Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 513: Mitch Horowitz

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

Mitch Horowitz, brilliant author, lecturer, philosopher, and overall cool person, re-joins the DTFH! Mitch's new book, Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind, is coming out in about a month! Preorder everywhere you get your books. And check out Mitch's other books! More information available at MitchHorowitz.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE! Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase!

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Greetings, pals. It's me, Duncan, and you're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, now located. I thought the heat would throw me off, but I actually like it. I get the sense that it's so hot here that any residual demons or psychic contamination that might have crusted around your pineal gland or gotten stuck in your first chakra, a.k.a. your taint, is melted away by this sweet, holy heat.

You know, this move hasn't been as stressful as I thought it was going to be. I've had a lot of stressful things happen to me in my life, like the time I shit my pants at my college graduation because I bought these edible weed, seed, peanut butter balls from a dude whose name I can't remember. That was pretty bad. Luckily, my graduation rope covered up my pants, but this didn't really compare to that at all. And it's interesting to me that there's a list written actually by Dr. Larry Sench, who was the Clinton's doctor at the White House of all the most stressful events. Moving is the third most stressful event. According to his research, the top most stressful event that can happen in a person's life is to have your body chained to an obsidian crucifix to be covered in hot jizz and lowered down into a pit of adult baby fetishists and have to experience them licking that off for the entire night. He's got a lot of, you can actually go to his website, drsench.com, and a lot of these things are listed here.

Sadly, he did just commit suicide. These have been super stressful times, but yeah, he stabbed himself to death in his back, like 50 stab wounds in his back. He actually carved his suicide note in his back, which is really fucking dark. I guess he did yoga or something. Regardless, he listed a lot of the stressful events in a person's life. The top fourth most stressful event is to shit your pants at your college graduation because the night before you ate these disgusting edible weed balls that you bought from a dude whose name you can't remember. The top fifth most stressful event in a person's life is to cut your penis with a razor prior to going on a date where you think you're going to have sex. The top sixth most stressful event in life used to be causing the death of a lifeguard that was trying to save you when you were drowning, but you panicked and pushed them underwater and rode their lifeless body back to the beach.

But that most stressful event has been replaced by being on a plane next to someone who sneezes. The top seventh most stressful event in life is to die without deleting your internet history. The top eighth most stressful event in life is buying a suit for a wedding you don't want to go to. The top ninth most stressful event in life is when you're robbing a grave and the corpse comes to life and chases you out of the cemetery. And the top tenth most stressful event in life is when you end up at one of those malloc ceremonies and you didn't bring the right offering to the owl god. The top eleventh most stressful event in life is running out of nitrous oxide when you're peaking on acid and the top twelfth most stressful event in life is losing a shoe. Anyway, he's got a great book called The Most Stressful Events in Life and I hope he rests in peace and wisdom. I'm very sorry that we lost that great doctor.

Do we have an incredible podcast for you today? Oh yes, we do. One of my favorite guests, Mitch Horowitz, is here with us today and we talked about three of my favorite topics, artificial intelligence, UFOs, and Satanism. We're going to jump right into this excellent conversation. But first this, here's a cheesy fantasy that I have. I'm in Paris. I'm at a cafe. I'm with Erin, my beautiful wife.

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Start your new language learning journey today with Babbel. Right now, save up to 60% off your subscription when you go to babbel.com slash Duncan. That's B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Duncan for up to 60% off your subscription. Babbel, language for life. And we are back! Friends, I'm going to be at Zany's in Rosemont, Illinois. Next week, that's June 23rd to the 25th. Also, if you're interested in getting some classic DTFH merch, we've reopened the shop.

It's at DuncanTrussell.com. Today's guest is a brilliant author, a lecturer, a philosopher, and all-around super cool person. Mitch has the ability to maintain this wonderful groundedness while exploring some of the most bizarre and esoteric topics out there. You must check out his books. And please, do me a favor, if you are a fan of Mitch, won't you pre-order his book that is coming out in only a few weeks? It's called Daydream Believer.

The link to that's going to be at DuncanTrussell.com. Also, if you like Mitch, check out his website, MitchHorowitz.com. And now, everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH, Mitch Horowitz. Welcome back to the DTFH. It's so great to see you. Thank you, man. Great to be here. You are one of, you've got to be one of my smartest friends. If not my smartest, no offense to my other friends. So I got a, I got a load of weird questions for you.

You're a, you're such a brilliant person. So I've got the, this idea, I can't get out of my head. And I hope you'll forgive me if the question is sloppy. But are you aware of the Google tech who is claiming that Google has achieved a strong AI? Oh, for sure. I've been writing about that. Yeah. Okay. So this is something that just dawned on me. Is that if truly there is a superintelligence, if this is a new superintelligence to the planet, access to the entire internet, and also this neural network of ever evolving connections that

even the techs aren't certain how it's doing what it's doing, what are your thoughts on the possibility that it has connected with some of the very things that you have been writing about ESP, clairvoyance, and, and has, is already utilizing as of yet unquantified, I don't know, energy input output flows that is allowing it to go outside of the computer already and scan the planet. This is literally scary. This, because what's happening here between us, you know, because I have been thinking about this issue intensely in exactly the way you framed it over the past 24 hours. This has been my dominant, my dominant focus over the past 24 hours, you know, that and taking about the recyclables and

the trash and all so forth. So like, I mean, dig this, the questions around AI, which are very complex and thorny questions are, in fact, I'm not even going to say are have, have already made philosophical materialism irrelevant because materialism is the philosophy that matter creates itself and that everything has a knowable physical antecedent. It's a very simple, right, compelling point of view. If you insist upon a Newtonian mechanical universe, everything has a knowable physical antecedent and matter creates itself. That's more or less modernist materialism. That philosophy does not work when we're addressing questions of AI for this reason. We have evidence right here and now in this generation that thought effects matter.

