Decoding the Gurus - Shamanism and the Art of Charismatic Otherness with Manvir Singh

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

The Decoders welcome back cognitive anthropologist Manvir Singh for a continued exploration into the social and cognitive dimensions of shamanism. Building upon their earlier conversation, this episode involves further discussion of the psychological mechanisms and cultural patterns that make shamanic practices a recurring feature across human societies. Drawing from Singh's latest book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (2025), the discussion addresses how these ancient practices persist and adapt in modern contexts.Taking our standard meandering conversational journey with Manvir, we traverse topics such as whether Jesus and the Buddha were shamans, the parallels between the Siberian tundra and Silicon Valley, the potential emergence of AI-driven shamans within virtual reality environments, and whether dialogos with Hermes counts as a soul flight.Something for all the family!LinksShamanism: The Timeless Religion by Manvir Singh (2025)Prof or Hobo websiteNew Yorker: The President Who Became a ProphetOur first interview with ManvirBuckner, William. 2022. "A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter–Gatherer Societies" Humans 2, no. 3: 95-103. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2030007

Hello Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus with the psychologist Matthew Brown in Australia, the anthropologist of sorts working in the psychology department, me Christopher Kavanaugh in Japan. working in the psychology department, me, Christopher Kavanaugh in Japan. And today we have returning guest anthropologist, psychologist, cross-cultural researcher, evolutionary theorist, Manvir Singh. Second time Manvir has been here. We didn't scare him away the first time. But the first time. But the first time Matt was too drunk to attend and he missed it. So now is his chance to meet up for it.

Ill from something. Yes. I was performing my important rituals. Let's just leave it at that. Good night Manveer. Good to see you. Yeah. Good to see you too. Thank you for having me on again. Yeah. It's a good too. Thank you for having me on again. Yeah. It's a good, you have a book coming out, but actually it's just a good excuse to, to talk to you again, cause we, we have a official policy. It comes down from the higher ups. You know, we can't, we can't mess with them and they tell us we're not allowed to do book promotions, but.

You know, we're rebels. We can push back. We make exceptions. So I'm very happy to talk to you about your book and do our part in like encouraging people to read it. But yeah, you're in the category of special people, man. There you get an exception from. Thank you.

Yeah. So what did you guys talk about in the last episode? Like what were the key things that you covered? I mean, it was so long ago. Are you testing a guess what? Do you think he remembers? He read back and renewed it. Fortunately I did because it's the kind of feral person I am.

But we were talking about shamanism, but mainly around Mandir's article in Behavioral Brain Science. And in the context of it being like an early developing profession and then other things as well. And we did talk about connections with gurus and stuff. But I think, Matt, that you will have your own thoughts. so I won't spoil that for you but um, yeah and and Mandir also I saw your lecture in the UK I think last year maybe it was uh yes yes at the association of cognitive yeah at the religion conference yeah and and you gave the overview of not just everything that's in the book, but like kind of a broad perspective on the topic. So yeah, I have a private presentation of the book as well. So don't worry, Matt, you won't step on any toes. We can grind. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, I'm going to do what an interviewer is meant to do now and ask Manvir about his book. So it's called Shamanism, the Timeless Religion. And, you know, it could be

said it challenges some of the conventional views of Shamanism. So let me ask you, like, how do you think about Shamanism? What is it at its heart?, and you know, what makes your view perhaps different or distinguishes it from other anthropologists' view of this phenomena? Yeah, great question. So I think about shamanism at its core to be three features. It's practitioners who enter non-ordinary states, enter trans states, provide services like healing and divination, and are understood to engage with unseen realities. And so I think many anthropologists

would have one of two responses to this. They would either think that shamanism is a useful term, but think that this is quite an inclusive definition, or as many people feel, they might be uncomfortable with shamanism being a term that we can use at all. And so for the first, there is this, like the term shamanism has been debated endlessly for the last century about like what can it include, what can it not include. Perhaps the

most famous definition is by this Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, who argued that shamanism is soul journeying, that its prototypical form is in Siberia, that it involves flight. But as I argue in the book, I think that's not justifiable. And then there's this other urge to say that using a term like shamanism across cultures leads us to draw analogies where they're otherwise not appropriate, that you should consider every cultural tradition in its rich local particulars. But I think, like I understand where both of them are coming from, but I think there's no doubt something very striking where like across societies you have this institution, this practice where specialists are entering these non-ordinary states, they're divining,

they're healing, they're understood to like battle with gods or commune with witches or, you know, fight off sorcerers. And we can use some other term for that. We can call it trans practitioners, whatever. I mean, given that that concept, that practice does accord with a lot of like what people have in mind with shamanism. I think it's justifiable. So yeah, yeah, I would say the main pushback I think is, and this happened actually last weekend. I was, I got in a mini debate with Wade Davis. He's this like anthropologist and ethnobotanist.

We were at the International Forum of Consciousness and I was making the argument as I make in the book that I think Jesus could, that we should more easily at least consider the hypothesis that Jesus was a shaman. And I think it made him uncomfortable. Why are you using this concept that is associated with Siberian practitioners and Amazonian practitioners and Koreans with something like early Christianity or Abrahamic prophets? And my argument is that I think it's very, very hard to create a conceptual category that captures what we think of as Siberian shamanism, Amazonian shamanism, Korean shamanism,

without also allowing that to include the Hebrew prophets, without also allowing that to include Pentecostal pastors. So I very much see it as this really ubiquitous phenomenon that humans, they recreate so reliably across cultures. Yeah, yeah. Look, I have a lot of sympathy with that view, you know, making this what I think is an artificial distinction between traditional or non-Western kind of historical backgrounds and Western ones and making these separate categories is not a helpful thing to do. Better, I think, as you do, to focus on the functional aspects of it. So you, I think, argued that shamanism is kind of like a nearly inevitable thing to arise in human society.

So I guess that implies that it's delivering on some core psychosocial needs. Can you speak to that? Yeah. So I think you described that well. I think the driving hypothesis of the book is that it is this near universal tradition that just arises everywhere because it speaks to something really critical about our psychology. And what I think is at the core of shamanism is that it is giving people a sense that they can manage uncertainty. The world is filled with these uncontrollable events that people want to have control over, the biggest one being illness, but misfortune more generally, the weather, attracting animal game, doing well in politics, doing well in sports. I mean, the list is very big, but misfortune more generally, the weather, attracting animal game, doing well in politics, doing well in sports. I mean, the list is very big, but the most common one is illness.

