Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 311: Mitch Horowitz
Episode Date: November 2, 2018Mitch Horowitz, occult scholar and expert in metaphysics, joins the DTFH! Check out Mitch's new book, The Miracle Club, available now! This episode is brought to you by [Squarespace](https://www.squ...arespace.com/duncan) (offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site) and [BLUECHEW](https://www.bluechew.com/) (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping). Friday, November 16th - Come see "[Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism](https://www.samarasacenter.com/cutting-through-spiritual-materialism-lots-of-icing-not-much-cake/)" with Duncan & David Nichtern at the Samarasa Center in Echo Park, LA!
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Hey, what's up, everybody?
Happy Halloween.
What you're about to listen to, it was an idea I had
for like a kind of special Halloween episode.
It is definitely not the recording of somebody
who represents a group of people that have made contact
with a very powerful legion of aliens
who are about to appear on our planet.
It's just an actor that I got to say
what you're about to listen to.
So don't worry, I'm not being threatened.
I definitely did not make an agreement
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It's just a Halloween gag.
So this is what I was gonna do until I realized
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You know we have an agreement
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You know what you're supposed to do with your podcast.
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are you recording this?
Obviously I did not record a person who represents
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and are about to make this their home planet.
I have most certainly not made a deal with them
in which in exchange for playing a simple tone
on my podcast, a sound wave on my podcast,
I will receive more wealth than I've ever dreamed of
and eternal life along with a harem
of some of the most beautiful, not just women
but beings from all across the galaxy.
Nope, this is just a Halloween gag,
meaning the following tone that you're about to hear
is nothing you should worry about
and in fact is something you should enjoy with headphones
and a room with ultraviolet light preferably
and you should listen to it at least three times in a row
to ensure that the sonic seeds
or the eggs of the great mother are planted
in the nest of your wretched human mind.
Again, I'm not selling out my species,
just a fun Halloween gag.
So let's listen to this innocent tone
that is definitely not a mind control sound wave
that will force you to be obedient to the great ones
when at last they come.
Welcome to the world of transformation.
Yes, ma'am.
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Are you happy now?
Ah!
I've definitely not sold my species out to aliens
but even if I had, I would still be excited
about today's guest, Mitch Horowitz is with us today.
We're gonna jump right into it
but first, some quick business.
I can remember one of my friends telling me
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by a upset pseudo web designer
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He smashed his teeth in with the brass knuckles
and then he heated up that iron pentagram
and left a horrible eternal burn on my friend's neck.
This used to happen all the time
because pseudo web designers
who barely understood how to make websites
would get all jacked up on meth or amphetamines
and then you would complain about the horrific website
that they made for you and they would come
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All right, let's do this podcast.
Sweet friends, today's guest is a occult scholar
an expert in metaphysics, an author
and a wonderful speaker who has just published
a fantastic book on the topic of new thought,
which you might be familiar with
if you've seen The Secret
or if you've read Napoleon Hill's Thinking Row Rich
or Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind
or if you live in LA and go to Agape Church.
It's the concept that our thoughts create reality
and different methods that can be used
based on that concept to bring us closer to our goals
and to bring things into our lives that we desire.
It's a fantastic and controversial philosophy
and our guest today does a brilliant job
not only in explaining this idea
but also in addressing some of the more difficult,
paradoxical parts of the idea
that some other authors seem afraid to even mention.
You can find out more about Mitch
by going to MitchHorowitz.com.
I'll have all the links at DuncanTrestle.com
but now everybody please welcome
to the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast, Mitch Horowitz.
Here we go.
Welcome, welcome, welcome to you
that you are with us.
Shake hands for me to be blue.
Welcome to you.
Wha, what?
It's the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast.
Mitch, welcome to the DTFH.
Thank you so much for being a guest.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
I am a big fan of yours.
And I admire your ability not just to write,
but also your ability to convey some
of these very dense ideas in an informative and entertaining
way that are, I think, so important to be
able to be a bridge like that.
And so I was floored in an interesting way,
knowing you were coming here in the sense
that there's a million different things
that we could talk about.
But I thought you have this wonderful book,
The Miracle Club, that's out right now,
which is, covers a thing that I have been deeply interested in
and have used with some success and also have
a little bit of, for lack of a better word,
apprehension about it to some degree.
Is that the right word?
Not appreh, yeah, apprehension.
And so that's what I'd love to talk about.
And I really want to take advantage of the time
that we have so that my listeners can maybe
get a little seminar in converting thought patterns
into reality, which I think is a possibility,
but maybe isn't as quite as easy as it sounds.
So I just want to start off with a question
I saw you ask yourself in one of your many great talks online.
Is the purpose of the spiritual search,
thy will be done or my will be done?
That's the central question.
That's the central question.
I want to be very plain about answering
that rather than alluding it or trying to dilute
or change the question.
For me, at age 52, the central purpose is my will be done.
That's the path I walk.
I believe that desire is sacred.
I believe that we are here for a limited period of time
to be generative and to be productive.
And I realize all the baggage that my response comes with.
I realize people are going to hear that and say,
well, which I, and which I are you thinking from?
Which I are you manifesting from?
Is there a difference between the higher will
and the lower will?
I honor and I bow before all those questions,
but I've been walking this path for a long time.
And I'm not going to be here for an infinite amount of time.
When you're looking at life from middle age
and from children who have entered adolescence,
it tends to render your focus sharper and more serious.
And I believe that the individual will
and individual desire is sacred.
And I don't make a distinction between higher and lower.
And frankly, at this point in my path,
I don't even make a distinction among multiple eyes.
I don't speak in terms of ego, inner, outer,
personality, essence.
I think there's one of you and me,
and we're here for a finite period of time.
Many things have claims on us,
but attainment has a primary claim, I believe.
And I believe in the statement, my will be done.
Cool, that's great.
Okay, great.
You just made me scratch off
all the other questions I have for you.
Wait, just hang out and enjoy the weather?
Yeah, why not?
Well, I did one thing that,
and again, okay, before this question,
there's like, oh God, forgive me,
I'm going to quote Bob Marley.