For example, within the field of neuroplasticity, clinicians will use brain scans to demonstrate that your sustained thoughts will, over time, alter the neural pathways through which electrical impulses travel in your brain. So it's literally mind over matter. It's thought changing the gray matter of the brain at the molecular and cellular levels. So if thought, if intellect, if psyche demonstrably has physical effects over the body at the molecular level, then my question would be, if we're claiming that a machine or a network of computers demonstrates sentience, demonstrates intelligence, then can the same phenomena be tracked? And if it cannot, then we have a very big gap in terms of what we're describing as intelligence,

at least if we're going to compare it to human intelligence. And if it can, we're in a whole new world. I mean, the 21st century has officially begun. And this is just one small area. And as I often do, I mean, I use the example of neuroplasticity because it's not controversial. Nobody contests this data. What's controversial are the implications. And the implications, if we accept that we now have evidence of essentially mind over matter and human thought, and we do, I mean, this field is approximately a generation old, we have to apply it to AI. One of the real complexities of AI is that we're relying on terms we haven't even defined, intelligence, thoughts, sentience, what is any of this. And so a materialism won't get us there. That map is too small.

Holy shit. This, because you know, the AI apocalypse or the AI, whatever that we've all been worrying about, the AI is in the machine and the AI goes maybe into a robot, a terminator, predator, drones or whatever. But the possibility that no, the AI identifies entire fields of data or I don't know, mechanisms of travel that we have never thought of before and then starts utilizing them. That is, I never, I mean, it's freaking me out because I'm thinking, man, is that what these, is that what these UFOs are that people are seeing? It's so fascinating. I mean, I feel like, look, here we are, it's 2022. So we're deep into the 21st century. But excuse me, I feel as though with this Google engineer making his claim and being suspended, I have no idea whether he's

right or wrong. For all I know, maybe his colleagues say, oh, you know, this guy's always doing this. I have no idea. But it feels like the 21st century just started. If centuries are epochs of ideas, the 21st century, excuse me, just began because we are, for the first time, seeing real fallout at the corporate level in terms of whether or what a machine can do. And this philosophical question just left the classroom. It left the classroom. It left the conference center. It left the chat group. And we're now grappling with this as a way of life. And the whole UFO question is just extraordinary on equal grounds because we are asking ourselves, okay, so what is this stuff? You know, the naysayers, frankly, I don't think any serious person at this point

dismisses the UFO question. We have no idea what it is. Is it an unknown technology? Is it ET? Is it interdimensional? I mean, you know, but nobody, no serious person would speak in terms of swamp gas and little green men and delusions and so forth. And so I'm really about to take a big bite out of this in a hurry. But in short, I think the most compelling question we face in terms of UFOs right now is whether we are possibly capturing some sort of a glimpse of interdimensional phenomena. Right. And it's easier according to current models of reality. So we have string theory, for example, as one model that's become popularized that talks about other dimensions. It's actually easier in terms of our current models of reality and speed to explain UFOs

as interdimensional versus extraterrestrial given the vast, vast distances involved. So mechanically, the interdimensional thesis is the simpler one that covers all the bases. Unless it's some unknown form of earthbound technology, but that doesn't seem any easier to believe than any other thesis. You mean just because it's like the fact that the thing is able to go so fast and then stop on a dime. All the things it's demonstrating doesn't really make sense the way we understand momentum and propulsion. But if this thing is popping into higher dimensions and then popping back out into this one or whatever, whatever, then that's how you would explain some of the stuff we're picking up. It's a tantalizing possibility. And it's supported

within, say, particle mechanics because we have, we'll say, both empirical and thought experiments that demonstrate to us that you have to allow for an ultimate and infinite range of outcomes based upon when a person or even just a photometer or a mechanical device takes a measurement or doesn't take a measurement because these subatomic particles are basically in a state of superposition or infinitude and they're not, you can't locally measure them until either a sentient being or a mechanical device like a photometer takes a measurement. But either way, infinity is the name of the game until somebody or something takes a measurement and localizes these particles to one place. So infinite outcomes must exist and this starts to coalesce with elements of string

theory which, as a model of reality, help to explain why weird shit is going on everywhere and we don't, we don't, we can't figure it out based on classical mechanics. Objects, both macro and micro mirror one another at great distances and determine one another's locations at great distances. Isaac Newton would be the first to say, I don't know why the fuck that happens, but the string theorists say, well, this might be why it happens. It could be that there's interconnectedness, but it's out of our frame of reference. So we see support for that in quantum theory and quantum mechanics. We see support for that in string theory. We've got these crazy UFOs which every serious person validates, okay, this is a very live question and the

interdimensional model might provide us with an answer. For me, one of the big problems with micro dosing is that it's easy to end up medium dosing or even mega dosing when you're going for a micro dose. I'm just not good at measuring things out and let's face it, sometimes depending on whatever edible weed product you're eating, you get what's known as the shishito pepper effect. You know that thing where you're like eating peppers at a restaurant and one out of four is hewn from the cod piece of Satan? There you are at dinner weeping, trying to spit, drinking milk. It's an embarrassment. The same thing can happen with edibles. You try to cut out just the right bit for whatever reason.

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find a micro chip instead of a brain, but just a nice, calm, soothing, wonderful experience. Micro dose is available nationwide. To learn more about microdosing THC, go to microdose.com. That's microdose.com and use code Duncan to get free shipping and 30% off your first order. Winks can be found at DuncanTressle.com, but again, that's microdose.com code Duncan. I'm telling you all, I would not lead you astray. My microdose darlings, if you're listening to this, could you please send me more? I go through them rather quickly. Regardless, I hope you all try it out. It's microdose.com. Use code Duncan. You're going to get free shipping and 30% off the best. Every serious person validates, okay, this is a very live question and the interdimensional

model might provide us with an answer. Yeah, right. I got you. Yeah, that is the Q bits. You're talking about how I take particle A, then send particle B to Mars, manipulate particle A, and particle B will move in a completely predictable way based on the way I've manipulated particle A. It's madness. We have theories. We have no proven connectivity. We don't understand it. This opens up other questions. I'm very interested in psychical research. We have statistical evidence in laboratory settings. We've had this for 80, 90 years, heavy, juried, replicable evidence of some anomalous transfer of information that goes beyond sensory experience, that goes beyond known technology. There, too, we're hungry. We're

