Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 467: Mitch Horowitz

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

Mitch Horowitz, brilliant mind and author of a HUGE selection of books, re-joins the DTFH! Check out some of Mitch's books! The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality and Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind. You can also check out this article about James Randi that Mitch wrote recently. SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT! Duncan's amazing meditation teacher, David Nichtern, is hosting FIVE weekend workshops for his meditation teacher training. Click here for more information! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: BetterHelp - Visit betterhealth.com/duncan to find a great counselor and get 10% off of your first month of counseling! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package. Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE!

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because you deserve to invest in your greatest asset, you. Welcome, my darling sweets. This is the Dugger Trussell Family Hour podcast, and what you just heard was, I still need to buy bananas by Francis Scott Bacon's, and he's going to be playing that EDC. I got money on it. I cannot wait. Holy shit.

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into 1,000 tiny tooth-shaped fragments that more than likely will shotgun scatter into the people behind me, completely vaporizing them and simultaneously causing them to ascend to the highest plane of reality possible. We've got a great podcast for you today. Mitch Horowitz is here. But first, a word from the Highwayman.

The Highwayman. Highwayman, keep on doing the best you can. Hey there. It's the Highwayman here with an important safety message about fighting. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes you might be a witness to something bad going down, like maybe a teenager trying to steal an old lady's groceries,

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Coming up, a weird way to get rid of the obnoxious demons that you summoned accidentally because you said the wrong phrase from a grimoire that your grandmother gave you right after this break. I'm not fucking joking. You got to let me record. I don't care. This is my job.

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Again, head over to squarespace.com, forward slash Duncan, use offer code Duncan, you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace, and we are back, and here's the answer to that question. How do you get rid of the obnoxious demons that you accidentally summoned using the grimoire

that you found in your grandmother's attic? The answer, you sell them at demonmeets.com. I run with a wonderful group of people, and many of them are into meditation and magic, and every once in a while, hanging out with these people, some of the weirdest stuff happens that is completely impossible to explain. I know you've heard me ramble about this before.

I'm not gonna bore you with it, but for me, someone who has directly experienced some of this stuff, it's always obnoxious when the possibility that human beings have abilities that maybe haven't quite been figured out or quantified or documented is shut down by skeptics. And then I think, why wouldn't they shoot it down? Some of these stories, some of these things

are actually incredibly strange. In fact, I'm not gonna go on and on about them, but I've had a lot of weird experiences working with my meditation teacher, David Nickton. Speaking of which, he's offering a wonderful course. It's called Become a Meditation Teacher. You can find out all about this at darmamoon.com. It starts October 15th to the 17th,

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All you gotta do is go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and you will not get any more of these annoying commercials along with access to our weekly meditation group, our weekly family gathering right now. The community is working on a book of erotic, cryptid short stories. I just read one today in the family gathering and it was brilliant and wonderful and fucking hot.

Super hot. Never thought praying Manus Cox could be hot. All you gotta do is sign up at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You'll have access to our Discord server where you can participate. It's not too late. I'm being part of this anthology. All right, friends, without further ado,

I am thrilled to offer you this conversation with Mitch Horowitz. He's got literally has too many books to name in this intro but if I were you, I would start off with The Miracle Club. It's fantastic. Occult America is really, really good. He is a brilliant mind and I feel so lucky that I got to spend an hour with him talking

about one of my favorite subjects, parapsychology. Now, everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH, Mitch Horowitz. Good evening. Welcome, welcome, welcome to you, that you are with us, shaken, nothing to be moved. Welcome to you Welcome, welcome.

It's The Duncan Trussellwater bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon. Mitch, welcome back to the DTFH. It's great to see you. Thank you, my man. Great to be here. You look great. Let's go.

What is your accent? I always, anytime I see, every time I see you, you're like, you're like, what are you doing, man? You've got some kind of like, are you doing yoga or something? What's going on? I don't sleep.

This is an ongoing experiment for two years. Maybe that is something to do with it. I do like what I do and I don't sleep. And those are my fitness tips. Ah, are you glad, man? That's my wellness protocol. Look, man, I think you've got your next book. Don't Sleep, Love What You Do.

That's great. Mitch, you know, I know today we're gonna talk about parapsychology. And I thought I'd share with you, you know, when I was in college getting my, I don't know if you knew this about me, but I have a bachelor's degree in psychology. Not to blame.

But I did do a, I did a, I tried to recreate a parapsychology experiment using those awesome psychic cards with the triangle, the circle, the square, the wavy lines. And you know, it was fascinating because at one point someone was calling every single one of them in a way that was completely improbable and really freaked me out.

It was this one girl and it was like, we kept doing it and she wasn't getting any of them wrong. Is this, when you mentioned parapsychology, is this what you were talking about? Yeah, actually, J.B. Ryan, the Psychological Researcher at Duke University who pioneered the use of the Zenner cards that you were using, he had one such experience

with a subject named Hubert Pierce. And the amazing thing about J.B.'s card experiments is, I mean, the man just did tens and tens of thousands of trials and when he would pool the data, what he would find is that he was constantly getting a blip that went several points above statistical average. So if you're using a five suit deck of cards,

over time, over time, the so-called law of statistics says that you're gonna get 20% hit rate or a guess rate basically, over time. And what J.B. would find is that over tens of thousands of trials with certain individuals, you would get a hit rate that was not 20%, that might be 25%, might be 27%, might be 28%. And when you keep doing that and when you jury the data

and when you subject it to total transparency, ensure against any corruption, you include the null sets, you include everything, something is going on. You know, you're in front of a magnificent, strange question, you know, either there's some break in our statistical models as we use them or there's an anomalous transfer of information going on in a lab setting.

And the wrap that you'll read, if you put the Ryan experiments into Wikipedia, if you put the Ryan experiments into Google, you'll find that they weren't repeated, that there were null sets that weren't included. None of it's true, it's a modern mythology. It's a modern mythology. The fact is the Ryan experiments were repeated for decades.

