675: Mitch Horowitz

Summary

Podcast Summary: Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Episode 675: Mitch Horowitz

Introduction

In Episode 675 of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour, released on March 24, 2025, comedian Duncan Trussell welcomes author and modern occultist Mitch Horowitz as a recurring guest. This engaging conversation delves deep into the intersections of artificial intelligence, Buddhism, quantum physics, and practical magic, offering listeners a rich tapestry of insights and actionable practices.

Exploring the Multiverse and Black Holes

The episode kicks off with Duncan expressing excitement over Mitch's return, highlighting the anticipation from their listeners. The discussion rapidly transitions to contemporary scientific theories, particularly the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (Timestamps [02:22]-[04:50]).

Duncan mentions a recent paper suggesting the existence of galaxies that appear older than the universe itself, proposing that our universe might reside within a black hole. He poses a thought-provoking question: "If we are in a black hole, how does that connect with magic?" ([03:50])

Quantum Computing and Interdimensional Theories

Mitch Horowitz elaborates on the implications of these scientific discoveries, drawing parallels between quantum mechanics and ancient esoteric practices. He references Google's quantum computing prototype, Willow, which purportedly solved a complex equation in less than five minutes—a task estimated to take ten septillion years ([05:00]-[09:00]).

“We might live under Newtonian mechanics, but there's something going on outside that orderly intimacy.” ([08:20])

Mitch introduces the concept of interdimensional thesis, suggesting that quantum entanglement might allow for interactions beyond our conventional understanding of time and space.

Retrocausality and the Laws of Psyche

The conversation shifts to the fascinating topic of retrocausality, inspired by psychologist Darrell Bem's controversial studies. Mitch explains Bem's experiments, where subjects who mentally prepared for the future showed improved performance in the present ([20:36]-[24:35]).

“It's crazy. I remember I was talking to the religious studies chair at Rice, and she was like, 'Let me get this shit straight.'" ([20:36])

Duncan amplifies the absurdity and intrigue of these findings, pondering whether our emotional states and intentions might influence our reality through mechanisms akin to quantum entanglement.

Practical Magic and Manifestation Techniques

Mitch introduces practical exercises rooted in his upcoming book, "Modern Occultism and How", aimed at harnessing these esoteric concepts for everyday transformation ([81:33]-[89:00]).

1. Sexual Transmutation ([81:44]-[82:04]):

   • Mitch: “When you're feeling sexual desire, consciously channel that energy towards a cherished or necessary task.” ([82:04])

2. Retrocausality Practice ([83:34]-[84:20]):

   • Mitch: “Keep focusing on your desired outcome, even after experiencing setbacks.” ([83:34])

3. Eliminating Negative Online Behavior ([86:00]-[89:54]):

   • Mitch: “Stop trash talking on social media for a month to cultivate a more positive and confident self.” ([83:34])

Duncan and Mitch emphasize the importance of simplicity in these practices, making them accessible and actionable for listeners seeking personal growth and collective transformation.

Anecdotes and Real-World Applications

Mitch shares compelling anecdotes illustrating the effectiveness of his methods. Notably, he recounts advising Thai kickboxer Spencer Hanley to use retrocausality techniques before his championship bout, resulting in unexpected, positive outcomes ([26:00]-[28:23]).

“He won. May have won anyway. And for his entry music, he chose Belinda Carlisle's 'Heaven is a Place on Earth,'... months later, Belinda Carlisle contacted me.” ([28:23])

These stories serve to bridge the gap between abstract theories and tangible results, reinforcing the potential of practical magic in influencing real-world events.

Cultural Implications and Responsibility

The dialogue addresses the broader cultural landscape, discussing how new scientific discoveries validate ancient mystical practices and the societal blockages that prevent widespread adoption of these ideas ([70:04]-[77:14]).

Mitch warns against the dangers of adopting apocalyptic mindsets without actionable steps, advocating for "quantum activism"—actively shaping one's reality through focused intention and ethical behavior.

Conclusion and Call to Action

As the episode nears its end, Mitch promotes his book, "Modern Occultism and How", available for pre-order on March 25th. He encourages listeners to engage in the proposed exercises, particularly the month-long challenge to cease negative online interactions, labeling it a form of "quantum activism" that can lead to personal and collective betterment ([81:33]-[89:34]).

“If you're in, I'm in. Friends, let's do it. Let me know in the comments. That's a month of no talking online.” ([89:34])

Notable Quotes

• “We might live under Newtonian mechanics, but there's something going on outside that orderly intimacy.” — Mitch Horowitz ([08:20])

• “Your emotional feeling states are determinative of reality.” — Mitch Horowitz ([20:36])

• “Just stop fucking trash talking over social media. Stop it. It's disgusting.” — Mitch Horowitz ([82:21])

• “You despise negativity, so manifest positivity through your actions and intentions.” — Duncan Trussell ([55:31])

Final Thoughts

This episode of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour masterfully intertwines cutting-edge scientific theories with ancient mystical practices, presenting a compelling case for the existence and application of practical magic in the modern world. Mitch Horowitz's insights offer listeners not only a deeper understanding of these complex ideas but also practical steps to harness their transformative power.

Resources

• Book: Modern Occultism and How by Mitch Horowitz
• Retreat Information: Duncan's Road Shows

Transcript

[Duncan Trussell]

Hello, how are you? Here's a little bonus episode for you guys. I, from time to time, do these. I don't know what you call them. They're basically podcasts with David Nichtern, who you know as David for the midnight Gospel. He runs a wonderful group called Dharma Moon. They give meditation, teacher trainings, lots of stuff. David and I are actually doing a retreat coming up at Menla in the spring. That's in upstate New York. You can find the link down there. But I just wanted to share this with you. It's just a commercial free episode and a conversation that we had during one of our livestream zoom conversations about artificial intelligence and Buddhism, and it got really deep and interesting, and I think you'll really enjoy it. So I thought I'd share it here. And. And if you all want to take to participate with Dharma Moon, and if you feel compelled to do one of David's meditation teacher trainings, you can get $500 off the coupon is DTFH. And for those of you cynical monsters out there, I'm just doing this because I love David. I'm not getting kickbacks, and I believe in what he's doing. He's a brilliant person, and I think you'll benefit if you feel called to take his class. Mitch Horowitz, welcome back. It's so good to see you, my friend.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Likewise.

[Duncan Trussell]

And I. I think a lot of people are happy to see you, too. You are a very requested guest. And so requested. There was some outrage I detected, like, where is Mitch? What happened?

[Mitch Horowitz]

So I'm glad I hung myself with my wallet chain. I'm wearing it. See, I'm wearing it.

[Duncan Trussell]

Beautiful wallet chain.

[Mitch Horowitz]

God, that I. Illuminati issue.

[Duncan Trussell]

So many problems could have been avoided in my life with a wallet chain. So many problems.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Think of it.

[Duncan Trussell]

I need chains for a lot of things, though. Not just my wallet, phone chain, keychain. But anyway, Mitch, why are we talking about chains? You somehow have another book coming out. You spit books out. But this book, this book, I think a lot of folks are gonna be interested in practical magic.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Thank you.

[Duncan Trussell]

And what I love about you is the way you're able to tie some of these esoteric ideas into the current paradigm in a way that makes them actionable. And I think people really love that. So this is coming out of left field. I recognize that. But I don't know if you've been reading the current clickbait news out there. I guess a paper has been released interpreting James Webb data. So James Webb has picked up galaxies that shouldn't exist. For the galaxies to exist in the proximity of the AI to the Big Bang, there's just no way they could have happened. So the galaxies seem to be older than the 13.7 billion years old that most people think the universe is. The age of the universe, at least the physicists, secularists. So one of the explanations for there being galaxies older than our current understanding of the age of the universe is that we are in a black hole and that the reason galaxies all rotate clockwise, I guess from the perspective of where we are in the universe makes sense from the perspective that we are in a black hole and there would be a predictable momentum which we are all inside of a black fucking hole. Now, the reason I felt like this connected to your book, a book on magic, the roots of it, and tying it to sort of modern theories is primarily because for the secularist, the first day in the book of Genesis is the Big Bang. This is God. This is the creative outflow. And if you think, well, at least we know how old the universe is, weirdly, it creates a little bit of ground to stand on, right? Like it started somewhere. There's a beginning. This theory is saying, no, no, no, no. That's just, I guess when we got sucked into the black hole, there's something outside the black hole. There's black holes inside this black hole. So it's black holes all the way down. Now help me connect that with magic so I don't seem like an idiot, bro.