All right.
A hungry man is an angry man.
Yeah.
And I think that it's all good and well
to get to this point of like,
thy will be done through me.
Therefore, I'm not going to sort of try,
or I'm not going to push forward
some something into the world
that's going to give me material comfort.
Yes.
But when you're hungry,
or you have a kid that needs food,
or there's like an actual deep, deep,
real primordial need there.
Yes.
I don't know, the thy will be done thing,
I think becomes a little,
it seems like a great idea.
Yes.
Until you need a glass of water
and there's no water around.
Yes.
And you know, some survival issues.
So that being said,
I was watching a Chogim Chomper Rinpoche talk,
and he said something that stuck with me,
which is, before you can reject yourself,
you need to know yourself.
Yes.
Similarly, even though you did say,
look, it's all sacred,
I do feel like,
isn't there a sort of step-by-step process here
before you start getting into mind manifestation?
Won't it save you some trouble
to actually know who you are
so you can really know what you want?
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That's a wonderful question.
My wish is that getting in touch
with one's authentic desires becomes
a form of self-scrutiny, a path to self-scrutiny
because there are going to be failures.
There are going to be dead ends.
There are especially going to be failures of perspective.
We've all had the experience where we wanted something.
Maybe we lusted after another person
or maybe there was a particular job offer
that we wanted to get
and I've certainly had experiences
where I could be very persuasive with myself
and others about something I wanted to attain,
maybe something in my career
and I've had the experience,
as I'm sure your listeners have had,
of not getting it and saying,
thank God I didn't get that.
That would have been the worst thing
and that calls into question about this whole nature
of who am I, what is my perspective?
Am I able to see more than a couple of feet forward
on the road?
My contention is this.
I think that over the course of life
there are inevitably times
where we're going to make terrible mistakes.
We're going to demonstrate a lack of perspective.
We're going to be thinking from a place
of very short-term gratification and we may get hurt.
But I do believe, I really do believe in my heart
that there are instances in life
where every sensitive person does have moments
of exquisite clarity and exquisite perspective.
And I was just speaking with someone about this.
There are some people you meet
who know exactly what they want out of life at age six
and however they get buffeted around
by the currents of life, they still know it.
They still know it and they feel intrinsically
when they're separate from it,
when they're gravitating more closely to it.
I would say in truth,
we all have that primordial understanding
of what we really want.
We may circle around it.
We may hit dead ends.
We may bump into walls.
But I don't think that life has played this cruel joke on us
in which we're fully bereft of perspective.
We're sometimes bereft of it and we're sometimes misled
and we will get hurt.
But there are many, many times, I think,
moments of sensitivity, moments of exquisite instinct
where we do feel what we want.
And I counsel people, follow that.
That's precious, precious information
that we're being granted.
Cool.
Because it's like, yeah, you get these desires
and then it's sort of like the Buddhist concept
of the poison arrow.
So here is some desire, whatever it may be.
And then the desire gets almost instantly followed
with a myriad of judgments or potential repercussions
or this is an indication of you slipping into a bad place
or all of these things follow this initial desire.
And it seems like what you're saying is
that initial desire has within it some kind of truth,
some kind of...
I really believe it does.
And it's funny, we repeat things to ourselves like,
well, money doesn't make you happy
or career success doesn't make you happy.
And I would take a second look at those truisms.
I would take a second look at those truisms
because, for example, let's say you can identify
a famous actor who behaves obnoxiously.
And there are any number of examples
that you could select from.
You could look at that person and say,
well, see, he's a case in point.
The pinnacle of success hasn't made him happy.
He misbehaves.
And I would say, well, let's take a second look at this.
It may be true that that person misbehaves
and that is a problem.
It's also a problem for those around that person
and they have things to answer for themselves
because they're remaining in his orbit
because he gives them goodies.
But the fact is, if that person didn't become the performer
that he or she is, I believe they would probably
have a yawning gap in their lives
and they would probably feel a sense of being lost
and stuck in a kind of vacuum and not knowing what to do.
I think our desires can point towards something
very vital and significant.
I was watching recently this two-part documentary
about Elvis Presley on HBO
and Bruce Springsteen was narrating part of it.
And Bruce said that later in his life,
when Elvis was up on stage in his sequined jumpsuit
and everything, that actually was the real guy.
That's who he was.
And it was only when he got home at night
and tried to function as a private individual
that he had difficulties.
And I thought that was a good observation
and it was probably an observation basically
that Bruce was making about himself
and putting on somebody else, which is what we often do,
but I thought it was valid.
But I also thought to myself, and so what?
And so what?
I think he's correct.
That was the guy on stage.
He was funny, he was relaxed, his fans loved him,
he loved them.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that?
He was providing for people.
I'm not aware that he ever did anything
that deprived anybody of anything around him
to which they were entitled.
So what's wrong if Elvis was only real when he was on stage?
I think we have to be flexible about these things
and we have to ask ourselves,
maybe that's exactly where he belonged
and exactly what he should be doing.
So he never got the garage door fixed.
All right, get somebody else to get the garage door fixed.
It has to be fixed and we have to take care of that,
but that's not his job.
His job is to do that.
What's your job?
That's what I would put back onto the listener.
Yeah, okay, okay, so this is great.
And again, it's just every so many grimoires
or so many books on magic,
they start off with this inevitable warning.
Beware, beware, beware, your mind,
you'll lose your, even the cutting through
spiritual materialism that Trump has starts with.
Don't go down this path if you can avoid it
because once you start going down,
you gotta go all the way.
Once you jump in the river, all the way.
So okay, warnings aside.
Now, listeners have some desire.
Whatever it may be, no matter how mundane
or greedy or freakish or whatever,
let's just say some folks have these desires
and they want to bring this into their reality,
whatever it is.
And your book presents a kind of methodology
that has been refined and developed by many people
over time.
And so I would just love to start getting
into that methodology from the moment of knowing something
that you want to the process that a person might go through
to see some version of that appear in their own life
in a real way.