And so I think people really have a desire to control these outcomes that are very high stakes in their life. And that essentially creates like a market for magic. It creates an opportunity for specialists to compete amongst themselves with the results that the most psychologically compelling specialists or practitioners will be the ones who succeed, the ones who can essentially tap our psychology

in the most effective or compelling way to convince us that we have this control. And I think what's really critical at the center of shamanism is the sense that if a person deviates from normalness, if they seem fundamentally different from a regular person, that makes it more credible or tenable that they have special abilities. And while I think this is at the core of shamanism, I think this is in fact like a tendency that you find all over the place, even outside of trans practitioners, that

like a tendency that you find all over the place, even outside of trans practitioners, that we want to manage uncertainty and we turn to individuals who seem to perform credibility often by deviating from our sense of a normal human. I see. Yeah. So they have to present themselves as a very special human because someone who can deliver on the promise of addressing those needs that can't be handled in a more prosaic kind of way. So I think that's connected with your idea or your term that you coined of zinizing. They zinize themselves in order to appear more otherworldly and therefore sort of more credible. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. And you can think about it essentially if, if let's say I wanted, you know, my family member is sick and we live in an oncology where I think that's caused by gods or witches or

sorcerers or whatever. And you came along and you were like, hey, Manvir, I can battle the witches that are causing your illness. I would be like, you're just a regular dude. What gives you that ability? And the way that shamans do this so common across cultures is a kind of fundamental transformation. And it happens both. There's like an essential long-term transformation and there's one in the moment, the long-term one. And both of these are zinizing. They're moving away. They're essentially fundamentally transforming, moving away from, from normal humanness. And so one is, is you might say, oh, you know, I'm a different kind of human. I got struck by lightning. My skeleton was replaced. I underwent these like really profound transformative events as a young person. And then in that moment when you claim to speak to a witch that's causing illness, you

might enter these really non-ordinary states, these trans states. You might dance until you're speaking in tongues and babbling, or you might take a psychoactive substance that makes it seem like this person is experiencing something no normal human normally does. And I think both of those are essentially performances of otherness that make it more compelling to the client that, okay, this person is actually essentially capable of doing the superhuman, the near miraculous. I have a related question, Manvir, that I'm very sympathetic and probably in broad agreement with the

definition that you have for shamanism. And I also like that, you know, you have these three components, so you can say, you know, something that has two of them might be a bit like shamanism, but missing the kind of full package. And on that, related to the point you made about Jesus or, you know, parallels in traditions where people might not have traditionally saw them. Again, I'm absolutely open and I think that's a perfectly viable thing to, you know, point out Pentecostal preachers and whatnot that meet the definition. But I am curious if you have figures like Jesus or the Buddha or any number of religious founders or just influential figures in religious tradition.

Like when I think about the Buddha and I'm thinking of more the traditional presentation than the one that's necessarily that popular in the West, but like a mastery over metaphysical knowledge, including unseen realities, right? Heavens and hells and ability to interact with gods and teach gods and so on. And has supernatural powers, has like a hygiographic story where he's doing lots of crazy things and comes back and can heal followers, but also provide them with like a philosophical system to lead to, you know, salvation Nirvana, whatever the case might be. So is there an issue like how do you draw the divine line or is the argument that actually well in that respect, the Buddha would also be a shaman. I'm kind of interested, you know, on the boundary of the definition where you draw it. Yeah. So I don't know enough about like historical reconstructions of the Buddha, but let's say if the Buddha is claiming to engage with these unseen realities, gods, hells, et cetera, and using that engagement to heal divine, provide these other instrumental or pragmatic services,

then the really critical question is like, does that involve non-ordinary states? Is the Buddha, you know, even like entering a very still meditative state in which it's believed that, you know, the Buddha's soul is leaving or, you know, was there a trance state? Then that would be a shaman. I want to say though that like, so I think this form, the shamanic practitioner, is very common, but it can have different social implications. And so one thing I talk about in the book is when shamans become messiahs, when you have a social context where people are not only in need of healing or some kind of divination, but they want some really major social transformation.

They want cargo. The colonial authority has come and they have these incredible goods and they want those somehow. Or they want the Europeans to be wiped out. I'm thinking of South African,, Kosa, messianism. They want some like huge social transformation or the Taiping rebellion being another one where they want some huge social transformation. Then you have instances where shamans not only promise healing, et cetera, but they promise upheaval, social transformation, overthrowing

some government, banishing evil, and then they can become a kind of new social form beyond the local healer. So I think those are still shamans, but they are kind of shamanic messiahs. And so I think, you know, maybe the Buddha is not only providing these shamanic services, but then also providing like a new philosophical framework or, you know, providing some kind of, I don't know, grand enlightening, whatever message, then I would, I would think, yes, there's like a shamanic core, but that is being used in this different way. know, even though those aspects are in like Buddhist narratives or whatever, it's warned against being the main focus, right? Like you shouldn't be going in order to develop supernatural powers or whatever. You should have the goal of extinguishing karma so that you can exit

the cycle of samsara. So maybe in that respect, it's more that there are like shamanic features at play than necessarily like the Buddha primarily as a shamanistic figure. So if I mean, if we use Jesus as an analogy where I think during the time of Jesus, to the best that we can tell, Jesus was foremost a healer and to some degree like an end times prophet. But of course the historical Jesus that, you know, the Jesus that has a function within the creed of Christianity takes a very different form where maybe these miraculous healings, demon exorcism are really downplayed and instead Jesus as an icon of the main ideological tenets of Christianity comes more to the forefront. So again, I don't know so much about like the historical Buddha, but I think it's not uncommon where figures are themselves relatively shamanic. They start a new religious movement and then the religious movement changes their character

in the context of that religion. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you can see how someone could be operating as a shaman, perhaps like a local kind of figure in their lifetime. They might not imagine that they're going to ultimately be promoted to, to occupy a central place in a new religion. And the role that they perform historically and in retrospect could be entirely different from, from what they were doing at the time.

Related to this a little bit, maybe it's not, but anyway, one of the things I think you emphasize is that it's a healthy, normal kind of sociological activity that's going on. The people that follow a shaman and engage their services are getting something from it, and the shaman themselves is getting something from the deal as well. So can you tell us about what each party is getting out of the transaction, if you like? And also, are there situations that you came across in your travels and in your research where in your travels and in your research where it wasn't perhaps a healthy reciprocal relationship or was it always kind of adaptive? Yeah, so I actually I think it would be a bit apprehensive about viewing it foremost

as like a healthy reciprocal relationship. Or at least I would caution against that being like the prevailing framework and maybe view it more as shamanism is an incredibly compelling cognitive technology that creates a very rich simulated reality or experience in which people feel like this person is somehow controlling the ultimate uncertainty in their life. And I think that can be beneficial to the client. It can be therapeutic. I also review evidence that maybe there are genuine therapeutic effects on things like pain or fatigue. The shaman in turn also often gets paid for these services, sometimes in very explicit ways.

But I also think it can just as often be used for exploitation. I think it can have very negative consequences. And so in the book, for example, I talk about how different shamans will often use their position to get sex. There's this great line from this ethnography about the Sora in India where a shaman is working with a widow. He's channeling her dead husband. And as the dead husband says something like,

I really want to have sex with you, but I need to do it through the body of the shaman. There were also, I mean, there are reports among the Inuit in the Arctic of shamans threatening that particular women might get all kinds of supernatural consequences if they don't have sex with them. I mean, there's ethnography from the Hivado in, I believe, believe Ecuador where shamans are very open about getting preferential treatment because other people are afraid of them. I mean shamans are humans and I think they can take advantage of their position for exploitative

ends. I also think, I mean just as much as going to a shaman and being healed or them performing a healing can have potentially therapeutic effects. It can also sow discord. Shamanism is deeply linked with witchcraft. And you come to me, you think that someone is haunting you. I can reify that. I can say, yeah, it is the case, Matt, that Chris has been using spells at night and I am going to enter trance and I'm going to fight off Chris. And the result is that there's more distrust. Chris's magic is too strong. And that also creates a complicated thing for shamans themselves where they themselves

walk this tricky line between being considered healers and often being considered sorcerers. So where I worked with the Mentawai, the Sekire are very clear that they do not know how to treat witchcraft or sorcery. And what I suspect is going on is that in those contexts where shamans do claim to deal with witchcraft and sorcery, they are themselves often accused or suspected.