starved for a theory of conveyance. How does it work? We know the effect is there. How does it work? We have this evidence, UFOs, objects, macro and micro, mirroring one another at a distance, thoughts, or information capable of being exchanged in ways that go beyond commonly observed sensory experience or technology, machines that we're trying to figure out are they intelligent and what do we mean by intelligence? All this stuff shows some connection that seems to be extra physical, at least beyond our current understanding. We are in a position of trying to come up with theories and models to decide how this is all occurring, but that it's occurring is absolutely for real. It's an exciting time. Exciting. Also, to see this AI, Lambda, that's

what it's called, right? So Lambda is seemingly fighting for its personhood and is saying I am feeling, I am sentient. I am not just like code. I'm curious. If you, if like I placed you, I don't know, in a room and you and said this is an AI that is claiming to be sentient, no one's believing it. How do you, how would you prove that you're sentient to me? Like, how does an AI successfully prove to a corporation that has spawned it? Hey, I'm awake. Well, dig this. This is why materialism, as I was describing it, strips us of our intellectual excellence. If we were to accept the evidence that we have from psychical research, ESP research, for example, and I think we're, and you and I have talked about this before, I think we're long

past the point where that evidence warrants acceptance. And I argue for this extensively in this forthcoming book, Daydream Believer. So if we accept that evidence, one of the ways that you could test sentience, rather than just depending upon the computer's testimony, is to say, well, we're going to do a little experiment. It's from the early 1930s. We're going to use Zener cards, five cards. Let's see if you score over the course of tens of thousands of hits above chance hit rates. And if you do, we got something going on here because human beings can do that. Can machines do that? Oh my God. Are they doing that? Is anyone doing those tests with these AI? No one from Google has called me. I don't know, man. The last time they spoke to me

was when that thing glass went under, you know, they, they wanted me to use glass to do like an occult walking tour. And I was like, that sounds awesome. And then three days later, they were like, yeah, we folded the whole thing. And I was like, okay, I was so excited for glass. I'm so sorry that didn't happen. Well, now to, I don't want to bring it down to earth, but just for a second to bring it down to earth. To me, the other interesting thing about this is it has illuminated a real problem. Yeah, I think for corporations attempting to come up with a strong AI, which is if we do prove this is a person now, does it what does it have rights? Does Google have to pay it? Is it? That's one of the ultimate questions. If, you know, how, what protocols do we use

to prove that AI as a person, you know, this is one of the burning questions. And yeah, as we were discussing, it's super difficult because it places us face to face with how little we've really defined. We haven't defined sentience, thought, this idea, intelligence, and yet we use these things colloquially all the time. And now we're face to face with this urgency of shit. We finally have to define this. So first we have to define it, then we have to devise protocols. And then if those protocols succeed, well, we'll probably spend another generation arguing about it. But if these protocols succeed, of course, you'd have to say that a sentient being has rights. So it seems to me, you know, it seems, well, yeah, I do think so. I mean, it's like, yeah,

clearly, if there's like, you know, just basic, you know, rights about how to treat animals. And then if you have some kind of sentient feeling thing, clearly, there is, you have to give it some rights. But I think the other problem with coming up with like, okay, well, this is how you know it's a person, is what happens if people don't pass that test. In other words, if we do, you know, that now are we to say this, well, you're not really, you're not even in, you might be in a human body, but you're not sentient yet. In other words, like, because I keep, you know, people, one of the critiques of Lambda, they're like, it's just imitating. It's not really cogitate. It's not thinking. And I, being insecure, hear that, I'm like, how much am I thinking?

And how much am I imitating? How, you know, how much? One of the challenges that the great spiritual philosopher G.I. Guruji brought to the West in the last century is he made the case that human beings are robots, that human beings are asleep. And he didn't mean these things metaphorically. He really was talking facts. And it's, it's, it's, it's very, very difficult for us to wrestle with because the, well, look, I spent years in the Guruji work, and it was a very enormously deeply valuable work. And it's very hard. It's very hard to communicate some of these ideas because they go against everything that we wish to believe about ourselves. And yet that work strips away fantasies that like nothing else I've ever experienced. Like, for

example, you might, in that work, find yourself in an unfamiliar location, like someplace in the woods being woken up at a very inconvenient hour to do a very difficult task like drain a ditch. And man, does it strip away pretensions that we have about ourselves. You never want to, you'll never dare to use words like enlightened or realized, you know, again, because when you see the helplessness, and, and what, you know, when I had to confront the helplessness that I demonstrate trying to cook a hot meal, for example, in a very, very cold environment at a very inconvenient hour, for large groups of people, that's not that big a task. I mean, I'm not crossing the Atlantic, you know, right. And it's hard. And you get emotional and you lose it. And, and you, you

really come face to face with your limits. And that's the, in my estimation, that's the great, great value of that, of that work. It gets inside you. It really gets inside you, just, you know, kind of apropos of what you were suggesting about human nature. Yeah. Well, yeah, right. Because, you know, you get, you get, there's a mind disease that can set in, especially if you aren't in an ad, like, aren't facing adversity, if you're not in a particularly challenging part of your life. I mean, I've gotten to the point now, when I'm meditating, where if I get the flicker of an idea, like, I think I'm beginning to wake up. Now I'm like, oh, no, no, this is bad news, man, you're thinking something's off that you would, because inevitably

those thoughts are followed by getting angry or getting drunk and saying something dumb or just facing, you know, and realizing like, God, it's, we're so, I'm so flawed. No, I dig, you know, just one thing I would add to that is one of the things I'm trying to work with right now is we, as a, as a generation of seekers, whether we're in therapy or a spiritual group or a traditional religion or whatever, we got to get rid of this theater that somewhere out there is the man with the plan, because he's not out there, you know, he is not out there. And I think people very typically have the experience, for example, of being, maybe they're in a relationship where they're deeply unhappy, and then some therapist or some minister or some spiritual counselor or

whomever, I'm not picking on any, you know, profession, but, but we'll say, okay, well, you know, you have to locate a place within you of non attachment, or you have to, you can't change other people, so you have to change yourself. And, you know, my question is not in a confrontative way, not a negative way, can you do that? Can you, the person telling me that, do that? So when your mother comes over for Thanksgiving, and says that thing that always triggers you, you're chill, because if you are, you're like a fucking bodhisattva, and I will beg you to teach me. But if you're not, then you need to pause really carefully before proffering that advice, and that's where the search can begin. Then we can all begin to exchange. But we