Yes, the inception point starts
with a clarified passionate desire
as we've been talking about.
And that's easier, that's not as easy as it sounds
and it's not as plainly available to us as it sounds
because we mislead ourselves and we tell ourselves things
by rote, I'd like to have lots of kids
or I'd like to travel or I'd like to climb
the corporate ladder or what have you.
Beware of mental habits because we can get
into this recitation of things that we feel
will make us look good in the eyes of others
or make us look good in our own eyes in some way.
It's exquisitely important to have a clarified desire,
not just a desire, but I'm even gonna go so far
as to say an obsessive aim, a central wish
that you have for your life to the exclusion
of everything else because I think that kind
of concentrated, psychical energy
is extraordinarily impactful and important
and if you scrutinize the lives of people you admire
whether it be Bob Dylan or Nelson Mandela
or Helen Keller or Steve Jobs or whomever it may happen
to be, you will almost always find
that that person was motivated by one obsessional desire
and it was all consuming and it can be very threatening
in a certain way because I think it's a tough bargain
that life strikes with us.
We're not given everything and I actually personally
believe that well-roundedness is overrated.
Bob Marley was not sitting around worrying
about his tennis game or worrying about whether
the dishwasher was fixed.
He was being Bob Marley.
He had this vision of himself as this musical prophet
which he was, which he was.
Helen Keller was dedicated to uplifting the idea
of human possibility and human potential.
I don't know whether she was a nice person
to spend Christmas with or not.
I have no idea.
That was the central facet of her life.
You have to arrive at that and that's a very tough bargain
to strike with life but it can also be
a very gratifying bargain.
The next thing is you need to come up with
a really concrete integrated plan
of both mental visualization, affirmation,
creativity and outer action and knowing just when to strike
and you will know when you're exquisitely focused,
relationships and tasks that are superfluous
tend to fall away and I don't mean to sound
ruthless about this.
I'm just trying to be honest with the listener.
When you become focused, you find that you develop
much less taste and patience for things that are frivolous.
That can include small talk, that can include movies
or television shows that really truly are not worthwhile
and that don't build your aim and your outlook
and your point of view, books that don't build your aim
and your outlook and your point of view.
And I think you need to be very concrete with yourself
about writing down and committing to paper
what your goals are, dates, numbers, periods of time
by which you wanna reach things.
I think I'm not really talking about a go with the flow
approach and the reason I prescribe this
and the reason I think it's so important to write things down
and to be specific in terms of numbers and dates
is because these things not only serve to focus
and harness one's mental energies
and it's my contention that we do have mental energies
that go beyond the cognitive and motor functions and such
but the very act of writing something down
from its point of inception is almost the bringing
of a tactile physical actualization
of what you're after into the world.
And I would challenge the listener, try it, try it.
Right now in my pocket, I am carrying with me a card
on which I've written a particular goal,
a particular sum of money and the date
by which I want to reach it.
And I have laminated this card with packing tape
because I carry it with me everywhere
and I want it to be very, very sturdy.
There is a certain special something that comes
from my carrying that card around
because it's a tactile representation
of my aim into the world and it's very no holds barred.
It's realistic, but it's very, very bold.
And my contention to you would be that if you do this
as a mature adult, not flitting from one flower
to another like a bumblebee, but you really know what you want
and you're prepared to employ affirmation,
visualization, prayer, chanting, meditation,
every mental faculty that you're disposed
including physical modalities.
And you're willing to act in outer life
in all kinds of ways that are constructive
and that are appropriate to the furthering
and the pursuit of your goal.
And you do this with a concentrated, obsessive passion.
You're going to get where you want to go.
You're going to get where you want to go.
Try it.
Well, here's what I want to talk about.
So a person finds themselves either,
well, either the person just dies
or they find themselves suddenly surrounded
as a person begins to wake up.
So a person suddenly finds themselves surrounded
by this massive chaotic matter
that they stumbled into throughout their lives.
Cause they've been kind of like sleepwalking or whatever.
And they thought they wanted this
or they thought they wanted that,
but quite often they end up in sort of what
they think up as a rut or there's just a,
they don't have enough money to pay rent.
They can't, their car's about to get repossessed.
They are alcoholics, their life is like in a kind of like
very, very dark and darkened state.
And within that darkened state,
it's not just that around them is chaos,
within their mind is some form of chaos
and their will is very weak
because they're sort of being,
they've created a feedback loop
where there's a constant reflection of all their past
decisions in the form of everything around them.
And it's affirming their, how could you,
sort of their, I don't want to say impotence
cause it sounds so severe,
but it's kind of confirming this state.
So I bring that up only because people
in that state of consciousness,
though they might want to have single pointed focus,
even getting that is almost as difficult
as a person whose legs have atrophied
and who wants to stand up.
Yes, yes.
What I mean, their will has atrophied.
And so now they do have the desire.
Right, right.
But it's, the desire is even foggy.
So how does a person in that state begin to sharpen the will
to get to this point of a kind of single pointed fixation?
Yeah, that's a wonderful, wonderful question.
And I would respond to that in a couple of ways.
First, one of the things that I try to be very clear
about in the book and that I refer to many times
is that we do live under many laws and forces.
I don't believe that within the cosmic framework
that we have to function in within this life,
not everything is controlled by this one mental super law,
which is why I don't use terms like manifest
or law of attraction or things like that.
It may be, and this is part of a broader discussion,
that awareness or intellect or consciousness
is the ultimate arbiter of experience.
And I do believe that's true,
but I also believe that we live in a world
in which we experience multiple laws and forces.
The law of gravity, for example, is ever operative,
but you'll experience it differently
on the moon than on the planet Earth
because gravity responds to mass.
Our lives are a lot like that.
So it's not that thought is the only game in town.
Obviously we live under physical limitations.
Our bodies eventually decline.
There's mortality.
There's never been an exception to that.
So there are things facing the individual
and there are emergencies facing the individual
that I do not contend are the result of mind or thought.
It's very, very important to understand that.
