro causality, we have to be reckoning with that thesis and material immersion of it in our existence that these things show up in concrete physical existence as the ultimate sin of the Western mindset as it's been constructed up to this point but the Western mindset intellectually, less so perhaps culturally, but intellectually, has shifted and materiality is at the table. This hasn't reached Wikipedia yet. It will, it may take a generation but immateriality is at the table. Questions of retro causality, the multiverse, the incredible speed of quantum computing which violates our physical understanding of anything approaching linearity. These are things that every serious person has to be thinking about so to not bring that into the UFO conversation is a mistake. It has to be brought in, it has to be brought in with the appropriate degree of doubt that it's anything more than a supposition just as we're discussing magic as a supposition but there are correlates and there are things going on and we have to be able to talk about that. This UFO thing is very interesting. The public is very hungry for information and the public is also impatient. Now take my show alien encounters for example. That was in the HBO Max top 10 for three weeks and I was very excited but it was not renewed and I think what happened and this happens on Netflix as well is that the numbers trail off over time because the public wants to see the flying saucer. They don't want some guy talking about the multiverse or the chemistry of pure aluminum although I think all those things are really important and thrilling. They want the spaceship, the flying saucer, not the guy saying I'm a military contractor and I vow to you I have the highest security clearance as I've seen one, that era is over and the public is impatient and they will trail off and their attention will trail off without concrete evidence and I really do sympathize with their impatience and I understand it. So where the next turn of a page is coming from I do not know but it's now 2026, the groundbreaking reportage that opened up the news of the government program and validated the TikTok video and so forth occurred in 2017 on the cover of the New York Times so it's been a few years. That page has turned and we are due for another page and people are impatient. That impatience is either gonna go towards speculation or it's gonna go towards disengagement or it's going to be satisfied by something remarkable. I couldn't begin to say. - I mean it does feel like partly because of AI we're getting into a neighborhood of phenomena that any one of which will open up the whole thing so whether it's us or the Chinese or whoever get quantum computing and it's like, I don't think you can realize quite, you know, it's like or if Sam Altman and his friends get a conscious friggin AI or something or a, like again, or even just an AI that's complex enough to allow a hermit crab phenomena to let an entity or a demon or something, oh, I can live in here, you know? (laughing) Whatever happens, it's gonna break open. It's gonna break things open. I mean, we as a public have not been exposed to quantum computing yet. We talk about it, but all that we're talking about is news coming from people who are experimenting with prototypes, no businesses or defense companies that I'm aware of have yet used this in a more than experimental fashion. Now, Google made news a little over a year ago by announcing that it's quantum computing prototype Willow solved an unthinkably complex math problem in under five minutes that they estimated should have taken more time than actually exists to solve. And so the engineers surmised that Willow may have plucked the answer from the multiverse, which is very interesting. - Right. - And these are the kinds of things that quantum computing may place us in front of and it hasn't even reached us as a public yet. And another interesting possibility, I propose what you're saying, and everybody's debating it, is this question of AI and consciousness. Now, I used to be of the camp that AI machine intelligence can never be conscious because consciousness does things that AI doesn't do. For example, psychokinesis, which I know that our physicalist viewers will cry me for bringing up and say, "Doesn't exist." And of course, I have the numbers to defend that, but forget about the numbers. Let's talk about neuroplasticity, which is a more elementary field that everybody understands, where thoughts, whatever thought is, alter the neuro pathways through which electrical impulses travel in the brain. Is that of a different category than psychokinesis, only by terminology and culture? So, AI, to my understanding, can't do that. I would have been first in line to say no to the AI consciousness question, but I was recently talking to Tony Nader, who's the head of the worldwide transcendental meditation movement. Dr. Nader is the successor to the Maharishi, lovely man, and a brilliant man, a neuroscientist. And he said to me, "Not only