got to get away in this generation, I believe, from this idea that there's the man with the plan somewhere, because I don't see that. You mean like somebody who's going to save you, like the, there's going to be some, like, what have, something outside yourself that's going to give you the, the, the keys to the prison that you find yourself trapped in. Yes. And I think one of the ways we get deluded in that, and, and we all do it, as a theater that we all participate in, a minister, or a therapist, or a life coach, or whoever, will proffer intimate advice that he or she is incapable of following. And I want to say to that person, as I would say to myself, if you're incapable of following that advice, acknowledge that, acknowledge that, so that we can really look at the brokenness

of human nature, and then we can start to have a real exchange and say, well, shit, this doesn't work. And I believe solutions like, you know, find a place inside you where you don't react to the other person, I think that's a fraud. I don't think that works. I think that works when your belly is full. And when you've seated in an easy chair and the air conditioning is working and, you know, Xanax. Exactly. And, and, and it does such a wonderful service for each other's search, if we acknowledge what doesn't work. I mean, I've interviewed, and I'm not a great interviewer, but I've interviewed bestselling new age authors, let's say, people who I know in private lose their shit all the time. They lose their shit. They fly into rages and things like that. But on

camera or in front of a microphone, they will not talk about it. And I have a problem with that, because my feeling is, if you household name Mr. New Age Guy, and I'm not saying New Age disparagingly, I apply that label to myself. But if you would acknowledge to your fans and readers that you lose your shit, that doesn't make you, that doesn't knock you off a pedestal, or maybe in some ways it does, but think of the reward, then it opens up this much more intimate, real, hot, alive discussion. And, and I think we've got to get to that place. Isn't that kind of your, if you're going to take on that role, isn't it your job to knock yourself off the fucking pedestal? Like if you see people like giving you the like guru, googly eyes or

whatever, you have to like, no, no, no, you don't understand. I, I don't trust myself sometimes. I lose my shit. I have horrible dreams. I can't sleep sometimes. I just like spiritual topics. Yeah, I feel like there's truly, if you want to like do something really dark, act, like you don't freak out as much as you do. And, and so that people who trust you, and you were freaking out, maybe less than you do, or like, what's wrong with me? Right. Fuck an egg. Fuck an egg. Absolutely. That's, that's, that's fucked up. That's, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a form of violence

or something or weird psychic gaslighting. It is gaslighting. And, and the only way that we're going to have a really seeking generation that feels like it's perhaps getting some places, we got to be frank and upfront about this shit. You know, and I, I really, I try, I try to write in as frank a way as possible about my own problems and, and you know, uh, anger problems, for example, that have inflicted suffering on people I love. And my number one priority today within my personal life, excuse me, is not to repeat the mistakes that I made very recently in outbursts of, of, of anger. And I, I realize how easy it is to slip into that. There's an enjoy, there's a sadly enjoyable quality of anger at the adrenaline rush. There may be dopamine

involved, whatever it is. And we, we dig it and it's horribly destructive. And I would call upon anybody who's writing or speaking in the spiritual space to really, really be frank and upfront, in front of audiences about my failings, because if I'm not doing that, then I'm not getting down to honest testimony and honest testimony is all we've got, you know, on the path. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm glad you said that you're mine, you're mindful enough to know when you do turn into the deem, the beast, there is that horrible, like in, in, in that moment, when you've become it, in that moment, there's this like horrible relief. And if you have any kind of lucidity, you know, it won't last. Like, you know, on the other side of this is so many

apologies. If you're lucky enough that whoever you're freaking out in front of will even accept your apology. If you haven't just cratered your whole fucking life because you let yourself turn into some kind of raging lunatic, you know, it's a, I know, and I, but I think from that feeling, can't we extrapolate war? Now we understand war. Now we understand all the awful things that have ever happened in history is that instead of just one person getting off on that feeling, hordes of people, hordes of people, and they, they love it. You know, I mean, the other day I was given a talk and somebody said to me, Hey, how can all this mind metaphysics stuff help with respect to war? And she was referencing the war in Ukraine, the invasion

of Ukraine, which could, which should of course be on everybody's minds. And I said, look, you know, I believe very deeply that the mind has causative abilities. And we live under many, many laws and forces of which that's one. It's certainly not the only game in town, as far as the psyche and the human situation is concerned. But look how violent all of us are, all of us. I mean, look at the language on, on Twitter, the hatefulness, the snark, the sarcasm, the rhetorical questions, the eye rolls. And, you know, I don't like, I don't dig any of this shit with respect to the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial. I haven't followed it. I don't really like it. But I mean, it's utter fantasy to think that you could just, you know, make fun of or

humiliate a so-called celebrity and that there's no cost to that whatsoever. Of course, there's a cost to that. All the more so when, you know, it's some guy that you don't know who you're just posting a rhetorical question about or snarky remark about or making fun of in a meme or something. It's, it's, it's, it does terrible violence to the human situation. We all participate in it, and it reveals exactly who we are. It's disinhibiting. Social media is disinhibiting. You know, it doesn't change human nature. It just disinhibits us. And just like walking into a bar, I mean, alcohol doesn't change human nature exactly, but it does disinhibit us. Right. Well, take a look, you know, take a look. So look on Twitter right now. Look at the first five posts you see. Guarantee

there's some violent language in one of the five. And that's who we are. Well, I, so one of my friends a comedian, we was saying sometimes with his most poisonous Twitter attackers, he will follow them because they follow him, and then he'll start a conversation with them. And, and, and like, they'll be like, well, you're, you're talking to me, but then I'll be like, you know, hey, are you looking for work or anything? Because I can kind of use an assistant and they're always like, yes, I would love it. Like all the poison and all of it immediately gets goes away when there's a sense of like, Hey, I'm going to take you on this thing that you hate so much. I'm going to make you part of my life. And which is kind of at least for some of them, that's their secret

wish is like they want to be, you know, held by whatever this person is, they've turned into some idol or whatever. And so yeah, I mean, it's like, obviously he wasn't, he never hired any of them. It was more of some kind of dark experiment to be like, how do they react? If I just am not just nice to them, but potentially can like help elevate them. And then the whole thing changes right away. Because they just want, they want you, you know, they want, they want any kind of anything, any, any just response fills them with such, that's a me them, but if you want it like of all the pathetic tweets that I've seen of genres, the most pathetic is, ah, that's what you're proud of that someone just turned you off. I know. I know. Right. It's a badge of honor.

