It Could Happen Here - Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Garrison talks with a panel of magicians while attending a conference in Berlin focused on the intersection of mainstream culture and the occult.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That was dumb. Do not follow my example. Listen to Crimless, Hillbilly Heist, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, here we go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? Each week, I'm calling up my friends, like Bill Nye, Lily Singh, and Pete Buttigieg, to talk about everything from the space race to movie remakes to psychedelics.

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And I fear I've angered her Wait a minute, Sophia. How do you know she's a cult leader? Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the Okay Storytime podcast So we'll find out soon. This person writes My neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals. And now my ceiling is collapsing.

I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they might be part of a cult. Hold up. A real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue, Dakota. Find out how it ends. Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everybody, it's snacks from the trap nerds.

All October long, we're bringing you the horror. Boogity, boogity, buggy. We're kicking off this month with some of my. my best horror games to keep you terrified. Then we'll be talking about our favorite horror in Halloween movies and figuring out why black people always die further. And it's the return of Tony's horror show

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I heard... Ah, hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the spooky special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis. Once again, there has been far too many important world events taking precedence that we here at the show are unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth of themed episodes. But I know how important Halloween is for many millennials. So I've taken it upon myself to produce two spooky episodes to bookend the holiday.

This episode that you're listening to right now, as well as another that will release Monday morning or Sunday night. As the world is becoming an increasingly spooky, scary place, I needed to up the ante to exceed the weird and eerie fright that comes from living in America and the world in general in 2025. So last week, I traveled from New York to Brussels, briefly caught up with my close personal friend and colleague Tintin, and then took the train to Germany. Very scary indeed. Once in Germany, I was confronted with seemingly occult words and symbols.

People spoke in odd incantations. I came across a map that appeared via my black scribe. mirror, the iPhone, which upon deciphering, led me to an old power plant warehouse in East Berlin. I entered this dark looming building, and inside the air was thick with smoke and incense. Figures dressed in all black emerged from the fog, witches, wizards, and magicians. I followed them into a candlelit room where hooded occultists conducted a ritual, welcoming us to the 2025 Acculture Conference. A Culture is a bi-yearly conference, that's once every two years,

focusing on the intersection of occultism and culture, pop or otherwise. This is arguably the most prestigious occultism conference in the world. I have been wanting to attend for years, and I was finally able to go, this go around, on the condition that I make four podcast episodes. The two that I'm releasing this week and next will cover some of the core, magical, and topical currents throughout the conference, mostly via a panel discussion between myself

and three other attendees. And then before Christmas, I'll have two fully scripted episodes, interrogating these concepts further and discussing the use of occult practice in 2025. So to start, let's meet our panelists. I should introduce my, uh, magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta, a Belgian magician and artist, which I recruited to join me in this wacky adventure.

Delta, say hi. Hello. What do you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty I, I suppose. Um, well, it's kind of a mix of... Into the microphone. It's kind of a mix of things where, part of it is just... Into the microphone. I'm sorry. You can get pretty close to it. Okay. It's kind of a mix of things really

between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical, like weird theory stuff like Mark Fisher and the CCRU adjacent things. We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some bland stuff, meta-fiction, theory fiction,

Hypersition, Delta, myself, talk about magic through the internet quite a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left. I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan. I practiced the Vajriana, a Greco-Egyptian magical practice, and also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that, I was also an academic for a good period of time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy, and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide and varied. We've been making a lot of haggle jokes this weekend. So many haggle jokes.