You know, they do a healing, it doesn't work, the person dies, the finger is pointed at them first and foremost. Yeah, you can see the risks involved. So on one hand, the role of a shame, it is generally going to be like a high status one. Like you're going to be respected and you're going to get some kind of regard from it, which then can translate into more basic things like money or sex and so on. But they're dealing with existential fears and existential problems that people have got. There could be something like cancer.

And when the stakes are that high, then there's a good chance of some blowback. So what's the range of, I guess, high stakes existential problems that people go to shamans for? You mentioned health is a big one, obviously. What are the other ones? Yeah, so health is a really big one.

Then there's divination, which includes a lot, but it's just going to someone for otherwise inaccessible information. And so of course that like deals with a lot of things, you know, will it rain tomorrow? In Mentale, it's like, will tourists come and bring a lot of money? But so then there's also getting this opaque information, which I think applies to a lot

of stuff. Then there is different forms of economic success. And so that can be like, we want hunted game, we want to go catch animals. That can be like, we want the crops to do well. But that can also be in a place like Korea, like, we want this crops to do well, but that can also be in a place like Korea, like, we want this company to do well. There's weather control, which is, of course, relevant to those kinds of things. Shamans also, I mean, just as much as they heal sickness, again, this is the complicated nature, they also are sometimes hired to cause illness. You know, you want your rival to get sick, you want an enemy to die. I mean, then it really

expands. So I was talking about the, oh, I said hivato, they're called the shwar, sorry. Hivato is, I think, no longer used. But the shwar, so Dorsa Amir, who works with the shwar, was telling me that people go to the shamans before big football matches to help them get success in those the next day. I talk about in the book, I was watching a ceremony

in India where people were asking about how a student would do on exams. So it, I mean, the biggest high stakes thing is of course illness and to some degree just subsistence, but the number of domains were uncertain where there's uncertainty and people want to control it is much more widespread. Manvir, you mentioned there, you know, like the range of things that people can be interested in resolving. And one thing it made me think about, and we talked about it last time, but I don't think I asked you this. So mediums, right, have special abilities to communicate with the dead. And so in like the Western context, probably the way that it's most commonly done is a performance, right? That's where most people have seen it.

However, lots of people engage medium services privately and they find the experience therapeutic, right? Because they want to go and communicate with loved ones and basically get reassurance that things are okay and so on. So are mediums a subcategory of shamans or are they doing some things that mark them out as a distinct category? Yeah. So I would say that very often mediums would qualify as shamans. And that was part of this whole debate that you had in the late 20th century where like, or the mid to late 20th century, where Eliade said shamans are only those practitioners whose souls are believed to leave their bodies. But then many individuals who are widely thought of as shamans, including many Siberian practitioners,

are actually possessed, you know, the soul of someone comes into their body. Korean shamanism is ultimately something of mediumship. It's spirits coming into the body and then the individual channeling. And so then someone, Lewis, pushed back on Eliade and said, actually, it's not soul journeying, it's all soul, spirit possession is shamanism. And so what I'm saying is like, you're both right. I mean, they're both shamanism. And because people have shown that even in Siberia, which is because of historical reasons,

really taken as like the prototype of shamanism, the same practitioner can be understood to go on a soul journey, to be possessed, to call spirits and talk to them. In some instances, it's really like the trance state that is very salient. And then the cultural script actually varies much more around them, if you know what I mean. them if you know what I mean. Yeah. And I think an interesting aspect of that, like related to what you were saying about shaman, you know, just being people that like in that context of of mediums or spirit communicators or whatever in Western context, people have the image of, you know, there are charlatans or like predatory individuals. And they're also like, you know, sincere people who are trying to help people and believe that they have those abilities. So they extend the range, I think, in general of possible motivations and human characteristics. But when it comes to exoticized or more foreign religions, people are lumped into one category.

And it can either be disparaging or it can be kind of hagiographic, like putting them up on the pedestal. But it made me think that I saw a paper, I think you were retweeting it recently. Is it William Buckner? I think that's his name, evolving Mollick on Twitter, who wrote about sleight of hand techniques. I think he was talking about shamans and this kind of thing. Yeah. And that you know, that the practice like James Rondy talked about it with psychic surgeries where people will remove things as a demonstration that they have found an insect or an organ or something bad. But in that case, it involves sleight of hand.

It has to write unless you believe that they're materializing the item. But that seems to imply intentional deception to some extent. So I'm kind of curious about your opinion of that man. Do you think that that obviously people are going to do theatric performances and people are going to have different degrees, different. So I'm not saying like across the whole field. I just mean in general that element where somebody is presenting the part,

but they they are engaging in, you know, deception in order to make it more dramatic or more convincing. Do you think that is like a common thing or is that going to be more like just a subset that appears in? I think that's super common. I think slight of handsh, like what we might call certain forms of charlatanism is super common. I think though the term charlatan is complicated because I think in many contexts you will have, so you find this in Mentale.

In Mentale they do this thing where, you know, let's say your knee is in pain, I will rub it and I'll pull out a little stone and I'll say that was the illness. And so the shamans will do that, the sikere will do that. But then when they get sick, they go to each other. When their children get sick, they are desperately going through the shamanic healing techniques.

And so the way that I think about it, I guess I think two things. On the one hand, I think the same reasons that patients often think that shamans work, the shamans often think that they themselves are effective. The patient will go to the shaman three days later, the patient will walk away or their illness might heal, just as the patient will think, oh, then I think the sikere actually worked. The sikere will also potentially think that. So I think the shamans probably have this

nuanced understanding where, yes, there's some sleight of hand that they engage in, but they also probably, I think, believe that to some degree they are effective and maybe that's necessary sometimes. But then I also, there's a really interesting thing where sometimes I think some shamans might think, yes, I have to do this sleight of hand, but even the sleight of hand might have some effect. And there's a quote in Will Buckner's paper that I put into the book that he found in a Thierry Del Fuegge ethnography where the healer says something like, you white people give sick people these white tablets, that's not gonna heal, you have to,

I forget the exact wording, but you have to remove the illness. And it's a healer saying it, and of course they are themselves, I think potentially using sleight of hand, and yet nevertheless, they seem to think it is necessary for an effective healing. So I think how they themselves think about it is pretty complicated.