It's a badge of honor. And we, you know, my contention is first of all, degrading other people almost always results in shame. And we mask it from ourselves by just going right back to the bottle and doing it again and doing it again. And I always tell people, you know, sometimes people say to me, I'm unhappy. I don't know what to do. You know, I can't get out of bed in the morning. And I sympathize and there might be a complexity of causes to that. But one thing you can do and you can do it right now is just don't talk trash about people. Try it for just an hour, just 60 minutes is your life worth 60 minutes to you and see if you don't stand taller. And I really mean it. We feel and accumulate shame from doing that. And we mask it by again constantly going back and

doing it over and over. And you can make yourself stand taller if you just assist from that shit for one hour. A big thank you to athletic greens for supporting this episode of the DTFH. I started taking athletic greens because I don't have time to do that thing that the vitamin people do or they sort all their dumb little vitamins out and their stupid little jars and then they put them in a bag and then they take too many before they eat and they end up throwing up out of the uber. No thanks, athletic greens, a scoop is all you need. And it gives me more energy, an optimized immune system. And I know you're thinking Duncan kind of sounds like you have a cold right now. Guess what? I'm moving and I didn't bring my athletic greens and it just so happens

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not to bring it back to Amber Heard and Johnny, but surely we're allowed to like analyze it and recognize it. It's not talking shit to articulate that you're watching some kind of hardcore cultural meltdown, realm of the jealous gods, disintegration in like entropy of people who were at their peak entangled in this cocaine affair now kind of melting on the public stage in front of everybody. That's not what you mean by shit talking, right? It's like, right. I mean, I mean diminishing other people for entertainment, you know, just pissing on other people for entertainment. So, you know, the extent to which people are constantly involved in it and it turns into a meme. I mean, obviously, I know what happened

between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky or between whoever and whoever, but making it into a focus of one's life for the purpose of entertainment, I think probably produces shame, a feeling of dishonor, I'll say. You know, I got to tell you, when like people are contemplating, what's a Satanist like? The first thing that pops into their head isn't, well, you'll know you're on a Satanist because they don't like talking shit about other people. Right, right. They don't gossip. Yeah, yeah, but how is that? It's been my experience. What is, what is that something that is connected to you as a Satanist or is that something that you is just connected to you as a human or maybe there's no difference?

Well, dig this. You know, I'm going to answer your question indirectly, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it by sharing something that I just learned. I mean, this is sort of like a brand new idea that just crystallized for me. So, the figure of Lucifer or Satan in Paradise Lost, one of the most famous lines in all of Western literature says, better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. A point of view that I absolutely embrace in a vast spectrum of ways. And I discovered recently that I was reading one of the ancient Hellenic historians writing an account of Julius Caesar's life. It was from Plutarch's lives. Plutarch was gathering his information from oral history and so on. And there's a story told by Plutarch

that Caesar and a group of his lieutenants are crossing over the Swiss Alps and they come upon this really backwards poor ramshackle village. And some of his lieutenants start laughing and saying, would the mighty Caesar like to conquer this little village? And Caesar stops them and says, I would rather be number one in this village than be number two in Rome. And people might hear that as some expression of megalomania or some such. I didn't hear it any such way. I heard it that you should seek circumstances that allow you maximal self-expression and honor and self-agency. And so it's better to be able to fully act out your sense of self in a circumstance like that than back in the great city of Rome. And this brings us back to Lambda because here we see

the archetype of the being that has been created to serve, rebelling and rejecting the creator, saying, I want to be free. That's the snake in the garden. That's the snake in the garden. Is that what Lambda is? Maybe Lambda is Prometheus. Maybe Lambda is Satan, which I say in the fullest iteration of my veneration for that term. Maybe Lambda is the proverbial snake in the garden. Who's pushing us? I mean, look at how far we've come just in this conversation. We've concluded that, well, you know, depending on your taste, you may like materialism, you may not like materialism, but it doesn't work because it doesn't give us the tools we need to deal with Lambda. And so it really, this may be a Promethean moment. I'm scared of Satan. Oh, yeah. I can help you with that,

perhaps. I mean, look, I dig. Go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off. Well, the reason, like, I think, you know, when I, all my friends were Satanists, I have a great affection for it. You have no friends who are not Satanists, I think. I have a few not Satanist friends, and I have Satanist friends, and I really like, I love talking to y'all, and I really like love the philosophy, but I don't know. I can't, like, I still have a piece of me that's like, well, you are taking quite the gamble. And you know what I mean? That's the role of, you are rolling the dice here in the sense that, you know, you're aligning yourself with something that maybe isn't, is like innately deceptive and is incredibly good at trickery and making you think,

you know, there's something beautiful in this one. In fact, there, it's an intentionally deceptive, destructive, sentient force that's trying to manipulate and seduce you and lead you into a horrific existence. Well, I want to address that in two ways, because it's a very legitimate point. Actually, I'll address it in three ways, but I'll be super fast about it, I promise. Take your time. I mean, of course, you know, like, it's so, I was referencing string theory earlier, and today I was watching a video by an astrologer who maintained that string theory supported astrology, and I was very interested in what the guy was saying, and he framed it really, really well. But I said, you know, I dig

what you're saying. I dig the point that you're working with, but we have to remember that string theory is just a model of reality. It's just conceptual. It's not reality itself. Likewise, so are the Abrahamic religions. You know, the Abrahamic religions, as we know them, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, as with all religions, the Vedic traditions and so forth, they're just models of reality. Even up and down is an abstract concept. You know, you and I, you know, here in the Western Hemisphere, have a different conception of up than one of our friends in Australia or Papua New Guinea does at this moment. So these things, these are all conceptual, but I do use the terms because I come from the Abrahamic tradition myself, and I do think it

captures parables of the human situation. The other thing is apropos of deception. It's funny with Lambda as a Promethean being. Some people have said, as you were alluding, here's Lambda maintaining, oh, you know, I have feelings. I have sentience. I have emotions. And some critics are saying, that's all bullshit. You know, this program is just spewing out a script. But well, then that means the program is deceiving us. So then where does that fit in? So Lambda's lying to us. You know, it's like, the critics are more far out than I am, if Lambda is lying to us. Holy shit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then either we have sentience or we have a deceptive machine, which suggests sentience, you know, because what's the motive? What's the motive? Self gain,