Our last crew member, which people may have heard before on various shows. Hi, my name is Elaine, and I make art and research a lot of renaissance. on script morric magic, and though most of the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and Balkan folk magic. Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests, let's start by discussing the word a culture, the namesake of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the word occult and culture, and it describes how the two influence

and possibly undermine one another. I'm going to read a quote from the person who originated the term. Quote, a culture is a word that was inevitable. During the hyperactive phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the 1980s, we were casting around for an all-embracing term to describe an approach to combining

a unique, demystified, philosophy with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible. At any given moment, our sensory environment is whispering to us, telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions is what we named a culture. Unquote. That is from Genesis B. Peoridge, a musician, magician, artist, a cult leader, and hashtag slightly problematic queer icon. In the 70s, they started the band Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later started the Chaos Magic organization, the Temple of Psychic Youth,

and its associated band Psychic TV. Though a culture did not just describe this sort of personal spiritual movement, it carried a strong offensive element, targeted against society and perceived systems of control. Through there are many projects, including Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the Temple of Psychic Youth, Peoridge utilized art and magical practice to conduct a quote-unquote war on culture, similar to another figure that will soon get to William S. Burroughs. A culture describes a process of cultural osmosis. The occult bleeds into and morphs culture, affecting everything from pop culture to politics and philosophy. But as a part of this osmosis, the occult becomes increasingly commodified, knowable, safe territory, marketable. The hidden occult

loses its very essence of being hidden. Despite its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture, like most countercultural forms, the occult has been largely recuperated. Even creative works, which are genuine explorations into the occult fall into this recuperation paradigm. They get turned into products, consumed by a mostly secular audience, like the works of dueling wizards Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

Now, some occultists rejoice, knowing that this wide exposure will influence more people to become interested in or adopt occult practices of their own, while others bemoan this dialogue and commodification of what to them is an important spiritual practice. As the modern occult revival, along with a heavy helping hand of scientific advancement,

de-territorialized Christian hegemonic religion, now the occult itself has been re-territorialized, which is not to say that the occult is no longer a field of play, which is what this conference attempts to assert. Let's go back to the panel. In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later, the term occulture very specifically seems to be focused on the study of the interrelation of magical practice and the material aspects of occult culture and its influence and appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political projects or social projects, you can probably relate this. I think that it would be fair to say that it's something like culture jamming if we're looking for some familiar concepts

for people to map onto. That is to say, a focus away from simply solitary practice in the ways in which occult elements influence broader aspects of our society or are appropriated, whether that's through consumerist forces or through various artistic practices or even the production of, for example,

film, television, movies. So I think that that's a fair assessment of the impacts of a culture. And relevant to our discussion later, its influence in the tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current manifestation of has some heavily occult origins

regarding around a whole bunch of people in the 90s who were writing about AI as this occult project and then that influenced many an AI engineer and coder who are now building this stuff. And it's becoming an ever-present part of our lives. And the occultists now aren't trying to

incorporated into their own practice, which we will discuss in a sec. Any other notes on a culture as a concept or what this conference is doing with the concept? I think a culture as a concept is something that's basically been around as long as there's been magical practices, just looking at so much of things like, you know, the concept of the British Empire being invented by John D. because of conversations he was having with angels. So I think that naming it and calling it something is also very much felt like an attempt to sort of regain control over the ways that magical practice and greater society seem to influence each other as opposed to a more unintentional way that they have been going back and forth for

hundreds, if not thousands of years. There may also be one other aspect that's important for our American audience. given that we're recording this in Deutsche Lund. This conference varies significantly from other American equivalents or something that might be an American equivalent, formerly Pantheicon, in and around San Francisco and San Jose specifically, or Paganicon in the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of a new-age, neo-pagan reconstructionist.

And so most academic discussion is viewed with some suspicion. And I'm hesitant to say that there's an anti-intellectual trend because I don't necessarily think that's true. However, there is a resistance to the kind of academic styling that we saw very prevalent at this conference to talk about the occult, more generally, as an area of study in addition to just idiosyncratic practice or part of a larger social neo-pagan movement, which is, again, very much the focus of most U.S.-based conferences. As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify, we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to magic with a k, that is rituals and practices based on occult knowledge that seeks to cause change in accordance with will, whether that's change within yourself or in our consensus reality. Occult magical practice can also serve as a form of spirituality, mysticism, an alternative religious practice, or an alternative to religion,