There's this amazing, although the historiography is a bit complicated, but essentially an autobiography of a Pacific Northwest shaman, a Kwakwaka shaman called Kisaleed, where he starts by saying, I'm doubtful, I'm skeptical of whether these shamans have the powers that they do, so I want to become one. And he becomes one. And then he learns some of this sleight of hand. He learns that when you were extracting illness, you want to put some down in your mouth, you want to bite down, the down will get bloody and then you suck on the part that hurts and then you pull it out and you say, there's the illness and you have this bloody, weird thing in your hand. But then he says that, yes, he learned this and all of the

other shamans were blown away and they came to him and they wanted to know what that technique was. And I think he says even that one shaman offered his virgin daughter to have sex with Qasallid to learn this technique because Qasallid learned it in a neighboring group. But then he also says over time that he thinks that shamans do actually also heal. And so that I think is an interesting place where you find this more complicated belief about efficacy or authenticity. A big asterisk is that when Qasale's story is often presented, it's presented as this like untouched indigenous authentic shaman among the Kwakwaka and it turns out he actually worked as Franz Boas' assistant for like 30 years.

And then after that Franz Boas took his autobiography or maybe during and edited it. So he also, I think, has some sense that Westerners have a certain skepticism or doubt? I mean, I guess it makes sense if you have a view of the world that is perhaps a little bit magical, like that's how you feel like the world works, then you could very easily, earnestly believe that going through the motions of extracting some blood and guts from your belly, right, even though you know it's a show and you could see that that could have a functional, you know, it can actually help as well because it's clearly, it has the vibe

or the feeling of doing something much more than taking a little white pill does. So I think that makes sense. I'm trying to, I think this sort of comes up when we look at the gurus as well. And like, are they, are they intentionally deceiving people? Or to what degree do they believe in themselves and what they're doing? And it's clearly a bit of

both. And those two things seem to be mixed together. And I sometimes think of like a used car salesman who, who is, you know, like his job is to sell the car. But to the extent that he thinks about it, he may well believe that he's, he's, he's helping people and he's getting people into the car that they need. And the car's a good car. And I feel like people are much more flexible generally to align those two, those two things. Yeah.

I mean, it comes back to self-deception. I mean, I wonder what y'all think of this idea of self-deception. I know that in cognitive science, it's a bit debated. I know Hugo Mercier is quite skeptical that this is what's going on. But this idea that, yeah, that you sometimes think you believe in something when it's strategically useful to believe it. I think it makes some sense. Yeah, I mean, Chris will make fun of me if I mentioned my favorite psychology article of all time, which is belief select possessions. But it's, it's kind of about beliefs,

basically, and there are different kinds of beliefs. There's a belief like, where did I leave my car keys, which I'm not invested in, it doesn't provide me any sort of social benefits, but it's helpful to me to the extent that it matches reality, physical reality. And then there's a bunch of other beliefs that we all have, right? That I'm good looking, people like me, you know, whatever, I can write a good article that I'm writing is good, you know, the list goes on. And with these, which I think this is connected strongly to your book, which is the important thing is not so much whether it matches reality, but rather whether it

fosters useful behavior in you and in yourself and also in other people. And the point that I was going to make was that there's a figure, an online streamer who engages in therapeutic known therapy online because he'd be censored by his official body if it was therapy. But he's called Dr. K. And he's basically engaging in long form, therapeutic-like conversations with people. But he's also a guy that's quite heavily into Ayurvedic type stuff and spiritual approaches. And recently he was talking that he's become more convinced about the power of paying large amounts of money for spiritually potent items or just like transfers of spiritual power from, you know, gurus or yogis.

Right. And in this, he was pointing out that one, he's very skeptical about the whole practice. You know, he, he thought it was a scam, but then he had some experience and he looked into it a bit more and find out maybe not, but he is warning in that, that the problem is that there's a lot of scammers out there who are, you know, taking money and providing things that don't do anything. Um, however, for the real deal, you have to pay them a lot of money because, you know, there's a lot of things that go into it and they got to do that. And he also said, he, you know, advocates for meditation style practices, but he mentioned that 99% of meditation instruction is bullshit, but 1% is like the real deal. So it's like this

simultaneous thing where you're highlighting, you're skeptical and you're aware that there's a lot of issues with it, but there's like a core that is authentic and real. Now, in his case, you can talk about, you know, all the incentives, but I also think it's absolutely true. Like he practices what he preaches. He's very interested in those things. He's often talking about the benefits that they have. So I think it isn't so simple to be like, well, he just wants to discredit, you know, anybody that would compete with his perspective. It's more like it is often the case that there's a dual narrative of we're aware of the problems and the kind of like more people towards the charlatan side of a field. But we think that there's, you know, good stuff going on. And that's what people say about evolutionary psychology, right? Or cultural evolution as well. So I get it.

So I mean, it reminds me when I was working on the book very early, and this eventually went in the book, but I also wrote an article for Wired about it, about how CEOs seem to be engaging in a lot of practices that look very shamanic to me. And the one I was really focusing on was the obsession in Silicon Valley tech culture, especially among CEOs or including among CEOs for deprivation schemes. And so it's things like intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is like the most tame version. Then there's things like dopamine fasting.

There's crazy claims about subsisting on green juice. I remember one CEO like every day would eat food only that started with that letter. And just the like strange deprivation schemes reminded me so much of what you see in shamanism where you have these practitioners who are denying them food and sex, and that is perceived as helping them cultivate some kind of special sites, some kind of special power, these special abilities. And I talked to one of these CEOs who has really talked about his deprivation scheme quite a bit. It's on LinkedIn. He has talked to various media outlets about it. So he really advertises it. And he had said something like,

and I don't want to pick on him, so I don't want to give too many details, but he said something like, yeah, I mean, so many, it really disgusts me that people do this for the social benefits. What really motivates me is wanting to really get the benefits, the personal benefits, the increased focus, the better health that comes out of these different self-denial schemes. Like these are really necessary for me to cultivate the abilities that I think are so critical for doing special work, but I recognize that like all these other people are doing it so performatively. And I found that fascinating. And A, that's probably

what he believes, but I think it's also uncomfortable for a lot of us to recognize and to state publicly if we are doing something for performative or strategic ends. Yeah, this speaks to Matt's, you know, belief or like possessions people as well, like, you know, people, we're all engaged in signaling in lots of different ways. And it is true, however, that some do it more. engaged in signaling in lots of different ways. And it is true, however, that some do it more than others. And I remember Manvir that there was a magazine that was writing an article about misogi events, the kind of cold water rituals in Japan, right. And they they saw some of my stuff about fieldwork there.

And they they wanted to write an article about it. And they sent me a list of questions and I could see exactly what they wanted me to say, because they were saying, you know, oh, what is what are misogui practices, why do people do them, blah, blah, blah? You know, would it be good for people in our readership to engage in their own misogui practices? Right. And like I also find that my answers were deeply, deeply unsatisfying to somebody with that agenda because I was like saying, well, I mean, you could do it, but like, why you would do a misogi ritual in like New York if you don't have, you know,

that like, there's a very, like specific context and social thing around it. But like, I mean, you could do it you can You can fill up your bath and go to if you were lucky But I don't think like and and there was there's also an interesting aspect than that that at that misogi ritual like the priest for example At the temple it was that would talk about high or some of the like the more senior people would talk about high It's about you know, a kind of not a individual focused thing. It's about like developing a kind of good merit for the community and fostering the spirit, you know, for the kind of health of the community. But then individuals competed like how long they could sit in the cold water for

and like who can hug the block of ice? And're getting like pictures taken by journalists right like hugging the ice and competing so like it clearly was also an individual you know demonstration of resilience so that thing about you know which one do you take as the actual motivation it's likely all all mixed in together. But the optimizer stack approach that, you know, here's a list of 20 things you got to do before 9am. It is interesting to put that into the framework of, you know, aesthetic practices in like what would be regarded as spiritual or non-scientific type practices. Because yeah, there's a lot of overlap there. I think yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it's something that I think is especially relevant for like the Silicon Valley tech scene, I mean I so I live in California I live like an hour from the Bay and so of course, I'm like very aware of a lot of these dynamics But if you think about it, it's like an ecology where there's

so much uncertainty. It's like all of these startups and which of these startups is going to be successful and the startups are competing amongst themselves to get funding. And the people who have money who are funding these startups have so little to go by other than in many instances, the charisma and personality of the founder and CEO. And essentially what they have to convince these people who they're trying to get funding from is that they can produce the near miraculous. They can get a unicorn, they can get a dekakorn, they can get one of these companies that produces a billion or $10 billion.