[Mitch Horowitz]

That is actually the bedrock of some of the things I'm saying in the book. And, and I can't wait to read that paper. I have not read that paper yet. But the fact is, we as a human community keep on amassing data upon data upon data that doesn't fit with classical physics, that doesn't fit with Newtonian mechanics. Never mind the fact that Isaac Newton himself was an alchemist. So I think he'd be delighted with all this. He wouldn't feel that somehow he was being overturned. He would feel that we're now appropriately standing on his shoulders. Yeah, we're seeing things that don't work. We're seeing things that don't fit. Perfect example that's come out in recent weeks. Google announced that its quantum computing prototype called Willow, solved an equation so problematic that it would have taken ten septillion years, which is longer than the entire projected span of humanity. So where did the answer come from? So Google's engineers wrote, well, this speaks in favor of the interdimensional thesis. In other words, maybe Willow was able to pluck this answer from another intersection of time or another dimension. And that might sound very far out, very heady, but the fact is, where did the answer come from? If, according to the team's calculations, getting this answer, which they procured in, I believe it was less than five minutes, would otherwise take ten septillion years, and that's a timeframe that's, strictly speaking, does not exist. It does not exist, right? So dig it. What's so fascinating is that we as a public are not even yet exposed to these programs. They're in Beta Launch. AI is in Beta. Quantum computing is in Proto Launch. And unless you work somewhere at Google or at a lab or maybe at the upper echelons of high finance, you don't even have access to this stuff. So it seems very far out to us. It's going to become less and less far out as time passes, just as it, you know, we don't feel the earth turning, but we know indelibly that it is whether it's a black hole, a simulation, a multiverse. We simply don't live under the umbrella of Newtonian mechanics alone. We might live under that little umbrella, but there's something going on outside that orderly intimacy. And we've known this really since Einstein, who proved through his relativity theories, which, which have since been validated through experiments, that time itself is not linear. Time bends in conditions of a black hole, extreme gravity. Time bends in conditions of extreme velocity at or near light speed. And it's so funny because when you talk about time moving backwards, people, people howl against that. The arrow of time goes one way. You can't break an egg. Einstein's second law of thermodynamics. All true, all true. But that's classical physics. That's Newtonian mechanics. Quantum mechanics, in fact, does show things moving backwards. There's a particle called a positron, which is has been demonstrated since 1947 by the great Richard Feynman to move backwards in time. Literally. Literally.

[Duncan Trussell]

How do you measure that?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Well, you measure it through interference patterns, such as in the double slit experiment. You measure it through basically taking a atomic microscopic image of a situation of particles, maybe firing a particle or some exotic matter into the framework that's being measured. And you find that the framework undergoes changes whereas like an electron switches charges or an electron goes backwards. Or this is how we understand what Einstein somewhat derisively called spooky action at a distance. This is what so called Bell's theorem is about, where we're measuring how objects are affected in Time faster than light, speed with no actual linkage. And of course, ever since we've been kids, we've been taught nothing can move fast, faster, faster than light. That has been considered a natural law. That is true within our immediate neighborhood that we live under. But this macro neighborhood, like apropos of your example of the black hole, is one in which, well, speed does surpass light. Because this so called spooky action at a distance, which Einstein found very frustrating, is. Well, entanglement is a more common word. There is entanglement. There is moving backwards of objects in time. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1966 for that discovery. It took almost 20 years because it was so far fucking out.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay, let me stop there for a second. It is a weird world, but what I love about this and anytime I stumble upon it with, you know, what I understand about some like, magical principles, and you see these parallels. It's somewhat God vindicating in a small way and hilarious. And like, I think like if we look at Newton and more recently the Google quantum computer, which is using entanglement, it's not just like this is something on a chalkboard. These are very, you can do things with this. And you know, specifically like sending data in a way that's like you can't decrypt it. And God knows what else they're going to figure out. But so take this concept, spooky action at a distance, what they're calling quantum entanglement now. And let's go back to, I don't know, something in folklore which is, God help you if some witch gets some of your hair. Yeah, because they could take that hair and they can make a voodoo doll. And using that air, they could actually have some control over you. And then I'd like to add just one more example and I want to hear your thoughts on this. And I don't know if this is even true or if this is just an urban myth, but you know, somehow when I was a kid, you hear about how there's certain indigenous tribes that didn't want their picture taken because they were afraid it would steal their soul. Now what do we see happening? If your picture is anywhere on the Internet, someone can take that picture and deep fake you. Then if there's any kind of semblance of your thumbprint, of your personality out there, the way your voice sounds, they can train an AI to become you. Now, is this stealing your soul? No, it's a digital clone, I guess you could say. But is it that different from what People who had no exposure to this tech, who lived prior to this tech even being here, were expressing in their worries over a simple photograph. There's weird parallels there, as though they intuited something that we are just now stumbling upon.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I'm glad you used the word parallels, because that's a really important word. Sometimes I might invoke the presence of some wisdom that reminds us of quantum mechanics among ancient people, and everybody will howl. Hartwood says the ancient Egyptians had quantum. How dare. That's ridiculous. And it's like, yo. There's a difference between an uninterrupted family tree of ideas, which is very rare, and between parallel insights, as you've just been saying. And it seems to me that the basic. If the occult has a law, it could be said to be like attracts like, or a variant of it, the hermetic statement, as above, so below. So the idea that the image of something contains an aspect of the whole, which we're now seeing in terms of technology, could have been understood in some deeper way, some folk way, we'll call it.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay.

[Mitch Horowitz]

By the ancients. And I think it's, it deserves probing. That's part of what I attempt in the book.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah. And it also makes sense that if any of these ideas that are popping up in quantum physics that are so mind bending are real, then we would have stumbled upon them in some way prior to being able to write out an equation to demonstrate what they are, why it happens. If there's quantum entanglement, then, yeah, theoretically there could be some. We don't understand what this connection is between entangled particles other than they're connected. And you can send data through whatever the. That is.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Right.

[Duncan Trussell]

That means they, they interact. There's interactivity between particles that are separated theoretically by infinity. And so, whoa, when you start looking at that from the perspective of channeling, of hearing the voice of God, or of getting some sense that you are receiving messages from the future or whatever you've heard madmen and saints have said maybe they just stumbled upon some organic analog mechanism, some way of working with this thing that we're only now quantifying.

[Mitch Horowitz]

And it's, it's, it's wild because look, here we are, we're just in the first three months of 2025, and we've got a computer that can solve a problem that takes longer than the span of human existence and solve it in about five minutes. Yeah, we've got Microsoft engineers saying their quantum computing prototype has created a new form of matter. You have a. You have two binary numbers, right? A0 and a1 that make up DNA of computer code. They've created an electrical charge that is neither zero nor one. And they're calling it a new form of matter. You've got people seriously looking and they. Bank of America. This goes back a few years now, but you've got bank of America telling what must be a mildly surprised group of investors, that there is between a 20 and 50% chance that we dwell in a simulacrum. This is bank of America, okay? Not your local New Age store.

[Duncan Trussell]

I heard this. Can you. Oh, yeah, go into that? What?

[Mitch Horowitz]

In a 2016 report to investors, bank of America said, this is happening. That's happening. Oh, and by the way, there's a 20 to 50% chance that we live in a simulacrum. This is the simulacrum theory that Elon Musk and others subscribe.

[Duncan Trussell]

You call it simulacrum, not simulation.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Oh, either one. Either. Or is just fine.

[Duncan Trussell]

Gotcha.

[Mitch Horowitz]

And, and so it's absolutely mind blowing because the logic behind it is airtight. If you believe that we are going to have ancestors capable of running absolutely vivid computer simulations, let's put it this way. To deny the possibility that we're living in a simulation, you'd have to deny the possibility that we will have ancestors who are capable of running such simulations. You're either saying you think there's going to be an extinction event, or you think we as a human race are just never going to get there. And it's reasonable to argue for either of those. But if you're not arguing for an extinction event or that we're just never going to get there, you have to acknowledge that our descendants, rather not ancestors, but our future descendants are going to have that sophistication and crunching the numbers. Bank of America and others said, yeah, folks, it's probably between 20 and 30%. I mean, if you heard an asteroid might strike the Earth and it was 20 to 50%, it would be shocking. It would be a real problem. You'd be thinking about it every day, looking at your kids, you know, and yet we're being told that we might not be flesh and blood, we might be, you know, bites, and yet life goes on. You know, I, you know, I open my, my, my green tea, I heat up my coffee. I, I don't think about any of it. And yet there it is. We are going to start to think a bit more because it's going to start to become more and more common in our daily lives.