with its beliefs and practice largely influenced by historical esoteric orders, mystery traditions, paganism, witchcraft, herbalism, astrology, hermetic philosophy, and alchemy. And all these things are influences. I'm not saying that the actual historic manifestations of these things are the same as the modern occult practices that are influenced by these things, because often these can be wildly varying, especially when you talk about things like witchcraft and alchemy, which have been misinterpreted or reconstructed

into completely new forms than what the historical manifestation of them actually contained. But a lot of modern-day occultism has manifested as an individually mediated spirituality, containing some of the group ritual or ritual aspects of something like Catholicism, but with the individuality of Protestant, Many conferences have an opening ceremony, and as I previously mentioned, a culture had an opening

ritual. This accomplishes a very similar goal to any opening ceremony, to get attendees in a certain headspace, prepare them for the rest of the conference, and set a certain mood in which the rest of the events will kind of follow suit. The acculture opening ritual called upon the attendees demuregic capacity, how they are part of creating the reality of what this conference is and how it will continue for the next few days. Back to the panel. The framing of the ritual was a blindfolded woman holding the scales of balance, and each person put a intention for the week or for the conference or for themselves into a stone, which was handed out to each person who entered the ritual. And at a certain point, these stones were placed on

to the scales of balance to create an equilibrium between the two sides of the scale, along with the, you know, chanting, meditation, and a lot of incense. A significant deal of incense, given that we were in a former German forge warehouse, the, you know, billowing smoke that existed throughout the conference from fires to incense to various other inflammatory items was rather impressive. But in terms of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I found to be rather impressive. One, it was encompassing of all of those elements that we would later expect to see in the actual body of the conference itself. In terms of the artistic performances, the musical, you know, metal goth music that was played, but also a very practical and open approach to ritual.

It was highly inclusive. Everyone who was there participated. It did an exceptional job, I felt, of actually bringing, setting intention and adding to, I don't know, at risk of sounding too new age, the vibrations that we all felt as we engaged and were present. The theatrical quality, I have to say, was also very much. Dark and spooky. Dark and spooky, but something to be admired. They did a very good job. Definitely one of the more high effort rituals of the weekend in terms of the performative.

with there being little less than a dozen hooded, cloaked figures stationed at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative state for probably over half an hour standing still in a position that would become uncomfortable and swinging incense or holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually, you talk to these people, the first step of any kind of magical working is setting your intention for what the work is supposed to do or accomplish in you or out into the world. Mirroring the opening ritual, the culture 2025 little booklet has a few paragraphs on the concept for this conference talking about the cosmic craftsman as the demiurge who shapes matter and spirit

alike who embodies creation and transformation revealing both the light and the hidden, the shadowed face of the divine, as well as having cosmic balance and balancing destruction with creation and order and chaos and the hidden and the scene. The last paragraph in which I will read, I think relates specifically to this show and the cultural political aspects. Quote, in the age of relentless acceleration, the craftsman becomes a figure of resistance. His patience and ritual discipline reclaims sacred time, restoring a rhythm beyond the acceleration of modern life.

A culture 2025 invites us to dwell in this threshold where creation, intuition, and the hidden divine converge. And with that, we converge on an ad break. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor

from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili,

Sing and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I live below a cult leader and I fear I've angered her. Well, wait a minute, Sophia. You know she's a cult leader. Luckily, it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes,

My neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult. Hold up, Sophia. A real-life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue. But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with their ceiling, and her neighbors are not happy.

Well, she needs to report them ASAP. She did, and now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time. So, do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, everybody? This is Snacks from the Trap Nerds podcast, and we're bringing you the horror every week all October long. Kicking off this month, I'll be bringing you. you all my greatest fear-inducing horror games from Resident Evil to Silent Hill, me and Tony Bringing Back Fire Team on Left for Dead 2, and we're just going to be going over some of the greats.