And I think when the individual is in a desperate situation
and he or she just doesn't know what's coming next,
the repossession man may be outside the door and so on,
there's a couple of things I would say.
First of all, I believe very strongly
in the power of prayer.
And I don't believe life plays a cruel joke on us
in which it sends some guy to tell you,
hey, you gotta focus your thoughts,
but when you're in emotional agony,
you can't focus your thoughts.
I can't focus my thoughts all the time.
I happen to be in a very good mood right now
and I'm psyched to be here with you,
but I would be misrepresenting myself to the listener
if I didn't say there are also times and nights
where I'm in agony or I'm guilty
of committing an act of road rage
or I behave like a real asshole towards somebody
and I don't mean to,
but the Mitch that you're hearing right now
is the best that I am.
Thursday afternoon at two o'clock,
I might be in a really shitty mood
and be an asshole in Starbucks.
And I might also be feeling very sad over something
and not able to focus my thoughts.
I do believe that prayer is a real and a powerful thing.
I do believe in the existence of higher
and extra physical forces outside us
to whom we can appeal and I do believe
that there are no rules involved in prayer.
I've never liked the new thought orthodoxy
that you have to pray in this state
of calm expectancy and satisfaction
as though you've already received what you're after
and according to your faith, so shall it be.
I know there's precedent for that in scripture,
but there's also precedent in scripture
for people arguing with God,
for getting pissed off with God,
for begging, for being angry,
for asking God to change his or her mind about things
like when Cain is punished for this act of fratricide,
he says to God, the punishment you've given me,
it's too great, I can't take it.
And God says, okay, I'll amend it.
I'll put this mark on you
where nobody will be able to hurt you.
And there are many instances in scripture
of the creator changing his or her mind
after somebody argues with him or confronts him.
There are no rules with regard to prayer.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, it's right there, it's right there.
People get pissed off and they're like,
I can't put up with this.
And he's like, okay, I'll work with you here.
And so I do think that prayer is ever and always available
and I do think extraordinary things can happen from it.
I would also say that if you're in desperate need,
don't condition your solution to such an extent
that you narrow the path to which it can reach you.
Magic or answered prayers or options or possibilities
may reach you in all kinds of different ways.
Accept them, accept them when they come into your life.
If somebody offers you something, you accept it.
You don't say, no, I think there might be something
better over there.
So it may be that you pray for relief from something
and relief may come in an unusual unexpected way.
It may even come in a way that brings with it
other problems and complexities, but it's there.
It's what's being presented to you.
So when you're kind of going along the path,
don't condition your ideas too heavily
of what your response might look like.
It might come to you in different ways.
The path of prayer is open to you.
It would be a cruel joke if channeling one's thoughts
in positive directions were the only way
to kind of get out of a problem
because there are times honestly
when we're facing emergencies or anguish
where that it can't be done.
And there are sufferings in life.
New thought's failure is that it's never come up
with a theology of suffering.
It has never found a way to meet people who are suffering.
That's one of the things I make an effort to work on
or to correct in the Miracle Club
because I do think that people who are suffering
or who might have a disease from which frankly
there is no real prospect of recovery,
although there are miracles and there are anomalies
and I talk about that in the book.
But there are things that play out also
according to convention
and New Thought has to be able to meet those people as well.
If you're forced to consume half a loaf of bread
rather than a whole loaf and you have to,
can that half a loaf be consumed while standing fully erect?
And if so, other things may happen.
Other things may happen
that open up possibilities that are unexpected.
New Thought has to be able to address that person.
Yes, when New Thought,
you can run into some really problematic,
you can run into some problems with the math
which one specific problem that I wanted to bring up to you
is I was at a New Thought church once that I love
and it's authentically like chain, like help.
This stuff is not in a kind of like sweet way help.
Literally has had a real, I've used it and it works.
But I can remember sitting in this church
and there was a sweepstake for a car.
Someone, you know, there's a raise in money for the church
and someone was gonna win this car.
And I'm sitting there thinking like, wait a minute,
are we now in a visualization contest?
You know what I mean?
Is it the person who like has in the best use,
whatever this skill is or science
or however it's science in mind,
they've won and everybody else is a little weaker than them?
Right, right.
Or is it a multi-verse situation
where you win the thing,
and you split into another multi-verse
where everyone else is lost?
Could be.
Or, so yeah, but you know what I'm saying?
I do.
Everyone on the planet suddenly begins to adhere
to this sort of idea that I can focus my will
and manifest or whatever word you want.
I don't, what word would, well, I don't wanna get mixed up.
Select actually is what I use, select.
I could select some reality.
Yeah.
But in a planet where there appears to be
limited resources.
Yes.
Problems with countries that you can't,
you can't come into certain countries.
That's exactly right.
So how does this, to me that seems to be
one of the big logical problems with this.
How do you work that out?
That's a great question.
And you know, I would refer back
to what I was saying a little while ago,
which is that we do live under a complex of laws and forces.
And I've always rejected the new age principle
that there are no accidents.
I think there are accidents.
I think things that happen to people sometimes
are matters of geography, economics, politics,
things that are weather patterns,
things that are completely out of the hand
of the individual.
So when the nation of the Philippines is struck
by a horrible monsoon, I completely and roundedly
reject the notion that some of my friends
in New Thought might hold, which is that, well,
you know, the vibrational frequency of people's thoughts
was operating on the level of that disaster.
There is absolutely no way to verify that.
Yeah.
In fact, I don't even want to hear from people
in such situations who haven't passed through natural disasters,
who haven't lived through war, who haven't lived through poverty.
This is one of the reasons why I ultimately
break with the way of thought of Rhonda Byrne, the writer
and filmmaker behind The Secret.
I think Rhonda has a lot of good insights into human nature,
and there's a lot of very good things I can say about Rhonda.
But she was being interviewed several years ago
by a reporter from the Associated Press named
Tara Burghardt.
And Rhonda famously doesn't give interviews.
And Tara just emailed her.
And Rhonda responded to all these really hardcore questions.
And my hat was really off to Tara.
