The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Mitch Horowitz | Gandhi, Reagan, and the Occultists History Erased

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

-Head to https://Superpower.com and use code BASEMENT at checkout for $20 off your membership. Get 100+ biomarkers tested every year, plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod #ad -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call [phone] now. -For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com. #ad Mitch Horowitz spent 27 years inside America's biggest publishing houses — and the whole time, he was the occult guy. PEN Award–winning historian, practicing occultist, censored in China, endorsed by David Lynch. We get into hidden history: presidents, gurus, dime-store horoscopes, and experiments that shouldn't work but do. Some of what he told me, I can't even put in the title. Come down to the Basement and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I'm talking with Mitch Horowitz. When Mitch was a kid in Queens, he got an astrology scroll from a vending machine. Every adult around him said it was nonsense. Oh, every adult said it was nonsense. Adults also said the moon lady was real, so. He spent the 50 years since taking that scroll seriously. He became a highly respected editor at Penguin Random House and won a pen award for writing the history of the occult in America.

Today we're covering how occult ideas got into Ronald Reagan's speeches, Gandhi's philosophy, and the dollar bill in your wallet. I promise it's way weirder than that. Plus, his new book, Esoterica, and its formulas for tearing down your false self. Oh, I tore down my false self once. Underneath was another me.

Handsima, bigger muscles, better credit. Yeah, I miss that guy. He also made a calm, friendly case that I might be a left-hand path Satanist. That one caught me by surprise. Stick around after the episode. I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. And it's very tangled.

Let's go down to the basement. Mitch Horowitz, welcome to the basement. Thank you, my man. Great to be here. I'm excited. I am excited. Before we get started, why is the occult guy on a Zoom with the Henson family? Oh, I was doing a fundraiser for the Philosophical Research Society,

and they are an organization dedicated to studying the esoteric that was founded by the Great Occult Scholar Manly P. Hall. And I was told that a couple of members of the Henson family were interested both in supporting the center and in my work, and would I do some sessions with them to talk over a cult history and esoterica? I was delighted. Of course. I'm a gym fan going back to diapers and remaining today, and I was delighted to talk to them,

and they are carrying the family flame. Wow. I thought I heard you talking about never-ending stories, one of your favorites. Oh, tremendously so. Henson has such an incredible ability to capture the mythical in a way that entrances young kids and adults alike. And at age 60, I'm still finding folds within his work. I just love the man. Yeah, and you could watch Dark Crystal.

I think it came out in 79 and you still see things in it. You still see things. He was such a genius. He worked so hard. And not only was their technical excellence in everything he did, but he finally, he found. the inner meaning of myth. And he tells the story as an outer story, but you capture all the esoteric lessons

and elements within Jim's work. I need to revisit it now that I'm familiar with yours because I know I'm going to find new stuff in there. So the occult, this is how I work. It's just a semester. The occult, does it start with the Silver Moon Diner or does it start in Mrs. Shapiro's Sunday school class?

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Okay. Belrose Queens. I remember Mrs. Shapiro telling us Halloween, that's all a bunch of nonsense. And I started thinking, no, that's not really true. This is a holiday with roots that go as deep as our own Abrahamic traditions may be deeper. And my job as a kid, age eight or nine, was to listen to people say, Halloween is nonsense, was to listen to people say, oh, newspaper astrology, that's all bogus, was to listen to people say, don't pay attention to the robed guru on Merv Griffin,

and ask why, why? And I wanted to peel back the layers and discover the history of these things. Look, newspaper astrology, just to take an example, it's an expression of possibly the oldest religious retention on Earth. It goes back to the third millennial. millennia BC, ancient Mesopotamia. Our Western astrology is not exactly like the astrology being dealt with by our primeval ancestors, but there are some very serious similarities, symbolically, mechanically in terms of meaning, and I wanted to get it all that. A cynic will tell you, for example,

oh, astrology has lasted so long just because humanity is a bunch of suckers. That's ridiculous. practices from the ancient world have been discontinued by the thousands. The reason we in the Western world retain a version of astrology is because it's pretty damned accurate. You still read Sally Brompton? I love Sally Brompton. And with apologies to Mrs. Shapiro, who taught me a lot and also had a habit of banging me on the head with her ring when I didn't get my Hebrew letters correct, which was not

infrequent. Being challenged that way at a young age when I had a taste for the esoteric was in its way very refining. It put me on my path. What was it about the story about the goat and a zazel that interested you? You know, it's interesting. You find within the Abrahamic faiths a huge amount of material that we would label occult, stories of giants and spiritual messengers and things that we today call demons, a term that we're conditioned to be frightened of, Azazel being one of them, to whom the Hebrews would make sacrifices in the desert. And what you'll find if you turn back the pages of scripture is a catalog of occult and esoteric topics, not just straightforward monotheism, although that's part of it, but you find monotheism

coexisting with a world of myth and wonder that would be at home in any Jim Henson's story. And for that matter, not all ancient Jews themselves were monotheistic. There were many Jews living in that region of the world who practiced polytheism. We know this because they adopted names of gods other than what we call Yahweh or Jehovah. And eventually Judaism developed into a faith of monotheism. But at its most primeval roots, that wasn't the case. So if you want to find the basis for the occult look at our most ancient traditions, the ones that we stand on. I love the theory that Moses could have been Akhenaten. Have you heard that one? Oh, of course. And Sigmund Freud, of all people, the great rationalist, took that very seriously.

He, in his very last book, Moses and Monotheism, propounded on that theory. Fort Knox, everybody's heard of it. Supposedly it holds over 400,000 tons of U.S. gold. But the thing is, the last full independent audit of that vault happened in 1953. Since then, we've gotten photo ops, supervised walkthroughs, and a whole lot of trust us. Never any outside auditors. No full inventory count. Or no way for anybody outside government to actually verify what's down there. That's not a conspiracy theory.

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surprised if they turn back the pages of Freud. He's supposed to be a great rationalist, and he was a great rationalist. But what we as a culture forget is that rationalism is not conclusion, it's process. Rationalism is methodological replication. So in Freud, the great rationalist, you will find a man who was deeply interested in dream telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, and even delayed the publication of some of his papers on these subjects to avoid public opinion fallout. Get yourself a copy of the collected works of Freud. You'll find several deeply heartfelt and intellectually rigorous papers on occult. topics. That stuff was left out of my psychology courses in school. That is his interest in

Psy. What do you think, why do you think that was done? Why keep that from us? Well, Freud's biographer, an Englishman named Ernest Jones, was very concerned that Freud's interest in parapsychology would prove compromising to his efforts to shape psychoanalysis into a recognized medical science. So he had a hand in the early compilation of Freud's papers. He had a decisive hand in our understanding of Freud as a biography, but he didn't fully represent Freud the man. And our notion of psychoanalytic history is too simplistic. We see Jung is the occult one, and Freud is the materialist one. It wasn't true at all. Young was every bit in a empiricist and Freud was every bit interested in the esoteric extending to alternate histories of Moses,

extending to a very rigorously worked through theory of clairvoyance, passing in between the psychoanalyst and the patient. And some of this material, as I mentioned, was withheld from publication until after Freud's death. It does all now appear in the collected works at Freud, but we tend to think in categories rather than content. And we think of Freud in the materialist category, so we tend not to see what's in front of our own eyes. Yeah, that's interesting that you bring that up, is so much power goes into the hands of the biographer, the translator, whether it's ancient epic poems or just psychoanalysis. They have a lot of power. Tremendous. In fact, I often caution people. show me a traditionalist and I'll show you a modernist who's just not aware of it

because the wisdom literature that reaches us today, it's almost always translations of translations of translations written in an original language that most of us cannot decipher. And in fact, in most cases, we don't even have the originals, even extending to the Renaissance, which in terms of the arc of human history was five minutes ago, We're in a very disadvantageous position in terms of understanding what the ancients were thinking about. We have been reached by threads. We have been reached by fragments.

So people need to be very careful about where they draw the line between what's traditional, what's the real thing versus what are modern novelties. More often than we know, we're dealing with modern novelties. I work long days. I don't sleep as much as I should. And for years, I could just power through it. But as I've gotten older, I've noticed the same routine hits differently. Less energy, slower recovery. I figure that was just aging, but there may be more to it.

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free shipping and three free gifts at men go to mars.com that's men go to mars dot com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out after you purchase they'll ask you where you heard about them please support our show and tell them we sent you and the translation of the translation that's really a tradition of the esoteric anyway isn't it it's it's a tradition of the whole human story to know ourselves And so much of the literature that reaches us, whether it's scriptural, whether it's hermetic, which is the philosophy that was written down in the final stages of ancient Egypt, it's passed through so many hands. I'm a little tablo right behind me there. Oh, brilliant. Brilliant.

As above so below. As above so below. These works of hallowed wisdom literature have passed through so many centuries and in some cases millennia of translation that, we really don't have a full reckoning of what's gotten inserted along the way because translators build upon what is given to them. They sometimes represent different power centers, different faiths, different schools, and they will insert sympathetic material. So we have to tread very carefully before declaring what is the truth with the capital T. Isn't that Rule 101?

Is it? Is it? It's in there. Ask constantly. How do I know that's true? Yes. And my God, let that be your sword and shield through life. How do I know that's true?

We live in a culture of I heard it somewhere. And peel back just one layer on that. And you'll start to ask really vital questions. I mean, my God, I've had incidents happen in my own apartment building and people can't agree the next day on what transpired. much less what transpired millennia ago. We really just have to keep asking ourselves, how do I know that's true?

What's the source of that quote? And this is true in mainstream history as well. I'll come upon a quote by Thomas Edison, for example. I'll look for the quote, it doesn't exist. I'll look for a quote by Arthur Conan Doyle. It doesn't exist. Someone made it up. Someone repeated it.

It happens with William James. These are all modernist figures. These are people who wrote and spoke in English. And my God, you know, they were living and functioning 150 years ago. You go through Bartlett's and half of that. It didn't say that. Polony.

Right. And one has to keep asking that question. How do I know that's true? And in the current spiritual culture, I'm always telling people, verify things, not just in some rhetorical way when someone tells you, yes, verify things. And when you agree with me, come back and we'll get along just fine. verify. It falls to every generation of seekers to verify things for themselves. Yes, depend upon the best sources that we have available, but don't stop there and keep peeling back that onion.

So, Silver Moon. Paint the picture. Where was the Silver Moon diner in Queens? Oh, that was in eastern Queens in the town of Belrose, where I grew up on Union Turnpike, just before it transforms magically into Marcus Avenue. Yes. When you hit Long Island. I know it very well. Right. The invisible line of demarcation.

Right. This is Nassau County. That's a fact. Right. And I grew up in that neighborhood in eastern Queens. Subways don't go there. Nope. Way out in the, I suppose, as far out east as you can go and still be in New York City.

And that was the family gathering spot. That was the neighborhood gathering spot. And this was the 1970s. And so the real. magic was at the at the lobby entrance where you would find the machine where you could insert a dime and get an astrology scroll or have your bio rhythm read oh that's right you put your finger on the right yeah they didn't have a zoltar machine but all but and they had the computer dating machine i remember you could take the form fill out you know what you're comfortable with what you like

and meet your meet your perfect mate probably no better or worse than anything we do today and uh for For me, it was just magic. That's where I wanted to hang out. When I got my little dime star scroll at the Silver Moon diner, and I saw these magical signs and sigils of Aquarius and Mercury and the sun and I wanted to know where did this come from. And I learned that, as I mentioned, these are some of the oldest religious retentions on Earth.

And just think of it. Our primeval ancestors in Mesopotamia, their system was different. the night sky looks different because the earth wobbles on its axis. But I tell you, some of those signs and symbols mean the same thing to us today in the 21st century as it did to our ancient ancestry in Mesopotamia. That's extraordinary. That's a sacred language. And it's remarkable to me that you can go through the Western world, ask anyone you meet, what's your sun sign? And not only will they know, but they'll be able to tell you something about it, whether they profess belief or not, I fall to my knees in front of that.

That's a tradition that extends back thousands of years. Even if we are skeptical about astrology, we just can't help ourselves. It's wired into us. I'll tell you something funny. There's an esoteric scholar, Richard Smalley, who's been an enormous influence on me. Several years ago, he and I were doing a dialogue over Zoom, and I said to him, Richard, why has astrology remained popular after all these millennia and centuries? And he paused and said, well, because it's pretty accurate.

Brilliant. And I stand by that. And there's no way to know it's accurate unless one studies it. And of course, the cynics who are ready to say, nonsense, I don't expect them to have studied it. But here's what the cynics don't know. The experts upon whom they are relying, they haven't studied it either. This is one of these, I heard it somewhere concepts that we call rational because we misunderstand rational as endpoint versus process. It's an art. Is it always accurate? Certainly not. Are there great differences between the east and the west? There are. And those mechanical differences warrant understanding. But as a thumbnail typology of personality, it's remarkable. That's why it's lasted. It's the last place.

that journalists will look. It's the last place that social scientists will look. Every Halloween, when I start to get the phone calls about the article, why is astrology still so popular? Why is taro still so popular? The answer that they're always fishing for is economic uncertainty, uncertainty about the future of the world, as if there's ever been a generation that hasn't experienced that.

The last place they'll look and the place that I insist upon looking, among others, is verity. You hit on something that it's in your book I want to ask you about. Before we do that, didn't your grandfather have an opinion about what was on your scroll? My grandfather, who was the very practical manager of a flower shop in Rockefeller Center. It's good on his work. Yeah, it's good on his work. It's good on his work.

And he worked hard, and he earned his retirement in Florida. That was the dream. And he earned it. I was reading from my Star Scroll and he said, does it also say you're a sucker? Perfect. And I understand. I understand. But kids have to rebel.

And I said, I'm not accepting that just because an adult figure says it. In fact, because an adult figure says it, I'm going to push and probe. And I had funny experiences as a kid, taking out books of astrology and Pennsylvania Dutch folklore from the Belrose public library, remarkable experiences. I remember when I was a kid, I took out one book in particular of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore, and the centerfold of the book was a pentagram, and it had these little phrases dotted around it, it's Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, and you were supposed to close your eyes, hover a pin over it, and bring the pin down on your fortune. While I did this, I brought the pin down, and it said, a letter, you will receive a letter.

I was age nine, I didn't get many letters. The next day, a letter arrived and it was an overdue book notice from the public library. That's how works. Synchronicities. It gave me pause at age nine. I still have pause today. But you get little green lights like that and it deepens your curiosity. I love it.