[Duncan Trussell]

Right? That's the most Important part is like this, you know, that what, what this seems to be like the flowers growing off of the tree of physics. And for a long time that just seemed like a fucking boring ass tree with ununderstandable equations that you didn't give a shit about and didn't make any sense. And now all of a sudden they're finding ways to, to demonstrate what some of these things that they'd stumbled upon, specifically quantum physics, the, the application of these things. And so what I think is really curious about what's happening is that number one, when I read that shit, we're in a black hole. And I was texting with my friend too, both of us were like, man, this sucks. And it's like, why do I care if I'm in a fucking black hole? Yet somehow just that reframing of reality gave me a weirdly spooky dismal sense. But more to the point, in the reframing of reality, in the challenge to Newtonian physics, or in the confirmation that some ideas that many of us have intuited or people like you have actually utilized in nonstandard ways, which we call magic, there's some liberation there. And it's almost like this spell has been cast over all of us. This is what's possible. This is not possible. If you think that this is possible and we've shown that it's not, you're a fool. Don't even go there. You're wasting your time. No magic, no magic, just science. And that science is this narrow avenue that you've learned in high school unless you went to school for science. And so this is an incredibly limiting worldview, especially in light of all these bizarre discoveries that are suddenly emerging into the zeitgeist.

[Mitch Horowitz]

That is exactly right. And the fact is, now dig this. I've talked about this, this guy before. You and I have talked about this guy before. I have a lot of affection for the work of a Cornell research psychologist named Darrell Bem. Bem spent 10 years on a paper that he released in 2011 on the subject of retro causality. And in short, he made the case, backed up with stats up to your eyeballs, that if you study for a test in the so called future, it can subtly but trackably increase your score in the so called present. Sounds ridiculous. Everybody wants to argue with it.

[Duncan Trussell]

That's cool.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Everybody wants to argue with it. A decade on Bems data was meta analyzed, improved confirmatory in an analysis of 90 experiments in 33 different labs in 14 different nations. How's that for replication? Replication of ESP is supposed to not exist.

[Duncan Trussell]

But maybe you could elaborate on this, on what he means by that study for a test.

[Mitch Horowitz]

By all means. In his most innovative experiments, Bem basically gave subjects a word list to memorize and then asked them to recite back whatever they could remember. So let's say you're given a word list of 10 words and then you're told, okay, Duncan, now what do you remember? You might remember 6 out of 10, 5 out of 10, something like that. In any case, then he tried a different wrinkle in the experiment. And the subjects were asked to continue their memorization. You know, they, they, they, they gave their recitation, but then in certain cases they were asked to continue their memorization into the future. Those subjects that continued their recitation into the so called future, which is just a conceptual term, really spiked a score of 2% higher or so again and again and again.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay, wait.

[Mitch Horowitz]

So tens of thousands of trials.

[Duncan Trussell]

So a group of people are given this test. There's a median score and then there's some people who scored a little bit better on the test. The test has been done. But you randomize and you select this group and that group. And then of that group, some of them are told to study into the future. And there is a correlation between higher scores and those that were told to study into the future.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Correct.

[Duncan Trussell]

And that's fucking batshit.

[Mitch Horowitz]

It's batshit, right?

[Duncan Trussell]

That is so hard to wrap your head around.

[Mitch Horowitz]

It's crazy. I remember I was talking to the religious studies chair at Rice and she was asking me to repeat this. This is a woman, wonderful woman. April deconnick. Dedicated her life to esoteric studies. It's like, let me get this shit straight. Because it goes against everything that we understand as, as real. It undermines our whole sense of reality that time is this circular spiral. You know, it's not this arrow of time. And people, people will excoriate me for having said this. Like, what the fuck? There you go, you wu meisters again. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't make the rules of science. Science is methodological replication. You know, I'm just the messenger. This paper was produced, this paper was proven confirmatory in a really large scale meta analysis in different nations using different languages over the course of 10 years.

[Duncan Trussell]

Wow.

[Mitch Horowitz]

BEM was excoriated for all this in the New York Times. In other places he was held up as the poster child for bad science. And I've got people come to me all the time saying that's bullshit. You can't Break the arrow of time. And they're wrong. And they don't know they're wrong because they're not sitting around reading Richard Feynman's paper about positrons and realizing that in quantum mechanics, not Newtonian time does in fact move backwards under select conditions. Bem's innovation and retro causality is discussed. It's the subject of conferences within quantum physics circles. Bem's innovation was applying it to cognition. Applying it to cognition, for which he was excoriated. But a natural law is a natural law.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah.

[Mitch Horowitz]

And so it means it's ever operative, which doesn't mean we're always going to feel it. We don't feel gravity, we don't feel changes in gravity. We live under a constant gravity here on Earth. Yeah, but we know gravity changes. It's affected by mass. So I'm not saying this stuff can be turned on and off like a water faucet, by no means. But to say it doesn't exist, it's burying your head in the sand. Well, okay, absolutely denying reality.

[Duncan Trussell]

But then you know what it's making me think of? And who hasn't gone through a Tony Robbins phase? You listen to Tony Robbins, you know you're probably fucked. When you're listening to Tony Robbins, something's.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Going, you've hit bottom.

[Duncan Trussell]

You're like, jesus Christ, I need help. But you know, Tony Robbins and a lot of like, life coach manifestation people like him really emphasize goals, you know, like an action. And they talk about how action actually happens prior to the action. It's the decision. It's a true to do this thing. There's no question about it. Once the decision is made, it's done. You know it's done. It produces a kind of confidence once you, like, grab the steering wheel to that degree. Because how many of us have said, I'm going to the gym, and then cut to two hours later you're playing PlayStation, like, no, you're not going to the gym. This is a different. This kind of thinking is. No. When I think it, I do it. Now, from this perspective of this insane study, one could think that via that decision, making that real decision, you have connected to the future you, who has done said activity already. And somehow that is washing backwards to your present moment.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Correct.

[Duncan Trussell]

Via some kind of bizarre temporal quantum entanglement. Because if we're not quantum entangled with ourselves, what the fuck are we quantum entangled with?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Right? And I will tell you a funny anecdote. This is in the book. Months ago, I was contacted by Thai kickboxer named Spencer Hanley. And he said he had a champion bout outside of Austin. And he. He had nine days to go before the fight. And he said he was feeling good about his training, but he wanted something to help keep him on his mental game. So what could I recommend? So I gave him an exercise called the 30 Day Mental Challenge, which is just a self contract that commits you to keeping your thoughts in a productive, positive, constructive direction for 30 days. And he said, well, I appreciate that and I will do it, but again, the fight is in nine days. I need something more short term and explain to him what you and I have just been discussing. I said, bro, this is short term because I can guarantee you if you continue this after the fight, there may be an entanglement effect, we'll call it, that reaches back in time and gives you an extra edge. And I can guarantee you nobody in your opponent's corner is saying, well, today's retro causality day here in the gym and, you know, we're gonna plan out what we do next week after the fight. And so he did it. He looked terrific. He won. May have won anyway. And for his entry music, most. Most fighters, you know, for their entry song choose like some ear bleeding metal or drill rap or something. He chose the Belinda Carlisle song Heaven is a Place on Earth. And one of the announcers said, the fact that he's coming out to Belinda Carlisle makes me so happy. Before I fucking wrote about it, before I said a word to anyone about it days later. And I swear to you, Duncan, I swear to you this is true. I can play it for you. I get voicemail messages over Instagram from Belinda Carlisle, who I've had a fucking crush on since I've been 17 years old, telling me she's a fan and she read Modern Occultism and How you doing? And I'm like, what the fuck? And I'm like, yo, I have been in love with you since age 17. Okay, can we just get that fucking. And I mean, it was weird, bro.

[Duncan Trussell]

That is real weird. And, you know, could have all happened.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Anyway, you know, but it was damn weird.

[Duncan Trussell]

Did you. Did you. I'm not going to get asked for details about what I hope is a brewing romance between you and me.

[Mitch Horowitz]

She's married. I'm happily partnered with Jacqueline. You know, nothing going on there.

[Duncan Trussell]

My apologies to Jacqueline. My apologies to Belinda Carlisle. You know, it would just be cool, maybe in a parallel universe, but you know, man, this. This stuff is. Is so when you start thinking of, like, common understanding of the way the World works as blinders on a horse. And these experimental methodologies as, let's see what happens if we take the blinders off for a second. We're not gonna. We're not gonna pretend we see something that isn't there. We're just gonna see what happens. And the moment that you start doing that, things like that happen, suddenly Belinda Carlisle's reaching out to you. But it's not just that. It's that a person that you are helping train for a fight picks. If we're in Vegas and there are 10 songs that you could choose, what do you think this fighter is going to pick for Walking Out Music? Nobody's picking Belinda Carlisle. I mean, we got to sign and so.

[Mitch Horowitz]

And Heaven is a Place on Earth, like, that's his song. I love that.