And she asked her the $64,000 question, which is plainly
put, what do you say about people who
perished in horrible events, like the Holocaust or 9-11,
are you saying that their thoughts created that?
And Rhonda responded by saying, well, first of all,
there were also miraculous exceptions to those events.
OK.
And secondly, I do think that it is possible,
this is Rhonda speaking, that a population of people
can be thinking along the lines of a certain vibrational
frequency that vibrate to or have an affinity or correlation
with certain events.
Not only do I disagree with that,
but I think that if you speak about events
that you haven't passed through or experienced yourself,
such as a horrible catastrophe of war
or environmental devastation or a tidal wave or an earthquake,
it's nothing other than throwing a stone.
I'm just speaking about and explaining away
my neighbor's circumstance.
I want to hear from the person who went through that him
or herself if they're still around to record that to me.
I want to hear the testimony of people
who have been through this.
Tell me about what you've been through.
Tell me about what you've experienced,
not what somebody has experienced from another country
or another time and place that you've never gone through.
I believe there are accidents.
I believe that the law of mentation,
if there is such a thing, is one vital part of our lives,
one part that begs experimentation,
along with many other things, including weather patterns
and hostilities and political conflicts
that the individual him or herself bears no responsibility for.
I would also say this, particularly
with respect to lotteries and gambling and cars.
There are people who come to me sometimes
and they want help at the poker table or something like that.
And I'll do my best to help them because I
do believe that the mind can play a role in these things.
And I'll meet them where they are and I'll say,
well, let's try this together.
Just do me a favor.
If you win, and I hope you do, give away
10% of whatever you want to someplace worthy.
That's the deal.
So let's see what happens.
Let's try it together.
But more often, I find that uncanny results and correlations
occur in people's lives over an extended period of time.
There's sometimes an interval or a gestation period.
A human life requires nine months of gestation.
A horse requires 11 months of gestation.
There are gestation periods for everything in nature.
So there must be apropos of our minds as well.
So I ask people to watch very, very carefully what unfolds
over a long period of time because we're very forgetful.
We can be holding some thought and there's an interval
and we forget all about it.
Sometimes these things occur over very broad periods
of time, not in connection with the sweepstakes or so.
That's great.
And that's such an important thing to realize
Personally, I always want results way faster
than they're ever going to come.
Me too.
Me too.
In a big way.
And so then there is this period in between whatever
the thing may be, planting the seed, saying the prayer,
preparing the focus.
And then some amount of time passes.
And within that amount of time, you might even see a reversal,
some backsliding or something.
And you're like, this shit doesn't work.
Oh, shit.
That's right.
Fuck all of it.
But yet, if you allow that sort of transitory phenomena
to confuse you, then you can again start
mentating, I guess you would say, certain patterns that
are going to affirm that temporary thing.
And then you end up going backwards.
The backwards happens because of, let's say, whatever.
Nature.
Nature.
It's just some unpredictable, chaotic thing.
But then you attach to that a story.
And the story is, fuck Horowitz or some version of it.
This shit don't work.
It's a bunch of, yeah, from the witches.
Right.
Sadly.
And now you're producing the sort of the opposite of what
you recommended, which is single-pointed focus
on a specific thing.
And how many mythological stories of realization
are just prior to the realization of this being or that?
That's right.
That's right.
Always met with the opposite of what
they wanted to have happen.
Always met by some test.
Yes.
And that was true of Moses, for example.
If one makes a mythical reading of the life of Moses,
he had all these weird ups and downs occur.
He spoke with a speech impediment.
He didn't want to be selected as the leader of the Hebrews.
He committed a murder in anger.
He never was able actually to get his arms around
his anger problem.
He was ultimately punished by God at the end of his life,
not being permitted to enter the Promised Land
because he was pissed off all the time.
I mean, obviously, I'm making a mythical reading
of the life of Moses.
But it was very Byzantine and serpentine.
And all kinds of things happened.
But ultimately, ultimately, he did
do what his aim was, which was he led the Hebrews out of Egypt.
And it was very, very tough.
And they spent a generation in the wilderness.
All kinds of things occurred.
But he did do that.
And it was very serpentine.
It's funny, there's this popular expression,
careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
And I do the forensics on that in the book.
And the closest I've been able to come
is I think that popular expression originated with Gerta,
who put it differently.
What he wrote was, what you wish for when you are young
will come upon you in waves when you are old.
So be careful.
And a lot of people would want to argue with that
and say, that doesn't make any sense to me.
The ideals and the wishes I had when I was young
haven't come upon me in waves.
I'm very dissatisfied.
Gerta's contention was, we are extremely forgetful.
And if you take a yellow light and just don't judge what he's
saying immediately, but actually really go back
across the layers of your life and ask, is Gerta correct?
Have I gotten in waves what I wished for,
when I was young?
Was I not careful?
Was I not careful?
That's where that popular expression comes from.
How cool.
That is so simultaneously terrifying and cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Holy shit, man.
Oh my God.
Wow, wow, wow, that's cool.
Whoa.
And I think that, so here are these waves crashing
into our lives.
And who knows?
It depends on what lens you want to look through.
Let's imagine, I'm reading this wonderful book on karma
right now, and it's sort of breaking down
the Vedic conception of karma,
which has a lot of really, really cool breakdown,
the different sorts of karma that some,
there's like four types.
One is the karma which has within it
every single thing you've done thus far,
including in all your past lives.
This is sort of somehow intertwined in your energy body.
And so this thing flowers into your life
just like what Gerta might say,
waves of this thing coming to you.
Waves, yeah, yeah.
And so now you have all these waves
that are crashing in and you're looking at them
and you're like, what the fuck?
This is not what I want now.
Yes.
And so now you have to deal with it.
Yes.
And there's no way around it.
You just have to pay your tab, you know?
Right.
You gotta pay the bill.
There's no way out of that paying bill.
Right, right.
So I just want to talk a little bit
about how to simultaneously pay the bill, so to speak,
while working on from this sort of like tsunami of past karma.
Yes.