They are still repeated from time to time today. There are exemplary standards where you can take a certain protocol, repeat it, show the same results, same results, and it is a break in our understanding of sensory perception. It puts us in front of an enormous question and this is stuff that by this point is 80 years old at its inception and there have been many things

that have surpassed the Ryan experiments again, subject to repeat analysis, a level of jurying, a level of criticism, transparency that exceeds by many degrees the kinds of scrutiny that are most of our pharmaceutical experiments are subjected to. The repetition is there, the data transparency is there, the lack of corruption is there.

The fact is we have statistical evidence of some anomalous transfer of information, which you can call ESP, you can call non-local intelligence, but you can't call it a mistake and it just puts us in front of the question of what it means to be human because we're raised to believe that the mind is an epiphenomena of the brain and the mind is like the bubbles

in a glass of carbonated water and when the water is gone, the brain, the bubbles are gone, but that's not the case and we have generations of experiments that provide statistical evidence for that. Why the severe pushback do you think? Why is this something that gets just instantaneously dismissed by scholarly people? It's a wonderful question and I've pondered

the question myself, the truth is I seek out skeptics to debate with, I seek out constructive skeptics and it's very, very difficult to find folks. I mean, I've had people, I was having a dialogue not long ago with a social sciences professor about a series of experiments that were conducted in the 70s and 80s called the Gansfeld experiments and these tested in short for telepathy

in conditions of sensory deprivation. Similar results to the Rhein experiments, over tens of thousands of experiments you're finding hit rates that go beyond average and he acknowledged to me, yes, those are remarkable and the pioneer of those experiments, a guy named Charles Honerton who's now deceased, he collaborated with a well-known skeptic Ray Hyman

who's a psychologist from the University of Oregon on a joint paper and Hyman said he didn't believe in the ESP thesis, but he did agree that the data was uncorrupted and that it required more research, which is great. You know, that gives us all common ground. Let's just pose the question. But, you know, in as much as I can get skeptics

in private conversations to acknowledge to me, yes, you know, that data is remarkable. Literally the next day when they get back into their peer groups and social groups, usually, you know, on some social media platform and other, they start saying, oh, it's all baloney, it's all bullshit and I don't know why the reversal is always there.

I suspect they fear that if there's an acknowledgement of the ESP thesis or anything that comes close to it, they're afraid it's gonna unlock this wave of irrationality of so-called magical thinking. And I'm not so temperamentally different from them that I can't understand that, but there's a point at which, you know, skepticism becomes ideology and then it's no longer skepticism.

Yes, and we're, you know, I think some people aren't aware of the fact that scientists are just like anybody else. Like, you know, if you wanna publish a book, you've gotta get a publisher to fund it. You know, if I wanna make a TV show, I've gotta get a network or somebody who likes the idea enough to fund it.

If scientists wanna run experiments, somebody's gotta fund that. So then that funding is not gonna come to someone who has been labeled as a quack. So they have to be very careful not to seem like that. I've heard this is one of the reasons why the subject matter isn't explored more is just because the presenting the possibility

that you wanna look into this stuff, you risk your reputation. I've heard, so. Without question. Yeah. In fact, a recent case of that evolves a psychologist at Cornell named Daryl Bem, who some of your listeners have probably heard of,

Bem conducted a series of precognition experiments in 2011. And he was subjected to just withering criticism. Absolutely withering criticism. And he published in a very prominent journal, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, and there was enormous pressure on the journal to rescind the paper and so forth. Couple years later, The New York Times

ran a front page article about a spate of fraudulent experiments in the social sciences. In the first paragraph of the article, they referenced Bem's ESP experiments without ever referencing the experiments again in the article, without ever referring back to why the experiments were considered lumped in. Why the experiments ought to be contextualized

with fraudulent experiments. I've published a number of things on controversial topics in The New York Times. I reached out to people there. I reached out to the editorial on Bootsman, a position that no longer exists. Total silence, total silence. Now, whatever spoke to it.

Now, the rap on the Ben experiments is that they haven't been replicated. Not only have they been replicated, but in fact, Bem took the unusual step of making all his data, all his software, all his notes, all of his material, positive sets, null sets, et cetera, available to anybody. And there was a meta analysis published in 2016.

It was updated as recently as July of 2020, in which his experiments were replicated. Dig this. 90 times at 33 different laboratories in 14 different nations. 90 times 33 different laboratories in 14 different nations. We don't do this for aspirin, you know?

Yeah, and we don't do this for pharmaceuticals that many of us listening to this podcast are taking. And that's the depth of the vetting. But I will tell you, if you put Darrell Bem's name into Wikipedia, you put Darrell Bem's name into Google, you will see the information that this hasn't been repeated. If you put the Gunsfeld experiments into Wikipedia, you will see them referred to as a pseudoscience,

even though they have been vetted according to the highest clinical standards. And so it's not only a problem in terms of skepticism, morphing into etiology, but it's a problem in terms of who has influence over forums like Wikipedia. Wikipedia does lots of great things, but in fields of parapsychology and esoteric subject matter,

it's profoundly flawed. There's people who police that stuff to the point of, I would say almost a materialist fundamentalism. Wow, materialist fundamentalism. That is incredible. Here's another sinister problem, which is if this depression is happening, and I believe it is, then theoretically,

well, I guess to put it like, okay, there was a time, and some assholes still do it, where people would say in comedy, they would say women aren't funny. And it was this fucked up thing that was happening. But what was really happening was that it was really hard for women to get stage time. And there's no way to get better at stand-up comedy,

except by going on stage over and over and over again. So what was happening is men were getting like way more stage time, and so they were able to develop the ability to do stand-up, and thus it created this bullshit idea that, look, women aren't funny, men are funny. And one of the realities is it's like saying, I don't know, somebody who has access to a gym

and someone who doesn't, it's going to be more in shape. So this was the similar thing seems to be happening in the sense that these abilities, whatever they may be, and again, we don't know, because this information is being suppressed, they might be things that could be developed, right? And so the act of suppressing the information simultaneously, implicitly invites people,

don't explore these in your own identity, don't explore these possibilities in your own life, meaning that if there is some, I don't know, for lack of a better word, some psychic appendage that we're not even aware of, then it's going to be atrophied in anyone who hasn't actively been exploring it in their own consciousness, right?