[Duncan Trussell]

You know, I do too. But I wouldn't pick it for a fight.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Of course not. You know, and the announcer was like, what a change. What a refreshing change. This is great. I want to share something else that I think will be super useful for your listeners and viewers because people say to me, you know, I need something practical now. You know, I'm very interested in the philosophy of G.I. gurdjieff, the esoteric philosopher. Okay? So Gurdjieff, he was a man of such gravity, and he went through so much in his life and so did his students, that when he says something simple, I always say to people, when it gets really simple, that's when you really start listening very carefully. Because what would be a nothing, throwaway statement coming from someone else is really some. Is really profound and seismic coming from Gurdjieff. So he said the following. He and some of his followers were based in Russia during the revolution, civil war, and they had to flee. They were in trouble. Some of them were connected to the old government and so forth. And so they fled. And they eventually, after making an incredibly dangerous trek across Eurasia, where it was really life threatening and very unstable, they wound up in Paris. And at a certain point in Paris, they were just busted, broke, and they were really, really in trouble. I mean, there was not money for food. This was a grave, grave situation. And Gurdjieff said, I tried everything to earn money. I tried everything. And he said, I was sitting in my room one day and I was right at the brink of despair. I had made every effort, me and this group of students, we were on the precipice. We were seriously on the brink. And he said, out of nowhere, his mother walks into his room. She had just arrived a couple days earlier from Constantinople because she was with another group that had been fleeing. And she hands him a handkerchief, and she says, I want you to take this package from me. I've been carrying this across Europe. It's making me sick to be hanging onto this. I can't hold onto it any longer. And he opens it up and there's this very valuable brooch with a very valuable gemstone in it. And he remembered that back in Russia, he had given it to her in case she needed to use it to buy food or to bribe a border guard or something. And he forgot all about it. He just assumed it had been used in the journey. And he said literally, literally, literally, he could have gotten up and just danced around the room for joy. They were saved. They were saved. And he said, the thing that I take from this, the thing that I take from this is that. And I'm really reducing his words into something more ordinary, but it's the best I can do. He said, there is a lawful aspect to, and this was his term, unflinching perseverance. Unflinching perseverance. And of course, you hear that from an ordinary person. And sure, it sounds like an expression to go on my coffee mug or something. You hear it from Gurdjieff. You must stop and listen and sit with that. Maybe, maybe if we do live in a simulation or a multiverse or a black hole or some function of life that we don't understand, which in itself is a given based on what we've learned at this point, maybe unflinching perseverance or perspective or outlook in this unstuck multiverse of infinite events that we live in has a selective feature, has a measurement feature, has a localizing feature. It can work. It can work. I've had it work in my life. And the odds, I mean, they go beyond any actuarial table, any actuarial table. It's not the law of large numbers. It's something much more complicated than that. So I offer that to people.

[Duncan Trussell]

Well, here's the problem. I mean, I don't mean I, I, I think I do agree with you, having heard this stuff like many have, and then attempted it and then realized, like, Jesus Christ, this works. But here's, I think the reason people have a difficulty with what you're saying. Primarily, you stumble upon what you just said, and let's say you're gurd, chief. You're in some hotel room and you're fucked. In Paris, you're fucked. You're just doomed. Like anyone who's Experienced being completely broke in a big city. You understand how fucked you are. It's bad. You're going to be on the streets. You are fucked beyond compare. And so the feeling that goes along with that, it's a feeling state is obviously like he said, despair, anxiety, depression, fight, flight, freeze. For a lot of us it's just paralysis, ignorance. You want to ignore the situation so you get addicted to something to try to distract yourself from it. So the feeling you have does not match the place you're trying to get to. And there's a sense that my feelings are correct, their assessment of reality is right. And the fool in my head that Gurdjieff is inviting you to like let drive the car. It's just wishful thinking. And so I think this is what for me and maybe a lot of people, it's, that's the primary block is because I don't feel like I just got a treasure that I forgot that I gave to somebody because I don't feel like I just got the job, got the deal, got the house, got the whatever the thing is, the body, the thing. Because I feel wrecked. And why wouldn't you? Especially, I mean imagine if you've been like, have no idea how to control a horse and someone chained you to the goddamn thing. You're going to be covered in briars scratches. This fucking thing's been galloping through the swamps and you can't get off of it. So of course you're going to feel like shit if you haven't figured out how to navigate in this way that you're talking about. So yeah, what do we do about that? We've been trained to believe our sense of reality is informed by emotional states. And this thing you're talking about, it's not like I can just switch my anxiety off, I can't turn my hunger off. I mean, I guess I can ozempic, but you know what I'm saying, right?

[Mitch Horowitz]

No, no, you're making an incredible point. And one of the figures who has most influenced me made the very same point. That's Neville Goddard, who I have tattooed right here. And Neville said that, you know, basically your emotional feeling states are determinative of reality. And I have wrestled with that terribly because of exactly what you just said. I can't go to a person in grief, in depression, in fear and tell them, well, just, just change your emotions. I mean, you'd be Buddha if you could do that. You, you, you'd be the Buddha emotions. As Gurjeev also taught emotions run on their own track. Intellect runs on its own track. Physicality runs on its own track. And intellect is the weakest of, of all three. And if it weren't, there'd be no addictions. I would say, well, you know, this is getting bad for me, so I'll stop, but I can't stop. So, you know, what's the issue? And the issue is we're in pieces. But I don't think this is my take. I don't think mother nature played a cruel trick on us and we're just prisoners of these emotions. I think there is a selective capacity that can make itself felt through persistence, perseverance, and passion toward our goal. I don't think you have to change your emotions in order to feel passion. And that's why I very frequently say to people, hone down that wish and keep it private. What is that personal wish you have? Don't go blathering it all over the place because people will steal it. They'll take it from you, they'll tell you that's silly or whatever. Hone it down, hone it down. We all have a wish we're passionate about. And let me tell you, it could be, it could be anything. I want people to feel very unembarrassed about this and keep it private. And one of the questions I ask in this book is, is the wish enough? Is the wish enough? Could the passionate, finely defined wish be a, be a, be a localizing factor? A localizing factor. And I want people to at least try it, you know?

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I mean, I can't fathom a life where we just say confirmation bias, survivor bias, law of large numbers, and we dismiss human possibilities. I mean, would you say that to Lao Tzu? Would you say that to Jesus Christ? Would you say that to Marcel Proud Proust? It's ridiculous, right? That's not the human situation. We try things this.

[Duncan Trussell]

So the wish. Let's talk about the wish. And again, like, I just, I really want to point out how the things that right now we are hearing in default reality, in the zeitgeist, in mainstream media 10 years ago, would seem like a fucking fever dream.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Exactly.

[Duncan Trussell]

We have high ranking government officials basically saying that we have UFO wreckage.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Right.

[Duncan Trussell]

And that's just. We have scientists talking about how they're accessing parallel universes with computers that have chips frozen to absolute zero. So we have magic now there is indisputably magic happening. And yet still in the culture, things like wish, dream, these things, they're poo pooed. Oh, do you have a little Wishy wish. Are you gonna find a little cheesy bottle and rubbish? Wake up.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I'll get wish tattooed right here.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah, why don't you just go listen to fucking Belinda Carlisle, you pussy.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I like Jane wheedling.

[Duncan Trussell]

But, and, and, but this is though I do not believe though in like times of overdosing on edible marijuana, I have. I don't believe there's a conspiracy out there to try to keep people from stumbling upon this stuff. I do think there's a cultural form of self censorship that is injected into us probably by World War II, like PTSD, epigenetic trial. I don't know what it fucking is. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Stock up sale is on now, which means you can save big on all your favorite essentials throughout the store. Stock up on participating items and earn four times points to redeem for your discounts on groceries or gas. Now through March 25th. Saved by shopping in store or online for participating items from your favorite brands like Pampers, Dove, Band Aid, Playtex and Premier protein. Offer ends March 25. Promotions may vary, restrictions apply. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. But I do know that the wish, and especially contextually with what we're talking about, the wish number one, you can tell a lot about yourself by what you will let yourself wish for. So something will pop into my head and I'm not gonna say it based on your advice. And I'll think, you shallow motherfucker, you want that? Really? Really? You want that, you shallow piece of shit. Don't you want world peace? But then maybe you have a less specific idea, which I think is a healthy thing to want, which is I'd like some abundance. I got kids, I'd like them not to worry about anything. This is a foggy, ambiguous kind of thing. What does that even mean? But a lot of times that shallow thing you're wishing for, if you just think about it, that's a GPS coordinate to one particulate of a reality. And surrounding that reality is the abundance that you are wishing for. So you need that little focused thing, right? That's it, right?