When you were unconscious,
though I don't want to say you were unconscious as a teen,
but you know, kind of just like,
well, I mean, if I, when you look back
at what you were as a teen versus what you are now,
it's almost as though it might as well have been a past life.
Yes, yes, yes.
Okay, so how do we deal with not confusing our desire
to not pay our karmic tab, so to speak,
and the thing that we actually want?
How do I discern these two things?
That's fascinating.
This question, and I've wrestled with this myself, you know,
how does one pay the karmic debt
while also pursuing aspiration?
Yeah.
You know, because it seems like
these could be two tasks
that pull you in opposite directions.
And now it's interesting,
if you were to speak to somebody who was a traditional Hindu,
he or she would say, well, what is karma?
Karma can be seen as the accumulation of past lives,
and as you're alluding all the events from these past lives.
If you were to speak to somebody who's interested
in, say, the multiple worlds theory
of the physicist Hugh Everett,
and Hugh Everett who was interpreting
the Schrodinger's cat experiment
to mean that we live in multiple worlds.
There are multiple outcomes and possibilities.
There's an infinitude of events going on,
all the time, all around us,
which is why I use the word select rather than manifest,
because I grew to what Hugh Everett was talking about.
And he would say, well, you know,
if you were to take that idea to its ultimate extent,
it's possible that there are an infinitude of wives,
episodes, things occurring all around us.
And Hugh Everett might say, you know,
I agree with the traditional Hindu,
but he and I have a little bit of a different way
of looking at things.
I don't so much see it as past lives
as I do intimate lives.
And what happens in those intimate lives
may be going on all the time.
So your way of paying your karmic debt, so to speak,
might be selecting something different,
might be selecting an approach of nonviolence
if there's been violence in your past,
at least in as much as you can cognitively recall it.
So I always tell people, you know,
this act of selection could be not only your pathway
into entering an experience,
but it also could be a manner
of paying the karmic tab, so to speak.
And choosing a path or attempting to choose a path
of nonviolence to the greatest extent possible
can be extremely important.
And when I say nonviolence,
I'm not just limiting that strictly
to a physical definition,
but what I'm saying is not doing anything
that would violate anybody else's ability
to seek his or her highest sense of self-expression.
Man, that is such a great definition.
And how easy is it to hear nonviolence and think,
okay, no problem,
I'm just not gonna go around punching people.
Right.
You know, you hear something like that,
and you're like, ah, that's easy, nonviolence,
I'm not very violent.
And then I find myself sitting with someone,
and I am giving them an unholy ear beating
about Cog-U Buddhism.
And I'm watching this aggressive recitation of something,
they're clearly not that interested in.
Right, right.
Pouring out of me in this weird,
in a weird, it's like, feels masturbatory,
and it's gross to watch,
and you wanna jump out of your own body
because you're like, watching this like,
this person, they are nice
because they're listening to you.
Yeah.
Yet, if you really, if I look at like the energy
that I'm, that's sort of tied up in the thing I'm saying,
there's aggression.
Aggression, and I will say this,
and I don't say this to be morbidly self-disclosing,
but I say it because I think people will relate to this.
I can track out periods of my life,
especially where I'm standing there
in front of the shaving mirror,
and I'm shaving away,
and my thoughts are just going, going on this repeat loop.
And I'm having these horrible revenge fantasies,
things that I might never act on in a tactile way,
but I'm thinking of people who said or did something
that really pissed me off,
people who did something that I felt was really selfish
or irresponsible, and I look at the clock
and an hour and 15 minutes have passed,
and I've been thinking about this person
while I'm shaving, while I'm showering,
while I'm preparing breakfast,
while I'm commuting, while I'm riding my bike,
whatever it is, and I ask myself,
what am I unleashing in my life?
I mean, medically, you could tell,
if you sort of hooked me up to various sensory equipment
that there's probably bad stuff going on in my body,
but what else is going on?
What else is going on?
And that's a kind of violence.
That's a kind of violence of the psyche,
and I believe it has to have consequence,
and that's been one of the most difficult things
for me to wrap myself around,
because I will, these thoughts can become very revolving
and consume enormous amounts of time and energy.
What's the consequence of that?
I know, I had this realization,
this sort of paranoid realization.
I was thinking about shit talking,
the habit that people have of shit talking.
Heavy, yes, yes.
And like, so there's the past time of shit talking.
I'm a comedian, so many of my friends are comedians,
and my God, it's like tennis for comedians.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was okay, but so I was just sort of thinking though
about this sort of game,
and it's the shit talk game,
where usually you'll bring up some person,
and then within that, there's usually the masquerade
of maybe some kind of legitimate concern.
It's blah, blah, blah, okay?
Right, right.
Did you see what the, you know what I mean?
But really, within it is like,
you've taken this simulated version of a person
and thrown it out on this weird game board,
which is the connection between you and the person talking.
It's an arena, and then you start letting
these judgment lines run out to attack the person
until the person has just been desiccated
by both of you and your friends,
sophisticated and self-frighteous outlook.
So I was thinking about that, and I was thinking,
wait a minute, if there were some metaphysical
slash mycilio-connective mechanism
connecting us to that person,
then you'd be charging that person up
with all your negativity,
and maybe that person, when you got around them,
would act in some way that they might not have
because they've gotten this heavy charge.
Anyway, I had this dream
after I'd been thinking that and getting really paranoid.
And the dream was, I'm sure you get these dreams,
someone comes and tells you something,
and you can never, I can never see who it is.
And the person is saying to me,
it's usually a group of people these days,
but people are saying, listen,
regardless whether that's true or not,
you have created a part of your brain
that is this person, this is a simulated person.
And when you're talking shit about the person,
really what you're doing is cutting
a little tiny simulated part of your brain
and hurting yourself, it doesn't matter, who knows.
Yes, yes.
But why are you like beating up
something that's living in your head?
Yes.
That.
You know, speaking in terms of the practical,
and you were asking me before about what a person can do,
who's in anguish or who's in some desperate situation,
I wanna lay this on everybody and on myself.
And this is really the truth.
And you can use this and you can use this right now.