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Welcome back to the It Could Happen here Spooky Special on the Acculture Conference. The figure name dropped the most throughout this conference might surprise some people because I'm assuming most do not consider him to be an occultist or really a serious occult figure. The most discussed individual, at least in my experience of the conference was not Alistair Crowley, John D., someone like Elena Blavatsky,

but in fact, William S. Burroughs. And now we'll return to the panel to discuss the Barosian current. Let's talk about what I would argue was the strongest current throughout this conference. I'm going to call the Burroughsian current relating to writer, beat, poet, and mystic and occultist

in his own right, William S. Burroughs and the magical technology that he either invented or popularized in the second half of the 20th century and played a significant role

in influencing successor movements such as chaos magic and even the work of the CCRU and Land and Fisher. the very first talk that we attended was specifically on Burroughs

and Burroughs ghost haunted the remainder of the conference thereafter and introduced a few of the key tensions throughout the rest of the conference which we will discuss specifically technology and AI So our first talk by Castor Obstrop who I believe was Swedish

One of those. One of those He was working at the University of Copenhagen University of Copenhagen, certainly Scandinavian of some flavor variety, focused on William S. Burroughs and Brian Geysen. I think that it's important, and I appreciated this claim at the outset, that they argued that both Geysen and Burroughs are actually closer to the late surrealists rather than to the beat poet's generation, which we typically associate them with, which, interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more compelling to me.

my understanding of them, I mean, despite my familiarity with the cut-up method and, you know, several of the things that Burroughs had written, I always considered them far more beaten, therefore, less of interest to me specifically, but this proximity to the surrealists, especially the latter surrealist, I found particularly compelling. And I think that that brings us to. The real focus of this talk was Burroughs' cut-up method and another book that he published on The Third Mind, which gave way to the that are discussions on artificial intelligence and large language models. So Burroughs definitely popularized the cut-up method, which Geisen originated, but Burroughs changed its different forms and manifestations to various mediums of art, like the tape recorder and his own writings and just words and language. And I guess the reason why I think talking about this current is important to start, this also revolves around this idea of magic as this form of, like, resistance or this like culture jamming practice,

which Burroughs framed his own work and his like a work that we could describe as like esoteric or inspired by esoteric or achieving esoteric goals is specifically for this cultural infusion to disrupt mainstream culture in some capacity to go against the one God universe sometimes in an anarchic way,

sometimes in a libertarian way. There's a mix of like motivations at play here. Same thing with, like, Robert Anton Wilson, which I'm sure you've heard Robert Evans talk about before. These were contemporaries. These guys were friends and operating under like similar goals of disrupting culture through these techniques, which they thought literally, like, disrupted the linear flow of culture or the mechanisms of control, such as like language and linear time, which later gets developed on by land and fissure. Yeah, I think looking at some of my notes, some of the things that stuck out to me, especially in view of the fact that the other classes going on at the time began with Alster Crowley, but we're diving into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions, was that language can shape reality, which is something that would also be held up by a lot of the classical magical ideas, that sound and image have occult power, which is very true in a lot of magical traditions dating back to the picatrix and more ancient texts. And that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument, which the tech available currently and for William Burroughs is very different than classical tech, but is something

that has been done for a very long time as well. What really changes is stepping out of the idea of a linear representation of it and into something that could be edited, cut, and reprogrammed specifically using technology that allowed that as opposed to something that you're trying to control solely

through, say, more spiritual, magical acts. It's something that you can do with a tape recorder. And this is like, you know, based on forms like social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality, which Burroughs believes language plays a key role in.

even though I might disagree with him on a few ways on the nature of, like, a language as a human concept versus this, like, alien concept, which is, like, infected the human. Delta, you should explain what the cut-up method is. Yes. Well, the name itself kind of is self-explanatory. But the idea of being essentially to take any form of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces of sentences, jumbled them up in a hat or a bucket or whatever, and then kind of like play a jigsaw puzzle with language, reshifting sentences into new ideas and new forms of poetry,