So you just said that every generation has these same anxieties. In your book, I think you mentioned that every generation feels like they're on the precipice. Always. But we're different because we have a sense. that we're in the matrix. Yeah, it seems to me, I encourage people to be very careful with apocalyptic talk because every generation feels that it's living on the brink.

And if you look at our generation with all our crises and so forth, my God, compared to what people went through, say, in World War I, we're not living in that world at this present juncture. And we have to be very thoughtful and we have to be very careful about these things because every generation feels like it is just poised on a cliff's edge. You'll find that throughout religious history. Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, they're messianic traditions. And we have almost programmed into us this messianic notion that everything's going to come to an end and

then there'll be an aftermath. We even have a secular religion around that called Marxism. Sure. Which is an Abrahamic religion without God. It's a materialist faith that the change agent will be the working class and then afterwards will come something that someone might call Nirvana or heaven or the afterlife and that we call revolution. Whatever comes after it, we don't know. But we're sure that there is this turning point. Anyway, we who live in the West and come from the Abrahamic traditions, we have this kind of messianic or apocalyptic worldview baked into us. Someday it will presumably occur, but I ask people to take it easy with that point of you because every generation occupies it. Our generation has something different going on,

which I'm very interested in. And that is this notion that we're living in an Ayrsat's reality. And I think there's something to that because of how universally felt it is. It surpasses culture. Now dig this. Several years ago, the Barbie movie came out. My reckoning is that roughly the first 20 minutes of that movie is the finest ever popularization of, of Gnostic themes, the idea that we're living under a false sun or a false God. Yes, I hadn't considered that, but yes. Barbie starts thinking about her own death. Yes.

And then she realizes, I'm not really here at all. I'm not living in a real world. This is artifice. And so she begins her journey. Beyond the veil. Beyond the veil. Yes. Now we've had wonderful movies like that before, Matrix, Truman Show, but this was different.

That movie was a hit worldwide. It was a hit in Saudi Arabia. It was a hit in China. Two radically different societies. Saudi is a religiously conservative society. China is an officially atheistic society, and everybody got it. Everybody got it. There are people around the world today who don't get Star Wars.

We think those themes are universal. They're not, if one really speaks globally. There are Chinese audiences among whom Star Wars has tested poorly. They're asking questions, why does this man live with an A-Vey? and so forth and so on. It doesn't translate. Always. Barbie, this Gnostic-themed movie about a young woman who starts contemplating mortality and realizes, I'm not even living a real existence, it spoke to people around the world. There's a scent trail of some universal truth there. And I think that we as a global culture, if we agree on nothing else,

we agree that something doesn't feel quite right. We feel like we're living in this airsat's reality. historian, other generations didn't feel this? I can't say other generations globally felt this. Of course, people didn't necessarily feel things globally at all because we weren't an interconnected world. But here we are today. We're an interconnected world. We have wildly different perceptions of reality. First, I'm popular in China, then I'm censored in China, and these things shift with the winds. But I'd be hard pressed to find somebody who didn't encounter media like The Matrix, or Truman Show or Barbie, and say, oh, yeah, I get it. I relate to that.

There's a reason for that. There's something archetypal there. Do you think there's something to that? Do you subscribe? You do? I do. I'm haunted by the idea. I couldn't possibly venture specifics.

I'm haunted by simulation theory. If one reads Nick Bostroff's original paper on simulation theory. Why haunted? Why? What's wrong? Why not? Because the logic is impeccable. and it's possible that we are made up of dots and dashes rather than DNA, and it's all programming in a certain sense or coding at the end of the day.

And I'm haunted by the possibility that the reason why Gnosticism as a faith has really come roaring back into our world and is probably the most popular of all the, we'll say, esoteric spiritual traditions right now in the 21st century is, we all relate to it. We all have a feeling that we're not living as we ought to be living. And I think that that's absolutely correct. Take as an example. Around the world today, everyone agrees that war is terrible. There should never be another war. It solves nothing. And yet we keep having them. We keep having them. And we don't live according to our own professed values. We sit in a chair,

we read the Doubt-A-Ching, we read the beatitudes, we read the Damapata, right on. That's the way to live. I get it. We get up from the chair, everything is lost, everything is lost. There is a chasm between conviction and conduct, and it is global. We're broken. We're broken as a human community. If we weren't broken, Confucius would be enough to save us.

Christ would be enough to save us. Nietzsche would be enough to save us. enough to save us. Marcus Aurelius would be enough to save us. We have it. And we all agree with it. And we don't live by it. It does suggest that there's a brokenness in human nature that's very real. I always have three books on my nightstand. One is Marcus Aurelius. One is the Bible and one is whatever sci-fi. I haven't ever be reading. But that's absolutely true. The reason I asked about previous generations is we talk about the Gnostic texts come up all the time in the show. So the Apocryphon, the book of Philip,

book of Enoch. I mean, these are ancient texts. Did they know something then that now we're just all learning as a species? I think that the Gnostics, who, like the hermeticists, existed in late antiquity, they were part of a world that was just transforming into dominant monotheism. And they were resisting monotheism because, For them, it didn't cover the basis of man's predicament. This sin and salvation model was insufficient. They sensed something that we sense about this terrible, terrible gap

between conviction and conduct. And the Gnostics came to the conclusion, we are living under a false God in a false world with false perceptions. And that's why things never seem to get better. and they too harbored some of the apocalyptic thinking, which I think is intrinsic to our Western or Abrahamic point of view. Hang on, I think it's universal. There was a Japanese author who said, every one of us deep down in our hearts is waiting for the end of the world. Well, I think there's truth to that because we are also so frustrated with the routine sameness of our lives.

I remember when Y2K was popular as a subject, people would talk about it. it and I would sense that they were enjoying it. Yes. It was this universal snow day and I would say well wait a minute you don't really want to see supply lines get disrupted. You don't really want to see it tough to refill baby formula and prescriptions and diapers. None of us want to see that and their attitude is always yeah but we're so hungry to exit routine and I really understand that I feel the desperation that people experience with routine.

And so a turning point, apocalism, Y2K, call it whatever you wish, it appeals to people because it seems like it's an exit from this grinding ordinariness that we're very often unhappy in. I love a disaster movie. I love a apocalyptic movie. I think it makes us feel like we're part of a grand opera. Yeah. Wouldn't you rather go out with an asteroid impact than just old and sick? I see it, look, I see it right here in Vegas, a town that I love.

There's Excalibur. There's Luxor. There's Mandalay Bay. And I like it. I like it because people are so eager to escape rote and routine life. And not everybody is going to visit Luxor. Not everybody's going to visit Middle Europe. And not everybody can afford to. And fuck the snobs. You know, there's a recreation of it and people from all over love it. But it also speaks to the hunger that we feel to get away from four square existence. And so much of the low-grade depression and anxiety that we feel, the addictions, is a response to that. And so we grok sometimes to apocalism because if nothing else, it's an exit ramp. Yeah.

I'm glad that you don't hate on Las Vegas like so many people do. I love it. Me too. I think it's just wonderful. Fuck the snobs. I look at these things and I'm enchanted. We have a view from our hotel at Mandalay Bay of Luxor. I've been to Luxor, going back to Luxor in a year.

I love Egypt and I love the Egyptian people. And it's kitschy, but it's great. Yeah, yeah. And there's a Nathan's in Luxor, by the way. Which one, the Egyptian? The Egyptian. Okay. I've been to McDonald's in the Egyptian Luxor, and it's not bad.

Let me recommend it. Yes. There's a great scene in your book at the Belrose Jewish Center where your rabbi shows up wearing a toupee. Can you tell us what happened with your sister? I dig this story. I've told it several times. I tell it because I don't want people to feel hemmed in by their subcultures. Back in the good old days, when I was a little kid,

growing up in a traditional Jewish family, we attended Belrose Jewish Center, and it became the scandal of the neighborhood. If only these were our problems today. This is what passed for a problem back in those days, that the rabbi started wearing a toupee. And so people had discussions about whether this was appropriate, isn't a spiritual leader supposed to model self-acceptance.

It wasn't put quite that nicely on 251st Street, but that was the basic argument. And one day, we were on a receiving line after services where people will shake hands with the clergy, Have a nice week. Thank you. And my sister, my older, four years older, was in front of me. And, oh, my God, I still feel embarrassed talking about it to the day.

I'm embarrassed waiting for it. Yeah, I feel it like I did when I was 10. And she said to him, don't you think that's a little ridiculous? And he said, what? And she said, the Dupe. And through very tight lips, he said, I don't think that's any of your affair. And I still feel mortified talking about it. But I look back on that and I tell that story for a reason.

He was right. He was right. Of course he was. Yeah. I feel very strongly that people in our alternative spiritual culture, which is where I'm from, which is where I spend most of my time, we get hemmed into orthodoxies the way everybody else does. We flee orthodoxies only to recreate them and slam the door behind us as quickly as possible.

What I'm really trying to say to people is, just as in ancient, Myth, strangers, spiritual messengers, gods would sometimes wander the earth disguised as vagabonds, and people who invited them in would receive extraordinary gifts. So do solutions reach us disguised as strangers. Things that we are ready to reject might be what we need. So if somebody says, I'm spiritual, well, that may be. Spiritual means extra physical. But, The world we live in can bring you solutions in ways that are disguised as those unbidden vagabonds. So I beg people. I beg people.

Think for yourself, decide for yourself. Don't turn something away because it doesn't fit your cultural image or your mind's eye image of what is supposed to be right. Don't get fixated on the example. I choose the example because it's true and it's particularly vivid. Here was a spiritual leader being talked down because he did something. that the neighborhood didn't think was physically appropriate. The neighborhood was wrong. The neighborhood was wrong.

I encourage the individual to find his or her own solutions and to make ethical determinations about them yourself. So if you're interested in natural medicine, bravo. The solution that you're seeking may come in the form of that little pill. Or if you insist that you don't go for any of this woo-woo-hoocus-pocus, Well, the solution that you're seeking may come in the forum of Reiki or some other energy medicine. Just be flexible. That's what I'm trying to get across.

Does your sister remember that scene? I don't know whether she recalls that explicitly. And if she doesn't, she will let me know. She has quite an influence on you early on, no? Did she bring one Carl's Castaneda? I'm indebted to her for the path that I'm on because here we were two kids of different. ages growing up in the 1970s and she would bring home paperbacks from school on Bigfoot and flying saucers and ESP and the paperbacks of the the the the the

poor beleaguered Carlos Castaneda which I started reading when I was a kid I'm astounded that Castaneda is still such a subject of controversy in our culture can we not understand allegory the the stories that he told were not forensically verifiable that is correct Carlos was a true trickster, and he created a pass for himself. That is correct. Do we not understand allegory? Did Christ not teach in parables? I was just going to say the same thing. We bring this over-literalism to Carlos, and we dismiss him. There's tremendous wisdom in those books, particularly the first one. And I started reading Carlos as a little kid, thanks to my sister, Nina. And that too helped put me on my path.

Tell me about how your parents' divorce kind of became an engine for you. Sure. As personal as you want to be. No, no, I'm... And, you know, we had talked earlier about being on similar paths. Yeah. I went through the same thing. Huh? I went through the same thing. It was a traumatic time of life.

Everyone's been through trauma. I have nothing special to claim in terms of my tale of woe. I was just speaking with my wife this morning. You look from one mountain range to the other in Las Vegas. It's a city filled with people who have undergone trauma. It's part of all our lives. I was 15. Oh, the family was just torn apart by financial disaster.

My dad, as we were discussing... 15, okay, that's hard. He had been a legal aid attorney defending the poorest of the poor in New York City. Very tough work. Long story short, he went into private practice. The private practice failed. It threw our family into financial turmoil. The turmoil boiled over into divorce.

It was a very painful time, and it was no one person's fault. He was made the fall guy for a lot of stuff, but I never thought that was fair. And with the divorce came a whole change of life because, look, we were going to an orthodox synagogue where the sexes were separated by seating, and we started going to a reform synagogue, signaled a big change in our religious life. But in addition to that, I began looking for spiritual solutions. And when I say spiritual, again, I mean extra physical. I do believe that we occupy this world we can see, this tactile world, and a world that we cannot see, a transpersonal world.

And I came to believe very strongly not only in the power of petitionary prayer, with which I had extraordinary experiences as a kid, continued to today, but I came to believe that there are causative properties to our psyche, and that which we believe, our emotionalized thoughts, our thought pictures, have a selective quality to them. And that became a foundational part of my belief. And I nurtured that from age 15 up through today, testing it, probing it, trying it, denying it, fleeing it, coming back to it. And nobody wants to repeat the suffering that they have been through. But we all would acknowledge that suffering created the parts of ourselves

that we consider most refined. One more question, but you mentioned another rule that was, don't make fun of people because you don't know what they're going through. And I do it all the fucking time, may I tell you? And I'm so goddamn ashamed of myself. And I say this because what else do we have but transparency on the path? Transparency, verification. I look over at somebody, you know, I'm seated next to on an airplane.

I think, oh, they're making noise, whatever. I have no idea what that person is going through. I have no idea that that person might have a special needs child seated two seats down from them. Yep. And that they are going through things that I have never had to go through. So for God's sake, can we just take it a little easier on one another? Seems such a simple statement, right? But as profundity appears in application, and I'm always telling that to people.

I like at this point in my search very simple things because first of all we won't try things unless they are simple and secondly the profundity and the difficulty and the complexity will not appear until we try them you know we all love the Delphic Maxim know thyself sure I agree with that put it on my coffee mug nice refrigerator magnet but none of us engage in it

you know we all think we know ourselves we don't take it seriously we don't take seriously self-observation we don't take seriously the dictum not to lie. Again, here's this chasm between conviction and conduct. Of course, lying is terrible. Well, you know, peel back the layers a little bit. When have I lied in the past 10 hours, 24 hours, what have you? Another rule, everybody lies.

Another rule, yeah. Well, these rules, people need to read these. They're rules to live by. I was telling you earlier that I believe every single one of these, and I fail at quite a few of them. Constantly, constantly. Like this requires work, vigilance. Yeah.

And it requires at certain moments coming face to face with oneself and feeling like you're a stranger to yourself and that aperture will close. And then, you know, I reach for the TV clicker and I, you know, reach for the beer or the weed and that aperture will close. But for God's sake, let it live.

Let it live for a few moments. don't put it in other words, in other words, just let the remorse be there when you see that gap between self and conduct. And count on the fact that it'll go away, and don't worry about that. We're not built to sustain it. But don't throw it away when it comes.