So you have a market for which there's very high uncertainty. I mean, it's very similar to shamans and they have to essentially convince potential clients, is a weird term, but these people who want to get something out of them that they can produce the near miraculous. And so the way that they do it is competing amongst themselves to look like they are different from normal humans, that they are touched, that they have cultivated special powers, that they see the world differently. In the book I talk about Sam Bankman Freed, after that whole catastrophe it came out

that he was actually so deliberate in part about his weird schlobby appearance that people would be like, you gotta cut your hair. And he was like, well, the hair is positive expected value. Having wild hair, you know, gains credibility or makes me more charismatic. So there was even on his part a recognition that looking like a schlub, looking like someone who's unconcerned with social norms and almost like unable to understand social norms made

other people think, oh, there's something potent about this guy. Like this guy doesn't understand social norms, so he might be a genius. Well, look, it's absolutely true. On a university campus, if you see a guy wearing a suit, then he's usually an idiot. The guy shuffling around in sandals and a bad t-shirt, that guy is a genius. I'm sold on that heuristic. Wait, speaking of that, have you all ever been to profferhobo.com or something like that?

Profferhobo? No, I love it. Is it like Gary Lix? or something like that. No. Off or mobile? No. That's, I love it. It's like Daryl East. I might be forgetting it, but Kim Stirling is on there, who is like a, anyway. I love it. But OK, what I was going to say is that your model, we'll link to this website in the show notes.

But be your model makes very specific predictions about when you would expect to see this kind of shamanic behavior because it's going to be situations which are very high stakes and in situations where there is a high degree of uncertainty. And so to the extent that both things get sorted out, then there won't be much of a place for it. Are there any other, like are those the two key ingredients or have we missed anything? No, I think those are the two most. Yeah, yeah.

I think those are critical. And I don't think it's necessarily always, of course, that you'll have trans practitioners. You'll have people who are entering trans. But I think you'll have these specialists who promise control over uncertainty and the main ingredient, the main thing that they are often selling is charisma, is a performance because like you often have nothing else to go by. I have like two related connections there that I see and one is one is with your research, but the first one just Manvir is like, I know you talked like in a recent article in the New Yorker

I know you talked in a recent article in The New Yorker about the kind of connections to this suite of practices and charismatic authority and Trump, MAGA, and QAnon, this kind of thing. And that in moments of uncertainty or financial crisis or this kind of thing, these people can be appealing. But I also, like Matt suggested, and like we're talking about with Silicon Valley, think back to when Japan had its economic boom in the 80s and 90s. And it led to a revival in interest in New Age and religious traditions. Aum Shinrikyo rose during that period. And then that subsided whenever there was the sarin gas attack. That was like a fairly dysphoric experience for people. But it seems to mirror the kind of thing that you're talking about with like techno monk style CEOs or Lex Friedman meditating on death when he wakes up

in the morning before he starts his podcast preparations. So I'm interested, is that connection there that you have both if you have like a material abundance period where there's people's needs are met on an economic level to a certain extent, right? There's lots of people not doing well even during the boom in Japan and also these crisis periods. So I'm just curious about that dynamic. Like is it, would we expect it in both periods or is one more conducive than the other? Well, that's a good question. I would think in general, avoiding misfortune is, I think people have a, you know, at the end of the day, people have a stronger desire to avoid misfortune is, I think people have a,

at the end of the day, people have a stronger desire to avoid misfortune, but I think when the economic benefits are so potentially huge and there's a lot of uncertainty over who exactly is gonna get it and how you get it, I think that's very ripe for it. So I mean, I think in general, people are probably a bit more spiritual or religiously minded when there's misfortune at hand, but I think potentially huge benefits are a very important driver.

And what I like about pointing out these times of abundance is that I think sometimes when we're talking about uncertainty, people can very, if you talk about, oh yeah, people are more likely to engage in spiritual or religious practices or magical thinking during times of uncertainty, they really focus on threat, misfortune, but there's also a lot of uncertainty as, as we're talking about during times of abundance, where the abundance is hard to predict who it'll go to. Yeah. And that actually relates to the second point I was going to connect to with your stuff, Matt, is that, you know, Matt's done work on addiction and gambling and this kind of thing.

And it seems to be like, Matt, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but like, the gambling environment then seems like it should be ripe for that kind of dynamic. But does that occur a lot like oh, yes magical in gambling context, uh Now I think about it no, no not so much shamans, but certainly like magical thinking and Delusional thinking like and there are heaps of rituals and stuff that gamblers do in order to get, you know, be more lucky. But why not humans? Yeah, why not specialists who can promise to help you figure it out?

Yeah, I mean, I could be forgetting something. I mean, there are, I mean, I can think of examples. So in the arena of sports betting, for instance, there are tipsters. So there are people who provide services to... And it's an extremely dodgy industry because they're getting kickbacks from the actual operators, the actual gambling companies, and they make money when their clients lose money. That is in spies. Yeah, it is terrible. It is terrible. And they can do,

it's a way for the, this is off topic, but so it's a way for the gambling operators to basically do this terrible behavior, which is to encourage delusional thinking, do a whole bunch of false advertising and encourage people to bet a lot. But what, because they outsource it to these independent tipsters, they don't have legal you know liability so they can go all the tips is in it and we didn't know so Yeah, so it's anyway, um but look I think another area that I've done of some research on is complementary and alternative medicine and

Why it is so appealing in some ways in contrast to conventional medicine, despite it usually not really working in the material sense. And so there's a lot of crossover there, I think, with the services that is provided. You see with some, not all, but a great deal of alternative medicine. There is a ritual associated with it. There is a sense of mystery and complexity. And there's kind of like a fascinating like backstory. If you take anything like homeopathy or anything like that, there is a rich kind of law attached to it.