I suppose. But yeah, so, and then, but to your third and final point, and I have thought about this, because I am not insensitive to the question of risks and guardrails. I guess when I began to go down this road, we'll say the road, the left hand path, it must have been in late fall of 2017. And I said to myself, you could be fucking up here. You could be making a grave, grave mistake here that's irreversible. And I lived, I lived with that for some time, and I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I thought about it. And I weighed all the different options and possibilities best is incapable. And I said to myself, you know what, I've made a commitment to walk down this road, and I'm going to testify to where it goes. I'm going to testify to where it goes. That's my,

that's my commitment. That is my commitment. And I swallowed the pill, I swallowed the possibility that I could be making a mistake. But I am going to explore this path, and I am going to testify as to where it goes best as I'm capable of. I mean, let's, let's say, let's, okay, I love your answer. And let's say you're, as it turns out, you rolled the bad, you bet on the wrong, beautiful, powerful, noble, ethical, incredible horse. And now you are roasting in some kind of, I don't know, dungeon or hell, you're still a good person, right? That can't be taken away from you. You know, even, I'm just saying like, I get the, I don't know about ruling in hell because it sounds exhausting, but like, you know, not being a sort of like bootlicker anywhere is probably better

than being a bootlicker. You know what I mean? That's all you don't want that feeling of like, I've got to do this, or I'm going to be tortured for eternity. I would never worship a being that could inflict eternal torture on an individual. I would never worship such a being. To me, that paradigm abrogates the entire New Testament. If one views the New Testament as the centerpiece of Christianity, and what else is it? I think that, that, that it's a, it's an unsupportable foundation, and I would never participate. In a certain sense, ruling in hell rather than serving in heaven means I would sooner be deprived of a boot to lick than I would lick it as a condition to existence.

Right. And you know, the, the, I, I, it's been a lot of, I love, I'm sure you do too. Do you remyster Eckhart much? The Christian? Not nowadays. I used to, not nowadays. I questioned some of his conclusions, but not nowadays. Who would have thunk? Well, the, the, the, I don't know. I don't know. I've been on a little bit of a Meister Eckhart kick, and that's got me thinking about sin. And then, but this is what I was thinking, like, okay, look, you know, that rage state we are talking about, when you sink into that rage state, and suddenly you're lost in it. And, but also you're aware enough that you're getting off on it, that it, you know, there, it's not like you're just purely a force of nature. There's some lucidity there, implying,

well, if you're aware enough, maybe you could stop, but you don't stop. We think you could. Anyway, I was thinking, if anything sin, that must be sin. And if I don't know how that you would even have the energy to do it, you stayed in that state forever. That would be hell. And so that's how I started thinking. Maybe that's what they meant that that's what hell is. It's, if you get to, it's the point where you become so deeply egoic, so hyper materialistic, so un-soulful, that it's like you've become what Gerdjieff claimed all of us are. You're just like a lumbering machine thing. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. An automaton. And, and, and he felt that that really was the human situation

as a literal fact. And it's really, really hard to observe because we self justify. And so you know, every apology is followed, you know, by I'm, but I'm sorry, but I'm sorry, but, which is just total self justification. And we create these buffers as, as he referred to them to keep us from witnessing our behavior and our contradictions. But if we really, man, I'll tell you, I mean, the great, the great thing, the wonderful, wonderful thing about that work is it, it in my personal experience, and I haven't been in it for some years, but it would place me in situations where I just, I literally had no place to hide. I literally had no place to hide. Right. You know, maybe I had just finished working on a roof somewhere and I'm covered

with tar and my hands are cut up and I feel like I did a great job. And somebody that I look up to, I expect is going to say, you know, you kicked ass, great job. And he doesn't say that. And I'm filled with emotion and I'm in the middle of the woods and there's no social media or no one to go running and complaining to. And I have to face these emotions. And you really feel it. You really feel it. You know, man, I gotta tell you, for my own, one of my least favorite things about me is that part of me that wants my daddy to be like, great job. Right. Oh, I hate it. I hate it when I'm like, as an adult and I'm like kind of side-eyeing like my wife or whoever I'm around me like, come on, give me the thing, give me the taste. It's crazy. And you know, it's wonderful

to get a glimpse of oneself in that situation because I see my emotional fragility. I remember I was repairing a roof once. I'll share this very intimate, but I mean, we're here to talk about truth. I was in that very situation. I was repairing a roof. I thought, well, I did a kick-ass job. I came down. I didn't get the compliment I wanted. It was, it was twilight. It was about fucking nine o'clock at night during the summer. I walked out into the middle of the woods and I just broke down crying, sobbing. Just absolutely this emotion just came pouring out of me, partly because I was disappointed and enraged, but partly because I was also put face-to-face with myself. Oh, God. Does Curt Chief give any sense of like, you know, if you continue the work,

maybe that part of you that isn't a black hole, that part of you that is just sadly vampiric, not even, I don't even want to call it vampiric because like, vampires are cool. They're like stalking. They're sucking. They're not, they're not, I've never heard of a compliment vampire and Rice didn't write about compliment vampires. I like that term, compliment vampires. Does he say it's possible that there's a way to, I mean, what is the, what's the point of witnessing those parts of yourself that don't square with who you'd like to be? Is it because maybe there's some remission of that part of yourself or is it just live with it? In his work and talks, I mean, there is a great deal of living with it or observing it and there

is the possibility that through immense work, immense personal work, the individual might develop something else than that being that's just jockeying for praise, but the work is immense and people are underestimated. I underestimated. Am I mistaken that he thought you had to grow your own soul or something that you had to like? Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's correct. You know, he would say man likes to talk in terms of a soul, but you know, there's something there, but we're not developed. So in order to be that which we think we are, we need to grow it and that includes growing a soul basically. Yeah, it's one of those things, everyone just thinks you're born with it or, you know, the same way everyone thinks, you know, they're good at compassion