So we're always defaulting back to violating these rules. Is that how you described, like, just running one of the programs, the 20 programs that we just run? when you get angry at that person on the plane, you're just running the program 8, which is annoyed. Absolutely. I came to realize at a certain point

that I probably have 20 total responses to life in one variation or another. And there's a nightmare in that. You know, we speak of free will. I'm closer to a pull-string doll than I am to a figure of free will. I do believe in free will, but free will requires development,

decision-making requires development. We hear all the time that wars happen because human beings choose to go to war. That's nonsense. We don't choose anything. We are the equivalent of automaton's. We can only speak of choice with development. And that's a long, hard, arduous road,

and I'm not sure it even ends anywhere, very promising. I think humanity's position is just disastrous. I think we're in a very serious dissent. And I don't think there's anything that I or anyone else can do about that. I mean, I ask people watching right now, if they're watching this on a computer, keep in mind all of us, all of us are going to throw out that computer someday, and that lithium battery is going to wind up in the backyard of some poor kid somewhere who's going to get poisoned groundwater because of that.

And we know that. And we do it anyway. Do it anyway. That's our brokenness. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I couldn't decide if your book was self-help or if it was a guidebook to the apocalypse. Well, it's interesting.

I worked for 27 years in corporate publishing, and I met a lot of authors who ran from the label self-help, because they think it's day class A, it's unsuriness. It's the philosophy of the people. I embrace the label self-help. I'm proud of that label. Now, is it a guide to the apocalypse? Yes, in a certain sense, because I believe that we are in a stage of decline. Call it Kaliuga, call it sleep, call it automaticity,

call it what the Gnostics called it, that we're living under a false God or a false deity. There are different terms for it. But to suggest that we are beings of free will making choices, I see evidence for that nowhere. So if that's the apocalypse, then I would have to agree with that characterization. We're all running one of those programs. Yeah, it was startling to read in your book. Before we go to break and I want to talk about your publishing career, we're talking about your dad.

Tell me about Dad versus Sid. Oh, wow. Well, I was very proud of Dad. At age 12, Dad ran for Congress on a district that Bridges. the Queens, Long Island border. It was that Union Turnpike Marcus Avenue District. And the Silver Moon District. The Silver Moon District.

And his opponent was a standard machine politician, not a bad guy, a bad guy named Lester Wolf, who was the chair of some subcommittee on narcotics in Congress. And Dad decided that, again, if only these were our problems today, better time. Dad decided that Sid Vicious should never have been allowed into this country because Sid supposedly killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungeon. I don't know that that's true, but that's certainly what history has recorded. Sid never got his day in court because he died of an overdose soon after.

And I loved Sid, but Dad decided that he was going to become the poster boy for anarchy in our borough, and people were worried about crime, and dad, to his credit, would not. not play the race card and instead he made Sid vicious into oh I don't know his campaign partner and so he went around giving talks uh that Lester Wolfe his opponent should be held responsible for a known drug addict entering our country and killing his girlfriend in our fair city and I remember once he was speaking in front of a group of a grumpy Jewish war veterans and he gave this talk and Lester Wolf showed up late, not a smooth move. And he had no idea that dad was doing any of this.

Didn't know who Sid Vicious was. And so they started screaming at him, You let Vicious Sid into this country. The presentation had to stop, so Lester Wolf could be told who Sid Vicious was. But again, I read very lovingly, very admiringly about this. Talk about the good old days when these were our problems. The title of the article was brilliant.

It was Dad fought the sex pistols and the sex pistols won. And now the song is in my head. That's how it happened. And we'll be right back. There's a section in your book called Cast Out. 1997 you're fired. The first of two times from your dream job. Yeah.

Two years in and it's over. What happened through that year? Well, I worked for many years in corporate publishing. And once upon a couple of... time, I was hired by a political press, now defunct, at Simon & Chuster, called the Free Press. And that place was flying high, and I was thrilled to be there. I could not get arrested when I was there, two years, and I just couldn't get agents to submit to me the way that was necessary.

And that chokes off your air supply in publishing. You live and die by that. So you have to wait for submissions? That was your role? Oh, I would try to drum up books, and I drummed up some damn good ones, and I'm very proud of a lot of what I published there, but you can only do so much of that. I mean, you really need to be getting a stream of submissions in. And for various reasons, I found it very, very difficult, and I'll never forget it. It's painful to recount, but people deserve to hear

it because they've been through things like this, and they'll feel less alone if they hear it. After about a year on the job, I came back from lunch. This was the old days before email ruled the roost, and we would still get phone messages on those. little pink scratch pads. There were no little pink scratch pad messages waiting for me, and my voicemail light was not on. And so I quietly closed my office door, and I lay my head down on my desk, and I thought, I am fucking going to get fired. And within about a year, that transpired.

And it was scary as hell, and it was painful as hell, because a lot of people in publishing got fired. It's a tough business. And I lasted longer than most. I continued to last for many years after that. But I thought, I am not the guy who gets fired. I am the achiever. That wasn't so.

And that was very tough. And so I started looking for new jobs. I have no family money. I live paycheck to paycheck. And let me tell you, I got the highest level interviews. John Kennedy Jr. interviewed me for a political magazine. He was running at the time. No shit.

Yeah. He offered me a job. He died shortly thereafter in a very tragic airplane crash. And he was a hell of a good guy. He was going to be mayor. Yeah. And I mean, he's American royalty. And you talk to him, puts you immediately at ease, super easy to talk to.

He was interested in cattle mutilations. It might interest you in your audience to know. I'm interested in what happened in that flight. Yeah, yeah. And so what a loss. I had experience one after another like that, not where something tragic occurred, but oh my God, I was in the running for an arts and ideas editor at the New York Times, interviewed with the executive editor, Joseph Lelyvel, nothing.

The editor of Harper's Magazine had a few too many one night, offered me a job. Next day, nothing. And so how does it feel when you come so close to winning the gold and you get nothing? You don't even get a bronze. You get nothing. And I thought, I'm in trouble. And I've got to start going the blue collar wrap. So I just started looking in what we used to call the classified ads like everybody else.

A backwater New Age publisher, which has gone through many different names because it keeps getting bought by different companies, opened its doors to me, and I went there. Which publisher? Well, it was known as Tarture Penguin back in my day. We were Tarture Putnam, then Tarture Penguin, then the unproncible Tarture Perigy, which every radio host we'd call Tartier. perigree and I'll be like this was a great move anyway it was a slightly down on its luck new age press and I was coming from what had been a very high flying press where everything

we published would get reviewed in the New Yorker and the New York review of books and the New York Times and so forth these were different days and my friends thought I was crazy they said don't go there and my attitude was no I believe in a yes and I believe in walking through open doors. You didn't feel like it was a step down? Oh, it was definitely a step down. Oh, it was. And I felt it intensely.

I mean, I went from, oh, man, Harvard to a little correspondence school that nobody has heard of. And it was a very serious step down. But I swallowed the ego, and I swallowed the humiliation, lost a lot of friends. God save us from our friends. Why? Why? Because I use the term friends resisting air quotes.

In New York City, friendships are based on usefulness. Friendships are based on what can you do for me. Another rule is steal yourself when your best friend betrays you. For real. For real. For real. Yeah, yeah. So it was painful.

So I use the term friends with qualification. Sure. Oh, people dropped away from me. People abandoned me. People would say, how you doing? As though I was in the hospital or something. Right. But I take seriously a yes.

I take seriously an open door. And remember, messengers come disguised as strangers. Be flexible. Don't get stuck to your mind's eye image of where you're going. I started to rediscover the occult and esoteric interest that I knew as a kid, which I still had, but they were secondary. They were on the back burner. This job brought them back up front.

Well, hang on. What was your belief system when you were an executive? Oh, well, most of my career was eventually spent in spiritual publishing. So my outlook was a lot like what you're hearing now. But before that, oh, I was just interested in politics and social trends and things of that nature. I might go on a yoga retreat now and then or do something like that. But it was secondary. It was secondary. Just New York Hustle is really what it was.

New York Hustle. And New York City, you don't talk about it. spirituality too much or people start to think you're a nut you know you can you can invoke your version of you know psychologized NPR Buddhism but you know you go beyond that and your tote bag gets revoked no the moonies the moonies were still on the west side at that time oh that's right that's right no you can't do an end up step and so it wasn't too frequently talked about and people had your fairly conventional attitudes it's a bunch of junk a bunch of nonsense don't tell me about your star scroll you know leave that back at the silver

Moon Diner. And so that stuff was back burn it in my life. I began reading into the backlist of this imprint and it changed everything for me. It reignited all my childhood interests. So I read about the different mystical positive mind philosophies. I read about the philosophy of G.I. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. I read all kinds of occult and esoteric and alternative spiritual texts that just awakened a fire in me that had gone way down to a little pilot. light. And then eventually, eventually, having thought I left writing behind, which was a real suffering for me, I rediscovered myself as a writer. Because to write well, you need that perfect marriage to topic. And I didn't have it. I didn't want to write book reviews for the village

voice or something like that. I didn't want to write about politics. There are enough guys bopping around town doing that. I didn't want any part of it. But suddenly, suddenly I began to realize that the metaphysical topics and their purveyors, figures like Manly P. Hall, Edgar Casey, Madam H.P. Blavatsky, these figures were not receiving fair treatment within mainstream letters. Well, people don't realize how influential you are with the culture. I mean, if anyone who watched or read the secret or thinks about manifestation, half the kids on TikTok, it goes back to Manly P. Hall, doesn't it? Yeah, it's remarkable. And these figures are almost like an underground river that feeds so much of our above-ground culture. But they get forgotten,

they get disparaged. They are, when they're acknowledged, they're all within mainstream letters, their reputations and their lives are butchered. But these are people who really lived for something. Well, how did you know Neville was important? Oh, man, I knew Neville was important when I first came into contact with his work. I had not heard of him. It was summer of 2003. And this is what reignited my writing career. There was a positive thinking magazine called Science of Mind, and they landed an interview with a major league pitcher named Barry Zito, and Barry became the hero of the 2012 World Series pitching for the San Francisco Giants. Barry uses or used a lot of these positive mind methods in his training came from his parents. And so they wanted to find somebody

they could trust to interview Barry. There was no room to mess this up. This was a very important catch and article and figure, and they asked me to do it, and I hadn't written for years. And I was so thrilled, and I thought, this is another open door. This is another yes. Take this.

And so I interviewed Barry in the summer of 2003. No anxiety. Don't fuck this up. Oh, I had huge anxiety. Good. And I read into his background very deeply. And I discovered something, which is that a good article of any kind is an article in which the writer follows his or her own proclivities and finds the connective tissue, finds the connective tissue. You create your own beginning, middle and end.

And I wanted to do that with Barry because I was so fascinated with him as a man of mystical beliefs who really took the rubber to the road. because you have nowhere to hide in athleticism, whether you're a martial artist, basketball player. You have nowhere to hide. You're out there naked. You can or you can't. You can or you can't, and your performance is your only proven ground. And Barry's performance was stellar,

and he was so frank and so upfront about the mystical ideas that fed his training, which he got from his parents, Joe and Roberta. And as we were talking, Barry said to me, you must really be into Neville or Neville Goddard. I had never heard the name. And he said something to me about Neville Goddard, this great British Barbadian mystic.

A ball player? Turns you up on to Neville. Ball player. Barry Zito. Yeah. And I got Neville's book, Resurrection, which was published in 1966, his last full-length book.

And Neville's contention, which he repeated elegantly across his career, is that your imagination is what is symbolically called God in Scripture, and that everything that you experience consists of your own emotionalized thoughts pushed out into the world, including my voice right now, including your presence right now. So Neville would say to your audience,

there's no Mitch here, there's no A.J. here. These are figments of your own imagination. You're just ready to receive whatever this message is through that form. right now. It's all rooted in you, as you are rooted in the ultimate. And I fell into Neville's message because he enunciated it so beautifully. And every time I read it or heard it, it was as though I were encountering it for the first time. And Neville became one of the chief influences on my life. So I write the article about Barry. About two weeks later, somebody tells me, Mitch, Joe Zito is on the phone, Barry's father. He wants to talk to you. And I'm thinking,

Oh, God, because Joe had a really tough reputation. So now I'm nervous. And I pick up the phone and he goes, Mitch, this is Joe Zito. That article was terrific. Now you listen to me. You stick with this thing by which he meant writing, by which he meant writing. And it was just what I needed to hear at that juncture of life. Had I not gone to that backwater New Age publisher, had I not read into its backlist,

had I not interviewed Barry, encountered Neville, encountered Joe, I wouldn't be seated here right now. I wouldn't be married to my wife, Jacqueline Castell right now, who we met through our shared adjacency to these topics. What I experienced when I was fired from the free press was a failure, and it was emotionally very difficult. I suffered. I suffered.

It's not something I want to go through again or wish somebody else would go through, but without that suffering would not have come the deliverance and the refinement that I saw. It's just the bargain that life strikes with us. Well, I mean, Jacques Ballet, Manley Hall, Neville, who was in the slush pile? What kind of work were you getting that you said, no? The only things for me that wound up in the slush pile,

and there are a few things I wish wound up in the slush pile that I published, were works that were just lazy, where people weren't really putting themselves through paces to ask, how do I know this? Have I struggled to verify this? Have I really tried to make this happen? And it's tough in publishing because even when you decide I'm not going to acquire a project unless I get sample chapters, and I know those sample chapters are just cracker jack and great.

People choke under pressure all the time. That was the most stressful thing for me in publishing. People used to ask me, do you miss publishing? Not for an instant. It did many good things for me. but being a writer and being answerable to myself is infinitely more fulfilling than being on pins and needles

as to whether somebody is going to meet his or her deadline. I would pay people good money to write on topics that were near and dear to their heart and they would choke. And it was always my fault. You know, never their fault. And there was an exception to that who I write about in the book.

and a lot of people don't like hearing the name of this exception. Go ahead. But that was Tucker Carlson. I knew Tucker when we were relative kids, and I signed up Tucker to write a book. His career was just taking off. Didn't work out. One day at my desk, I got a handwritten note and a check for $10,000 from Tucker,

and he said, look, I'm very sorry. I just can't do it. And one and only time in 27 years anyone's ever done that. taken the responsibility on himself, return the dough, and you part with a handshake. But the toughest part of publishing, and I suppose this goes on everywhere, this goes on in hospitals, this goes on in every workplace, is that people just will not say, I had an accident, or I couldn't do it, or I made a mistake, I failed, whatever. And that was a tough part of publishing for me.