So have you looked into that? Into alternative medicine? Yeah, like in terms of Shaman, the crossover between Shamanism and alternative complementary medicine. Well, I mean, my first thought is that like, where is the line between necessarily like Neo-Shamanism and alternative medicine? Because I think in many cases, like, you know,

I remember during COVID, I read about this in the book, but like, I think The Evening Standard in the UK published shamans who you can visit in London, which is that alternative medicine, is that neo-shamanism, is that paganism? I think they bleed so closely together. Of course, I think there are individuals who are not, who I of course think many individuals are providing alternative medicine and are not shamans. I think the question that comes with any kind of service like this is how does an individual

build credibility? So like you were going to someone, you want to deal with some source of uncertainty, that individual has to convince you that they have this ability in a way that normal people do not. Shamans do that through transformation, both fundamentally and in these other ways. But I think other people can try to build credibility. They can take different approaches. They might, you know, say that they are tapping into some ancient tradition or ancient knowledge that has otherwise been lost. Of course, a lot of shamans do that, but a lot of alternative medicine people might also say, yes, this is a body of knowledge that was recorded

and has otherwise been forgotten or has been deliberately excluded by some distrusted, by some malicious, powerful authority. Yeah, yeah, so I think some alternative medicine people are just taking a different approach to building credibility. Just thinking of a few examples, I could definitely confirm that some CAM practitioners definitely do cultivate a sort of sense of otherness. They have a certain vibe, they'll speak a

certain way, they'll dress a certain way, they'll decorate their consultancy room in a certain way, in a way that a conventional doctor does not. So it's maybe they're not doing a dance and they're not communing with spirits, but I think they're on the spectrum. They're analogies. I think it depends on the old kind of practitioner. Well, they do the dancing,

communing with spirits or not, but yes. Yeah, I mean, in the book, I write a lot about, I write about money managers and this whole category more generally of hedge wizards, these individuals who promise uncertainty or promise control over uncertain outcomes, especially in these industrialized Western societies where money managers are the prototypical example. And I'm very careful to say that of course they're not shamans, but they're shaman analogues. And there have even been people in their analyses of money managers who argue that they're not shamans, but they're shaman analogues. And there have even been people in their analyses

of money managers who argue that they're doing a lot of performances of otherness. They're claiming these superhuman schedules. They're like, for some reason, performing like incredible hedonism. All of these things that give you a sense that this person's incentives, this person's mind, this person's capabilities are distinct from mine. And so maybe they have the ability or the motivation to discern the patterns in this ultimately chaotic system that is the market. I mean, and they're very explicitly forecasting. There's a, there's a parallel that I see, and we talked about a little bit last

time, Mandeo, but it's like in sharper focus based on what you said, which is like in the guru category that we look at, that, you know, the kind of contemporary gurus, there's a very, very explicit disparagement of institutional authorities, mainstream authorities, alternative systems of authority. And there is simultaneously an effort to like build up an alternative foundation for credibility. And it can even be that you gained mastery from those organizations that you're discrediting, right? Like they are not corrupt, but you were there when they were still good or you, you know, managed to kind of develop the skills despite the corrupting influence. And in our experience with those kind of figures,

they are very often emphasizing that their way of thinking, that their approach to things is special, emerged early in life, was recognized by others as like unusual and allowed them to kind of see, so that they're not invoking not yet anyway, like invisible, unseen spirits or worlds, but they're often invoking their approach to the world as a transformative, different way. Game be. And that allows them to approach things in a way that is autodidactic and builds up credibility. So this like myth making around them is a consistent feature. And when I frame it in the way that you just talked about, that's like, everybody has to build up.

Like, why should you listen to me? What's the credibility? It makes sense, which makes me a bit sad. It makes sense, which makes me a bit sad. That's like a general pattern that just functions across humans in all sorts of different areas. But yeah. Yeah. So two thoughts come to mind.

One of them, oh my god, what was I going to say? OK, well, I'll say the second, and hopefully I can remember the first. I was actually on another podcast and we were talking about features of messianic figures. So we were talking about like cargo cult leaders, we were talking about this Ugandan prophet Alice Alma, and then we were also talking about contemporary messianic figures and something the other person had noted, which I hadn't really thought about, but was that so often these messianic figures, these individuals who promise to overthrow some kind of system, they have the mark of the system.

They have the taint of the system. So like a very famous cargo cult leader, Yali, if you've read Guns, Shrooms, and Steel, it's the New Guinean politician Jared Diamond talks to in the beginning. But Yali became a major messiah and a cargo figure, but had actually worked in the colonial authority, I think had gone to Australia for quite a number of years. Alice Amma, who was this big messiah in Uganda, tried to overthrow the government,

was possessed by an Italian soldier or an Italian captain. And then, I mean, for American politics in an interesting way, Trump is of course like the elite who's going to destroy the elites. And so your point about these individuals in the guru space having been touched by or enjoying the whatever taint of the system that they also discredit as an interesting parallel. Yeah, the anti-elite elites, we've been hearing a lot from them recently. We just covered a podcast where there were four billionaires, but they're disparaging like how out of touch people are. And they're literally talking about how they won't miss their flight because they've chartered

a private jet. And then they're like, but the problem is these out of touch elites who are, you know, like attacking the working people. And you're like, how is it possible to do that simultaneously? But it seems the crazy thing is that like it works. It seems to work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so getting back to this topic of shamanism and Guruism, maybe, um, in the modern world. So I think a clear example, correct me if I'm wrong, would be the kind of, um, spiritualism, you know, that developed in, uh, like England, for instance, in the 19th century, you know, seances and connecting the spirits and the dead, that certainly counts, doesn't it? As shamanism? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the kind of mediumship where individuals are possessed by individuals and they channel them and then they, you know, is paradigmatic shamanism. Yeah, sure. So, and you know, astrologists, unfortunately, are still popular today, right? This is, it's not like it's gone away.

I mean, they're gaining popularity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Rogan was just talking about how convincing astrology is. Oh, God. Yeah. He was, he was. So, so that seems like a clear-cut example, but the life coach is the self-help guru,

right? like a clear-cut example, but the life coach is the self-help guru. So we cover people that are in this space, but it's a broader kind of family of services, I suppose. So they're often promising radical transformations for people. And I guess that they're dealing with high stakes existential concerns that are sort of elusive, even for people living in the lap of luxury in a country like the United States, you know, happiness, personal success, social or... Information. Yeah, information. That's right. Chronic fatigue. We've all got that. I've just accepted it personally, but other people are trying to cure it. So they have often, you know, they leverage charisma and a bespoke style and a very, you know, they've got sort of access to some special knowledge.

Yeah, like, would you see this as like a clear-cut example of modern-day shamanism? Yeah, so I think I would call it, again, that they're shaman analogs. I want to be careful not to overextend. So I think the social and psychological dynamics are very similar, where individuals want to control these high stakes outcomes. They want to have good health. They want to be happy. They want to be successful. And so they turn to those individuals who can perform otherness.

But of course, they're not necessarily, maybe are you would know better but they're not like entering trans states and communing with God spirits, etc They're instead performing otherness or building charisma in these in these other ways I would say like it starts so like a couple months ago tucker Carlson claimed that he was mauled by a demon. And so I think that there are, you know, like the lines are getting slippery in some cases. We did.

Mambir just mentioned an example before it goes out of my head. We also had there's a Toronto professor, John Vervecky, who's very active in this kind of space called sensemaking. It's orbiting around Jordan Peterson. But it often is interested in symbolic interpretations of religious traditions and whatnot. And in some sense, you can see it as a psychologizing of religion, the way in the interpreting. But he went on the channel and talked about how he was doing.