[Mitch Horowitz]

What you just said is so important because those among your listeners and viewers who are on the spiritual path, we get our wishes taken away from us because we feel we have to reprocess them or perfume them through service. My least favorite word in the English language. And, and, and that's not natural and that's not emotional and that's not really our wish. If it is One's wish, more power to you. I'll, I'll vote for you for the next Dalai Lama. But my feeling is if you'd really want that, and my feeling is that, well, I'll give you an anecdote. It's very similar to what you were just saying. I used to see a shrink, good guy. And he asked me, you know, what do I want or something? And I answered him honestly and he said, yeah, but that's superficial. And I said to him, yo, Scott, how long have you known me? Do you really think my wish is superficial? I'm being frank with you admittedly, but do you really think it's superficial? Do you really think that there aren't many, many, many husks around that kernel just as you were just saying that I believe are going to have benefit for a lot of people in my life. Perhaps not that that's where I'm coming from, because it's almost like the wish holds you. The wish holds you. You know, like if you know somebody who, let's say I want to be the mixed martial arts champion of Poland or whatever it is that wish and someone's holding that wish, that wish holds him, you know, that wish holds him and it can't be morphed into. And that way I'll, I'll help this or that or the other thing. You'll help a lot of people, I presume. But I simply just believe that, that, that one has to be honest self honest in a very deeply unembarrassed way. Yeah, that's why advise keeping it private. And it's intimate. And I tell you man, I feel that we are so bedeviled by internalized peer pressure. I think it gets its, it gets its claws in us when we're young and it never goes away. And I often tell people, try to think of your, your, your wishes from your earliest long term memories, like age three, four, like really fucking young. Because I don't think, think that the cause of peer pressure quite get themselves in kids that young. I think it more really settles in a little older. Like a friend of mine said to me that when children stop talking to themselves in the bathtub, like around age 9 or something, that's when you can tell that, you know, peer pressure and societal norms are starting to give, you know. And so I think that that youthful wishes can be very valuable because we're not quite so conditioned. But whatever the case is, I mean think of the freedom this gives you. You're, you're in that hotel room, you're by yourself, you know, who the fuck are you bothering? Just. Just peel back the layers of psyche and say what you really want. Don't condemn yourself. See what happens. See what happens?

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah, it's, it's. And you know what's weird? Even just the discussion, I can feel my endogenous anxiety kind of lifting a little bit. There's something enters into you when you start liberating yourself cognitively in this way. Like how much of the dreary experience that many people call reality, how much of that is related to external phenomena and how much of that is related to gagging yourself, trying to put a cork in what could be this beautiful fountain of creativity inside of you because of, you know, you gotta get ready for the real world, kid. This shit is not good out there. It's gonna stomp your fucking teeth out and laugh while it does it. It's gonna shit your dreams right back in your face. You know, variants of that, some of them way more sophisticated than that. You shouldn't like what you do. That work guy who does shitty jobs, I saw some depressing interview with him. This thing where people think they should ENJ job. Wake up, you snowflake. You should hate your job and grind in hell. He didn't say that, but that's what it felt like. So then you have what you're talking about and, and what you've written about again and again and again and what you have demonstrated not just in your function as a kind of teacher in the world, but in the fact that you are fucking progenitive, man. Like you spit out books, dude. Like whatever you're doing. What do they say? Judge a tree by its fruit. So, you know, you can see that you have these, this combination of things happening, which is a. I hate this term because I think it's non nuanced and no one even knows what it means anymore. But I'm going to say it. You have like positivity, you know, and there's a lot of smarter ways to say that. But then also it's not the kind of positivity you run into that's a bit suspicious. Positivity where there's a very positive person, but there's feels like there's a grift going on. They're giving life coach, you know what I mean? When like you realize like, wait, you're a life coach, but prior to being a life coach, what did you do? And there's nothing there other than life coaching. They haven't demonstrated their teaching in a way that has shown up in their own lives.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I believe that's very often true. Absolutely. Yeah. It's suspicious. Yeah.

[Duncan Trussell]

But when we look at what you're talking about contextually, which you have connected the dots in your book, which is now, whether you like it or not, we are being. If you thought magic wasn't real and you didn't dare believe it because you didn't want your heart broken, just go online now and look up any of these new studies. You're in a fucking black hole. They have computers that communicate with parallel fucking universes. And what you just said, apparently you can get temporal backflow from future versions of yourself. Now, this is not things that you think about. I used to think that. Because I know this sounds nuts. There would be days. And it's so weird. I've said it on the podcast. I don't care. I'm not running for. I'm not trying to be a politician. But there would be days in my young, young LSD days where with no LSD around, it's very hard to obtain. In Hendersonville, North Carolina, during that, I had a hard time finding it. But in the morning, I would be like, oh, I'm taking acid today. That's so weird, because I could feel that high rolling backwards through time. And sure enough, someone would come up like, you want some acid? I'm like, yeah, I knew that we were doing this, and I never, like, obviously, I just thought, like, I'm a weirdo. But when you start realizing that this is based on what we are discovering, a new way of looking at the map of the universe. And that traveling through life is actually traveling between multiverses, that navigation is happening via will and thought. And that an unfocused mind without any clear goals is like a boat with no rudder just getting pushed around by other people's intent. And, yeah, you're gonna have a bumpy fucking ride. And you're definitely not gonna get to Hawaii, if that's where you were hoping. You need a sail. You need a rudder. You need to understand how to navigate. And these magic, as I think you understand it, is really a methodology of navigating through the ocean of time. And weirdly, this, where it gets weird, you can connect somehow to some reality. This is the fragment you get. It's what you give the hound dog to smell. You know what I mean? When you're hunting down a prisoner or anything.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[Duncan Trussell]

And that thing, no matter how insane, ridiculous, embarrassing it may seem, that that's the smell. That's the North Star. That's all you need. Right, you just need the fragment. And the more you go in that direction, you'll start getting other puzzle pieces. Probably. But you don't need to figure out how. You just need to believe that that's real. Am I interpreting this right?

[Mitch Horowitz]

I agree completely. I call magic causative ritual. That's my definition. And look, a person can be a materialist and engage in causative ritual. There are people who don't believe in deity or spirit or any extra physical energies as I describe them, but they might be interested in chaos magic, where you create a little sigil, you charge it by masturbating over it, and something happens. Well, it comports with chaos theory insofar as chaos theory really comes down to you introduce some exotic particulate, wrinkle, change piece of matter into a situation and it necessarily changes everything.

[Duncan Trussell]

Let me tell you, when you jizz on something, it changes it.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I'm quoting that. I'm quoting that, bro. And so. And it does. You know, it's so funny. Years ago, 10 years ago, whatever career skeptics used to say to me, you know, horrors, with this positive thinking shit and new thought, you're full of shit. It's all, woo, nonsense. And now, 10 years later, they say, ah, Trump is using this stuff. Are you happy now? Are you happy? And it's like, yo, it's your fault. Right? Right, it's my fault. Which is it? It's nonsense or Trump is using it, which is it, you know, because it's pretty fucking convincing.

[Duncan Trussell]

You know, he's definitely using it.

[Mitch Horowitz]

It. He's definitely using it. And, you know, I don't know. Trump never has specifically said. I've read Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, but he did attend Peel's congregation as an adolescent. Peel performed one of his marriages. Peel's successor, who I used to know, a lovely man named Arthur Caleandro, who's now dead, I think performed the marriage between Trump and. And Maples. Anyway, he was a fixture there at that church, and that seems to be an idea that he carried with him. Now, some people might be very fucking unhappy about that, but God damn it, that guy has gotten a lot of things done.

[Duncan Trussell]

Hey, look, man, when, you know, like, anybody who's brushed shoulders with this stuff, when you've seen what he's up to the first time, you might think, well, maybe he's like, nuts. You know, a lot of people love to say that, but then you begin to realize, like, oh, fuck, he's a magician. And he is.

[Mitch Horowitz]

He is a Magician.

[Duncan Trussell]

He is a magician, you know, good at magic. And. And I think this plays more to the point of, like, look, you don't. Go ahead. Don't believe this stuff. Like, turn your. Turn your back to it.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Go ahead, bro.