I don't want to depend upon somebody else to row the boat. I want to row it myself. I think your publishing career shows up almost as rule number one is do the work and do it on time. I mean, it's right there number one. Amen. And if you can't, then be open about it. Go to the person to whom you owe it,

and you'll fix it together. Just don't run away. Can we connect Manley P. Hall to Ronald Reagan? Yes. Let's do that. They knew each other. They did? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I wrote about this, of all places, in that Journal of Occult Passions, The Washington Post, in 2010. And I don't write very much for mainstream sources anymore because I find that my topics are treated with cynicism, and I don't like pushing back all the time against cynicism. But it's also a good exercise because you're writing for a place that has no sympathies to occult subject matter. I did a text analysis of Reagan's speeches, and I found dead to rights. And anybody who wants to can read about it in the Washington Post.

It's called Reagan and the Occult, is the article, came out in April of 2010 with my byline. I did a textual analysis of Reagan's speeches. And I found that from the earliest stages of his political career in the 1950s, when he was a spokesman for GE, up through the second term of his presidency, he was adopting not only ideas, but specific phraseology from the work of Manly P. Hall, particularly from a book called

The Secret Destiny of America, which is kind of a mythical retelling of American history. And Reagan would talk about this. He spoke about this at the centenary of the Statue of Liberty. He spoke about this in front of CPAC. He spoke about this in front of college,

audience audiences, commencement addresses, and everybody just thought, oh, you know, there goes old Ron again, you know, he gets a little barmy. Well, he was quoting directly from Manly P. Hall. Furthermore, there's a Gnostic scholar who died recently, Stefan Heller. And Heller, who I think was a very sober man and a very good witness overall, told me that he was on campus once at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, and that there was a very sober man, and a very good witness overall, told me that there was this beautiful limousine parked outside of Manley Hall's office. Heller went up to the driver who was a right proper chauffeur with the cap and everything, and he said to the chauffeur,

Stefan used to have a particular way of talking, to who belongs this beautiful car? And he said, well, you know, I'm not supposed to talk about it, but Governor Reagan, you know, he's there in the office with Manley Hall. And then when Reagan was running for president, he would come on the tube, and Manley would sort of laugh a little and say, Yes, we know him. And a woman named Pearl Thomas, who was a librarian, confirmed this.

But it wasn't something they liked to talk about because Manly Hall was not a star chaser. He didn't like to try to associate himself with political figures or bold-faced names. There's something I really admired about the man. He lived in Hollywood most of his adult life, but he never kind of chased after celebrity status. He lived a very quiet life. Anyway, best of my knowledge, he and Reagan had had friendly meetings. and as a dead to rights certainty, based on direct quotes,

Reagan was drawing upon the work of Manley Hall in his own speeches. So people say, oh, the Reagan's, you know, into astrology, numerology, yeah, that's true, and it went deeper than that. Went deeper than that. And do you remember any specific examples from Reagan? Oh, well, very specifically,

Reagan, across the arc of his political career, told a story about this mysterious unknown speaker at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4th, 1776. And no one knew how this mysterious man entered and exited the locked doors of the hall. But when the delegates were wavering and were afraid to put their signatures to paper, he gave this rousing address. And he urged all the delegates to rush forward and sign the paper. And so Manley wondered whether this was a secret agent of destiny.

a hidden adept whose job it was to nudge the New Republic along on its path to experiments in self-governance. And I remember I first got on to the centrail of this because a talk show host in New Orleans said to me, did you know that Ronald Reagan believed in secret spiritual masters? And I said, no, I didn't know that, somewhat skeptical. And he sent me a newsletter from some congressman who had written, something about it, and the newsletter from the congressman identified an article that Reagan wrote for Parade Magazine in 1980 on the topic of what the 4th of July means to him. And he wrote the article on a legal pad in Longhand, and I got hold to the article, and my blood ran cold because

I realized, oh my God, this is telltale phraseology from Manly P. Hall. And I began to track it, and I tracked the story that Manly told, which is a story of questionable vintage, but he certainly thought he was repeating something that had historical verity. Did he ever name that guy? Because he shows up in the Count of St. Germain, which connects to theosophy and all of that. Exactly. He called him the unknown speaker. Okay. That was the term.

It's a great story. Unknown speaker. I tracked down the etymology of the story, and I'm fairly sure that it comes from a mid-19th century work, and it was told in a way that was intended to be fanciful. It was written by a guy named George Lippard, who was a friend of Edgar Allan Poe, and he was trying to capture something of the fiery eloquence

at the time of the revolution, and he acknowledged that the story was invented, but he felt it was parabolicly true, mythically true. Manly felt that the story had historical verity. He repeated it, Reagan repeated it. Reagan even says, in front of CPAC, I have to admit, I've never gone through the trouble to verify this story, but I believe that it's true.

I've spoken to the man who told it to me. I think he's referencing Manly P. Hall. And there it is. There is deep-seated esoteric history. You've got to remember, during Reagan's lifetime, Manly P. Hall was an unknown. He's known today. He's known throughout the Internet today.

But back then, this was a real figure from underground culture. And there's Ronald Reagan, quote, from him. How does Manley Hall connect to Napoleon Hill? Well, I don't know that Manley Hall would have liked the work of Napoleon Hill because Manley was discouraging of an acquisitional approach to spirituality or to self-development. I don't share that critique of Manley's. I think Napoleon Hill, despite his own checkered biography, which I've written about, was a tremendously shrewd observer of human nature. And I reckon, that Napoleon Hill and his book Think and Grow Rich, which I recommend,

saved my own life because I was fired twice in publishing. The second and last time was in 2017. Now, my company was bought out by Random House. This was in 2013. And I thought, oh, man, they are going to come for me. Here we go again. Here we go again. And so I did something that I recommend to people.

I had known Napoleon Hill's work for years. I had published in addition of Think and Grow Rich since 2004. But I, like many people, thought, ah, you know, I don't need that self-help stuff. I know all these exercises. I'm an expert when it comes to this stuff. Come on, bring on the big boys. I was wrong.

I was wrong. I decided feeling that my job might be in danger, and I lasted another four years. Took them a while to find me. But I decided in 2013, you know... Was that when you were the best kept secret in the company? That's when I was the best kept secret in the company. You don't want to be.

I thought to myself, there's no such thing as a merger. There's a buyout. Right. And buyouts result in layoffs, and those are the hard truths. And so I started to think, I'm going to need to contemplate a career post-publishing, because I ain't going through this again. And I recommend this to everybody who feels they are at a crisis in life. I got a copy of Think and Grow Rich.

A book that I was on very familiar terms with, but I did something different. I did every exercise in that book as though my life depended on it. And when they came for me in fall of 2017, I was ready. I was ready to embark on my own independent career as a writer, speaker, television host. I was ready. And I attribute a lot of that to Napoleon Hill's work. People don't know think and grow rich. They only believe that they know think and grow rich because of our,

I heard it somewhere culture. The book has an element of mind metaphysics in it. It has an element of mental causation in it, but it's a very action-oriented book, and it is a book filled with shrewd observations about human nature, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. What do you think we're getting wrong about it? We get things wrong because we think we're too sophisticated

for books like thinking grow rich. I'm supposed to be embarrassed sitting on the New York City subway, carrying my copy of Think and Grow Rich. How Gosh. What are you going to read next? Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. That's next on my list. You know, I give that book as a gift to my kids and to other young people.

We, I'd like to say we've forgotten the lessons of these books, but we've never even learned them. We, as a culture, think we're too sophisticated for books like that. And I think that's a huge and tragic mistake. And I will read Think and Grow Rich cover out. with my white packing tape on it to my clear packing tape to keep it from falling apart. And I go back to that book just about every year. And I encourage people. I don't care how often you feel you've been around the block with self-help or motivational

literature or whatever it may be. Do the exercises as though your life depends on it. And things will happen. I state that from experience. I agree my copies are probably 30 years old. I still have it. Did you connect Napoleon Hill to Marxism at some point? That's very funny that you say that.

There was a lawyer from the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Best editorial note I've ever gotten. He wrote in the margin of one of my manuscripts because I was doing a book in conjunction with their foundation. Napoleon Hill was not a socialist. It was a very dry comment. I think what I was doing was I was comparing Napoleon Hill to the work of someone who was a socialist,

and that's Wallace D. W. Wattles, who wrote the science of getting rich, which was a primary source behind the book and movie The Secret. What people don't understand about Wallace D. Wattles and what I've written about in connection with his life is a beautiful man. He was a democratic socialist, and he believed that each individual could liberate him or herself from the machine by using these mental paths to wealth and could create kind of a society of benevolent anarchy.

I guess today we might call him an anarchist or a libertarian, but he saw himself as a socialist, and he saw himself in the march of progress, and he saw his methods as methods that would liberate working men and women from the machine. It's a beautiful man. Ren for office three times on the ticket of the Socialist Party USA, yeah, and was going to run for office a fourth time, but unfortunately he died of tuberculosis about a year after science of getting rich

came out. A beautiful man. And he was the real thing, Wallace D. Wattles. He was a real idealist. And I think his methods are among the most wonderful that you'll find in the whole mind metaphysics genre. He was, and I've written extensively about this, and let me tell you, this is a hard one argument. I wrote an article recently on the German idealist

FW.H. Hegel called H.G. And the validity of pop metaphysics. Wallace D. Wattel's, was a legitimate interpreter of the metaphysical ideals of Hegel as a philosopher. Ideals that got flipped by Marx into materialism, we sometimes use the term dialectical materialism. Hegel had nothing material about him. He believed that the driving engine of life was the metaphysical.

Wallace D. Waddles took this argument along with the notions, concepts, theories of other idealist philosophers, and he rendered it into a slender process. program in his book, The Science of Getting Rich. Again, kind of a gauche title that lettered people don't want to be associated with, but a memorable title. I always tell people when your titles are very important, they're critical. When you're looking for a title, the early pioneers of self-help were masters, think and grow rich, science of getting rich, the game of life, how to win friends and influence people.

You cannot forget these once you've heard them. They're outrageous. We spend more time on our titles than we do on our episodes sometimes. And well, you should. Well, you should. Books are made or broken by titles, and I always tell people, be audacious, but live up to it, live up to it. Make a bold promise and then deliver on the bold promise. Or use something really basic.

If you want to call a book The Tarot, okay, that's sufficient. If you want to call a book Lincoln, that's sufficient. But if you don't have something that's instantly recognizable, you're going to have to make a bold promise. especially to readers who are just being pulled in all different directions at once. So Waddles writes this book, The Science of Getting Rich, which seems very unsocialistic in its framing, but he had a point of view that was totally original and valid and I think really sincere in its iteration of Hegel's metaphysics. My article, Hagle and the validity of pop metaphysics, very hard one piece.

came through very deep reading of Hagle. It's available for free on Substack. I'm proud of it. And I'm proud of Wallace D. Wattles. I was probably comparing Hill to Wattles, and that's what engendered that remark. Would Waddles work now? Would his philosophy work now, like in our society? I believe so.

You do? I do. I do. I can't speak to the idealistic ultimacy of everything that Waddles said, but I do believe there's an intimate relationship between thought and event, between psyche and outcome. I describe psyche as a compact of thought and emotion. And I do believe, I do believe in a perceptually based reality.

I don't believe that that's the only game in town, so to speak. That's the only law we live under. That's why I don't have any argument with terms, law of attraction or manifestation, but they're not my terms. because they communicate the notion that humanity lives under one mental super law. And I dispute that. I challenge that. I cannot verify that.

Humanity lives under a complexity of laws and forces. My term is selection because I'm very interested in the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics, multiverse theory. I'm fascinated with these notions. And it's quite possible. It's quite possible that our organs of perception, which are no different than organic functions of measurement may localize experience,

may actualize experience in the same way that measurements do in the particle lab as above so below. If one takes that principle seriously, it bears probing. So if we think about, so it's more complicated underneath than just one. So I'm thinking about Bob Monroe, and the gateway process about how you can sort of bend the universe to your will

through the practice. Was he on to something, or did he get it wrong? Oh, I think Bob Monroe was a genius and a lovely man. He was a radio executive who came to feel through some research and through some independent scholarship that our psychology responds to sound and that sound waves and frequencies not only could impact mood,

but could induce trans-personal experience or what some people call out-of-body experience or which, if you like, you can call higher forms of intuition, insight, acumen. About a year ago, my wife, Jacqueline and I spent a week at the Monroe Institute in favor of Virginia outside of Charlottesville, and it was a wonderful week

where you experiment with the different stages of expanded psychiatry, that Bob Monroe felt could result from the application of specific frequencies and sound waves. So you're doing hemisink all week? Yes, and it was extraordinary. And the thing I love about the Monroe Institute program is they really respect your privacy. I think New Age centers are just too suffused with false intimacy, sharing, encounter style sessions. I don't like any of that stuff.

I believe very firmly in the respect for the individual's privacy. The Monroe Institute, I think, is very practical and professional. Enormously so. Enormously so. So we were there as part of a group, but you go into private chambers to do your exercises, then you come back as a group and you can exchange as you like or remain silent as you like. I did not have an out-of-body experience. Some people report these things.

That was not my experience. but I did have the most extraordinary intuitive experiences, expanded senses of consciousness, awareness, judgment. And I would say it was one of the happiest weeks of my life. It was extraordinary. I recommend it to anybody. Well, your motto for a while was try and then Monroe changed it a little, didn't it? Did I?

Well, didn't something tell you to? Oh, do less. Yes, you're very right. You're very right. My motto is try, and it'll always be in my bones, but we were, as you rightly hit on, at the Monroe Institute, as the ultimate exercise, we were invited using this sound technology to go into what might be called a transpersonal state

and ask five questions in order of descending importance. And I asked for directions, about what to do with my life, my work, my career. And the number one response I got back was do less. Amazing. Do less. And it was jarring for me because my modus operandi is activity. A book a year.

Yeah, yeah. Podcasts, TV, you're always going, man. I'm always going. I'm always going. Which is not ideal. Yeah. I had a health episode earlier this year where I was hospitalized because my hemoglobin tanked and we're still trying to figure out what happened and why, but it was scary as hell.

And when you get a message of wisdom and you don't listen, you can do whatever you want, but that message will take it out of your skin and it got taken out of my skin. And I'm fine now and I'm doing much, much better. But do less was a dictum that I really had to abide. and I was listening intellectually, and I wasn't listening emotionally. This is, again, why I believe in very simple ideas, because profundity only appears in application. Now, am I doing less?

I think I am trying to dedicate myself to things that will make a great deal of difference if they succeed. I'm not running around as harried as I was. This is probably the longest stretch of time I've gone with, fully throwing myself into a new book, although I've got one coming, and traveling. The yoga of money.