especially, which I'm just looking at my own cut-ups right in front of me. To force, like, randomized combinations of words that you would not choose to combine on your own volition and seeing what sort of thought that generates, what kind of meaning can be constructed. through that combination. Exactly. We're on some of the first cut-ups done with books and just making holes, cutting out words and seeing the other words that would appear underneath and if new meaning

would arise through the surprise combinations. Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves into a current present within the book. Yeah, I think one of the borough's quotes is when you cut into the present, the future leaks out. Which is related to the concept of time sorcery that was talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think another element to the cut-up method that's important, especially as it was framed in this, a culture context, as

the, we quoted from the, or as I wrote this quote down from the actual lecture itself, reality is made of words, images, and vibrations. And sounds and images have occult power, and therefore, these sounds and images and words can be marshaled or

used, edited, cut through, rearranged, for the purposes of reprogramming. It's fascinating because I think that this really is something that carries through to the whole conference. And not just the Burroughs method, but what this Burroughs method, or the Borogian current of the conference,

it seems that there was a problematic, I mean, we started basically with Derrida and we ended with Derrida. With discussions of like critiques of the master narrative that we get from, You know, Deleuze and Leotard and Baudreard and these people. But the goal of this cut-up method was to rewrite the master narrative. So again, back to that concept of culture jamming.

As Gere said, this concept of the one-god universe, this cut-up method is meant to interrupt the linearity of words, of language that is a process of control. So I take issue with this concept. of language is a virus because that implies that it's a foreign body. And, I mean, as true post-structuralist, I guess, that I am, there is no outside to language. And I think that that's actually something that shines through in this third mind concept. As two people work together on something, there's a composite mind that like emerges and affects the work is the concept there. So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you through the

revelation of the new that was already present. And I think that that's really important to point out because it's not as though that there's this outside thing. The implication is from this method is that the new reveals itself through this process that's already present in language. Because this is a question that I had throughout is that if language is this foreign entity that dominates us through control and the method itself is language, then how are we not just re, I mean, I guess it's a kind of inoculation if we have a, you know, a theory of language that is, you know, based in, you know, what do we call this? What is it that we all just got during COVID? Cabin fever?

No, no, the things that we inject into our body that created the entire. Vaccines. There we go. That's the ticket. Inoculations. Not all of us got vaccines, you know. Okay, Karen. You heard it here first.

Vaccine deny. No. Yeah, where was it going with this? Speaking of methods of control. I mean, a lot of it... Hey, the new just came out there. Wait, just one moment. Sorry, Elaine.

I likened this to this process of dialectics, but that's because I couldn't shut up about Hegel the entire time we were there because I don't think enough occultists are talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel? Everyone should be talking about Hegel. I mean, as fun as it is to think about this, like, third mind as, like, an egregore figure, which we've mentioned before, is, like, it's like a group thought form, like a being or a force that is generated through multiple people believing in it. You make up an imaginary friend, in a way.

That's more of a severator. Okay, okay. But, true, okay. In egregore, as a form of thought that they gained its own, like, autonomy and becomes kind of, you know, like a little tiny god, I guess. Or they also combined the third mind idea to, like, network consciousness. The one last thing I will say on this before we get to, like, the AI aspect, I guess, on this culture jamming, non-linearity, is the concept of the circuit jump, which was playing back words from, from, from, politicians in different contexts as a sort of like a uno reversal psychic attack, which I don't know if that actually works, considering the current political situation,

but this is certainly a tactic to which I have employed many such cases. And we see a lot of people attempt to do this. And I think there are certain figures who have their own very strong magical force field protecting them, which has been pretty evident through the past 10 years, including the president of the United States. But as a circuit jump, is it playing something from the wrong time in a different context as a form of attack, the most famous conversion of this, which isn't necessarily for political ends. So this was for personal ends. It's the Burroughs Cafe incident, which I've been a fan of for years, in which he was slighted by a cafe. So then he started recording.

All that happened was they changed their menu and he couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day. There's been some menus that have changed that I would continue using this tactic where he recorded sounds from outside of like people talking or arguing or walking by or plates dropping and then played them back outside of the cafe for a series of months until the cafe closed. And this is like the funny. The funniest form of this sort of magical obsession, because this really is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front of a cafe until they close. I mean, it worked.