I mean, you know, and the field itself has been stymied because of a lack of funding. We've probably lost a generation of progress in psychical research in the United States because the professional skeptics, they're so adept, they're so media savvy, they're so skilled at sound bites. And, you know, quite frankly,

and I hope I don't sound prejudicial when I say this, but it's just simply been my experience. They are willing to reverse even their own concessions. There is, in many cases, and I don't like saying this, I don't revel in saying this, but in many cases, there's an intellectual disingenuousness where, you know, I've seen people concede things in private conversations that have been really constructive

and helpful that they will literally reverse, you know, at some other time or date or, you know, in a paper. They're very ideologically dedicated to, it's not so much they want to win the debate, they don't want there to be a debate, and that's a real problem, you know, and that becomes anti-intellectual, and they've been successful

because parapsychology labs that have existed at Duke, Harvard, Princeton are closed. They can't get funding, you know, so people have to go off campus. There are a couple of independent institutes like the Institute of Neurotic Sciences in Northern California where scientists like Dean Raiden, for example,

who studies precognition, they simply write their own grant proposals. They have to drum up private money, and anybody who writes a grant proposal knows that's a career effort in and of itself, and there was a statistician. Wait, what do you mean? I'm sorry, what do you mean?

A career effort. Oh, like a scientist who's working on a grant proposal from private funding and has to do this as a matter of his or her air supply, that can just suck up all your time, you know, grant proposals to sort of stay afloat, to have no independent entities funding you, no departmental funding, nobody, you know,

paying the electric bill, it just sucks up so much of your time, and there's a statistician at UC Irvine named Jessica Utz, and she's crunched the numbers, and she has basically determined that for the past century or so, the grand sum total of inflation-adjusted dollars that has been spent on parapsychological research

in a century is the equivalent of two months, two months of spending in the United States on ordinary psychological research. That's how miniscule the funding has been. It's absolute peanuts, and these experiments, whether it's cards experiments, that's a little fashioned or flashing images or attempting to convey an image or something like that,

it's very inexpensive stuff. I mean, this is very, very, you know, from a clinical standpoint, this is very no-frills stuff. It's not expensive, and yet the skeptics have succeeded in cutting off the funding and the air supply of a lot of the key researchers. ["Express VPN"] I want to thank Express VPN

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Thanks. Do you know if there's any truth to what people say that the government, the state entities continue to study this stuff? Like in clandestine laboratories? Because clearly, it would produce an extreme advantage in espionage if these are built through. It's interesting.

For many years, the CIA had a remote viewing, or so-called psychic spying program, called Operation Stargate. And during the first year of the Clinton administration, there were budget cuts due to the Cold War petering out. And Stargate got cut. It was about $20 million a year, and it got eliminated. I know some of the researchers in that program.

Their outlook is that there's no secret remote viewing research going on right now, although they have explained to me that other nations are doing it. The Russians are certainly doing it. And what will happen in the Russian military apparatus, for example, with regard to remote viewing, they will, typically speaking, they might take five different sources of information.

They might take some verbal testimony from some informer who's on the other side, whatever the other side happens to be, some kind of electronic surveillance, something else. They'll pool the so-called psychic spying or remote viewing with that information, and they'll see if they get a hit. If you get a three out of five hit rate, for example,

they might say, OK, that's a legitimate piece of intelligence. So they're not relying on that in some exclusive way, but they pool it with other sources of data, which is what the CIA was doing for many years. And during the Carter administration, this is something Jimmy Carter has spoken about publicly, for many years, there were a couple of remote viewers

who were successfully able to identify the coordinates of a crashed Soviet spy plane on the African continent. And Carter regarded that as a real win, which he got made fun of for, and Gary Wills and other writers ridiculed him for it. And the fact is, you don't exactly view Jimmy Carter as a man of occult passions.

He was speaking about what occurred. And to my knowledge, the program hasn't continued. I mean, who knows? But the researchers have told me they think it's dead. Well, I mean, yeah. And just like they thought the UFO programs were dead, they thought that too. There's a lot of programs they think

are dead that aren't dead at all. And this is one of the things I love about the CIA's website is that you could just, the Freedom of Information Act stuff, it's just there for you to go check out. And the Project Stargate stuff is so fucking weird, man. So weird. I mean, that's where people talk about encountering lizard beings and stuff.

And I don't know if you've seen that stuff. I mean, this is the freedom. This is the reason. Oh, it is weird, man. It's so weird to be on the CIA's website reading testimonial from some of these psychics talking about encountering reptilians on the astral plane, which kind of lines up with what people talk

about when they take ayahuasca, meeting these weird super advanced lizard beings. So to me, obviously, my personality is such that I want there to be DARPA initiative clandestine stuff happening from our country. But I mean, if I had to roll the dice, I would say, of course, they're still investigating it. Because you have to.

If it's true that the Russians are still involved in any capacity or any other state entity that we're competing with, you don't want them to get ahead of the curve and suddenly discover whatever it may be, if it is in the human brain, or whatever it may be that's letting people do this stuff. Because once that happens, and who was it that just won the Nobel Prize in biology?