will AI become conscious, but AI is conscious because his point of view is consciousness is all there is, and that there are stratus of consciousness." And so, this table is conscious, but at a much, much infinitesimally reduced level to anything that we understand. But his attitude is that consciousness, or what is sometimes referenced as the unified field, is the baseline of all that there is. So, we can't speak of lines of demarcation, this question of strata. And I thought that was a very interesting point of view. And it opens up a consideration about AI, as it does about everything. And these points of view, again, there are physics departments where faculty are having these discussions. It doesn't trickle down into opinion shaping media or reference yet, but it's on the table. - Yeah, well, as Jeffrey Kripall would say, there are humanities departments having these conversations. - That's right. - And they happen. - For a few hundred years. - Although I tend to find that the hard sciences are a lot more friendly to my points of view than the humanities and the social sciences. - Right now. - Jeff is a blazing and wonderful exception. In fact, he's created the exception. Jeff has created the exception, which is why I love him. - By retrieving the rule, though. - Yes. - Because the humanities only became afraid of the humanities because of the competition for science. So, it was like, oh, we're gonna count the number of vows in this Shakespeare play. And we're gonna prove the history of this that we became like a scientific sociology branch of academia rather than the weird, as creative, bizarre, fouseless. - Right. - That's right. That's where we come from. - And fouseless is at least in Gertrude's iteration where this popular concept, careful what you wish for, you just might get it, comes from. So, it all comes around. - Exactly. You wanna be accepted as a legitimate academic discipline? All right, here you go. How do you like that? It's like, and then we lost the juice, the weird, the wiggle room, that sort of liminal uncertainty in which not just the fun happens, but I think our most effective stuff happens. It's not gears, it's. - Yes. - And it's funny. [BLANK_AUDIO] many physicists whose work have implications in some of the areas that we're talking about. In the 70s, let's say, they were scared off from talking about it because the skeptical apparatus subjected people to ridicule for this. So the skeptical apparatus set us back. I would say I'm misusing the term skeptical, the pseudo-skeptical apparatus, the apparatus that identified itself as skeptical, but was really just taking a position of counter-advocacy. They made application into a taboo so that you were looping new age, or if you talked about application, or if you talked about things that we might consider extra-physical showing up in our concrete world. Jeff, Jeff, has helped break down that barrier within academia. The barrier exists in its most strident form, ironically, within the social sciences, because within the social sciences, like clinical psychology, scholars are taught to understand all the myriad ways that we deceive ourselves, and they're right, they're right. But we can't have terms like these brutally compact terms, like confirmation bias, or survivor bias, yes, they exist, and yes, they're real. But I'm not going to have a conversation with Laoza, or Jesus Christ, or Sylvia Plath, and invoke confirmation bias. This can't be the end of the search, and what we're trying to achieve in parapsychology is an understanding of confirmation bias and like concepts which are overused. They're just clinical terms for prejudice. And what's the work around? What's the work around? And we as an intellectual community have to respect that work around, or we are just damning data that doesn't suit taste. Right, right, we are actually damning evidence. We're damning evidence. And for me, it's always been, this is what I'm always doing with my student, particularly like dissertation people, is just admit to your underlying assumptions. Yeah. Just admit to those, and then we can move on. Right. I am heavily motivated to validate the metaphysical, and that's a blind spot for me. We're all in a position of paying maximal attention to whatever confirms a favorite thesis, minimalist attention to whatever contradicts it, and then announcing it as truth. That's a problem for me. We have to be transparent about this. I tried to get some of the very, very few people who deserve the title of skeptic to meet me in Buddha's middle way, and they will in private. They will not in public. Two other things I wanted to ask you about before we wrap up. One is, I've been getting, I've been having a different sensation or perception of the world as, I feel like I'm not just through, let's call it through the workings or through the, the realization of will and stuff. I feel like I'm like moving into a new neighborhood. I feel like there's like, I'm the people I'm meeting, the experiences I'm having. It's