Of, yeah, playing back sounds of, you know, arguing, fighting, plates smashing, which would probably create a negative aura around this building. But that is the most funny of Burroughs, the circuit jump moment, although, I mean, Burroughs' life is full of these humorous. and sometimes worrying of anecdotes. There's one other thing that stuck out to me, given what a lot of the other talks in that space ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff,

was really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that for Burroughs and Geysen, the reproduction of reality is how control occurs. And so the goal was to manipulate the reproduction of reality, because if you can manipulate the reproduction of your, reality, you are also manipulating reality itself, which I don't think anyone went into nearly as much, but is something that we're seeing with, say, even the Republican Party releasing deep fake videos of Democratic politicians. Yeah, and this is something our materialist friend

Mia does talk about is how there's a quote from some neocons about how how Democrats just have to kind of like, you know, like react to reality versus the Republicans who, generate it. And they like decide what reality is. And you can see this with all of the sort of like moral, moral panics which have spread across the United States and around the world the past few years, whether that's gender ideology, whether that's immigration, whether that's this non-existent crime wave, or it is a genuine like creation of reality. And this, this goes into, you know, the Burroughs ideas later get developed by a group of academics and occultists that informed the CCRU. This included a city plant, Nick Land, who then,

turned to the dark side, and the since-past, Mark Fisher, who put a name to some of this sort of phenomenon called the Hyperstition, which is, Robert has talked about before on the show, but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a fiction that becomes true through the creation of the fiction and the dissemination of this fiction. And this is part of how reality can get formed is through these falsehoods that, that through repetition and dissemination become self-manifest. The thing about that, though, is the hyperstitional model itself requires the acceptance of the idea that everything is a fiction.

Yes. Like, well, I mean, a lot of, most things go through a process like this. Yes, yes, yes. But doing such a thing, like, intentionally and like offensively, right, which is, which is the idea that we're discussing here in like a political context, is this, this offensive of reality formation where you literally decide what is real and like what isn't. And, you know, if you have hundreds of millions dollars in like a news company at your disposal, this can become easier. Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up reality to shape it in the

image of the people who fund them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they are, they are much, it's funny because like occultists, I think, are the people who are often... How many sound clips are you going to use from the conference. I will later in my written work, but I think on that note, I think occultists are a class of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic. Because the people that are really good at this sort of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element of hiding their, you know, awareness of what they are doing. Because a lot of them know what they're doing. They just actually keep it more cultic, whereas the magicians will not try the fuck up because there's always a new book to sell. That was an excellent sedway to an ad break, Elaine. Thank you for that.

And now a word from our sponsors. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in

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How'd you know she's a cult leader? Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, My neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult.

Hold up, Sophia. real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue. But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with their ceiling and her neighbors are not happy. Well, she needs to report them ASAP. She did. And now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time. So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everybody? This is Snacks from the Trabner's podcast, and we're bringing you

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Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On this note, though, Gary, I agree with you completely. As a former academic and just a healthy level of skepticism going into any magical conference, I sat down, I listened, and I've been to enough conferences listening to magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a, cultural figure. And I think Burroughs is really unique here, but my academic pretense was to sit here and to listen and think about, you know, language as a pharmacon, think about Derrida, De Luz, Bodriard, Leotardt, when they're discussing the master narrative or rewriting the master narrative.