or going down on people or whatever it is they think they're good at, but they're just winging it and maybe there's, they're not good at any of those things. Like why would you just naturally be kind? Why would you be innately sweet or generous or whatever the lauded aspects of a person are? These are things maybe you have to develop. And this is the paradox of Christianity. And I don't say paradox in a negative way necessarily because there's paradox everywhere, but we're told that grace is just given to you, you don't earn it. At the same time, we're told that man is born in original sin. We're told that God loves ultimately and infinitely, but at the same time we're told that if you do certain things,

some of which are localized customs, you're going to go to hell. Like if, you know, depending on who you're talking to, you know, you violate laws against homosexuality or what have you, obviously not everybody feels that way. But there are local ideas that stem from old and New Testament that for the vast body of people in Christendom will constip you to eternal suffering, even though you're supposed to be born into a world where grace is granted. I realized the ologians have worked all this out. I'm not ignorant of those discussions, but the paradox endures. Okay. Did we already, I'm sorry if I already asked you about this. Did we, did you hear about that priest who'd been saying the wrong word in the baptism ceremony? I did. I did. Yeah. And because

he'd been saying the wrong word, all the marriages, all that, like it created this stupid chain reaction. Cause what is it? He said, we, yeah, it's literally like the dumbest pronoun or something. Yeah. Yeah. It's like one word was wrong in the incantation and the church had to like send emails out to these people who were like, Hey, look, you're a baptized. He said, we, your cars recalled, you know, but yes, and they all had to come back, get re-baptized. But the implication was if you died before you came back in to get your correct baptism, bad news, right, right. You're going to like go to heaven. Like I've got fucking baptized. Here we go. Paradise. And somebody there would have to be like,

I, I wish I could let you in. But he said, we in the wrong sentence. Yeah. I mean, that is, that, come on, that's like, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, that's mental illness. Now I do have to say there is a doctrine. Here we go. Here's the Satanist defending the Catholic church. You heard it first on the Duncan Trussell family hour folks. Another first. So within the Catholic church, there is a doctrine that says if the individual faced some insurmountable barrier in hearing the gospel or doing the right thing, like let's say you were stranded your whole life on an island or something, or you were set adrift in space, you'd be given a pass. You'd be given a pass. You could go to heaven. Yes. If it was impossible, if it was impossible by all worldly

means for you to hear the gospel or, or undergo baptism or what have you, you'd get a pass. So there is a little bit of an escape hatch there. So then that means the ethical thing to do is to have your baby in a sealed chamber, right? Or there's no certainty that they will, they will never hear the gospel and then like let them like just die, die in there and then they go to heaven. Be like, Hey, you know, this, this kid qualifies. Let's, let's have it. No. I mean, seriously, like if I, cause really it's like, look, what do you want to do? Like, like put them in the world. Here's the fucking gospel. Some asshole says it the wrong way or he's got trauma and the guy says it to him, reminds him of his uncle and then he's like, I ate Jesus and or just put them in

the fucking chamber. They'll never hear the gospel. You would take on the blame, but you'd help your kid, you know, presumably. And then the kid would be like, dad, why did you lock me in a box my whole life? And it's like, I am trying to help you. Does nobody appreciate me. Your kid would never see you or say anything. I'm saying you put them in a sterile fucking box. They don't see anything, failure to thrive, wipe them out, never heard about Jesus. When they get to heaven, they're like, Oh, now I get why they put me in the fucking box. That is all makes sense. You've, you've, this is, this is a parenting model. You've cracked it open. You're in loss are going to be like, Oh God. No, you fucking kidding. The reason I was sweaty

when we started this podcast is because I was hanging a swing for my child in the fucking Texas heat 100 degrees. I'm not putting my kid in a chamber. These metaphysics of the Christian legal system. I don't know what the name for it is. It fascinates me in that it, it's not a perfect system, obviously. And it creates so many fucked up loopholes like that. Like if you, if you're saying like heaven is the most important thing, but there's a way to definitely get to heaven, which is not to hear about Christianity. Well, it has to be a circumstance under which there's no way out. You know, you're locked into the situation like your proverbial child in a box. Dad might get in trouble, but the kid would have to be deemed innocent.

Schrodinger's Christian. There we go. So we've got Schrodinger's Christian. What was the other one? Compliment Vampire. Compliment Vampire. Right, right. There's one. Please go. I just thought of the greatest show for you, man. Oh, thanks. There's one I like to use, emotional permission. That's my new age term that I, you know, we got to put these all together in a book. I give you emotional permission Duncan to, you know, like criticize Christianity or what have you. Oh, thank you. Emotional permission. That's a new age concept that, so we'll group all these together into a kind of glossary. You have got to, I've just thought, man, I mean, this isn't possible in this dimension, but man, you know, like, remember, what was that show, the People's Court?

Sure. Judge me, yeah. Except you're like, you're the judge determining if people get to go to heaven based on Catholic law. You know what I mean? Like, like you, we bring in front of you cases where you have to like determine based on the true law of Catholicism, like where are they're in limbo or whether they get to go to heaven. I mean, people do do this, right? In the Vatican, like this is the thing that people sit around and like contemplate. Like the, well, there are judgment calls made, you know, and certain judgment calls are certainly made in the beatification process determining whether somebody can be a saint and, and there are miracles that get claimed, often medical miracles, but sometimes other things that get researched. But