like, and that I'm gaining the sense of how to navigate more into that neighborhood. You know, the people that are, I mean, it was funny. My daughter and I, sounds like it sounds braggie. We had dinner with Park Aposie last night. She's just spoke at the SAG thing, and she's talking about, and she couldn't quite articulate it, but I knew so what she meant. She was talking about the way theater was in the 80s, and she said it was just like, it was like, you had your eight by ten, it was like down the block, it was like a neighborhood. And I know what she meant, because it was like New York was big, but it was almost like, you knew, you were in a community. It was like, oh, there's Wally Sean at the cafe. Oh, I'm going to see this Andre Gregory play, and oh, my agent knows it was like a community of people, kind of. And now I feel like neighborhood. It's not just that. It's also a book that shows up. It's an article I read. It's a person who needs help. It's a, the reason this happened today, and this had to happen today. This was important for me to happen today. The person that was supposed to be here for this shoot got sick. Texted me last night, I'm sick, whatever. It's like, I don't want to catch nothing. I don't want to make you do it. We'll do it. And it was like, oh, and Josh, my producer just said, we've got to have Mitch on. It's been a year. It's been exactly a year, because you were the first person we have when we started with the Kobe thing. And it was like, oh, let's start with Mitch. It was like, it's a new thing. And then I text and you could make it. So it's like, it's all, it's like the neighborhood unfold. It's hard to describe what it is. It's like having a compass or a magnet or a thing that starts. I mean, do you have, do you have a way of understanding this sort of neighborhood feeling that you make the right choices and you moved into a new neighborhood? Yes. I've become friends recently. With artists who have built my experience, given me different points of view on things, opened up different doors to me, allowed me to witness the genius of how they do their work. And I rejoice at that. And I try to get to the antecedent and say, where did this begin? And to live in the appreciation that you are exposed to and next to artists and thinkers of this caliber, it means so much to me to know people I can look up to and I can say to witness this person doing his work is a privilege. And so that's the neighborhood that I've been fortunate enough to find myself in recently probably started with a brilliant, brilliant painter, John Newsom, who brought me into a project that he was doing with Raymond Petabon. And I wrote a catalog essay for their exhibit on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues. And that was a turning point for me because it brought me into so many different relationships. And I call John modern Hermes because he just connects people and he's my antecedent. And it's very interesting when that happens. And it requires a certain passivity. You have to allow yourself to be traversed by it to just go with it. I've made too much of activity in my life. And I need to enter more of a period of repose. And when you enter that period of repose, it doesn't mean all the labor that you've done and all the work that you've done goes out the window quite the contrary. But you're allowing the bread to rise. And I'm trying to be more passive. And the work is different. There's still just as much work. But the work now has become how do I prepare myself and create the conditions of readiness rather than how do I manipulate reality to get the thing I want? Yeah. I mean, for me personally speaking, the creation of the conditions has been absolute labor and hard work. Gerjeev spoke about the, I think I could call it metaphysical properties behind unflinching perseverance. And we always hear about stick to it. I might sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I don't think I am. In any case, paradox is part of the path. Unflinching perseverance has a metaphysical quality to it. And it may be that unflinching perseverance allows things to reach you through passivity through that current. It's very real. It may have been called the zeitgeist by some idealist philosophers. Victor Hugo said nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. All of this is true. All of this is true. That current exists. And finding oneself within it can be rather thrilling and it's a passive experience. You're receiving. Right. Interesting how it comes up for me when you talk about that. What I'm wonder then is, and there's a few ways to ask this, what are you most afraid of? You know, this is a dark moment nationally or internationally or geopolitically. It's a scary moment environmentally. And it's a fragile moment temperamentally for people. I mean, do you have fear? And how do you sort of metabolize it or transform it into something useful or less uncomfortable? Well, do you mean fear on a social level? I don't know. Intimate level. I