Do you remember his name? I don't recall. Because I don't. But he won it because he was interested in, I think, pressure and maybe heat or something like that. What is converting the experience of heat in our brains? What is the process where that happens? Any identity, identified parts of the brain

responsible for that. And that might not seem like a big deal. It's a huge fucking deal. Because that means just in the realm of virtual reality, that dream is some way of stimulating those aspects of the brain to replicate experience. I mean, that would be an incredible leap forward for all kinds of things, training, whatever it may be.

But similarly, if these remote viewing experiments are true, if it's just not a fluke that's psychics, and this has also been documented from time to time, will take cops to a place where a body is, how the fuck do they do that? If we could identify these things within humanity, then it would be the equivalent of when pre-eyeball would be the equivalent of our species growing a new eyeball

or something like that. Oh, absolutely. And if even the most rudimentary of ESP experiments place us in front of a legitimate question, and I'm playing it very, very conservative. I see that. That opens the door to everything. I mean, that opens the door to extra physicality.

And suddenly, we're no longer functioning within a strictly materialist paradigm. The philosophy of materialism says, matter creates itself. That's basically the outlook. That outlook no longer holds up in our generation. We've seen way too much in terms of quantum theory, string theory, relativity, not to mention what's going on in the outer regions.

It feels like neuroplasticity, where the thoughts themselves are changing the gray matter of the brain, the neural pathways through which electrical impulses travel in the brain, the outer reaches of placebo studies. We have evidence on the books for a generation of successful placebo surgeries. And if you throw psychological research, good, solid clinical, psychological research

into the mix, which we now have in terms of modern science, 80 years, 90 years data of, updated data of, replicated data of, repeated experiments, every possible null set being counted, and so forth. You get to the incontrovertible conclusion that the mind is extra physical. The mind is non-local, not exclusively so necessarily. It may not be the only thing that's going on.

But the problem is, within the materialist mindset, when they get one correct hit, they decide, that's the whole story. That's what's going on. The placebo effect, they'll say, is nothing but endorphins being released by the body. Nothing but? Nothing but?

There could be a dozen different things going on, of which that's one. That could also be what the prayer response, or what hopeful expectancy looks like in the body. But in any case, when you open the door to these questions, and you can state them in the most conservative terms, but when you open the door, you're opening the door to extra physicality, which

gets to the heart, I think, of why some of these guys push back so vociferously and so emotionally. And you've raised a good question, too, when you were talking about, what does a person want to believe? And I have to watch that in myself, because I'm very open about my sympathies in this area. So am I being prejudiced? What do I want to believe?

I don't want to just become some guy who's on the other side who's arguing with skeptics. I mean, what does that accomplish? No, me either. I'm trying to be legit about all this. I just want to find people to debate with who want to get somewhere. I'm happy to be wrong.

I just don't want to close down the question. Well, look, I appreciate your, I can see how careful you're being with it, and I really appreciate that. I'm not careful with it. I like not being careful. And I don't mind if, in the end, it's like, you are a fool. But I have to, anecdotally, I've had my own experiences

that are just impossible. And any time I've thought, OK, this is confirmation bias or things like that, it's like, that's not fucking confirmation bias, because it's like me interacting with people who have been meditating their entire lives, and who very casually and gracefully display some of the things that in the East, they call cities, you know, just like these are the potentialities

of human beings. And so I would have to discount all of those or just replace my own experience. And I understand this is why we have sciences, because our experience is very seductive, and it can make you believe a million things that aren't true. But then I wouldn't just have to throw out my own experience or just say, well, that was a fluke.

I would also have to, like, a lot of people that I'm friends with, I would have to say, you are all insane. That's all a fluke. Just to adhere to whatever the particular current standard is regarding what humans are capable of. And what was it they used to say, Mitch, about how humans can't run faster than what was it, like a five-minute mile

or something like that? Oh, the four-minute miracle mile, yeah. Right, right, right. It can't happen. And then one person does it, and then everyone suddenly can do it. It's bizarre, right, and every record is consecutively being shattered.

The funny thing is, you know, you use the term confirmation bias. And confirmation bias is a term that social scientists use. It gets thrown around colloquially too much. It's basically just a fancy term for prejudice. And we all suffer from it. Every socialist, the most materialist scientist on earth, is embarking on a study,

and he or she is suffering from confirmation bias. It's a facet of human nature. Yes. And one of the problems with the social sciences in general is that it may be the one branch of the sciences that consistently overturns its own data generationally, because methodology gets better. So whole generations of experiments

are overturned or overturned. So methodology questions, questions of bias, these things are always at play. But in terms of public perception, like you were referencing, experiencing things in connection with meditation that you know are profoundly meaningful, that has to be taken very seriously.

Testimony has to be taken seriously. Dig this. In the year 2014, a professional skeptic named Michael Shermer, who writes a column for Scientific American, he wrote a column in October of 2014 talking about a really bizarre uncanny event that happened on his wedding day involving what seemed to be communication from a dead relative.

And so Michael wrote, listen, I'm a skeptic for a living. Statistically, I understand you could kind of crunch these numbers, and maybe it wouldn't seem too far out, but crunching numbers doesn't measure the emotional impact of an event on the life of an individual. That starts to get into stratosphericly rare numbers that are very hard for any actuarial table to get at.

This was in October 2014. That same year, January 2014, I had a book come out called One Simple Idea, which was a history and analysis of the positive mind movement. Unbeknownst to me, I learned this only a couple of weeks ago, unbeknownst to me, I had made exactly the same point in that book. I wrote an essay called The Bucket List, where

I had this bizarre experience where I was given a task by a spiritual teacher of mine of finding these little pink buckets in New York. And it was fucking hopeless. I mean, fucking hopeless. And at the last minute, in the strangest place, in the most dramatically unexpected way, I found a cache of little heart-shaped pink buckets.