If you desist from all gossip and tail-bearing
and rumor-spreading, you will find yourself
standing more erect almost instantly.
There is a nobility that gets infused
in the character of the person who resists gossip
and rumors and trash talk that is felt almost immediately.
And it's incredible.
When I was a kid, I had an Orthodox bar mitzvah.
I grew up in a traditional Jewish household
and I went to a synagogue in Queens.
I read about this in the Miracle Club
and there was a rabbi who was in charge
of the Youth Congregation.
And the Youth Congregation was like the worst job
because these were rowdy kids who didn't wanna be cooped up
in some basement of a synagogue
on a sunny Saturday afternoon and we behaved like shit
and we were terrible.
And one day, this rabbi whose name was Larry Ziffer.
He lives in Baltimore today.
I always give dates and names
because I want people to be able to shadow me
and follow me on this shit
so they know I'm not making anything up.
I just spoke to Larry recently.
Larry Ziffer, he was a youth rabbi.
He lives in Baltimore today.
And he was speaking to the congregation of kids one morning.
You know, just kids, young adolescents, rowdy.
And he said, within Judaism, the only sin
that surpasses rumor and tail-bearing is that of murder.
So only by murdering someone
have you done something worse in the eyes of the creator
than if you trash-talk them and you put them down.
And I tell you, that room full of kids was so silent
and so quiet and you could just feel
this pregnant energy in the room
where every kid in that room by dint of his silence
was demonstrating, he knew he was being told
the absolute truth.
And I swear to you, I'll never forget these words.
Larry, who was a slight man, a thin man,
he looked out, but it could have been
as if a 12-foot giant was talking to us.
He said to the group of kids, there's no joke about it.
There's no joke about it.
That gossip and tail-bearing is surpassed only by murder
because when you're killing someone's reputation,
that is tandem out to wiping out the individual.
And I never forgot it.
I was nine years old and I never forgot it.
And the beauty of this is, and thank you, Larry,
is available to everybody.
All you need to do as you're being asked,
desist from rumor, desist from gossip.
People don't wanna do it because it's enjoyable,
it floods us with adrenaline, it makes us feel important.
We like to interject ourselves
into the lives of other people.
We're afraid that we're gonna be boring to people
if we don't gossip and tail-bear.
We won't have the goodies to expose to them
at lunch and everything.
My challenge is just try it.
You'll feel out of sorts for about an hour.
That feeling will pass and you will feel so much better.
It's a universal law, just try it.
Wow, man.
It's almost like conversational alcoholism or something.
Yes, exactly.
Alcoholics feel like they gotta do this shit.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
And you do, I've noticed one thing to do,
which I wouldn't, I mean, I listen to Mitch.
I don't know what, but.
Playing traffic.
The next thing, time, you do find yourself doing this game
of shit talking somebody with someone.
Instead of stopping yourself,
maybe give yourself one more time to do it,
but this time actually really look at the way you feel
when you're doing it.
Yes, yes.
Because it's like, yeah, I guess there is this kind of like,
it's eating something that's like hyper, hyper sweet
or something.
Perfectly put, that's exactly an algae I've used myself.
It's a sugar high and you crash and you feel awful.
You feel disoriented, you feel awful.
Awful, man.
I've had that experience.
So do it and maybe watch how bad you feel.
And then it's like, oh, this is not even a good,
this sucks, but then how about this, Mitch?
So we have the person who has started to wake up
and because they've got stumbled into their place
because of either, like prayers,
they didn't even know they were saying
when they were a kid or prayers
of the action of unconsciousness or whatever.
Not only are they surrounded by kind of like living situation
that they don't really want to be in anymore or ever,
but also they find themselves surrounded by people
who are reflecting that state of consciousness.
So what are they to do when suddenly they realize
it's not really enough for me right now
to just shift my thinking if it also,
I'm going to experience a direct rejection
from everyone around me because they are all devotees
of shit talk land.
They're devotees of violence.
They want to hurt.
They like the low vibe.
They like to scratch the flesh of life
in this way or that way.
And I don't want to do that anymore.
But that being said, I don't want to be a high-roading self
where I just piece of shit and stick my nose up.
And then, you know what I mean?
So how is a person to navigate?
We need friends.
We need our connections.
We need our friends.
What are you to do?
It's very similar again to when an alcoholic sobers up.
Yeah, that's a very important question
because people are very often surrounded by others
by whom they feel intimidated,
by whom they feel put down,
who they feel are negative towards them.
I would say that it is incumbent upon you,
absolutely incumbent upon you
to separate yourself from cruel people.
Do it immediately.
Do it without reservation and burn your bridges behind you.
And it's that simple.
And there are people who are listening to this
who are saying, okay, great, but I can't do that
because it's my boss or it's somebody I depend upon
economically or whose house I live in.
And I recognize that.
And I would say, do it silently.
The point is not to be high and mighty
or not to visit upon somebody your own impressions of them
because they have their own impressions of you.
And the point is to do it silently,
separate it first inwardly and vow to yourself
and write out the vow if necessary and sign it
and carry it with you that you will
at the first possible opportunity
separate from them physically, however long it takes.
And if you want inspiration,
I'm gonna recommend a very unusual source for this.
And I wanna be very clear that I'm not drawing
any kind of analogy because I'm about to invoke
the name of a sacred man.
And that sacred man is Frederick Douglass
who wrote three memoirs, all of them outstanding stories
of human endurance about his life as a slave
and his escape from slavery
and his emergence as a hero of abolitionism.
Frederick Douglass told this story
in all three of his memoirs and it can be read
and profited from on many different levels
in any of his memoirs.
He talked about at the age of 15
standing up to a cruel slave master
and getting into a physical confrontation with this man
whose name was Covey for about two hours
and Covey who was famously known as a breaker of slaves
and was a very sadistic, horrible figure
was unable to get the best of Frederick physically.
And Frederick felt that Covey
was probably somewhat embarrassed by this
and Frederick wrote that at that moment
I experienced an inner revolution
that would never really be able to be rolled back,
that would never be able to be reversed.