But what's unique about Burroughs and why I gave up that, you know, academic mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we having this conversation? We could just go read these texts. They talk about similar things. But the point is, is that those texts talk about similar things. things. And what's unique about Burroughs is that he's actually doing... He's a doer. He's a doer. This is fundamentally the difference between the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemptaiva. Like, I'm thinking in terms of philosophers, and it took me half of this talk to be like, no, he's actually doing shit. As soon as we get out to, like, you know, him actually standing out in front of the cafe and doing this, he's not just developing a method, but by virtue of the fact

that he's inviting other artists, like the slides upon slides that we saw of him, you know, working with new machines that he was creating and trying these things. He was actively involved in this practice, which, again, makes him far more magical than most occultists. Don't come for me. Absolutely. AI, specifically we'll be discussing debates and uses of generative AI in this conference. The last Acculture Conference was in 2023 as these large language models and image generation

platforms were just starting to gain popularity, and now they have a stranglehold over the stock market and many people's imagination. The first, I guess, real debate around AI happened as the three of you, stayed to listen to a panel after the William Esperos panel, as well as an Austin Osman Spare panel, a proto-cast magician from the 20th century, who's a contemporary of Alistair Crowley. I left to go listen to a mathematical, thalemic ontology talk, which was probably less interesting than the panel. I'd like to hear you guys talk about the debates around AI and how they emerged in this panel and then also juxtaposing that to the different forms of like AI discussions around AI

that dominated a large part of the rest of the conference. Well, actually, AI came up because the initial discussion question for the panel was what does it mean to talk about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between the creation process is magic when you can use AI, when you can use large language models to just generate things. And if the generative method using AI was at all related to, say, the cut-up method or other things. So that was the initial conversation that began, that whole panel. Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged by the other two talks that we didn't really

discuss the um austin osmond spare was about automatic drawing um so this conception and of you know this this drawing that is coming from the outside coming from the subconscious coming from within all within one line all within one line but more than that it was a very traditional kind of European 1970s lecture you you know you had our lovely Italian man who stood in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette while trying to get through you know, a very well-formulated, well-argued essay while a series of images presented to us behind him that covered an overview of artists that are doing very similar things,

or he argued, exists in a similar kind of vein. And the occurrences of not just magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently. So artists all over the world. The third talk by, I believe, Kate Lady, Yeah, the ritual transformation and hybridity in Leonora Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production, which happened in Mexico City, I believe. So we had a few pictures of this, but Leonardo Carrington's art very specifically has to do with this hybrid of like animals and mythical figures and creatures.

And the stage production was incredibly intense. I really appreciated this talk a lot. But then focus on talking about, you know, generative artificial intelligence and these large language models. and the role of art or what it means to do art in this era was related to this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing, of this concept of hybridity, of this transformative or this discovering of the new through a synthetic putting together of different elements

or images, words, sounds, costumery, these kinds of things. So it was a natural question to lead, but the audience members took it in a very strange direction. that I would like you all to talk about. I mean, the initial question was really that people started asking after the panel topic was proposed was, so what did the panelists think about AI art? Do the panelists think AI art is magic?

Do the panelists think that AI art is channeling? Do the panelists think that putting a prompt in a language model is the same as doing some sort of trans-state automatic writing? there was a lot of variations on functionally that. All of the panelist's reaction was, no, it's not. And a lot of them did not immediately really want to even dive into that topic and were very annoyed at the question initially. That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately

because it was our first speaker that responded, not to that first question, but to the second question. And the second question had to do with the role of technology and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools, you know, as a technology, a tech ney, in magical practice. And our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and give us a tentative yes. To the tech. To the tech.

That's correct. To AI, they were like, their initial reaction was still also no, but. Yes, they indeed got there. But it was unclear at first. And I was a little raw about it, given that. it seemed completely contrary to the talk that, or, you know, that he had mentioned before. There was a question about NFTs. Do you remember this question? Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head because of the fact that it started with like,

well, NFTs failed because people like weren't ready to embrace the blockchain as a generative idea for making art as opposed to the fact that why would I own an NFT if I can screen shot the picture. Yeah, well, it was this idea that, like, NFTs themselves were part of this breaking up of the control process, the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it was related to the cut-up method. It was one of those questions that was a narrative before it finally got to your question that really just invited the readers to respond.