Yoga of money, that's right. Yeah. I have to get back to that. But the travel and engaging in exchanges like this, these things are renewing for me. I'm not sitting down, pounding away at the keyboard, or prepping for a shoot. They're more natural for me.

And so I've started to abide, do less, although I'll always hang on to try as my motto, because it not only pertains to work, but it pertains to spiritual experiment. I think those can live together. Yeah, for sure. Is that what made you promise to talk 10% less? Well, talking 10% less is something that will benefit everybody's life. Because most of the time, most of what we say is just the chirping of cicadas. It's so unnecessary.

I think that if people want an immediate technique for improving self-image, silence. Just say less. Don't overcompensate. Don't walk into a room and immediately start trying to influence things. Listen more carefully to what's going on. Don't throw yourself into relationships too quickly or invite someone or something in too quickly. There was almost nothing in a person's life. that won't be improved by talking at least 10% less.

When you came back from Monroe, I think you went on Duncan's show, and there were things that were so intimate that you didn't want to talk about them. Have you ever shared those? Well, do less was one of the things I didn't talk about. Was it? You didn't tell Duncan? No, I didn't want to go into the specific messages that I had gotten because they felt too raw, too fresh. and I needed to sit with it for a while.

I do disclose things. I encourage people, it's ironic, because I encourage people not to disclose things. If you put something out there, if you put a wish out there, someone will destroy it. Someone will take it from you. I, with certain boundaries, tend to be very disclosing because I want to be transparent.

We have a crisis of transparency among spiritual communicators. spiritual communicators, and I know this from 27 years in publishing, having worked with a lot of the household names, they're as weak as I am, and they're not the same people who appear when the camera's on, or when the microphone's on, or when the audience is assembled, and they ought to be, because to hide for the sake of theater is to misinform people that someone lives on a higher level or a higher echelon and that's not true.

And it's more than just a problem of misleading the audience member. That's problematic by itself, but there's a greater problem. And the greater problem is it conceals the severity of the odds that face all of us in matters of self-development. I am not hopeful about humanity. I am not a lover of humanity. I'm a lover of individual people, very few in number. Because I think humanity is in horrendous condition. And when I say prepare for the day when your best friend betrays you, I mean that, and that's painful.

And I don't like stating such a thing to people. If you live long enough, these rules come true. They come true. And my wish, my deepest wish, is for the happiness of the reader. But you can't have happiness. You can't have ideals without being very direct with people. And spiritual communicators must be, if they're really going to be serving the human exchange,

more direct about their own frailties. So I try to be transparent. In your book, and a lot of your work, I see a fascination with people who have these manufactured personas, whether it's Flavatsky, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. You're the leather jacket tattooed self-help guy. Is this a persona?

How much of Mitch Horowitz is the leather jacket guy? Are you exempt from it? I'm not exempt from anything. I tell people that if you decide how you want to be in the world and you pursue that in terms of environment, selfhood, that's not wearing a mask. That's dropping a mask. The mask is conformity.

realized at a certain point I had left a part of my existence behind. I had left behind seeing Black Flag when I was 17 years old. I had left behind what thrilled me when I was a kid. I left behind hearing the Dead Kennedys sing Holiday in Cambodia at age 15 and knowing what truth was. And so I began to reclaim that. And if that chafed with New Age culture, I don't really care. And if I'm invited to a new age center where everybody wears white and I'm walking around like this, which is just Monday for me, I don't really care. It's who I am. I got a letter once. I still like get goosebumps thinking about it from Peter Chris, the first drummer in Kiss. Sure. Because I had written about something Peter said in one of my books. He made a fascinating

observation. Peter said that the bandmates were, you know, they were looking around for a sense of identity when they were young in the early 70s. And when they came up with the makeup, he said it was the most incredible thing because it wasn't like we were hiding. It was like we were revealing ourselves. And he said that Gene Simmons had confided to him one day that putting on that demon makeup was for him so self-revealing that if he could, he would never take it off. And he said that he noticed that when Gene put on his makeup, the roadies,

and even audience members and everybody would sort of step around him a little bit. And he said, you know, we became ourselves. We became comfortable. We became relaxed. We became familiar with ourselves for the first time. We weren't hiding. We were revealing ourselves. And so I wrote about this in a book.

And then I heard from Peter and I got hysterical with joy. And I take that as truth. And I want to suggest to people, I want to suggest to people, whatever walk of life you're in, are you really dressing, acting, comporting yourself the way you want? And I'm not saying you should act on it immediately. But know your preferences, know your preferences. Get up in the goddamn morning and ask yourself, is this what I want to wear? Is this who I want to be?

Is this how I want to sound? Is this how I want my hair to look or whatever it is? Just no. You know, we never even ask ourselves. We're so suffused with peer pressure and with cultural conformity, and it gets its claws inside of us to the point where we can't even talk to ourselves using authentic phrasing that belongs to us, the individual. So know your preferences. Start there. It's not hiding.

It's revealing. That's perfect. I got to spend two days with Gene on a job, and boy, I just ate it up. I just picked his brain every minute of all those days. He was amazing. He was great to me. I love Kiss. And I am forever a 15-year-old boy, and proudly so.

Of course. We saw Kiss at Barclay Center in Brooklyn. And oh, my God. I think doesn't Ace show up in your work here and there as well? Yeah. I love Ace. I love every one of them. When they took off the makeup, it was jarring. Remember that?

It was a traumatic experience. It was. It was. I'm still not used to it. So the book is aimed at the false self. And we've kind of, we talked around it a little bit today. When was the last time you caught your false self kind of running your personality? When I talk about things like service or when I start finding myself using language internally

that belongs to the external spiritual culture, that's why I'm very careful with words like love or peace or service. I don't want to see anybody using terms that come out of the Bartlett's book of divine quotations or that sound like they belong to a business plan from Silicon Valley 25 years ago. I want to know what I and what the individual wants. Let's start there. Let's start there. It doesn't mean you can act on it immediately, but I write a lot in the book about knowing your wish.

And it sounds so self-evident, and that's exactly where to start digging, when something sounds self-evident, because I challenge the reader that he or she doesn't know their wishes, because we internalize peer pressure, including that of our subcultures, and we start to talk about service, make the world a better place, love humanity, and so on and so forth. I'm interested in conduct. I'm not interested in pretty phraseology. I want to be rich so I can start a charity. I want to be famous so I can influence.

That's dishonest. Right. It's dishonest. Unless one really means it, and if you really mean it, well, then Bravo be my guest. So if you want to be rich, just say it. No, that you do. Say it.

And for God's sake, money does a lot of good things. It educates children. It takes your family members on trips. It replaces the roof in a house. It's necessary. So let's start from stark honesty. A wish, if it's authentic, should feel a little embarrassing because we are so induced by our subcultures

to use a language that is not our own. We were talking about this earlier with the idea of quoting from translations of translations of translations of wisdom literature that we can't even access in the originals. The originals may not exist. We call it tradition. It's custom.

It's not always custom. often it's habit. Let's give ourselves a break. Give ourselves a break in private. Dispense with habit, dispense with custom, and in an atmosphere of exquisite privacy within your own psyche, the only domain of privacy left in our interconnected culture. Speak to yourself, for real, about what you want. I'm not saying you're going to act on it immediately. I'm not saying you're even going to like it. But at least, least no, don't be a stranger to yourself. Because I think past a certain age, maybe age nine, a kid is so suffused with peer pressure that the outer world and its subcultures just get their

claws in us. And we can't even talk to ourselves in a real way anymore within. I also counsel deep privacy, because if you arrive at your wish, and it's something I hope a person does, and you share it with someone else, they will destroy it. Yes. They will because it's not what's inside them. And we as a human community just love making rules, and we love slamming doors on one another's fingers. And I can't tell you the number of times

the people who have spoken to me of service and love, and I'm your best friend, I've still got the shivs in my back from those times. So let's let the pretty language go for a minute. Let's let the pretty quotations and the customary ideas. ideas that divines all over the internet can repeat, let's let that go for a minute. Forget the comments section. This is about the individual.

What is the individual want within his or her psyche? Well, can we just quickly go through the nine steps? Because people need to know that your book is, it's a practical guide. We've got the nine steps is the wish, ask what you truly want, ends not the means. Yeah. That's interesting to me because you're not focusing on, I forget what you even use in the book, but it was if you're picturing yourself playing in an arena, you don't picture the guitar lessons. You focus on the arena. And in conjunction with that, I would say that we can't choose the conditions by which something reaches us. And we have to be flexible about those conditions. I did not plan on getting fired. hired by a new age publisher. That wasn't in the business plan. But that's what allowed me to

rediscover myself as a writer. And that feeds into what I was saying about parables and myths in which God's spiritual messengers, genies come to you as a disguised stranger, an unbidden stranger. Let those strangers in. We throw away incredible miracles, incredible gifts, because they don't fit our mind's eye picture of what we think we want. The philosopher Jacob Needleman was a mentor to me and he once said to me, what do you do when someone offers you a gift? And brilliant student, I was. I stared at him blankly. And he said, you accept it. You accept it. And we throw away extraordinary gifts all the time because they don't fit our mind's eye image. So flexibility. That was the one was very striking to me.

Speak it, hold the wish, say it out loud to yourself. Absolutely. The talisman. Yeah. So write it down, protect it, and hide it. Write the wish down, write a well-focused, passionately felt, an exquisitely honest wish down on a little card or something. Put it in the old clear packing tape.

I'm a big fan of clear packing tape. Yeah. Treat that wish. Carry that wish with you like you were carrying a candle in a rainstorm. Make it real. Make it real. And dig this. It may seem like, oh, for God's sake, Horowitz with his fucking index cards. But trust me on this. Once you've taken that step, you've created something that wasn't there before. In nascenty, in particle form. But the honest rendering of that wish privately on that little card, create something in particulate form that wasn't there before. I value that. That's the whole basis of chaos theory and chaos magic.

Yes. Step five is rehearse it. Run out through your mind. Live with it. Live with it. Pray for it. Petition whatever greater force you seek, if none appeal to the infinite matter of chaos.

Hypnagogia. Hypnagogic state, that's interesting as well because once again we're in practical application. Yeah. So for those who don't know, what is the hypnagogy state? Hypnaggia is a deeply relaxed state that we all enter twice a day, just as we're falling to sleep at night,

and just as we're coming to in the morning. This is a state that was first described, although not in that term, by a French mind theorist Emil Kuwe, who was very popular in the early 20th century. He's a hero to me. Kuwe is famous for having prescribed a mantra, day by day in every way I am getting better and better.

And critics would howl and make fun of him and say, how could anything so childish make any difference in anybody's life? But what they missed was how Kui prescribed using it. In this state of hypnaggia, a term that didn't come into use until several generations later in the 1980s, Kuii died in 1926. Hypnagasia is this exquisitely relaxed state that you enter, again, just as falling to sleep, just as coming to, it's a state of bodily heaviness, almost bodily paralysis. You may experience waking dreams, you may experience hallucinations.

Your rational defenses are lowered, but you still have active cognition. Use that time, use that time to say a prayer, make a visualization, make an affirmation, make an affirmation, Kui called this conscious auto-suggestion. It's a kind of self-hypnosis. Now, he was very adamant about not being a spiritual figure. He was trying to separate hypnosis as a therapeutic art from anything to do with the occultor esoteric. So, so be it. So be it. But in that state, you are very suggestive. You are very suggestive. And it has proven, in the 1970s and 80s in experiments called the Gunsfeld experiments, which are bulletproof. to be prime time for telepathy.

That if you induce someone into this state of relaxation, this semi-sleep state, statistically incidences of telepathy spike. And this data has been published, pondered over, meta-analyzed to the ends of the earth. It's unpolluted and it's bulletproof. Even the best skeptics agreed, and we have precious few of them today. And you ain't going to find them on Wikipedia.

No. Anyway, there is an extra-physical aspect to this state, and it's so simple. It's so simple, because everybody answers it twice a day. Use that time to run your wish through your head. That's a period of special suggestive power. I believe a period of unique, extra-physical possibility, and a lot of people who suffer from grief will describe the early morning hours as the toughest time of day, and that's because our rational defenses are down.

And things that we're afraid of or we're grieving of, they grip us when those rational defenses are down. And then the workday comes and we realize, this wasn't so bad. So hypnagia can be a fearsome time, but it's also a time of great potential if we use it. So use it to repeat one's wish. When those rational defenses are down,

there's the possibility of a real penetration. And step eight is silence. Yes. How does that work? First of all, we talk about things in order to dilute them. We talk to our shrinks, we talk to our friends, he said, she said to dilute them. And sometimes that's necessary. But you don't want to bring that quality of dilution to your wish.

Keep your wish silent. If there is one law that runs through occultism, it is the power of silence. There's great wisdom in that. We talk to dissipate. We talk to disperse. we're silent to concentrate, to focus. You'll see that law repeated in nature. We can wave air currents with our hands,

but a focused air current can have the power of a bullet, as above so below. Abide that in the psyche. Well, let's take a quick break, and we'll come back and talk about how you maybe have convinced me I'm a left path Satanist. All right. So I think you use occult, esoteric, and Satanism

as a way to kind of badger people. because you won't disavow, you say, I'm a Satanist and that's that. And you kind of leave it there without a definition because when I hear your definition of those words, it's like, I might be Satanist too. What I'm trying to do, and I'm trying to do it as transparently as possible, because I do write a lot in the book about the historicism behind this, is I am trying to push back at centuries of,

conditioning around our religious models and ideas. For example, if I use the word demon, everyone has the same association with that word, something evil, scary, terrible that will possess you. Well, the original Greek demon or Latin daemon was a neutral term. It just meant a kind of worker-be spirit like a gin or a genie in Arab culture. We use the term angel and we all have the same association. I may as we'll be using the term snow white. Everybody sees the Disney cartoon, even though the myth of Snow White

is centuries older than the Disney cartoon. So Angel is Greek for Messenger, and that's benign, whereas the other is bad. All I'm trying to do is to take a sledgehammer to this conformity and conditioning. The early Hebrews had a concept of Ha Satan, or the Satan, which was sometimes translated as the adversary, or the prosecutor or the disturber.

This is the friction of creativity without which we wouldn't be ourselves. This is the friction that refines us when we suffer. I talked about the experience of being fired and what that led me to. The mythical, although I would say also veritable force of those experiences, is what the primeval Hebrews referred to as Ha Satan.