guess where do you, where do I'm where on, I don't know what level you might? I mean, if you've, I'm fits on all levels and talk about it. But if there's, I guess, sort of a most, where does where does fear surface for you? Well, I'm writing about this in a new book called Esoterica with a K. I said this to Raymond Petabon not long ago. I don't know if you heard me. We were at a very loud gathering, but sometimes people will pick up on transmission, if not on words. I said 90% of what I write, I write to prove that I'm not stupid. You know, that's my fear. Honest as I can put it to you. What is the search for if not honesty and transparencies and serenity of exchange? Those are the facts. I transmute it through my labor and it's led into gold. It's led into gold. It's an alchemical operation. Without that, I wouldn't be able to pursue things with the excellence that I do. There is such an intimacy between suffering and excellence. I don't know one artist, inventor, actor who would dispute that. They would rush to say, oh my god, that's been the propellant for my whole life. And I'm sure there's exceptions to that, but it's a general truth and the transmutation that the artist makes of the led into gold is his or her work. It's the same transmutation that Steve Jobs did. It's the same transmutation that an engineer does or that somebody who's trying to express him or herself in the world as I think we're supposed to as a fundamental part of life as above so below. So that's my approach to fear and transmutation. Interesting. It made me reflect on what might be my own. And I thought, my greatest fear, and I guess the reason of the routine human, my greatest fear is to be alone. You know, to not because on some level we're all alone. Yes. Well, I didn't include this in the book I'm working on because it was out of place, but I'll share it with you for whatever it's worth. There's a Tom Mutech scholar now dead named Aiden Steinshalz and he showed up unexpectedly to say hello to the "Lobovacure" Rebbe Manachem Schneerson and the Rebbe said, "Oh, good things always arrive unexpectedly." And he said to Steinshalz, "Is your wife with you?" And he said, "No, I'm alone." And the Rebbe said to him, "We're never alone." I know, we're not. We're not. We're not. But it's a fear. Right. It's understandable. Look, I turned 60 in November. Mazelta. Thank you. And I never cared about birthdays. I turned 50, didn't matter to me. Suddenly turning 60, I thought the phone call is coming. When and how I do not know, but that phone call is coming. And that turned my head. You know, that was a different mindset than I had before. It may come at different times for some people. It may never come for some people. But for me, hitting 60 was the realization that there's many more years behind me than there are in front of me. That's just a fact of nature. And that's heavy. There's some fear there. Yeah. Yeah. But the best yet to come or the best actually, when I find it, it's like now. Listen, I've never been happier. I mean, I was miserable when I was 15 years old. I can assure you. I was not a very happy camper when I was 30 years old. I'm a hell of a lot happier at 60 than I was at those times in my life. Yeah. vastly so. And I will tell you this, sitting here with you doing this like this. For me, this is the sweet spot. This is good as a cat's. Back at you. Yeah. Back at you. Thank you for incarnating in the same time that I did. (laughs) Me and in this neighborhood. Pleasure. It's quite sweet. Yeah. Wonderful to be here. Went fast. And thank you all for being on Team Human. You know we're sponsored by Kobe. You go to KobeClean.com put in Team Human and get 31%. We'll look up that number later with that number. Means I'm sure it's a biggie. Could change everything. And also, if you want to support Team Human itself directly, please go to patreon.com and look for Team Human. You go to teamhuman.fm and click on support, become a paying member of the team. You'll be ad free. Never fully Kobe free, but you don't want to be fully Kobe free. But you'll be ad free and you'll be loved and you get all sorts of other stuff. Team Human is produced by Joshua Chapdillon and edited by Luke Robert Mason. I'm Douglas Rushkov. That's Mitch Harowitz. Get his books. Get what do you should say? Get modern occultism now. Get that one now. You feel that that's the one you should have now, but then also have a copy of Daydream Believer for you. Get that for yourself. You really just should have that around. It does things. Alright, I love you all. You've been on Team Human. Our last best hope for peeps. Acast powers the world's best podcast. Christian Bale was preparing for his role in American Psycho, dressing the part, hitting the gym for the first time in his life, even getting his teeth re-done. Listen to our podcast What Went Wrong Every Week as we unearth the chaos behind Hollywood's biggest movie flops and most shocking successes, available wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com