It was the craziest fucking thing that's ever happened to me. And I said, again, you could come in and you could crunch the numbers and say, well, it's not really that unusual because of x, y, and z. OK, but you can't fully, statistics don't fully get at the emotional impact, the stakes, the meaning, the drama that an event really has in the life of the individual,

which is critical testimony. Michael and I, who are considered to be opposite polarities, were making the same point. We were making the same point. So what is it that divides us? What is this ideological divide that can't be crossed? Mitch is a believer.

Michael is a skeptic. Call it whatever you want. We're both making the same point. We just got to get beyond this. We, as a human species, got to get beyond this encampment. It's just not necessary. Is the problem one of individuality gets challenged to some degree with this stuff?

If we're talking about non, and individuality is the anchor, it seems, that holds the ship of society into whatever fucking harbor we're currently floating in. It's like everything is all about the individual, the identity. When we're talking about non-local consciousness or the identity, and we run into this in Buddhism, and it's something that my teacher and I go back and forth

on all the fucking time. The idea of the skandhas in Buddhism, right? The piles, heaps. You're not really a person as much as heaps of all of this stuff that converges into this thing that you call your identity. But try to boil your identity down to one point. Like, this is Duncan. This is Mitch.

You can't do it, and maybe you can do it. I can't do it. I can't. It's impossible. And so is it just that because we live in this hyper-materialistic capitalist society that's designed on amplifying the illusion of that identity, that in some subconscious level, there's pushback or something

that if we start playing around with the idea, we share a mind, we lose what we're going to lose everything when it comes to literally, it would cause an economic crash if suddenly we were able to disentangle ourselves from our obsession with the individual, right? It's fascinating. I mean, people get very, very upset

when you begin to challenge so-called commonsensical experiences. And yet the ultimate materialist, Karl Marx, said common sense is a terrible means of measuring and understanding reality because it's a fount of prejudice. And you've got to peel the onion back. So the whole project of modernist philosophy is to peel the onion back.

What's the antecedent cause? Marx, it's economics. For Freud, it's trauma. For Einstein, it's time and relativity. From my story, it's germs. But the whole modernist idea is there's some antecedent. So why can't psychical research be fitted into that? And it does rattle people.

The idea, for example, that time is illusory, that linear time is illusory. It's inescapable. I mean, Einstein's own relativity theories and experiments that followed from it demonstrate to us that people's experience of time is different based on gravity, based on speed. We know this shit.

And this has also been demonstrated in quantum theory. The thought experiment called Schrodinger's Cat demonstrates that there's an infinite series of concurrent outcomes co-existent, co-existent. So we know that what we experience as orderly linear time is a necessary illusion. It's necessary for us five sensory beings, so-called, to navigate through life.

But it's not real. It's not real. It's not ultimate. I'll put it that way. It's not ultimate. We experience all these different laws and forces, and they're mitigated by different things, like gravity is a constant, but you're

going to experience gravity differently on the moon than you would on Jupiter. And everybody accepts that. So if anomalous transfer of information, or ESP, or call it what you will, is real, is there, it's also going to be conditioned by circumstance. So we're not all just going to go floating off into the stratosphere, like the people

in that weird vacuum tube in Logan's Run, or really long in the chocolate factory. We're not going to go floating up toward the fan. Don't worry. But we got to know what it means to be human. We just got to know. Yeah, but you, I mean, so much of your writing has impacted me, along with a lot of other people,

because you're so good at articulating like other possibilities involved in humans being more capable of things than materialism seemingly wants us to think. I mean, I'm implying a conspiracy here. Maybe there is one. I don't know. Maybe we're being sprayed or something with bad data

intentionally, like some like, you know, some like like bonsai tree or some shit, some special bonsai tree that for whatever reason, you know, people who understand this stuff as real wants to keep localized in a little like nice maintained garden of experience that we call society. Because a lot of what you write about, which I think people who have read your writing about this stuff

have experimented with and have incredible results, is the possibility that our minds can not just like, you know, know what's on a card that we can't see. But we are literally sort of, we are creating our universe. Like we can actualize into our lives things purely by not allowing ourselves to be tethered to whatever our own perceived limitations are or what we're being told our limitations are.

I mean, am I misinterpreting? No, I think it's absolutely true. When you're traveling to a destination where you don't know the language, it can be challenging to accomplish even a simplest of tasks. I went to Paris, I could barely speak the slightest bit of French, and it sucked. I can't even imagine what awesome parties

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It's absolutely true, and it's uncanny. The philosopher Guerta made the point indirectly that what happens to us, what we wish for when we're very young, comes upon us in waves when we're old. So be careful, be careful. And it's interesting to test that personally. I mean, I've looked upon and I asked people to look back on what are their earliest cognitive memories?

I mean, early stuff, going back to like age three, four, whenever we really begin to retain memories. And personally speaking, I found an uncanny congruency in the life that I'm leading right now at age 55 with what I used to fantasize about very, very, very privately and intimately at age four or age three, or as early as I can possibly recall. And these have been memories that I've been cognizant of for a long time.

So it wasn't something I just started telling myself last week. And it's difficult to face that, you know, because a lot of times, and there are countervailing factors in life, you know, I don't subscribe to that. There are no accidents thing. You know, there's lots of countervailing factors in life. But barring some really, really epic countervailing factor, and those things do occur.

A lot of what occurs to us in life bears the mental stamp of things that we thought about of our earliest cognition, of our earliest, earliest cognition outlook, fantasies, dreams, wishes, you know, just peel back the onion and look for it. And it has to be within the realm of the individual to make this inquiry or testimony doesn't exist, you know. So it's an experiment that I really ask people to participate in.

We have, I do believe that there are causative qualities to thought. There's no question about that in my mind. And we have, you know, we're afraid sometimes to carry forth the implications of, you can call it hard sciences experiments that get cleaved to that. But we also have to honor the testimony of the speaker. I mean, you know, look, when somebody goes to a hospital and they're experiencing pain, you know, we have no way of measuring pain.