I am trying to strip the bark off of these conformities and give people a vocabulary that is their own, that is free from centuries and centuries of customary usage. I am trying in esoterica, although as you've rightly said, it's a very practical book, it's a very hands-on book. underlying the techniques and the practicality is my effort to strip away centuries, if not millennia, of customary usage, and try to recover the threads and the fragments, because that's really all that we have, of our earliest spiritual practice among our most primeval ancestors, even including Neanderthal men and women, who did have a spirit, spirituality that would be somewhat recognizable to us today. I want to get to a sense of this fragmentary realization and what it meant best as we can tell to the deep ancients before our conformist acculturation process got hold of it. People don't know that Neanderthals had art and music and all. It's extraordinary. It's amazing. Neanderthal men and women had statuary, which in the mid-19th century got termed Venus figurines.

They're little bulbous female forms, and they are thought to have been either a mother goddess or a fertility goddess. They had talismans, things that we would recognize, like eagle talons or bear claws that were presumably for help with the hunt. We would look at these things in the 21st century, and we can recognize this statuary. we can recognize these talismans. I'm wearing a scarab around my neck. And it's extraordinary that these are our closest pre-human ancestors, a lot like us. But not us, not us.

And it suggests that spirituality itself, extra physicality, is not conditioned. It's realized. It goes back to pre-human history. I think people will be surprised to know that you have a great respect for Catholicism and really, really, really most religions you speak very highly of.

Didn't you say that Catholicism was closest to the most perfect religion or something like that? The universal religion. Yeah? We have to remember, first of all, I love Catholicism, and I would never say a word against Catholicism, which always surprises people because they think, Horowitz is so heterodox. And I may be heterodox, but I also have ideals. And I love that tradition, and I feel in some ways that tradition saved my life.

It's not my commitment. How did it save your life? I went through a time of terrible emotional suffering, and I practiced a very steady act of saint veneration to St. Jude, and I feel like there was a real opening in my life on account of that. Now, my approach is that Catholicism is a kind of vessel of the universal religion, by which I mean, this was the final outcropping of a Roman culture of faith, which itself was the final outcropping of Greco-Egyptian religion.

The Egyptian, the Persian, the Mediterranean faiths, North African faiths, were reconfigured within Hellenic culture. Hellenic culture was reconfigured in its final expression by Rome. and Catholicism with Saint veneration, with the boy savior, the earth mother, you can call it Isis and Horace, you can call it Mary and Jesus. It was a vessel for this universal religion.

And I think that in quarters where you find hatred or conspiracy theories for Catholicism, it's because of that, because it's that last vouchsafing of a universal faith. and I enter it and I approach it as such. I believe you, I'm not very religious, but I think St. Michael saved my life, and I've been wearing his shield ever since that day.

I noticed that. I was going to ask you about that very thing, yeah. Yeah, I was going through a hard time, and I just found myself in a Catholic church and suddenly felt better. The church was empty, and I was in St. Michael's row. And I just, I don't know. I felt something.

One has to listen to these things. Again, it's the disguised stranger. you're coming to us. I discovered the miraculous medal, the image of Mary from Visions by Catherine Labrerey, in a bookstore in New York City that was run by the Pauline's, and they are a devout order of nuns who maintain a media ministry.

Now, unfortunately, in our world today, bookstores like the Pauline's bookstore, have closed in New York City. Somehow I can spend $40 on a pretzel at a concert, but I can't support the Paulines. And the tragedy is if you don't have those places, someone's not going to discover St. Michael or the Miraculous Medal or St. Jude. And of course, we can be talking about any number of faith traditions.

And we just piss away so much money in the society. I hear about this place closing and that place closing. Plenty of money around. We just piss it away in places that don't matter very much. Yeah. Well, then what is Satanism to you? What is everyone getting wrong? Because I don't hear anything evil.

It's not a religion of maleficence or cruelty or evil. Of course, there are all kinds of different practices as there are different individuals. But as I see it, and the way I speak of it classically, it is the abiding of radical questioning, non-conformity, upending received notions, saying no to being told this is the way something is, but saying I'm going to verify this for myself.

And I do think, I'm not an atheist, I'm not a materialist, I do think there's a metaphysical aspect to the satanic, and I do think that one can seek a relationship with the being whom the ancient Hebrews called Hasatan, or in the Bible there is references we were discussing earlier to the, the so-called demon word we're not supposed to use Azazel. And I think that the individual is much freer and is possessed of much greater options than he or she believes.

Most people will hear this and reject it outright. Most people will hear this and say, he is leading us into perdition. Don't listen to this guy. This goes to a terrible place. How do I know that? That's centuries and centuries and century. centuries of conditioning speaking. Again, I can't use Satanist in the title of this episode.

Cannot. I cannot. It will take all the oxygen out of the room. And listen, this effort that I'm making, it may fail. I am trying to bring a degree of upending reasoning to our faith traditions. And the term Satan, as it's used in modern parlance, is too great. to windmill even for me to tilt at. Sure. But as I often say to people, you don't turn back once you've begun an errand in the classical sense,

and that's my commitment. And if I were trying to kiss up to the room, if I were trying to kiss up to the audience, I wouldn't talk about it at all. But I want people to have a sense of options. And even people who don't like me and don't like my ideas, maybe, maybe they'll capture a glimpse of the fact

that if there's some guy out there on the margins, saying the things I say, it affords them more room for their own search. And I'll settle for that. Have you ever lost any speaking gigs or anything because you refuse to, you have? Absolutely. I was kicked out of a new age organization with whom I had years of gainful collaboration. I had written a book for them as a fundraiser. I had nothing but friendly relations and somebody there started a whispering campaign against me. Next thing I knew, I was expelled, I was scrubbed from the website and so on. There was a free Masonic Lodge that canceled to talk on me.

These are only the things I know about. I'm sure there's lots of other things I don't know about. But the fact is, when I look at people I admire, people whose shoulders we stand on, they suffered far greater calumny than I have to defend their own beliefs. I spoke of becoming a writer because I wanted to defend the lives of spiritual messengers

who I thought were disparaged in the mainstream. Those are my heroes. I'm not going to run from expressing myself. Those expulsions were probably useful then. You had no use for a group that wanted to throw you out. They've certainly proven useful in that they put a person face to face with what he or she believes, what free expression means. We all say it's just like we're all against war.

We're all for free expression until we don't like it. Right. And so it teaches you something about humanity. night we were watching an episode of the Twilight Zone, famous episode, The Shelter, where neighbors burst into the guy's bomb shelter. And there goes Rod Serling, in all of 22 minutes, exposing us to human nature. So you learn something about human nature. You learn something about yourself. And in that sense, it's painful, but it's educative. That episode captures human nature perfectly, the paranoia and how people turn into. A lot of my content is based on

Rod Serling's work. What does it mean to walk the left path? Well, the left-hand path, as I use it, is a spiritual path that emphasizes individualism, the individual wish, self-recreation. You might say that it focuses on my will be done versus thy will be done. And some people hear that, and they don't like it. And I understand that, but let's take a breath. Most of the time, what most of us are seeking in the spiritual search

is some sense of agency, of power, not force, not force, power to see through our wish for expression in the world. And we sometimes perfume it, saying, Sure. Thy will be done with the right hand, but with the left hand saying, I'm really open, it comports with my will. And I really believe in the individual. I believe in the ability of the mature,

sensitive individual as a person to identify his or her own path in life. And I believe in ethics, which arise from empathy. And most people don't have it, regardless of how pretty they talk. Ethics arise from the emotions, and you have to have fine emotions to really even understand what ethics are. I write to people with ethics, and that's to whom my appeals are made. that's another rule is that don't underestimate the power of emotions world stands on them a couple of questions I want to go off script for horaticism

well it's from your book you said we don't have Buddha we have Buddhism the teacher becomes the teaching and the teaching calcifies so you've written a lot of books and one day there's going to be a horaticism and what will it get wrong about you? Wow. When you're gone.

Well, I'm referring to the fact that there is in life a descending octave and there's no getting away from it. Right. We don't have Buddha. We have Buddhism. We don't have Christ. We have Christianity or Christendom. What, if there's a Horowitzism, will get wrong is it will bring orthodoxy to these ideas. It will close them off.

It will slam the door closed. It will say things like live for yourself without being uncomfortable with that statement, as I am, even as I believe in it, from a more complex point of view than a later version might hold. The truth is all these traditions are the same in the sense that we cop to ideals, but we live according to what makes me feel safe, what makes me feel unsafe, what title can I claim that makes me sound like a hero, while puts the other person into an uncomfortable, little box. So, unfortunately, due to this descending current of humanity, pretty much every tradition winds up, winds up, despite its pretty language, being a statement of, I like and I don't like. So I can't expect if there's ever a iteration of what I'm into, it'll be much better. If it is, I'm wrong about human nature, and human nature is better than I think. I don't think it is.

Though, with so many religions, it's follow this book exactly, and you'll end up in paradise or whatever. With your rules, it's follow this exactly, and it's going to hurt anyway. It's going to hurt anyway, but you may be happier at the end of the day, and you may express yourself more at the end of the day, and you may spend less time falling asleep at night with chips on your chest, or complaining week in and week out to the shrink, and, and, you expressing yourself and doing more that makes you feel vital. There's only one person on the earth besides your mother who's allowed to call you Mitchell. Tell me about Paul Krasner.

Oh, may he rest in peace. Yes. Paul was an old hippie and beatnik. And I got this Penn Literary Award in Oakland, California. And they were giving Paul a lifetime achievement award. And he was in declining health at the time. and he walked up to the podium and he was limping. And he got up to the podium.

And some of us, including me, were giving him a standing ovation. And just with the most impeccable comedic timing, he said, why was it everyone standing? He was like a Lenny Bruce kind of figure. And I don't know, you know, he used to call me Mitchell, and I just put up with it. I don't let producers call me Mitchell. So Paul Krasner and mom,

the only ones who could do that. That's rare company. There was another anecdote that I found interesting. Whose memorial was it where the widow came up to you and gave you a word? Yeah. I was at the memorial service of a man named Irving Howe. He was a socialist, he was a literary critic, he was a great man of letters. Big inspiration on me.

He would not have liked or be interested in any of the topics. that animate me today. But you can't choose your heroes, and he was one. And after his memorial service, the widow of another hero of mine, Michael Harrington, anti-poverty, socialist activist, also a great influence would not have been interested in my topics at all. He was an atheist. Mike's widow came up to me, and she took my hands, and she said, Mitch, standards. If you want to learn one thing from Irving, that's it.

standards. And I've tried to abide that because when I write about controversial themes, those themes are always very foundationally grounded in a really searching historicism, and I hope in a really searching ethics and spirituality. So I took that to heart, although I took it into a different neighborhood than the ones that those guys worked in. So you're always thinking standards with your work? Always. Constantly. I will never write down a word. never write down a quote, never write down an idea without suffering it. Test the idea by suffering it. Test the idea by suffering it.

And I really try to live with things and I try to ask myself rather than repeating a quote or a story or reciting something from memory. This was in the Bible, that was in the Bible. Go back to the source and you might be very surprised not only at what's really there, but at how these things differ according to different traditions and translations. Reckon with that, live with that. I like the standard story

because I have a saying here that drives everybody nuts is we never phone it in. We never phone it in. Dick. Yeah. How does, your book has financial advice. How does a youth Democrat socialist accountant and end up telling me to buy index funds, which I do.

Right. Oh, good. Bravo. Your kids are going to be very happy for that. I can assure you. It's so funny. Man, I was a treasurer of the youth section of Democratic Socialists of America. Not an easy gig.

Right, right. I was one socialist who balanced budgets. It's so funny because my wife and I, Jacqueline, we were just talking about this last night. We were watching one of these financial talk shows, and they're going on and on about CDs and versification and so forth. I tell people, chin out, put your goddamn money into the S&P. 500 index fund, it'll go down and it'll also go back up. And if it goes down permanently, we're all in a lot of trouble. And it ain't going to go down permanently.

Nope, they won't let it happen. QQQ all day long. Exactly. All the bigwigs have got all their money there. And that's going to be the first to get bailed out. And I am not a finance guy, but I have a lot of in-laws who are. And one Thanksgiving, I was sitting around with a bunch of finance guys from Goldman Sachs and other big banks. And these guys, they're very confident and, you know, they march into the world with their shoulders swaggering. And I said, let me ask you financial wizards a question. And I want you to be 100% frank with me. My understanding is that no securities product, no financial product over time does better than the boring old S&P 500. And to a person, They all agreed.

They all agreed. And one of the things that has helped me in life and that I share on a strictly practical level with my readers is when I was in publishing, we had a 401k plan. I socked away as much money as I possibly could into one place, the S&P 500. Those are just the top 500 stocks in the market at any given time.

Diversification is a marketing term. Yes. That's from people who want to take commissions from you. Park it in the boring old day. S&P 500. Be chill. It will go down. It will go back up.

We watched it during COVID. It was very rough. Stand your ground. You will be happy. That's my advice. It's great advice. Here's how I diversify. S&P index.

Aerospace Index. Healthcare Index. That's it. I don't want any stocks. And that's where Elon's money is. That's where Zuckerberg's money is. That's where Sam Altman's money is. It ain't going down.

It's not. Yeah. So are you a capitalist? I can't, I don't know where you're, socialism, Marxism, you're reading Lenin? I do read Lenin. What do you try to learn from Lenin? What I grew up to in Lenin is even though he was an ardent materialist, he was into self-development. Yes.

And he really believed in the self-development project, as did a lot of people in his generation of Zaris Russia. Zoroast Russia created its own demise. Not only was it a horrible system of governance. that didn't allow a middle class to flourish, didn't really facilitate the conditions where people could own property and have some degree of freedom of search, freedom of thought, freedom of expression.

But Zoroist Russia made a faithful decision, which is that if we wanna modernize, we need some sort of a professional bureaucracy. We need people who are educated, who can run the civil service, and we need of course engineers and doctors and scientists. So they started, educating small clusters of young people who hated the regime and the government and one Vladimir

Lenin was among them. And Lenin doted upon a mid-19th century novel by a Russian existentialist writer titled What Is to Be Done? He later named his own pamphlet, What Is to Be Done After This Novel? And within it appeared a character named Rachmatov, who believed ardently in self-development. He It was kind of a Russian, hardcore version of, oh, I don't know, I guess you'd say an American up by the bootstraps type figure. And this inspired Lenin, and I like the Russian writers and existentialists because their point of view is expressed from a country that has been steeped in difficulty for many, many generations, allowing, you know, stemming from a Tsarra system that was truly backward and that the public hated. And so these writers were as realist as they come. And Lenin doted upon ideas of self-development.