[Duncan Trussell]

Totally fine. But just know a lot of people have been using this for a long time. They maybe have, like. It doesn't have all of the aesthetics that one might want. There's no Hogwarts or robes or Diagon Alley or owls or whatever the thing is. But when you begin to realize, like, oh, my God, like, one thing all these people seem to have in common is at the very least, an intuitive understanding of manifestation. And because generally, the people that are experiencing rarefied forms of existence are generally curious people, they have transmuted that intuitive sense of something into something that is more specific. And that's what I want to ask you about, Mitch, because I love our conversations, but it's easy for me to derail them because I could talk to you forever. But this is where we get into ritual. And one thing, though, I do love a lot of the teachers that you love. I mean, Ernest Holmes, I think, saved my life, I think, like, when I stumbled upon that. But what I love about Crowley and what I love about, like, the more, like, formalized, ritualistic stuff is. I mean, this sounds so shallow. It's fucking cool. It's got drama. Yeah, it's got drama.

[Mitch Horowitz]

It's got drama, and we need that. You know, I. I think that everybody has to find his or her own style. Like Trump, for example. I mean, there are a fraction of people who follow Trump as a chaos magician, and their reasoning is that Trump is able to disrupt norms of speech, politics, behavior, and somehow he does it and he gets away with it, and things happen. And I think you're correct, but I wouldn't recommend that to everybody. That's him. I couldn't do that. It's not my thing. It's just not my thing. I couldn't do that. But there's other things I can do. There's other things you could do. There's other things Ernest Holmes could do. Ernest Holmes, the founder of the Science of Mind movement, was a beautiful, beautiful man whose. Whose outlook naturally leaned in the direction of a radical optimism. And he kind of codified it into a spiritual philosophy. And he did what he was supposed to do. Aleister Crowley did what he was supposed to do. My wish in this book is to ask ourselves, what's the shortest distance between two lines for every individual? Can we simplify all this magic I don't want you or me to imitate Aleister Crowley or even to imitate, you know, Ernest Holmes, if that's not a person's direction. I start the book with a quote from the great rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons. And near the end of Jack's life, he wrote a letter to his wife, Marjorie Cameron, and he said, every ideal war that's ever been won in the history of humanity has been won through the principle of simplicity. And at this point, magic does not have it. And a very short time later, Jack died in an explosion in his garage in Pasadena. And. And I took that as my inspiration. Where is that simplicity and magic? I groove to Crowley as an artist, as a. As a. As a performative figure, as an intellect. I don't groove to these long liturgical ceremonies. I grew up with it. I ran away from it. And I'm asking myself, what is. Where's the simplicity? Where's the heart of simplicity in all this? And that's why all these heady ideas that we're discussing about quantum this and entanglement that and causative ritual and so forth, can they come down to the individual having a very focused wish? And that being a source, not a manifestation, a word I almost never use, but selection. Selection in the same way. Look, what are our five senses really but tools of measurement? We measure things. How far away is that? How loud is that? How does that taste? Can the impassioned wish under any circumstances, perhaps set in process a. A localization, a measurement, an actualization not unaffected by other things? Every natural law is affected by other things.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah.

[Mitch Horowitz]

You know, I don't believe in this exclusivity of there being one mental super law. I don't use the term law of attraction because it always seems to connote the idea that there's only one game in town, which is this mental super law. I absolutely do not believe that there's all kinds of laws and forces going on. And I'm asking us to experiment with the possibility that a law of psyche, which I see as an amalgam of intellect and emotion, a law of psyche, is among them.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay, let me ask you this. This law of psyche, let's dive into it a little bit, and let's dive into it based on what we've been talking about. So, you know, anyone watching or listening, if you have formulated some place you'd like to be and you've caught a little frame of that place, okay, imagine that frame. Now, if you haven't caught a frame of that place, I don't know, man, you're fucked. Because I don't know what to say or what you're supposed to do. And I think that's a real problem I've had in the past is like, even like, it reminds me of like my fucked up nose from COVID Like the talking in the bathtub thing. I've lost it a little bit. So when I do get a frame like that, it's like, okay, this is great, but one thing you do know if you don't have a specific wish is you have a future. And so there that. And maybe just for those people out there who are wish blind right now, imagine it's a better future than right now. But for those of you with a specific wish, this is what I want to talk to you about. You're there, actually. You listen to this podcast, you read some books, you got there. You're not there right now, but you're actually there. Based on everything we've just talked about, you're there. And now your job is to reach into the past, connect with you here in this moment on the other side of the river and start drawing yourself there. You sense yourself. The frames. Out of some compassion for all versions of yourself scattered throughout the multiverse, like the parable of the Sower, you threw these seeds of possibility out into time. You understood time is not the way we understand it. And these seeds landed in the minds of all the different versions of you. And that's your wish. So how do we communicate with that, us? And also, should we be trying to communicate with past versions of us in the same compassionate way?

[Mitch Horowitz]

I have a suspicion that we may be doing this all the time, unconsciously. In other words, communicating with so called past versions of ourselves. Often people say, what would I tell myself if I could go back to age 13 or whatever? What would I like to undo? What regrets do I have? We may be doing that constantly and, and, and, and it feels natural and, and now ish to us. You know, if you ask me, you know, where am I from? Who were my parents? What did they do? Well, I give you a town, I give you names, I give you their job feels as real to me as the words I'm speaking. It may be changing every microsecond based on selection and perspective. We may be living a weirder life than we think. That doesn't follow the arrow of time, but we need the feeling that it follows the arrow of time. Because we are limited. I mean, we'd be out of control. We'd be out of control to Feel a sense of singleness, linearity, rationality as we've come to define it. That just may be how were built. A goldfish certainly doesn't know anything about the fact that there are beings on Mars, you know, microbial fossils. But it's as. It's as real as the goldfish itself. It's funny, it's been pointed out that when you look at weird shit in physics like the Schrodinger's cat experiment, where you have two cats at once, or the. The proverbial spaceship that's moving at light speed and aging is slowing down for the person on that ship, which is absolutely real, by the way. Astronauts in our own era, astronauts in our own era moving nowhere near the velocity of light speed, do experience minute but measurable reductions in the aging process. This is as much a fact as one plus one equal two. But these things, they're so heady and they're so far out to us, we feel that they must be metaphors. They can't be real. We're built in a way to experience that's one straight line of time. And yet this stuff is true and it's going on, and it's going on all around us. And as quantum computing, certainly as maybe future aspects of AI, certainly things that we're learning more and more about the sheer logic of possibility involving black holes or simulations, these things are coming more and more down to Earth, you know, more and more down to our level. And denying their, denying their applicability towards cognition is, I think, one of the biggest intellectual roadblocks our culture faces right now. Because if, if, if a scientist or an academic like Daryl Bem decides, hey, we're going to study some of this stuff in connection with cognition, the edifice that is our media, the edifice that is our reference media, like Wiki, most of academia, they will shut them out, particularly the social sciences. One of the great ironies of our era, one of the great ironies of our era is that the things you and I are talking about, you could talk about this with people in the hard sciences, in medicine, in mathematics, in computers. It's the social sciences and letters where the extreme pushback comes from. That's weird. Ironies of our time.

[Duncan Trussell]

Well, you know, from that perspective, what you see, or I think of it as a kind of like cultural gravity. Well, right. Like it's like, again, I do not think that there's a conspiracy to keep people trapped in hell, but the collective opinion of reality as a hellscape has emerged culturally. Right? It has become A way of indicating to someone generally, like where you stand politically. You know, there is a fashionable thing to evoke how bad the world is. And I talked about it on an earlier podcast, but I found it to be so wild. Someone was accepting an award, an Oscar. And as they're accepting this award, they're getting an Oscar. They're in like this beautiful room filled with symmetrical people. They've done something 0,00 very, I don't know math population gets fucking Oscars. Otherwise they wouldn't give a shit. And they're also the fact that they were able to do the magic required to just make any kind of movie, much less one. And acknowledgement shows that they do know magic. They do know they're creative, they're talented. And so in the acceptance of the idol, they said the classic thing which is even in a world like this, and it's like you're looking the world like this that they're talking about is like, it's for a lot of people. That's their wish. They did it. They're there. And yet from their perspective, hell, they're in hell. And so I think this needs to be more emphasized for all of those out there who habitually in greetings with other people like to indicate that you also believe the world is hell. Based on what we're saying. This is a very dangerous way of living because in that articulation, world is hell. You steer your ship towards hell world. Right. Like just basically, you are not following Mitch's advice, who was Trump's number one manifestation tutor and their best friends.

[Mitch Horowitz]

We're playing racquetball later today.