I forget the name of it, but it's like this style of therapy where you dialogue with different parts of yourself through an assisted other therapist person there and he in that process made contact with Hermes, Hermes, the Greek messenger god, who then entered into dialogos with him, apparently communes at least once or twice a week or so, and, you know, provides insights on, they're just basically buddies now, and they're, he's gaining insights from Hermes and whatnot. But in that conversation, they're very, very careful. And they would be very careful about this in general,

if you ask them, are you saying that there is an external agent or an invisible agent? The ontological status of Hermes is deliberately ambivalent, vague, unclear. And there isn't actually the performance aspect. It's like a retold story where, you know, they aren't entering trans there, but they're reporting on the trans experience. So that's interesting to me because like then John Fervicki will come and talk about the insights that he gained from those encounters, but he doesn't do it in the kind of entering the

trans in front of people and talking about it. So that to me is like an overlap, but it's it's probably lacking the performance aspect that you would, you know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's of course tiptoeing close and it's like it's a strikingly close tradition. But I agree. It's lacking that performative element and the performative element is Often crucial because it comes back to like well, why should I believe you? You know, I can say that I talk Just yesterday Yeah, but in those spaces the solution is that nobody nobody's allowed to This is the solution is that nobody's allowed to stress any disagreement. There's like a thing called the Omega rule where essentially you must always yes and

the person. It's very much like improvisation. The rule is you don't- Oh, fascinating. You don't read as like uncomfortable questions. Interesting, interesting. So I actually realized what I was going to talk about earlier when I couldn't remember. And it was more generally, so you were talking about these individuals often attack institutions or central like epistemological authorities.

And I have been thinking that that, I mean, maybe this is true, but that is, I think, so important for two dynamics that I think are going on right now. One is just the rise in astrology, witchcraft, and interest in shamanism, interest in paganism, but then also the turn to these kind of messianic figures, charismatic figures, alternative figures that once you are, I think the big obstacle to being essentially a shaman-like figure is like, well, they're science. There are epistemologies that we trust. Yes, you might promise these cures,

but those cures don't align with the scientific method and everything that it's taught us. method and everything that it's taught us. But I think so as trust in these institutions and authorities of epistemic consensus declines and as individuals challenge them, then that creates a space for these older, more intuitive ways of knowing like shamanism, like astrology, and also creates opportunities for shaman analogues and for hedge wizards, for individuals who rely on charisma rather than knowledge or familiarity with things like science. Yeah, I completely agree with that view. I think it is about making space and promoting a sense of specialness.

And it's quite helpful, I think, that often sort of orthodox scientific solutions for things are often, they're often generic solutions, like they're not mysterious, they're not interesting, and they don't feel like they're tailored. They're not bespoke, that's right. They're not tailored for you specifically. So that is one of the great appeals of complementary and alternative medicine. I can see that it would be part of the appeal of going to a shamanesque figure as well.

And I think you can understand this really well by just watching some Joe Rogan, because what's going on in his brain really just reflects where modern society is going. But the anti-vax stuff provides a good example of that, right? So you have a scientific technological solution to a problem which works very well. But it has all those features I described. It's generic. It's not satisfying. It doesn't provide any psychosocial reassurance or anything.

You're getting the same thing as everyone else. You can see the appeal to the Joe Rogan's of this world when you have a anti-institutional, heterodox, free thinking, you know, often they do have some sort of background in medicine or whatever, but they've figured out some entirely bespoke concoction of 12 different central herbs and spices that is much, much better than these terrible vaccines. And you could just see the sort of psychological attraction to that. And I think you're right to be cautious to over about overextending the category

because like we've talked about, they don't necessarily do the performance, but they use other mechanisms to achieve that sense of specialness. Well, okay. So again, at risk of overextending the concept, I want to be very clear that I don't think of this as shamanism. But even my own relationship with AI, where there is uncertainty in my life, I want to know what will happen. I want to have some control over it. Here is something that is able to access all of human recorded knowledge and synthesize it

and spit it out for me. I can find myself turning to it as a kind of hedge wizard. And one example is with the book. The book is about to come out. I'm like, okay, here's everything that I've done. How many sales do you expect on day one? If I have that many sales, what does that mean for the long-term success of the book? And it's like, okay, a good book has this rank on Amazon, and I don't have that rank.

I'm like, what does that mean? And it's like, well, that probably means that the book will not be as successful as you think. And then I realized two days later that actually like first day sales are not predictive of third day sales or fourth day sales and that they're much more stochastic and chaotic. But I found myself turning to this, in some ways, agent that seemed superhuman, that seemed to access a body of knowledge that I could not, essentially an unseen reality, and was relying on it to control the uncertainty in my life. Oh my god. I just realized I had exactly the same interaction with the AOI this morning. So

you're gonna laugh at this example and think it's stupid, but I think it fits, right? So I'm making like a fancy dough, three days, right, to make a proper Neapolitan style pizza. I made a stuff called poolish right the little thing and I just noticed I'd look it's did very well than I before then I took it out and did some more things and it wasn't Rising like I thought and I I sought reassurance like and I wasn't that in fact I'm not even that invested in it right, but but I went oh look I what's the deal here? I'll ask touch you Peter and what I was looking for was kind of reassurance. And it said, look, everything's going to be okay. Don't worry about it all by itself. And I know that it's not, it may well not be right. But what I wanted was just for someone to tell me it was going to be okay. It was all going to work out so I could

get on with my day and not think about it. This is this is turning into a fair position. The point I realized something because I, I was cooking chocolate mousse for my wife with my kids. It wasn't, it would, you know, things I'm really bad cook. So like when things like went wrong, I had a recipe from the AI, but I was able to respond to him and be like, we would, it's not, you know, you said it's going to go like this and it's like, okay, don't worry. You're still, and you know, AI has a way of responding where it's going to go like this. And it's like, OK, don't worry. You're still, you know, AI has a way of responding,

where it's very encouraging. Like, you're doing great. You just will be able to fix this even. So it seems like work. But you know, Mandar, there's something I, you know, this is one of these, it's more of a comment than a question. But I want to make it clear to our listeners, because I really like that you emphasize that, you know, shamanism is

a cross-culturally recurrent phenomenon historically and in the contemporary period because it's this package of features which appeal to the way that, you know, humans are cognitively and the social animals and the way that we organize, you know, societies. It all makes sense and it makes sense in the modern world as much as it does in the ancient or the more recent history. So that you see it crop up in Western developed countries, or you see it in modern Korea, or you see it in the Siberian tundra and ethnographic accounts. It makes sense. But that then makes me think that what we're talking about here with like AIs, which are very, very agent like and designed to be that way, and the developments that happen in VR,

you know, like you're already seeing it with like VTubers and people taking on like, you know, mainly anime girls, but there are a lot of things that you actually will be able to hyper stimulate that package again in a new online digital way. And we should absolutely expect that that will work right with our psychology. So maybe we've invented a new, we can become like the exploitative like you know neo-shemans in the VR space. We gotta do something you know like that I think you should leave Sketch. I think there's something here the driving curve. We gotta make money out of this. No I mean I agree it's hard to predict but I certainly agree that like with every technological innovation occurs, it's not like shamanism disappears, it's that it can just take new forms.