He also liked the novels of Jack London, where the rugged, radical individualist was always the hero. And so I'm always interested in learning about the background reading of great figures. not a Leninist, but I'm interested as hell in his life because it was a difficult life, and it was a life animated by a singular goal. That goal succeeded. That goal also turned into a nightmare because it succeeded

with autocracy, paved the way for Stalin. But I found Lenin a fascinating figure. I think that's allowed. I mean, every time I put out a video about Hitler, it's a banger. That doesn't mean we endorse it. Right, right. It is a fascination.

And I would ask the public, I would ask the public, to question that in themselves, and I realize that, I mean, believe me, I watch enough Hitler documentaries to program a whole channel, so I'm not up on some high horse about it. But people will talk about Hitler and the occult, for example. It's wildly overstated. Whereas we never talk about, or rarely talk about Gandhi and the occult, even though Gandhi's relationship with Madam H.P. Blavatsky, he testified repeatedly throughout his life, ignited his first interest in human equality, the basic universality of all religions.

Well, tell that story of a struggling young lawyer in London. Absolutely. Nobody's interested in it. They're interested in Hitler in the occult, but Gandhi in the occult is much closer to the bone in terms of truth. And then I want to talk about the founding fathers in the occult. Oh, by all means. Gandhi, as a young man, was studying to be a lawyer in London.

and in 1889, things were going terribly for him. He was isolated, he was lonely, he failed his matriculation exams, try being a vegetarian in London in 1889. It's not very fun today, much less then. And he was lonely and isolated, and he met a couple of students, followers of Madam H.P. Blavatsky, who had fled India in the face of scandal. Madam Blavatsky was this mysterious world-traveled Russian occultist,

both loved and damned, love her. And she was living in the Notting Hill section of London, where she was completing work on her. She actually just published her, Magnum Opus, The Secret Doctrine, two-volume occult cosmology. Of course. Gandhi was very nervous about meeting her. He was invited to meet her, went to meet her, and he said, from that moment forward until his own assassination, he recorded in interviews, letters, articles, that meeting Madame Blavatsky, the high priestess of the occult, ignited his first stirrings of a philosophy of human universality, of civic equality, of the equal footing on which all religions should stand.

Theosophy had and has, as its motto, there is no religion higher than truth. Gandhi later said, all religions are true and all have some flaw in them. You could hear within the theosophical motto, an echo of Gandhi's within Gandhi's Maxim. How did she learn about him? Oh, listen, he was an unknown young kid studying law in London, and a couple of her followers asked him one day

if he could help them read the Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit. and he said, I could barely read the original Sanskrit myself. I wanted to get away from the Hinduism of my parents. I thought it was a bunch of superstition and nonsense. I was not interested in a religious text, but I was very lonely, I was very isolated. And if these two guys wanted to be my friends, I would agree to it. And then they asked him, by the way, would you like to meet the high priestess of the occult of herself, Madam H.P. Blavatsky. And he was shocked and said, I was...

Look at the chain of events from asking for a translation? to throw out the empire. It's just remarkable. And he knew Madam Blavansky as this anti-colonial activist from the old country. So he felt sympathy. And he went to meet her. And she gave him a copy of a shorter book of hers called The key to theosophy. And it speaks of human universality. And Gandhi said this was the ignition point that launched his philosophy. So everybody wants to talk about Hitler in the occult and it's so exciting and so forth and so on. But Gandhi, and the occult is a much closer to the bone version of historical truth that's unknown. If you get a biography of Gandhi today, you'll be surprised if there's three lines about

Madamevlovakki in there, despite how formative she was on his development. We've written it out of history. What did he take from her that, like, practically, that we can see? her key teaching at that time is that all of humanity's religions grew from one underground occult source that we've lost track of. And she referred to this as the secret doctrine. And all of our religions, all of our ethical philosophies are like trees that spring up from this underground water source. And so he came to feel, if that's true, and he felt that it was in fact true, it also means that our differences are simply surface differences, and that all religions, all beings, whatever, they're cast or background, are essentially equal. And he credited her with that realization. It fomented the largest democratic revolution, nonviolent democratic revolution in human history.

And here we are, nobody knows about it. Madam Blavatsky died an American citizen. She was very proud of being an American citizen. Nobody's heard of her in our country, or if they have, they're like, oh, that's charlatan, that fake. The story is so much deeper. And this is how history gets neglected. And she died young, didn't she? 59 years old.

Oh. So what do people get wrong about her in theosophy? Because when I think of ancient Egyptian religion, Sumerian, Catholicism, Sounds like she might be on to something. Yeah. They think of her as a fake. They think of her as a charlatan. They think of her as a purveyor of phony, mediumistic tricks.

And what they don't realize is that our world would look radically different today without Madam H.P. Blavatsky. Her influence traversed the globe in the late 19th century and resulted in the culture of spiritual search of which I am a part today. She and her colleagues reignited Buddhist practiced in the east where it was withering in the nation of Sri Lanka, even in Japan, in far-flung parts of India, where Vedic practice, Hinduism, Buddhism, were being chipped away by the well-funded machinery of colonialism. She and her compatriots not only revived the traditional faiths in the East, but they sent shockwaves throughout the world, purveying the message that there is a secret doctrine, there is an esoteric search, there is an unknown esoteric core to religions, and that it's the birthright of every individual to search for these things. It was almost like a worldwide seismic version of what Henry David Thoreau was trying to get across in Walden. But it played out on this global stage, and it created the culture of search that I'm part of today.

What was so attractive about her? Because you talk about Thoreau where I don't consider him an outdoorsman at all. He's writing about the outdoors, but he wasn't much of an outdoorsman. But, Madam Blavatsky, she lived it. She lived it. She was born in Tsarist Russia. She was part of minor nobility, but she suffered so much harassment that she had to travel in order to search. Why harassment? Oh, look, in Zaris Russia, I mean, Paradise Lost was banned under the Tsarist regime. You know, the idea of anything that went outside the Orthodox Church was above ground considered verboten. And so she traveled the world, as she described, it, searching for esoteric truths, came to the United States. in the early 1870s was fascinated with spiritualism and seance and midnight raps, not because she thought it was the real thing or the real McCoy,

but because she said, here is an opening. Here is a culture that is experimental. Here is a culture that, for all its contradictions, protects the individual search for meaning. And so she felt that the soil of the United States at that time was the place from which could spring a worldwide, revolution in spiritual search. And she told of being advised by these mysterious adepts from the East and people felt she was inventing it, making it up. But dig this, dig this. Americans at

that time, Westerners in general, had not really heard much about gurus and swamis and robed adepts from the East. These things were completely alien to Americans. India was considered as distant as the surface of another planet. And when such teachers, who were altogether real, did begin to come to America in the 1890s, then later in the 19th century, we Americans were able to recognize them because of her narratives. Her narratives made it into the press. Her narratives were sensationalistically treated by the media and thus introduced everyday Americans to things they might not have recognized.

So, when the Maharishi Maheshiyogi came to the West to teach transcendental meditation in 1959, Americans could place him immediately and people a generation earlier from him because of the narrative that she introduced. Right. We knew, we understood something, I get it, I get it. This is one of these holy men from the East. That was an alien idea to Americans in the Victorian age. So how about the occult with the founding fathers?

Because it's there, isn't there? Oh, it's absolutely there. Look for it in the connection of many of the founders to Freemasonry. Sure. An initiatory esoteric organization that uses symbolism as a means of teaching ethical development, emerged above ground for the first time with the Grand Lodge of England in the early 1700s, but has roots that I think go back to the cathedral builders who used symbolic and mnemonic devices. for memory as they were recording symbols into the great cathedrals. I think occultism

emerged in different ways, I beg a pardon, Freemasonry emerged in different ways and through different iterations during the occult Renaissance. You had certain initiatory brotherhoods and orders, some of which might not have actually existed but might have been thought movements like Rosicrucianism and all of this eventually converged into the initiative order called Freemasonry and you start to see the first telltale references 1638, mid-1600s, and then in 1717 the United Lodge of England emerges above ground in London. Now, many of the founders were Freemasons. This includes George Washington, this includes Benjamin Franklin,

this includes Paul Revere, John Hancock, and outside of the United States. And outside of number of Washington's generals, an outsized number of the signers of the declaration, the framers of the Constitution. And this is very important. People look for this conspiracy narrative and this look somewhere else. Masonry was a radically ecumenical organization, at least according to ideals, anyone who believed in a creator could be a member. And it fostered a protection of the individual search for meaning, albeit within a clandestine brotherhood. Some of these ideals, as they eventually got translated into law in the American colonies, and finally codified into the Constitution, were encountered by the early founders and framers

due to their affiliation with Freemasonry. We forget how agrarian a nation America was, how rural, a nation, America was. We didn't have hospitals and cathedrals and libraries. We had farms, business, a grange, to affiliate yourself with an initiatory order, a clandestine initiatory order that used right, ritual, occult symbol. That was a huge commitment for an individual in an agrarian nation. It was a conveyance of ideas.

It stands to reason. There were so few ties. side of family church business. To attach yourself to initiatory order of that type in a rural society, I think has to be seen as a real arterial influence in a person's life. Sure. So I am not a Freemason, but I am a great admirer of Freemasonry because I believe that affiliation introduced or helped introduce ideas into colonial life that were later codified into the Constitution. How about Wallace's influence on the dollar bill?

Absolutely wild. People want to talk about occult influences. Look at the back of the dollar bill, the mysterious iron pyramid with the Latin maxim around it, annuit septus noos ordo cyclorum. Providence smiles on our new order of the ages. It is not a Masonic symbol per se, but I think it's fair to say that it's a leaf from Freemason.

It's inspired by Freemasonry. By the way, the subcommittee that designed that beautiful, alluring symbol, was chaired by none other than Benjamin Franklin, himself a Freemason. We see the square and compass on the bill as well? And I think that the ideals behind the image, while it's not a Masonic image, were Masonic to the core. these framers wanted to associate the new republic with the great civilizations of antiquity, Rome, Greece, Egypt,

Sparta, you see it in our architecture, just walk around D.C. It's a temple to esoteric imagery. My God, the Library of Congress, you know, and you see it in other cities as well, Chicago, New York. They wanted to associate the New Republic with a great chain of civilizations that probed the search for being, that saw themselves as expressions of providence, that in some cases really did protect the individual search for meaning.

Rome could be a brutal conqueror, but Rome also afforded conquered people's religious freedom and not infrequently incorporated some of their religious views into its own gods and rights and rituals. And there were a very high set of ideals behind the design, of the eye and pyramid, one of them being that material sustenance is incomplete without inner knowing or the eye of providence. Now, this symbol, which is the, on the reverse of the great seal of the United States, the obverse being the more familiar eagle with the olive

branches and arrows clutched in its claws, this symbol was unfamiliar to most Americans, until during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, Roosevelt himself a Freemason, and his secretary of agriculture, later his vice president, Henry Wallace, himself a Freemason, as well as a theosophist, I should add. They came up together with the idea

of minting that symbol, God smiles our new order of the ages, into some kind of coinage, which they thought would inspire, Americans during the Depression and Wallace associated New Order of the Ages with New Deal of the Ages. Oh. And eventually, they determined to place the symbol on the back of the U.S. dollar bill.

And in the U.S. Treasury, you can find records. I read about this in my book, Occult America. You can find records of Roosevelt's own handwriting supervising the placement of the mysterious iron pyramid on the back of our dollar bill, where it appeared for the first time in 1935, and for the very first time, the mass of Americans became familiar with this esoteric and, yes, a cult symbol that previously had been just used for official business and was relatively unknown. I think it's one of the most beautiful expressions of ideals at the founding of this nation. So, occult, we're really just talking about hidden knowledge.

Hidden knowledge. Nothing more. It's hidden, it's secret, because it was left to decay, left to neglect. Is there a hidden history? Of course there is. We're talking about Gandhi and Blavatsky. You won't learn about that in most biographies of Gandhi. You'll see maybe scant mention of Madame Blavatsky, if that at all. It's not hidden because it's concealed. It's hidden because it's neglected. I'm going to change gears for a quick second. I think I saw in one of your books, maybe this one, mentioning Darryl Bems' work? Oh, I'm a big admirer of Dau Beme, great parapsychologist.

Merrill is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University. He conducted an extraordinary decade of experiments, which he published as a paper in 2011, and these experiments were into the question of precognition. And he found evidence of precognition in a very stringently designed series of experiments in which people were shown images that were meant to elicit a bodily response. They could be violent images or there could be erotic images. And what he found was that moments before the image was displayed, the bodily response would begin to manifest, like secretion of sweat or adrenaline or something of that nature. But in these experiments, he also included

two radically and remarkably innovative experiments which caused tremendous controversy and which have since skeptics be damned, been widely repeated and validated in meta-analyses. Darrell found evidence for what I'll call cognitive retrocausality. In short, in short, he found that if people were given very simple memorization exams, they would get your average score, nothing surprising, nothing out of bounds. If you introduced a wrinkle to the experiment and you asked subjects, to continue studying after the fact, after they took an exam, their scores would spike by a slight statistical degree,

but actually a significant statistical degree. Beyond random. Oh, absolutely, beyond random, hands down, of maybe 2%, something of that nature. Not Zeus throwing lightning bolts to Earth, but something considered very statistically significant within the schema of cognitive psychology. and Darrell reasoned that there is in effect a reaching backwards in time.

In time. In time of people's functional ability, in this case cognitive ability on memory exams. And of course there were howls of protest even though Darrell's paper was heavily vetted and published in a standard journal of social psychology with no sympathies towards his thesis. That's true. He just said, this is what happened. He said this is what happened. He documented it stringently. There were so much calumny directed against him, so much misinformation, and you can read it on Wikipedia. Sure. The home of misinformation about parapsychology. The home of it. Great place to learn about the Napoleonic War is terrible place to learn about parapsychology. It spiked. That's due to activist editors who are dedicated to discrediting any parapsycholicalism. studies, regardless of excellence in methodology and replication. And these are facts. That's why my books are heavily footnoted, and I ask people to go to my footnotes, look at my footnotes, and hold my feet to the fire if I am exaggerating, because that's not my wish. Well, let's detour for a quick second.