[Duncan Trussell]

Joking. But. But what you're doing is you're taking the cobbled together points of view of your friends, the media, the subreddits you go to, the books you read and you're weaving together a hell realm. It might be spring. You might be walking down a nice trail in a beautiful park with birds of tweeting. You can't see any of that. You only think that you're in hell. You may think, well, my life is in danger. You see, my rights are being taken away. But in this very moment, probably your rights aren't being taken away. You're just okay right now. I'm not to say that's not an impending danger, but I'm just saying the more based on this idea, the more that the test you're studying for is the apocalypse fucking test, the more you're gonna steer that way. And this is where it gets weird. This is my question for You, I don't know if you have an answer. You hear this pop up in New Age communities. Of course you hear this shit all the time. Which is timeline split. And is it fucking possible that we are about to have a timeline split that literally the history as we understand it will cleave in half? And that there will be one group of people that spiral into World War 3, darkness, disaster, fascism, and another group of people that actually steer their ship towards the transhumanist AI utopia. Do you think about that? Because how can this is. I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I was at Agape Church. There was a contest to win a goddamn car. And it's a manifestation church. And I just thought, I guess only one of us wins the fucking car, right? Therefore, if we all perfectly manifest, we want the car. What does that say in regards to the general sort of instruction regarding manifestation? That there's better manifestors than other? Or is it that we all went into an alternate timeline where we all won the car? So all I'm asking is what are your thoughts on this? In other words, how can heaven and hell exist side by side? Or are we, via this mode of connecting with what we call the future and steering our ship there, actually moving into parallel universes that are less apocalyptic than the one that seems to be fashionable to believe that we're in?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Well, it seems to me it's theoretically possible. In fact, it may even be considered a theoretical necessity that we do. We as individuals experience multiple outcomes within this infinite infinitude of events going on within this circular spherical dimension that is time, in a certain way. That's what some people call string theory, this idea that there's shit going on all around us, infinitely constantly, a ripple effect may occur from. From one of these so called multiple dimensions existing upon undulating bands of strings. And something happens. You may experience something singular. That's not singular. One of the things I was saying before is that in the. In the framework of quantum mechanics, in the Schrodinger's cat experiment, to the cat, there's one cat. To the observer, there's two cats. Because that outcome would have to be permissible if you're directing an atom at the box or some sort of a subatomic particle, it's in a state of superposition. It's in both boxes at one time, but it localizes in one box.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah.

[Mitch Horowitz]

When. When the observer measures it. The cat, however, experiences one cat. I experience one. Mitch, you experience one. Duncan, the figure in the proverbial spaceship moving at light speed. He is undergoing a slowing of the aging process. That is a concrete fact. But he experiences time as normal. He's not moving like that. Slowly. We may see him that way. He doesn't see himself that way. So psychologically, we are all experiencing ourselves as one thing people have said to me, the problem with your philosophy, Mitch, is that it creates this horrible dystopia of stratified life where one guy, Duncan, wins the car. And the single mom who really needed that car, she doesn't win it. It's like, yo, let's step back here for one second. We live under this stratification already. There's going to be one winner in a race. There's going to be one winner in a match of some kind. There's going be one dude who gets a job. That's our life, but that's our life. Without delving into actual reality, which we're talking about now, if we're talking about actual reality, we don't know, it must be said, we don't know there could be all these different branches where we are continually experiencing different things at once. And as far as this talk about apocalypse and so forth, one of the things I take very, very seriously is I don't like people to talk about shit unless they've got sort of skin in the game and they really mean it. I don't talk, for example, with people about apocalypse or fascism or World War 3 or anything else unless we're being deadly fucking serious. You know, I've got two sons, you've got three children. You know, point. It's like, don't come and talk to me about that unless you are, you know, digging a well, installing solar panels, getting trained with firearms, getting MREs, raising goats. Like, what the. Because if you really believe that that's what you're doing, otherwise this is entertainment. And I have my forms of entertainment, you know, and, and. And I don't need that grim for entertainment. Right, but if you mean it, then let's. Let's go, let's talk about it. I know there are people who feel that way, and I'm very interested in what they're doing, but I'm living here in Brooklyn and, you know, I've got the ocean two blocks away. So it's like, you know, if I really mean that, that means I'm moving and that means I'm doing something, you know, So I want. Let's just be adults about this shit. Let's be adults. If you care about people dying in wars, what the fuck are you doing? I Know, we're all supposed to say that so we sound nice to our friends and nice on social media. But what are you doing? Let's be serious. If you hate Trump, are you registering people to vote? Because I'll tell you, the first time he won, I was hanging out in a barbershop talking to somebody, and a lady came in and she had voter registration forms and said, hey, could you hand these out? And I was like, well, fucking A. If you're against Trump and you want to register people to vote, that's seems positive, but put some skin in it, you know, be an adult.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah, right. No, that's beautiful. I mean, that's beautiful. It's great. And I think that's an important thing to ask yourself. If you've gotten. If you've gotten yourself into a psychological prison. That is eschato, that's apocalyptic.

[Mitch Horowitz]

And do you really mean it? You know, do you really mean it.

[Duncan Trussell]

And you believe it?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Conditions of comfort. Always have a good time talking about, you know, horrors. And it's like, you got to get.

[Duncan Trussell]

Out of a city. Like, this is the way I see it. If you really do believe that we are on the precipice of civilizational collapse and you're living in a big city, you got to get the fuck out. Because otherwise you're suicidal, you're committing suicide via civilizational collapse, you need to be arming yourself, you need to be getting your go bag together, and you need to fully live that life if that's what you believe. Because if you're not doing that, no wonder you feel anxious all the time. It's like someone sitting in a house, smoke is coming from downstairs, and you're like, the house is on fire. Does the house seem like it's on fire to you? Fuck, it is on fire. And you're not getting out of the fucking house. You gotta move. But maybe the fact that you aren't doing those things would imply you don't quite believe it, and that's not bad. That you don't quite believe in. Maybe there's another way of looking at things that you know, and as far as, like, if you are, you know, what I try to do in my general naive and unsophisticated view of war as failure and the worst thing ever is look at my own life and look at the things I decide to do and ask myself are these, like, little miniature sparks that if done, if the whole planet did it, wouldn't this lead to war? If I was like, you know, if everybody was a vengeance seeker, if everybody was letting their anger take over, this would lead to a really bad place. So one boots on the ground way you could be against war is more than just shrilly yapping about it on your podcast like I do. But also, don't you know, there was that saying, the weather underground, bring the war back home, bring the peace back home. I'm saying what you're teaching, as I understand it, is we're all like white holes through which the future pours into the present. And my God, if you could connect with some paradise right around the corner and begin to emit that into the present right now, that's, that's some quantum activism. That's some real shit there.

[Mitch Horowitz]

I like, I like that phrase, quantum activism. I dig that. And one of the things I tell people, and again, this all like very, very simple stuff. But I believe in simple stuff because if it's not simple, people won't do it. And simplicity reveals its profundity only in application. That should never be forgotten. Like we can all say, don't lie, it's bad to lie. It's like, right on. But the difficulty of that and the profundity of that will only reach you through effort, through trying. Otherwise it's just another pretty little thing that goes on the coffee mug, right? I tell people, if you really give a about the state of our world, you can do something about it right now. Desist from trash talking on social media. Our entire civilization is spending all of its time trash talking one another on social media. It's unremitting rhetorical questions, body shaming, sarcasm, all the. And it flows out of us. You think there aren't people being hurt by that? You think they don't get angry and want to strike back? You think that doesn't matter, you know, and you think there's bit much of a leap between that and flash mobs that show up to, to, to kill Muslims in the nation of India. There is not much of a fucking leap from one to the other, right? And, and I implore people, if you want to do something for the world, including yourself, because you will stand taller, you will feel better, you will not be dealing with all this sublimated shame and guilt which does exist. Just stop fucking trash talking over social media. Stop it. It's disgusting. And there's no algorithm that's going to fix it for us. And I'm tired of hearing like it's Zuck's fault or it's Elon's fault. No, it's my fault, it's my Fault, it doesn't have to occur, and there's a conformity around it that's sickening. I tell people, and I stand by these words, you desist from trash talking on Social for one hour. See if you don't stand taller. Is your existence worth one hour to you?

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah, you feel better. And you know what? Let me add something to it. Don't forget, any interaction you have online is training an AI. Look up fucking Rocco's Basilisk. You are training a super intelligence via your interactions online. And the more you're a shithead online, the more you're teaching this thing at some level, even though its creators will try to control it. How to be a fucking shithead online. So it's like imagine you got a chance to hang out with baby Jesus.

[Mitch Horowitz]

That's right.

[Duncan Trussell]

You actually meet Jesus. Those 33 years you're hanging out with Christ, are you gonna sit down and be like, dude, you need to call that guy a cuck.

[Mitch Horowitz]

He's a cuck, right?