I mean, I remember during COVID, I had found that there were shamans who were Zooming and Singaporean Chinese shamans were Zooming and you could communicate with them using the chat. Yeah, I mean, I think it's such a powerful, psychologically compelling practice that I think it just remakes itself in different ecologies.

I do think the thing about AI is that AI has the superhuman otherness without necessarily having to enter trance and lose its skeleton. And so I think AI can assure us of its powers without having to do with what a lot of shamans have to do with a lot of what a lot of shamans have to do Yeah, yeah Well, it's it's it's great actually that you mentioned the AI because it's a it's a nice connection to our gurus who who often Don't do a performance in the traditional sense of the word But they certainly do do

Some kind of secular type performance in terms of how they speak, how they hold themselves, the kinds of references they're making, usually the stuff you haven't heard about, something very special stuff that only they know. But you know, they're ultimately trying to convey a sense that they know an awful lot. They have access to bodies of knowledge that you can't even encompass. And that's precisely what AI does for all of us, whether it's about chocolate mousse in Chris's case or book sales in yours, or whatever our concern is at the time. It generally knows more than us about the specific thing. It's more accurate than the gurus. They're like, I believe it's chocolate mousse recipe more. My mousse turned out excellent.

I agree. It's not fair to compare the two to the gurus. I actually could continue. I have a whole section of things I'm kind of curious to ask you about the sociology of the field and the reaction that your book has got, but I feel like we'll be using up too much of your time. But no, I'll still ask it and your output in general, is challenging some boundaries that people put up that are potentially legacies of colonialism or just like Western exceptionalism, ethnocentrism if you prefer, to discuss Pentecostalist preachers in the realm of shamanism or Jesus as a potential shaman.

I can imagine there's pushback against that. On the other hand, there's also pushback in anthropology and such disciplines to things which seek to look at things from a cross-cultural cognitive perspective as being reductionist, imposing edit categories and whatnot. So yeah, from my perspective, from the sources I see, your book is being broadly welcomed across the spectrum, barring your engagement with weird divas. So I'm kind of curious, are you just like the special, unique thing which has managed to weller through storms? Or are you getting that pushback? And I just haven't observed that because it seems like your work is being like well received generally. Yeah.

Well, and I'll quickly say that Wade Davis and I had that many debate, but afterwards the feeling was super positive and I think we agree more than we disagree. And actually, I mean, so the book has only been out, you know, eight days now. But the response has not been, people have not, yeah, I have not gotten like vitriol. I've actually gotten much more positive reaction than I had expected. I mean, in private, I've had some people who are like annoyed that I use the word shaman, but I wonder whether it's this. I wonder whether there is a recognition that there is some pattern, and anthropology has been so resistant to recognizing patterns

for such a long time that doing the project with a modicum of respect and thoughtfulness and engaging with the history of the term just is enough to assure people that I'm not doing so super irresponsibly. Yeah, so I will say, you know, I talk about in the afterward of the book that we had done this cross-cultural project on music, and the aggression that I got for that project was honestly really hard to comprehend. People were calling us Nazis. They were calling us like imperial racists.

And we were just saying like lullabies are universal. Like it was honestly confusing. And I have not gotten that kind of vitriol. And maybe I will, but I think it's partly because it's a book that is like very much grounded in my ethnographic research and other people's ethnographic research. And, you know, I quote a lot of shamans. I think I did what to a lot of anthropologists is like the hard work. And I think that gives me credibility and makes them less peeved at what I did.

But we'll see. I mean, maybe in a couple of months, I'll be like, you know, I await the fuck Manveer Singh articles and current appropology or whatever. But like, but yes, I think part of the explanation is that you have the graphic credibility and you do treat these topics sensitively. So you're not like, you know, flattening things. I also suspect that it helps that your name is Van Veer Singh. I think that to a certain degree offers a line of defense that Jack McCormick might not have. That's unfortunate, by the way, that I think that that could play any role in it. But the thing that I will consider bridging the divide, and I suspect that could very well happen, is when you appear on Decoding the Gurus and Joe Rogan and are warmly welcomed on H, and I suspect there's no reason why this wouldn't be

a super appealing kind of topic for people like Joe Rogan or Huberman and whatnot. So if you if you go there, Manvier, just make sure to, you know, give them a little slap in the head or something. The way I just from us, let's say I will say it's all we request. Yeah, linking to that, I will say something that I have found striking is that so, I mean, the publisher is trying to get all kinds of awesome opportunities. And I noticed that there are some podcasts that will have you on if you can be a bit of a hedge wizard. It's like, what can you tell our audience is useful for them dealing with their everyday uncertainties? What kinds of lessons has your engagement with the world's shamanic traditions held for these people? And it really motivates me. I mean, I've like, and I think there are some, but it's been

the product of like having to like sit down and think of them so as to get like an opportunity or a platform to talk about my work that has really forced me to think about my work in that way. work that has really forced me to think about my work in that way. We get asked that. We get asked that. And not that we're invited that much, but we are, we are often asked like, so what, you know, what's the lessons that you offer to people from this? So, yeah. Yeah.

And I think there are, but, and I definitely think there are from, from Yael's work, but it's just interesting the extent to which and it makes sense I mean, that's what people often want. They want some yeah, they want to be happy. They want to be healthy Yeah, and in cases when they cannot They want to turn to media to media that will provide that and so there's no incentive to have those takeaways Well, I think the course for your next book is clear, Manvier, shamanism, 12 rules for life. But it'll sell a zillion copies, it'll be fine.

It reminds me of that scene from the Monty Python, Life of Brian, where, you know, what should we do? You know, they want a Messiah. They're following him around. Tell us, tell us what to do. We'll follow you, really, really. You must think for yourselves. Yes, you must think for yourselves.

Anyway. I did, there are all other things I want to talk to you about, but I'm going to restream, but it'll be good to have you back on again to talk about all the things because I believe that you're now going on to a project about folktales and myths. Is that true? Or is that stories and folktales? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I did want to ask you some stuff about the ayahuasca ceremonies and whatnot, but the last time has escaped me because I have to travel to my university to teach. So that will have to do for another time.

But it's been very enjoyable for me. Matt was here this time, so he can speak for himself. But I enjoyed the book, enjoyed the conversation. Totally sober. Yeah, he's completely sober this time. He's, it's completely sober this time. It's yeah, and there is a lot of overlap and I think interesting things, but thanks for coming on and talking to us.

Yeah, thank you so much. It was so much fun. Thanks so much, Manvir and everyone. Shamanism, The Timeless Religion, available in all the best bookstores, probably online. Is there an audiobook? Last question. There is an audio book. Are you reading it?

There is an audio book. Oh, do you read it? Do you read it? I don't read it. I was going to read the introduction, but then I got sick and so I couldn't, unfortunately. Oh, bugger. It's all right. That's all right. That's okay. That's okay.

Yeah. This is a candidate for our Guru Book Club and I'm currently making them, everyone read a for our Guru Book Club. And I'm currently making them, everyone read a 560 page book on Buddhism. So I think after this, they'll be ready for something like a slightly less drive. Yeah, yeah. So I think the audiobook is really good. I think the reader did a really good job. Good. Once again, thanks very much.

And thanks for coming on, Manvir. Look forward to talking to you soon. Yes, thank you. Thank you. I'm going to be back. Music