Why is there a professional skeptic industry? Why is that useful? It seems to me that the ultimate sin within Western intellectual culture is to say that anything extra physical or spiritual or religious has any empirical concrete impact on our normal tactile world. You can talk about religion in terms of myth, meaning, theology. The minute you cross the bridge of suggesting that anything extra physical, let's say precognition, has some actual actual. impact on our world, regardless of how stringently the evidence is gathered, vetted, analyzed, replicated, you are cast out. That is the one unforgivable sin within opinion-making lettered culture. Primary reference material, Wiki first and foremost, social sciences,

mainstream journalism, mainstream letters. It's a point of view that's unsustainable because the evidence is just so strong. We could do a whole show on Daryl's research. It's extraordinary and its replication has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that these were not chance hits or accidents. His research has been proven confirmatory in a meta-analysis involving 90 trials in 33 different nations in 14 different labs. we don't even have that kind of data for aspirin. And these numbers are hardcore numbers. It doesn't mean that every experiment replicated his work.

It did not. It did not. But what a meta-analysis does is it doesn't seek uniform replication. It seeks to mitigate against accident or happenstance. And as that goes, his data is bulletproof and replicated. I urge people to go into my footnotes and tell me where I'm exaggerating. Tell me where I've stuck my neck out. too far because I am as dedicated to Verity in describing these results as pseudosceptics are to spiking

them. So hold me, hold my feet to the fire. What Daryl discovered is extraordinary and he and Dean Radin and other people who work in the parapsychology field who are few. They are people of methodological excellence and there is a professional skeptic apparatus or pseudo-skeptic or pseudo-rationalist apparatus that cannot tolerate it. And they cannot tolerate it for reasons of sentiment, which is because the data doesn't mean anything to them. And in most cases, they don't even know the data. They can't tolerate it because they will not accept the divide

of extra-physical effect crossing into tactile world. They don't believe in the extra-physical. It's a matter of religious, secular, religious faith for them. They're materialists. I've seen critiques of your book that I've read and I've read, this guy didn't read the book. He didn't read the book. And won't debate me. Won't debate you.

They run from me. I have challenged any number of credentialed skeptics to debates. They run. They run. Because the data is tough. It's hard one. It's not easy to get your mind around this stuff. You know, you really have to go deep into this data to understand its validity and replication.

And if you're going to do a hit-and-run attack, I'm not the guy you want to be sitting across from. No, you're not. And it's so astounding because we've all had synchronicities or coincidence. We've all experienced it. They have as well, and they're denying it. Absolutely. So tell me about manifestation in the future if I'm a Thai boxer. Oh, this is very interesting.

This is wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a Thai kickboxer named Spencer Hanley, Champion Fighter. And he was nine days out from a championship bout. And he said, I'm feeling really good about my training, but I wonder if you could recommend something that will strengthen my mental game. And so I gave him an exercise, very simple, very ordinary exercise, called the 30-day mental challenge,

which just involves directing your thoughts to the degree possible along productive lines for 30 days. I'm simplifying it, but that's the basic, gist of it. And so he said to me, well, look, I like this and I'm going to do it, but this is 30 days. I need something that's going to prep me for a fight that's nine days away. And I said to him, Spencer, this will prep you for it. And I walked him through Darrell Bem's research. I walked him through the replication of the research. I walked him through the warranted belief that Darrell's research deserves. And I said to him, working on your mental game after the fight is very likely

to have a cognitive reachback effect that improves your mental game during the fight. And I said, if nothing else, I can assure you, your opponent's coaches are not talking to him about retrocausality. They're not. I promise. And so he did it. And you can watch the fight on YouTube. It was a championship bout outside of Houston. He came out, I don't know why, he was wearing a Hawaiian lay around his neck. Very relaxed. Right. Relaxed, at ease in good humor, respectful to his opponent, but he was in command from the bell. He was in command, and he won handily. Now, for his entry music, the fighters can choose their own entry music, and usually they'll choose this ear-bleeding, drill rap or techno metal. He chose the Belinda Carlisle song, Heaven is a Place on Earth. And one of the ring announcers

said, the fact that he's coming out to Belinda Carlisle makes me so happy. This is the simple truth. Two days later, I had not written about this, talked about this, mentioned this to anybody. Blinda Carlisle, who I've been in love with since age 17, leaves me two voicemails telling me, I just want you to know, I've been reading your work and I really like it, and I'm a fan, and, you know, Bravo to you for what you do. I mean, dying happy, three, two, one. Right.

The whole confluence of events was just extraordinary. That's the only way I can describe it. There are these hidden tendrils. And when we catch a glimpse of these hidden tendrils, we know that life is not just cognition and motor skill. It's something else. It has to be. I just think it's so funny that we've got black flags,

circle jerks, dead Kennedys, but there's always room for Belinda Carlis. There is always room for, and I love her. Listen, she came out of punk. The go-goes came out of punk, so she's from the neighborhood. Anyone who says the go-goes didn't rock is wrong. Oh, come on. I love them. They upended things when I was 16, 17.

We all had them on our walls. There was something in the rules that really struck me. And it was about forgiveness. You know what I'm talking about? Don't come to Horowitz for forgiveness. No, I'm not against forgiveness, but I'm against it as a blanket rule. I think it gets presented to us. I liked it.

If someone causes you trauma, you have no, you don't have to forgive that. You don't have to forgive it. You can abide. I counsel abiding versus forgiving. I think that forgiveness through conditioning has been presented to us as this indispensable spiritual law. And I dispute that because I think it can tear a person too. When a person has suffered trauma, as we all have, let that be refining. Let that be a goad to something better.

Let that be a profound realization that hits me with the force of never wanting if I'm able to visit such a thing on another person. But forgiving, if it comes natural to you and you so wish, then by all means. but I don't think forgiveness is this absolutely necessary escape hatch or this must pass through tollgate before going on to something higher and greater and better. I don't see it as a spiritual law. I don't see it as an ethical imperative. I see it as an idea that might fit some situations and not others. And although I venerate the 12 steps,

and I venerate modern teachings like Course and Miracles, the channeled text, And I- You've narrated the 12 steps. Yes, I have. One of the proudest acts of my career. It should be. One of the proudest acts of my career. I love Bill Wilson, and I venerate the 12 steps.

But I don't want people to feel blocked off from spiritual paths like that if forgiveness presents a problem. I understand the rationale. And if it works for the individual, I am first in line to shake that person's hand. But I don't want people to feel like spirituality has rules that make it necessary. to pass go before you can do something else. I think that suffering can be a goad. It can be abided. It doesn't have to be forgiven.

There's going to be a lot of people who are kind of happy to hear that because maybe it's a woman who is attacked. And she feels like I'm not a good person because I can't forgive what happened to me. And my heart goes out to that person. But you are. She is. She is. She is.

I have witnessed seekers torn in two because they're told you have to use this language. You have to use the language of forgiveness or service or thy will be done or something else or non-attachment, non-identification, personality versus essence. These things as I see it are all they're artifice, their human constructions. All religions have been created at the hands of, human beings, and they all derive from a certain time and place to whose needs they responded. So most of our religions, for example, came out of highly stratified caste-based societies, where a person had no greater likelihood of exiting the caste into which he or she was born

than walking the surface of another planet. And the religions, Abrahamic religion, Vedic religions sought to compensate for that by forecasting deliverance in some future state of being. That is a response to the predicament of an age and an era. All I'm really trying to say is verify, question, ask again, how do I know that's true? The individual could go on to extraordinary ethical development and happiness. without forgiving and shouldn't feel chained to that as a must-do or an infallible law. It's conceptual.

It's not legal. And I want people to feel a flexibility. That's nicely said. What about the rule about the death of your tormentor? That's a striking one. People suffer. People suffer at the hands of bullies and tormentors. And sometimes they just can't find a way out.

and I just want to say, William James, the great American philosopher, used to say to people who were suffering suicidal thoughts, can you stand it one more day? Can you stand it just one more day? Because extraordinary turnarounds occur. Remarkable things happen. And what I want to say to people who are suffering from a tormentor, first of all, get away from that person. If you absolutely cannot get away from that person, or for the time being, you cannot get away from, that person. Keep in mind, extraordinary things happen all the time, just as we are visited by catastrophe, we are also visited by just remarkable, unbidden good news and tidings. A bully, a tormentor, a cruel person, could they just disappear? Could they just die? Could they exit the scene? Absolutely.

And that's okay? Yes, that's okay. Don't trouble you. yourself feeling that that's not okay. We live in a world of extraordinary suffering and catastrophe, most of it unbidden and undeserved, and we live in a world of extraordinary good news and remarkable tidings for which we are in debt. If you are suffering at someone's hands and that person disappears, go on with your life and be better to your neighbor. But don't give up a sense of I don't like to use the word faith because I speak in terms of persistence

more than faith, but it's warranted to persist in the verity that that person could disappear all of a sudden it happens all the time, and you will be free, and you will rediscover yourself as a person of good humor and relaxation,

and I wish it for everyone who's suffering. Because there were a few rules that spoke to me because being a bright student in the New York public school system was not great for me. Early on. So, lesson 42 is, um, learn to fight. Not a bad idea.

So I did that. Good for you. Did you? Were you bullied? Oh, yeah. Of course you were. And anybody who's different gets bullied. There's anger in your list.

Righteous anger, but I, but it's there. There's definitely anger in my list. Anger is part of life. Sorrow is part of life. Extraordinary joy is part of life. I mean, my God, last night, this is why I'm so glad you brought you me to Vegas. Last night, my wife, Jacqueline Castell and I, we repeated our wedding vows at the Graceland Chapel with Elvis officiating. Perfect. You should have seen the smile on my face.

Perfect. It's a dream come true. When I was 12 years old, I had tickets to see Elvis live. He died five days before the concert. I cried and cried. Now, All I'm really trying to get across is, do I evince anger? I do. Do I evince incredible joy? I do. Last night was a night of joy to have Elvis officiating on our wedding. And I could tell you this.

He played, and we sang with him, God Save the Queen, the Pistols version. Yeah. You just gave me chills. Elvis singing Sex Pistols is amazing. Sing, God Save the Queen with Elvis Presley. That was a moment. So let joy flow. You know, let anger flow.

But let ethics flow too. Let reciprocity flow too. Let empathy flow too. We're human beings and we live under a myriad of laws and forces. Don't tear yourself apart. Learn to live better within them. So I'm going to challenge you now. Because you don't have much hope for humanity.

I'm going to challenge you to give us a little hope and land this plane for everybody listening. Can we use your work to land on a positive note because there's a lot of positivity in it? The individual can. The individual can. I place no stock in humanity as a whole. Dare say I don't love humanity as a whole.

I see humanity talking one way and conducting itself another. And that's true of most individuals as well. But the individual to whom I appeal is the person with a fineness of emotion, with the fineness of a search, who's capable of holding a question. That's the individual I love and wish to encourage, and that person can find him or herself, I hope, within my work, if it's worth anything. It's worth quite a bit. Mitch Horowitz was here, everybody. This has been a joy.

Thank you for coming in. Thank you, my man. Pleasure. That was Mitch Horowitz. I did my best. He's a smart guy. There's a lot of theories and stuff. I don't really know that well.

Before we started, I had my research out, and he's an occult guy, so you would figure that'd be easy to prep for, and then the more you learn about it, the more you realize he's just wicked smart. And he's a lot more than an occult guy. There's psychology, parapsychology, all the history. Really hard to talk to a guy

with that broad amount of knowledge. So I joked with him, I said, why couldn't you just be a physicist? This would be so much easier because it's hard to keep up with him. But I tried. At the end, I asked him for hope because it was kind of a dark conversation in parts.

When he says that he has no hope for humanity, he means it. And we hung out afterwards for a while. We have a lot in common, both from New York City and moved out to the island. We hung out at the same punk rock bars when we were kids. So we bonded. You know, we sat out in front of the studio

and her black shirts, you know, two middle-aged guys smoking cigarettes. And it was perfect. So I felt like I got to know the guy a little bit. He's not as dark as that. So let's think about his hope statement for a second. All he gave me was three words. The individual can. So let me work back to that.

His resume checks out in 10 minutes. That Reagan claim? That was crazy. Mitch says Ronald. Reagan spent his career borrowing ideas and exact phrases from a cult scholar Manly P. Hall. No question about it. He did it. He even told the Count of Saint Germain story, which I think Mitch kind of debunked, but nobody really knows. I think it might have been the Count of St. Germain. The Gandhi story holds up to he

was a lonely law student in London. He meets Madame Blavatsky, the most notorious occultist alive, and credits the the theosophists with sending him back to the bagavagita. Now that's in Gandhi's own autobiography. I didn't believe it either. She's in there. And the precognition research, those studies are real. I talked about him before with Eric Wargo. And he has more, if you go back and watch that episode, he's got more and more and more proof that somehow the future reaches back to us. And that story he told about the fighter, like manifesting for 30 days in the future after the fight's over? I don't know. It's such a compelling story. I'm going to try it.

I don't know what to manifest yet, but I'm going to try it. Well, skeptics re-ran all those experiments we talked about, Darrow Bim and some of those, and mostly came up empty. But that fight isn't over because some of them reproduced the same results. So the individual can, and Mitch told me twice he doesn't love humanity. But I also watched him quote William James to anyone thinking about giving up. And then he renewed his wedding vows just yesterday with Elvis officiating. I mean, is that a little bit of him?

guy who's really done with us it's not the guy I smoked a secret with now his rules in his new book I believe every rule in that book I wish you'd let me just post the rules so you can see those I kind of wouldn't be fair I don't know how much the book is it's worth it the book is it was very surprising a lot of the occult books are just kind of a dense heavy read this felt more like a very self-help book but the rules were really great and there's super simple I've mentioned a couple of on the on the show but it's stuff like don't be an asshole learn to fight don't tolerate bullies pay your bills on time don't loan money

just give it away or say no a lot of that stuff like super simple basic rules I believe every single one of them and I fail out a lot of them but I'm still trying because if you follow those rules you're a better person but he said Failing is the point. Esoterica is with a K. It's out now. Mitch's essays are free at mitchharowitz.substack.com, and everything I mentioned is linked along. The Moreau Institute Tech is my gateway process episode.

You can check out the basement conversation with Tom Campbell, who invented Hemisink. And we've got an episode on Synchronicities. Check out Eric Wargo. A lot of that was covered here as well. We're starting to build up quite a library of this weird, cool stuff. That's why I did this. Until next time, be safe.

Be kind. And know that you are appreciated. I hear you. No cats in the studio. Eat it. Yes, an area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music.

So I'm singing like I should. But then another conspiracy sins. And it never ends. No, it never ends. Guy down got stuck inside males' hole with M.K.L. truck being only two of a way. And the Cubric face were the shadow people. The Indians just fought the smiling man. And I'm told, and his name was cold.

And I can't believe to have got the Secret City Underground. Mysterious number stations, planet's Earth O2, Project Star, And where the dark watchers found They're chasing