There were others that talked about this, too, and related their own personal experience to the generative AI process that, you know, they approached. AI, not with the expectation that it will provide sense, but it'll almost have this or, again, this, they related it to the third mind. They, this idea that, again, you and the AI come together and somehow reveal the new, which I at this point was absolutely seething. Yeah, I think the closest actually that we had to some really, like someone even trying to approach it, was asking about if you're making this art, if you're just

generating these new things, does it matter that corporations are controlling the algorithm by which you're doing so, which started to touch on some of the problems, but still was definitely relying on the base assumption that using a large language model to produce stories or art, that you're interacting with something else that's actually capable of creating at all. And to her credit, my girl, Kate Lady, who was talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be kind of tangentially separate from the other two, but the hybridity really made it. Was the one that just gave us a great, straight Marxist answer of like, no, this is bullshit.

Let's actually look at the material implications as to where this is coming from and the environmental costs of running these programs, of server farms, the destruction of space, of, you know, livable areas throughout the United States, that these are questions that we need to ask and are not separate from these questions of magic. So I really shout out to her. I appreciated that response because it was instant and it was it was heated. It is also like I mean from my perspective it's also a labor issue because these large language models and generative AI just scrape like so much data that that's like writing from real artists and created by real like painters and whatever. And it is.

the appropriation of human labor to shit out some advertising, essentially, that is like my main, well, aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it, it's like very much that labor angle to it that frustrates me. Well, in the context of the talk, it was really important to then ground, and this is the comment that I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with, although I, I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree with me. I mean, you're all right. Thank you.

Go on. So, this, Burroughs' concept of the third mind, this book that he wrote, right? When two minds collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you. Again, not about creating the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present. Yes. But the idea is that you. have to have two minds in order to get this dialectical third

mind that was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of the two. When one interacts with any form of large language model or chat gbt, I in my mind, and

with what I carry, sit in front of a computer and type my input. That's one mind. Can you tell me where the second is? Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a mind in the book. There's a story. There's an actual thing there.

There's a thing that you are interacting with that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet bowl of human production. But even if we're going to be generous and say that these large language models are the ones that are doing the cut up process and you are secondary or tertiary or even. further down the line to it. I mean, it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point. So just in terms of the, you know, the Berosian current, it's just not a third mind. It's, it's, the, the, the material conditions are such that it is not and cannot be a third mind.

Where I would like to take this discussion is actually to the very next talk that I attended was part of a three talk series called the Politics of taro. And the specific one that I think continued on this line of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was from icon to index by Thomas Leak, the generative logic of taro, in which he discussed, I'll have to check his name later, but discussed an author in the 80s who was trying to use tarot as a way to remove the human element of writing, try to create an automatic story using the taro archetypes assembled in a randomized shuffling

to generate a story based on the linkages between each of the cards and remove his own agency in directing where the story goes, except for trying to bridge each card from one to another. And the presenter was

discussing if this bears any similarity to generative text models. The presenter said no. The presenter said no, this actually is not like LLMs, which purely operate on a people-pleasing probabilistic capacity to follow one word after another in accordance with whatever the prompt of the person who's operating the AI wants it to generate. Though the presenter stated that this author who was using Taro probably would have loved using an LLM

to try to accomplish this goal of his, trying to access kind of like a form of automatic writing, similar to like Oshonaut's Spare, but without human input, the shuffling of the cards and forcing the human brain to make connections between these archetypes still contains a creative human process based on randomness in the shuffling of the deck versus the people-pleasing probabilistic generative text that LLMs produce. This concludes the first episode of my Acculture 2025 coverage. In part two, releasing Sunday night, the panel will discuss digital tech. no mansee, traditional magical practice, and why people are doing a cult practice in 2025.

See you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed,

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My neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals. And now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they might be part of a cult. Hold up. A real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue, Dakota. Find out how it ends.

Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Cal Penn. And on my new podcast, here we go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? Each week, I'm calling up my friends like Bill Nye, Lily Singh, and Pete Buttigieg to talk about everything from the space race to movie remakes to psychedelics. Put another way, are you high? Look, the world can seem pretty scary. right now. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future.

Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.