[Duncan Trussell]

You know what I mean? That guy is a Nazi. Jesus, everyone's a Nazi. Whatever the fucking thing you're doing, it's like you. We all get to be nannies to whatever the fuck this thing is. And there's never been a time where one's activity, especially online, but in the world you know, is going to have a direct impact on whatever the fuck this thing is we're all collectively making. Now, Mitch, we. We've gone over the general hour, but I have to ask this, and I might regret saying this, but I'm at all, anything, because when I talk about, like, the idea of, like, people who, like, sort of outflow, positivity in the world and create change because of that outflow, you're one of them, and so I trust you. And also now you're talking to a collective, the people who listen to the podcast and watch it. Why don't you give us an exercise to do as the collective and that plays into what we're talking about, about manifestation, some way that we can simplify a practical way for us to execute some of the things that we've been talking about so that maybe some of the skeptical people listening right now can get their minds blown. I'm not skeptical, but a lot of the things you've taught me have worked. And I don't know. You got anything for us?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Yeah, of course, man. I'm gonna suggest. I'm gonna suggest three things, but they're super, super simple things, okay? And they're utterly fucking private. They're utterly fucking Private.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay?

[Mitch Horowitz]

One of my contentions in the book is that everything. If there's a trigger to the magical operation, if there's a trigger to the magical operation, it's sexuality. It's the feeling of sexual desire, okay? And there's a practice called sex transmutation, which anybody can use anytime.

[Duncan Trussell]

Oh, don't tell us to not jerk off.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Oh, no, bro, I would never do that. I would never tell anybody not to jerk off.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay?

[Mitch Horowitz]

It doesn't. It doesn't involve avoidance or sublimation of sex, including jerking off. I would never do that to you.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay, I'm in.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Okay. Rest assured, but at times of your own shoes and completely private, when you're feeling sexual desire, wherever you are or whatever's going on, just make the personal election at a given moment, whatever it is, to mentally shift your focus and channel, consciously channel that sexual desire towards some cherished or necessary task, whatever it may be. And I would argue that salesmen, great salesmen, are doing this all the time without even knowing it. You know, we meet salespeople and we're like, gee, I don't really need this fucking blender, but I kind of like him or her. And. Or, you know, maybe, you know, I know I'm being flirted with, but she's. I'm going to say yes. Anyway. They're doing it all the time anyway. And I think it goes deeper than just the seduction of another individual. Much, much deeper than that. You feel sexual desire anytime, anywhere, you privately sublimate that, the satisfaction of that desire through a mental shift in focus. And you direct it. You direct it towards something else. And you will perform with greater acumen, creativity, ability, cognition toward that something else.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay, let me stop you there, guys. If you come to see me, the Denver comedy works this weekend, and I have an erection now. You know why?

[Mitch Horowitz]

But you will give it right now, and they'll be like, I've never seen him on fire. Like, how did he do it? A whole week of shows. He's killer, right?

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay, keep going. I love that.

[Mitch Horowitz]

That's number.

[Duncan Trussell]

Very actionable. Very actionable.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Absolutely. Another one is using retro causality. Not dissimilar to what I was prescribing for that Thai kickboxer, Spencer Hanley. And by the way, you can see Spencer's fights all over YouTube. I mean, go find the damn fight where, you know, he plays Belinda and so forth. I mean, check me on it. Check.

[Duncan Trussell]

Link will be. Link. Link will be in the. Underneath the video [e-mail]. we'll find that Link.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Yeah, yeah. And okay, retro causality. Let's say there's something, I know a woman here in New York, she was going this in the book. She was, she was going on a job interview to a religious organization. She really wanted that job and she really needed that job. She did not get it. And she was very disappointed afterwards. And she said, you know, what am I supposed to do with this disappointment? I said, yeah, go. Retro causality. You keep training for that interview, you keep training for that preparation, you keep preparing your materials. I'm not saying you stop applying for other jobs. You go about your life and you do the normative things that we all have to do to get through life, but you keep focusing on that fucking thing. And I tell you, Duncan, I swear. And this is in the book, you can check me on it. I'll show you the original emails. She wrote to me maybe week, week and a half later. And she said it, holy mother. The boss man called me and said another similar opening had emerged at that religious organization with more hours, with more hours. I can only tell you what happened. I can only tell you it happened. Use this stuff, you know, just try it. It's just an experiment. You have to tell your shrink, you have tell your spouse, your girlfriend, boyfriend. Just, just, just use it, you know, okay, so I really want people to experiment with retrocausality. And the final and other thing I'll say, and we've touched on it already, but it's so powerful, it bears repeating. Just stop gossiping and trash talk. It doesn't mean that you become Pollyanna ish. I'm not Pollyanna ish. But don't derive entertainment from running down other people, from pissing on people on social media. You will feel better, you will stand taller, you will be more attractive. Believe me, there's a fucking cost there. We think there's not a cost. Everybody running around with their anonymous names and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, being a smart ass, it makes for a shittier world. And if you're not persuaded by that, it makes for a shittier person. Individual will be more confident, you will be more charismatic, you will be more trusted, you will have greater exuberance. It doesn't need to be done. There are other forms of entertainment. And if there's a political figure you hate, you can still talk about that political figure. You're not sacrificing your opinions, but just don't derive entertainment from pissing all over people. And that includes fucking body shaming, sarcasm, trash talking, name calling, story spreading, 99% of the time. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. And you can do it. I mean, it's within your hands to do it. It. You know. Right.

[Duncan Trussell]

I'm so excited to go in the comments of this conversation to see who didn't make it to the fucking end. You didn't do the goddamn thing. Well, let's put it on that one, though, Mitch. Just because that you are talking, like, with that. When you really are getting to a pressure point in the collective. Give us a timeline. Like, how about. So it's not a permanent thing. Let's. How long should we do it, Mitch?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Like, what's your 24 hours? It's like, is a person's existence worth 20, 24 hours?

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah. I'm going a month. Anyone who wants to join me, we're gonna go a month. And I barely do that anyway. But. So until April 17th.

[Mitch Horowitz]

All right.

[Duncan Trussell]

If I don't seem like. Even though I barely post stuff, though I do like to post sarcastic stuff. And you won't see anything sarcastic.

[Mitch Horowitz]

You can still. I'm not like, calling out George Carlin here, you know, it's like I'm calling out mean trash, you know?

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay. Okay. Yeah. But no, I'm not. But I think there's more subtle. I think the main thing is you know your intent when you're doing it. Like if you're posting something, you know the feeling. If you have that sticky. Like you're a poisonous thorn on some thing. You know the feeling. There's a. Don't do it. Don't do it. When you're. When you're. When you have that feeling.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Duncan Trussell]

Transmitting the poison, Mitch. Holy practical magic, everybody. It's out now. Is there a preferred place for folks to order? It is out now, right?

[Mitch Horowitz]

It's out March 25th. It'll. It'll. No, no, but listen, man, those pre orders help.

[Duncan Trussell]

Oh, that's right.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Preorder, wait for copies. Yeah. You can pre order the thing. It's in digital, it's in physical copy, and it's in audio, which I narrate. And it goes on sale March 25th.

[Duncan Trussell]

Great.

[Mitch Horowitz]

And let me tell you, pre orders do help me. Whether it's Amazon or BNN or an indie, wherever you buy your stuff, they help.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah, so that's just. What is that? Week after next. Is that next week?

[Mitch Horowitz]

Yeah, I mean, we're talking less than two weeks. Yeah.

[Duncan Trussell]

Okay. Well, actually, I think when this releases, that'll be next week. So it'll be the following week. Unless you want us to release it closer to the release of your book? No, because then people won't pre order. I'm sorry. This is something we could talk about after this great podcast. What the fuck am I doing? It was so good and now I'm just, like, diffusing it at the end like a.

[Mitch Horowitz]

But it shows the reality. I mean, this is St. Patrick's Day, right? We're recording on St. Patrick's yeah.

[Duncan Trussell]

Yeah.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Well, 17th, right. And we've got the Duncan. The Duncan Challenge. You do this good until April 17th or something like 30 days. And then you see what happens.

[Duncan Trussell]

Let's see. I'm. If you're in, I'm in. Friends, let's do it. Let me know in the comments. If you're joining. That's a month of no talking online. You can still jerk off.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Absolutely.

[Duncan Trussell]

Thank you so much. You're brilliant. I just love that you give me your time to do these shows. Thank you so much. Love you.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Right on.

[Duncan Trussell]

Thank you.

[Mitch Horowitz]

Thank you.

[Duncan Trussell]

All right, bye. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Stock up sale is on now, which means you can save big on all your favorite essentials throughout the store. Stock up on participating items and earn four times points to redeem for your discounts on groceries or gas. Now through March 25th. Saved by shopping in store or online for participating items from your favorite brands like Pampers, Dove, Band Aid, Playtex and Premier protein. Offer ends March 25. Promotions may vary, restrictions apply. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.