They show them a chart with those little smiley faces on it. Are you a frowny face? Are you an indifferent face? You smile. What is that? You know, it's testimony. That's what the individual is experiencing. We don't know how SSRIs or SNRIs work, you know. We have all these psychopharmacological drugs we're describing them by the millions. We're really not sure how they work.

And anybody listening who's taken one of these, as I have, has the experience of sitting down with his or her therapist and saying, well, how do you feel? Do you feel better? Do you want to just, you know, I mean, it's testimony. You know, so we can't exclude that from the experience of the individual, including the extra physical. Wow. Yeah, that's so brilliant. It's like all the testimony where someone is like, no,

I actually did see a spear in the sky when I was camping. No, actually, I was thinking about someone I hadn't talked to in 20 years. And within three seconds, their friend reached out to tell me they had just died. All that testimony just gets thrown out. But the testimony of, no, this is how much pain I'm in, which those charts are actually how many drugs do you want charts? Really, if you think about it.

But like all that testimony is completely accepted and upheld. And so, yes, I think that's a very brilliant point that you're that you're making. There is that almost that's all we've got at one level is shared testimony regarding these things. Absolutely. And over time, testimony becomes a record. So if you've got centuries of people saying, I'm really seeing funny lights in the sky and I'm just not crazy. You know, two centuries of that testimony, you know,

eventually results in a Pentagon UFO report that won't rule out UFOs. You know, and this is this is how it works. This is how the human story works. But added to that, this like the whatever it is, the miracle mile, the four minute mile, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. So that so it's not just that. It's the the the the realization of this possibility actually seems to bring that possibility into focus.

Then you run into one possible explanation for why this data is being suppressed or ignored. Because if it is true that OK, wait, when we do when enough people see that person perform an athletic feat that was formally considered impossible, it becomes possible in the minefield of so many people that it begins to replicate itself in that regard. It's it's fascinating. Probably every Olympic record that was said in the 1930s,

you know, has been has been broken several times over. And, you know, I'm sure everything, the pole vault, the high jump, you know, sprinting, all this stuff has been repeatedly surpassed. So, of course, you know, why wouldn't that happen with the mind? And, you know, the question of why this stuff, you know, is it suppressed? Is it prejudice? It's it's it's so hard for me to get at even as much as I've tried to make myself on intimate terms with this material and its critics.

About a year ago, I wrote a contrarial obituary for a professional skeptic named James Randy, who was a stage magician. I know, the amazing Randy, you know, the amazing Randy. So he was like a psychic buster and he did some good things in his career and he also did some terrible things in his career. And one of the things I write about in the article and it's very detailed. It's up at Boing Boing. It's called The Man Who Destroyed Skepticism.

And, you know, one of the things, you know, James did. And this was just I'm sorry, can I pause you? The idea of you writing a negative obituary about me is chilling. Please, please, please. You're like of all the people I would not want to do that. That is so cool, man. I cannot wait to read that.

Go ahead. I'm sorry to cut you off. No, quite all right. So, you know, and this is a this is a very small example, but, you know, this is just kind of what happened on Tuesday afternoon. You know, James issued a classroom guide, helping guide teachers into instructing kids that ESP is garbage. And so in this classroom guide, which was issued by the James Randy Educational Foundation, a foundation that I researched and found that

there was very little evident educational work that it was doing. And I go through the numbers in the article as well. So James issued this PDF teachers guide on ESP. And in this PDF teachers guide, he said falsely that J.B. Rine, who who died in the early 1980s, did not report null sets in his experiments. So he would only report successful sets. That is patently false and has been false since the 1930s.

Not only did J.B. report all his sets, but J.B.'s parapsychological lab at Duke University was one of the academic pioneers in pushing the social science field to expose, to report all data. So there's no so-called file drawer problem where you're leaving the disappointing data, you know, in the file drawer. And, you know, I've spoken with friends and colleagues about this. I've spoken with J.B.

Rine's daughter, Sally Rine, who's a psychologist, who's now 91 years old, brilliant woman. And I said to her, you know, James has to know that this isn't true. James just has to know that this isn't true. I mean, it has been public knowledge for literally decades that J.B. Rine and his parapsychological experiments reported null sets and, in fact, was a pioneer in pushing the social science field to follow ethical practices.

And since that time, all legit parapsychologists, people affiliated with universities, people affiliated with places like Institute of Neolithic Sciences, they've all published their null sets. And yet he states this in a teacher's guide, and it seems so convincing and so persuasive. And you encounter this stuff all the time. It's everywhere in Wikipedia. It's everywhere in the top five Google search results.

And people think, oh, I don't have to worry about this. Daryl Bem's experiments were never replicated. It's been proven. But, you know, people won't hear the compelling follow up data that, you know, is on the next page of search results or didn't make it to Wikipedia because those pages are getting ideologically influenced. And so anyway, I digress. I have to believe that James Randy knew

that J.B. Ryan reported all this data. And yet I cannot tell you why he would state that in his PDF guide. I simply can't. So is it suppression? Is it prejudice? Is it ideology? Is it emotion? You know, it's it's very difficult because these things are out there.

They're stated in a media savvy sound by way. And there you can't dedicate your life to policing these kinds of comments because it's otherwise it's all you'll do. Right. And then you just become this bobble head on the other side saying, no, that's not true. I encounter things on Wikipedia all the time that I don't touch because I just don't have the time. You know, if somebody calls the Gunsfeld experiments a pseudoscience,

which is what you'll find out there on Wikipedia right now, or at least, you know, two days ago, I can't dedicate my life to becoming a counter bobble head. You know, right. And so it's hard to put a label on it. You know, what do you call that? You know, is it prejudice? Is it suppression? Is it is it fear?