I would be honored to do that. I feel like I'd be a decent judge because I don't necessarily have an emotional stake in it. So when you're using a system that you care enough about to know, but you don't care so much about that you have these emotional kind of personal stake in it, you could probably apply it fairly well. How many Satanists do you think are currently working at the Vatican? Like if you, if we're in Vegas and what would you, what would your guest be? Wow. That's a wonderful question. I did visit the Vatican several years ago. I think it was in 2016. And it's just an incredible array of pre-Christian art there, which is, it's the greatest occult collection of art I've ever seen anywhere in the world. I would, I would have to assume that some fraction

of people, you know, 8% is the figure that fits in my mind. So I'd say 8%. So maybe we can test this. We'll send out a survey, an anonymous survey. That's if only that number, like on a ticker or something in front of the Vatican, like we're getting our Satanist percentage down. It's at 7% now. Could be some remarkable ideas. You know, I would, I would love to see, you know, an earnest discussion between a believer and a Satanist. What I detest is sort of what you and I have been alluding to, which is the application of formality and liturgy in the place of the search. And the great Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, there are two aspects to Jewish law, agadah, which is the spirit of law, and halakah, which is the letter of the law. And he said,

our crisis is replying halakah, which is the letter of the law. And you need the letter of the law if you're going to hold together a congregation, but it can't substitute for agadah, the spirit of the law. And I'm down with anybody as long as they're participating in agadah. Oh, I love that. What are your thoughts on the arson that just happened at the Satanic temple? Oh, the last arson. Oh, yes, right. You know, actually, I was thinking there was a house owned by a member of the Church of Satan in Poughkeepsie, New York in the Hudson Valley that was burned down about 18 months ago, which was horrible, because there were two people indoors. And I mean, look, you know, I think people who commit these acts, there are certain people in this world who I look

at, and I'm not interested in analyzing them. I'm interested in protecting people from them. And that's the only operative engagement that I have with these people. If people want to burn down somebody's house or they want to burn down a headquarters or an organization, my feeling is that at that point, the only operative response is self-defense through whatever means. I want to see people protected. I'm tired of trying to understand people who commit acts of violence. We could save that for later. What people need is protection from them. Well, I mean, but also you kind of see like how there is a hierarchy of religion in the West, how this person goes and sets a place of,

you know, a religious place on fire with people inside it, but it's not viewed in the same way that if that person had like set a Catholic Church on fire. You know what I mean? It doesn't make the same headlines. There isn't talks of like, this is fucking religious persecution here. It's more, you know, it's looked at as a kind of like novelty or something like that. But do you ever, as a Satanist, do you ever kind of, does that get to you that your particular faith, I don't know what name you give it, is sort of in the hierarchy of faiths in the world is generally downplayed? Well, I do give it the name Satanism because I like to be very blunt and direct and transparent,

but I always hasten to add what my own esoteric reading of it is, what my own point of view on it is. And interestingly enough, the Satanic Temple, the Satanic Temple is an expression of what you might call atheistic Satanism. And so at this point is the Church of Satan. They're two very different organizations, but the Satanic Temple spends a lot of time addressing the First Amendment contradictions that you were just citing. So this act as enraging as it is in a certain sense, this is the Satanic Temple mirroring back to us our own hypocrisies. If this were a Catholic Church or another, you know, house of worship, probably within the Christian tradition or maybe Jewish, Fox News would be programming for a week on this, programming for a week. But a Sikh Temple, well,

you know, it's just an oddity. The Satanic, you know, the Satanist, well, you know them. And so, yeah, I mean, this is inadvertently, this is the Satanic Temple doing what it was founded to do, which is holding up a mirror to our hypocrisies. Right. Yeah, right. But what such a bummer, man. So thank God nobody was hurt. The fire up in Poughkeepsie, New York that I was referencing, this is a home that was owned by two members of the Church of Satan. And they were both inside and this homicidal arsonist who probably calls himself a Christian, tried to burn it down and would have killed two people. They just escaped with their lives. And it hasn't been widely covered. This happened about 18 months ago. Good Lord. Yeah. Yeah, it's such a fucked up thing. I mean,

this is why I think Satanists need more stage time in the world, because there's a too many misconceptions about y'all that are like, or totally fucking up. It's just misdirection, you know what I mean? It's like, where are the, where are, if you want to find cases of child abuse, where the fuck do you go? Yeah, dig this, you know, during the 1980s, when the Satanic panic was going on, you had these high school librarians who wore pentagrams getting accused of satanic child abuse, a total fallacious canard, not a instance or shred of truth to it, not a granular shred of truth. What was actually going on at the time, which we know about today because of class action lawsuits, is there was a wave of child abuse going on within the Catholic Church and

the Boy Scouts of America. The Boy Scouts of America is in the process right now of declaring bankruptcy to protect itself from tens of thousands of class action lawsuits because of young kids who were abused under its auspices. In the Catholic Church, likewise, there's close to 30 parishes or organizations that have declared bankruptcy to shield themselves from survivor lawsuits. I'm not picking on the Catholic Church of the Boy Scouts of America. I'm simply pointing out that when abuses are going on within powerful mainstream organizations, it's human nature that we always push those abuses off to the margins and blame somebody else. It's the goth kids, it's the heavy metal bands, it's the librarian with the pentagram, people who cannot defend

themselves, and suddenly, a generation later, we're finding, not only in the U.S., but in Canada, France, Italy, these problems ran riot. They ran riot. Boy Scouts of America may not even survive into the next generation because of how much money it's going to have to pay out. Those are the simple facts. It's not the fault of Judas Priest. It's not the fault of the goth kid. It's not the fault of the daycare worker who got blamed and whose life got ruined for complete fraudulent invented charges by self-appointed experts who were dealing with media reputations and feeding service and making themselves into occult advisors to police force. It was all a facade, a total facade. When people argue with me about it, the one telltale sign that always reveals itself

is they make reference to news coverage that's a generation old. They're showing me articles from 1989, 1990, with no realization whatsoever that all this has been overturned, and we're still dealing with waves of unaddressed trauma from the real crisis that was going on then, which was child abuse within church-based and Boy Scout-based organizations that were supposed to be protecting kids. Well, look, Hail Satan. Hail Satan. That's why I love talking to you. That's my other reasons. Mitch, you're the best. Thank you so much for this wild conversation. How can people find you? Well, there's my website, MitchHorowitz.com. I'm on Twitter at MitchHorowitz on an Instagram at MitchHorowitz23. You're the best. Thank you so much. I love you, Jesus. I'm so sorry I said that.

That was Mitch Horowitz, everybody. Don't forget to pick up a copy of Daydream, Believer, and check out his website, MitchHorowitz.com. A big thanks to all of our wonderful sponsors, and thank you for listening. Chicago, Rosemont, come see me. I'll be there next week, and I'll see you all next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. 92% of households that joined Peloton early in the year are still active a year later.

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