Is it corruption? It's a prep. I call it suppra. I mean, it's like it's not the effect of suppression. It's the effect of suppression. And, you know, especially with people like Randy, the amazing Randy, who is brilliant, you know, you have to. I love the theory about the amazing Randy, which again, I'm I feel I don't have to like. I love how careful you're being.

And I'm so glad that you are because we need that. We need that. But I love the theory about the amazing Randy, which is he's actually a wizard, like a very powerful sorcerer who is like that's his city is muting other people's psychic abilities. And so like that's what he does on purpose. And again, when when I'm speculating about these things and you know, like, I don't know, you will be able, obviously,

you'll be able to like describe this better than I can. But in my recollection regarding Young's idea about this shadow, the way that they're repressed, the sum total, the repressed stuff in a society will appear in the form of like a world leader, right? So like whatever human like in the same way that your shadow is going to appear, whether you like it or not, you know, when you're drinking too much or when you get angry and that thing pops out similarly in a society, that repressed shadow is going to show up as a Hitler.

That repressed shadow is going to show up as like whatever the fucking like awful leader thing may be. And so in this case, and that's not an intentional thing. In other words, when you're like deciding to like when that thing pops out of you, you might not have one of those things I do when the jack in the box comes out and suddenly you're like fucking screaming or pissed or whatever. And you're like, what was that? It's not like I chose that.

It just pops out. Same thing happens with a society, too. And so this, if I'm not saying it's an intentional conspiracy, yeah, but it's if. Or an intentional suppression, like people are meeting in boardrooms and being like, we can't let people know that there's this ability. It's more it's something deeper than that. Something built in like a kind of subconscious knowing

that if enough people realize, no, you know, your potential as a human goes so far past what you think it is that a kind of apocalypse will happen, you know, a kind of like or maybe a less intense way to put it is we're all playing this weird game of make believe where I've decided to be a podcaster and some people have decided to be presidents and some people have decided to be authors and some people have decided to be cops. And we are committed fully to this game.

We've committed fully to this game, to the point that if we all stop committing to it, holy fuck, people are going to die. The whole thing's going to fall apart. Right. Yeah. So maybe there's some subconscious understanding that if the cat gets out of the bag in this regard, humans are capable of, you know, extra sensory perception at a level that you couldn't possibly imagine that you can, you know, astrally project, literally send your consciousness out to other planets,

alternate dimensions, your experiences on DMT, where you ran into that advanced being that was like healing your energy body. That wasn't just what happens when you mash a digital watch and you see the funny colors. It wasn't like you were fucking with your brain. That's real. If we all simultaneously come to that conclusion, society as we know it kaput, it's over, kaput, it's, it's, it's wild.

You know, and there's a spiritual teacher named Vernon Howard, who I really love. He died in 1992 and Vernon, you know, spoke to something that I think supports your point about suppression. He would say, look, you know, you could spend all day long trying to analyze why somebody does something, but you have to ultimately get down to the effects. You know, so if the effects are intimidating another person, you know, it's hostility. You know, the effects are squelching information.

It's suppression. So in effect, you know, that's what's going on. You know, everybody thinks they have a good reason for throwing a rock at somebody. Everybody thinks they have a good reason for, for, you know, getting angry and making somebody frightened or whatever. You know, everyone thinks they're on a good guy, but the effects themselves are what really matters. So in effect, yeah, it amounts to suppression.

And it's not something I'd want to dedicate my career to. No. And, but, you know, like also, I love that you mentioned getting like stuck on the sticky trap of pushback to the suppression that you can just get just as stuck there, you know, whereas you spend your whole life as the reverse amazing Randy and then instead, instead of, you know, I think the logical conclusion to reach with this, right, is, is to begin to explore these own potentials in yourself, to begin to see what is possible within yourself.

Could you, you know, I just love your writing on Ernest Holmes, who I've loved a lot and that entire like philosophy, I have used that and it has worked again and again and again and again and again to the point where I would be so disingenuous to not say, I mean, I don't think that I would have successful podcaster be living the life that I'm living right now, if not for running into the science of mind and these philosophies. And because you've written so much on the topic, I wonder if we could kind of wrap up on you, maybe giving people some ideas of how to explore this

stuff in their own lives. Well, let me attempt a unifying point between the science of mind philosophy and psychical research. Cool. You know, the researcher, JB Ryan, who I've been mentioning, JB was so conservative in the way he pursued his ESP studies that he really hesitated to extrapolate implications from the studies. In fact, there were some mathematicians who said, JB, your material is never

going to get taken seriously with a mainstream science until you come up with a theory of delivery, a delivery mechanism. You know, how does ESP work? And, you know, JB would always beg off about that. And, you know, I've spoken to his daughter about it and, you know, he felt that his job as a statistician was to provide evidence, leave it to the philosophers and the metaphysicians to come up with a delivery mechanism. I'm not sure that was correct.

I think every generation has to at least make an effort to come up with a delivery mechanism for how something works. I try to do that for positive mind philosophy in my book, Miracle Club, for example. So I'm not sure JB was right about that, but he was a hero to me and a huge influence. And one of the things that I always noticed about him is that he was so dedicated to his work that he wouldn't get into extrapolations, but he did

make one note, one note in the British edition of his 1934 monograph, Extrasensory Perception. He writes an appendix where he makes the observation that in trials where the researchers are getting results, they find invariably that the results, the hit rates, seem to dip when the subject is fatigued or bored or distracted. And if they stop what they're doing and have a cup of coffee, have a conversation, go outside and have a smoke, whatever it is, you know, and then they come back to the table and there's a mood of conviviality.

There are good spirits that prevails. The results invariably spike again, invariably spike again. And JB said that the, the, the correlative factor seems to be hopeful expectancy. Wow. Expectancy. Yeah. Wow. Can you dig that?

Yeah. And Jung made this observation too in his own analysis of JB Ryan's experiments. And he said, you know, hopeful expectancy or a spirit of conviviality seems to be the factor that needs to be present if there are going to be any results at all. And I thought to myself, how much does that unlock that this man, this conservative man relegated to an appendix in the 1934 British edition of his monograph, but it's monumental.

You know, he would put something in a footnote that would be an epic observation. Hopeful expectancy is, is the key, is the turnkey behind everything that we're talking about behind placebo studies, behind, you know, all kinds of psychological possibilities, whether one, you know, sees them from a cognitive or a metaphysical perspective and why can't it be both, you know? And if you can learn how to catch that lightning in a jar, and that's what I've dedicated all, you know, the, the, the practical versus the historical side of my writing to, if you can learn to catch that lightning in a jar, the experiments

and the possibilities that unfold from that are extraordinary. But that's what JB saw as, as the critical key, the skeleton key to whether they were going to get results. And it unifies both science of mind philosophy and psychical research. You've just answered a question that I have wondered about ever since I read. I, I love, there's a Buddhist teacher, Mingyir, Mingyir Kinsi Rampashe. And he's so good. And his books are just wonderful.

But one of the things in the books that I found really weird was the advice that when you're meditating, if you start having wild, transcendent experiences, stop meditating for a little bit. And I was like, what the fuck? Wouldn't you want to continue the practice if you're having these experiences? Now it lines up with what you're saying. The idea is like, yeah, but the next time you sit down, you're going to have this thing in your head that you want that experience.

You're going to like, I imagine in the Rhine experiments, you're getting these results, you're going to get this kind of fatigue. And then somewhere in there, you lose the hopeful expectancy. It's the same with meditation. It's like the advice that sounds counterintuitive. OK, we'll stop for a little bit is actually would amplify the effects based on what Ryan is saying. The yes, yes, take a break, take a rest, take a breather.

And then so that when you're going into your practice, you're not going into it with a stern, like, I don't know, Shaolin monies, like I'm going to fucking eat a nail or some shit, but rather it's light, open and empty. And in that, that's where the magic could happen. That's really cool, man. That's really cool, hopeful expectancy. Wow. Yeah. And one of the things I'm trying to experiment with in my work right now

is what a person can do who's in a situation where they're unable to summon hopeful expectancy, like let someone is suffering from a crushing anxiety or grief or depression. It's not always fair, you know, to ask somebody to use that as the royal road to mental causation, because there are people who are in emotional anguish, and we all are, you know, from time to time, where sometimes they perhaps are unable to access that at a time when they're in deepest need. So I'm writing a new book called Daydream Believer, where I'm trying

to get down to the question of whether there are other ways as well to summon mental possibilities, mental causative possibilities, whether maybe just understanding, as people sometimes do in transparent placebo experiments, just understanding that your mind has causative properties that in itself may be enough to help actualize. So I'm asking the question of whether the wish itself, even in the absence of the emotional state, may be sufficient. OK, OK. Now, that sounds awesome.

But, you know, especially for folks like me who have anxiety, that that notion or the whenever I'm like in a particularly contorted anxious shit state, then, God forbid, I remember, you know, your mind has causative properties, then sometimes they can have the opposite effect where it's like, oh, no, it's like my fear is going to produce more fear. And now I'm afraid of my fear because it's making more fear. Then you go into a fear neutron star condition. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

I'm the same way. I suffer from anxiety and, you know, but but that helps me in a certain sense, because it allows me to say, OK, so if I'm not temperamentally hopeful, if that isn't who I am by nature, yeah, then that's good, because that at least helps me, you know, feel a sense of solidarity with the person, you know, who's also not, who is suffering from depression or grief or whatever it is. But, you know, the program in placebo studies at Harvard Med School has has done a couple of experiments in transparent placebos

where they found that they get significant results among patients who are told we're giving you, in effect, a sugar pill. This is an inert substance. And again, the Harvard researchers like J.B. Ryan have been very conservative. They haven't extrapolated from their own research, which I honor because they're really trying to play this as strict as they possibly can. But the results they're getting are incredible.

But it seems to me that the very understanding that a placebo is effective in itself is enough so that you don't need the so-called decoy pill or the deceptive pill or whatever, you know. So could it be could it be that a new thought that in science of mind, the very understanding that your mind has causative properties is enough just as it is in placebo experiments so that I don't have to necessarily go into the mental scenery or the emotive state that I might not be able to access in a state of anxiety at 4 a.m.

But could it be that the understanding itself is sufficient and and how does one attempt to harness and use that? Oh, I love that. I love that because, you know, this the domain of the of the fucking con artist healer is that they I think they tell themselves that they're bullshit ritual or whatever the thing it is that they're doing, even though they might in their own hearts know this is nonsense. They think, well, this helps induce the placebo effect

by deceiving the client or patient or whatever you want to call it, when in reality is like, no, you don't need to do all the smoke and mirror stuff. You don't need to do any of that. Right, exactly. And what if that's true within the structure of your own psyche, within the structure of your own psyche? What if just the understanding of what we're talking about is sufficient to heighten these abilities?

Mitchell Horowitz, always blow in my mind every time. Thank you so much. I'm pleasure. Wow. Yeah, that's incredible. That's free base. It's like every time I talk to you, you're like learning how to cook this stuff down into more potent yet simpler forms. It's really an intense thing to watch your process.

How can people find you? My website is Mitch Horowitz dot com. I'm on Twitter at Mitch Horowitz and Instagram at Mitch Horowitz, 23. Thank you so much, Mitch. I really appreciate it. Pleasure, man. Thank you. Thank you. That was Mitch Horowitz, everybody. Please go to Mitch Horowitz dot com, read some of his books,

take David's class, please, which is coming up and try out our wonderful sponsors. I don't care if you don't do any of that stuff. I'm just thrilled that you listen to the DTFH. I love you and I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney, family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style, dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with.

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