I had asserted myself as an independent human being.
I had successfully stood up to this man
and I was still enslaved, I was still enslaved
but I vowed to myself inwardly
that from that moment I would be inwardly free
and I would look for and find the first possible opportunity
to be physically free, which he did a couple of years later
and I would never, never compare the circumstances
of anybody's life in the 21st century
to the circumstances faced by a 15 year old boy
who had been forced into slavery
but the psychological verity of what Frederick Douglass
was writing there is universally applicable
and I think he wanted it to be universally applicable.
He was not able to escape from slavery
at that particular point in his life
but it was a turning point.
He did assert himself independently
and it doesn't have to be a physical assertion
and sometimes it can't be a physical assertion
but pay attention to the part where he vowed inwardly
that he would be forever separate
from this horrible institution that had enslaved him
and at the first possible opportunity
he would be physically separate.
Read Frederick Douglass' memoirs.
Any one of them tells this story.
Any one of them is equally valid.
You can find any one of them online.
You can find it on your phone right now.
Make that inner vow and separate from cruel people.
I love it man, it's really interesting to me
that sometimes though you do have to make an actual,
if you're in an abusive situation,
you've got to get out, stop tricking yourself.
Also a lot of times if you're in an abusive situation,
you will, your first analysis will be
there is no exit, it is, but then if you really think
about it, you'll realize like, well, I mean,
I do have a small key in my pocket.
There's usually some way out.
But in there are other situations
that are different from this
and not so immediately horrible.
Of course, yeah.
What do you have to say about the idea
that when you begin to make this a vow, so to speak,
or connect with this internal freedom,
it really doesn't seem to be necessarily based
on transitory phenomena.
Yeah.
That there seems to be a natural falling away
of the other people in your life.
That's right.
What's right.
Is that similar?
Is that actually a kind of representation
of this thought metaphysics?
In other words, by sort of,
you just started meditating
and maybe you started eating a little better
and maybe you started exercising and you stopped drinking.
And then all of a sudden you look around
and you realize, wait, I have a lot of new friends.
Right, right.
I didn't do anything.
I didn't make some dramatic call.
You know, it just kind of naturally happened.
It's though, weirdly, it's like I'm in
a completely different universe.
Right.
What is that?
Do you really, this concept of, what did you say?
Choosing, picking?
Selecting.
Selecting.
Is this as though there's like a multiverse
and we're like throwing some kind of grappling hook
into some version of ourself?
And very quickly, are we the ones throwing the grappling hook
or is some future version of ourselves
throwing lines out and pulling us in?
What a wonderful question.
You know, it's a lot to bite off,
but I'll try to be very plain about it.
I do believe that our minds have extra physical qualities.
And if somebody who is materialist
was listening to our conversation,
they would probably agree with much of what we're saying.
Yeah, separate from cruel people.
And yeah, you might find yourself in different circumstances,
different relationships,
because psychologically you've done the right thing,
X, Y, and Z, and that's fine.
And I believe all that's true.
But I'm not a materialist,
and I do take an extra physical perspective on existence.
And I write about this in some detail in the book,
and I'm speaking about it in shorthand now,
but I do believe in Hugh Everett's analysis.
I do believe there is a superposition,
a quality, complex to life,
and that there's an infinitude of things happening.
And when we select something
through our emotionalized thoughts,
or our mental pictures, or our perspective,
it's almost like we're imposing a matrix grid
on this infinitude.
And we're locating one thing in time.
And you've raised a magnificent question.
Who's locating?
Is it me, the speaker right now,
or is it Mitch in the future who's doing it?
I've wondered whether we possess one mind,
but it's ever operative.
And things that I'm recollecting right now as my past,
things that happened five minutes ago,
things that happened 30 years ago
that are as real to me as the chair
that I'm seated upon right now,
might be things that are ever changing,
ever operative, ever morphing, ever transitioning,
based on the perspective that I have concentrated on
or selected or chosen in the,
I can't say right now,
but I can say in the experience that I'm having,
an experience that has in itself
a past, a present, a future,
all of which feels as real to me,
apropos of the past,
as the words that I'm uttering to you right now,
but which might be ever changing.
There may be one mind that I experience as linear,
because that's what my sensory equipment permits,
but in fact, I'm selecting from among
an infinitude of things,
which I'm just experiencing as in the present right now,
because that's my capacity.
Yeah, it's like, it's almost as though,
like let's, you know,
you've got all these little creeks
and the creeks turn into rivers
and the rivers just join together
and now you have this one river
and that river turns into the ocean.
Right.
And maybe those little creeks,
they're like, have you, you know,
I've heard, I've heard of a place
where we're really fucking big.
Right.
You know, and this, shut up, you fucking hippie,
I don't know what you're talking about, right?
And maybe the little creeks might say to the other,
you know, we're going to become the same thing eventually
or you know, we're being pulled.
You know, we're being drawn in.
Do you feel this pulling?
Yes.
That's our desire and who knows,
but sometimes I do get this sense,
not only of there being this like perfected self
or a self that is awakened,
that is in some way or another,
God, it sounds so absolutely insane,
but giving me thoughts.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know, people might be listening
and saying to themselves, well, that's great,
but how do I verify any of this?
Yes.
You fucking hippie lunatics, you know?
And I would say this,
and this is one of the things I write about
at the end of The Miracle Club,
there's something I think all of us experience
and have experienced,
which I happen to call a time collapse,
where we have these moments of exquisite awareness in life.
Sometimes they come at the height of joy and ecstasy,
sometimes they come when we're experiencing
this absolute grief that seems to still,
everything in our lives that seems to still,
all the sensory information that's coming to us,
they usually come at some kind of extreme event
or heightened awareness.
We experience time collapses,
where we're having an experience,
not only of deja vu, but of past, present, future,
where everything suddenly seems mixed together
and everything seems to be occurring at once.
And I write about three of these episodes in my own life
at the end of The Miracle Club.
There are others I could have referenced,
but I invite the reader in that case to think of times,
as I'm sure most will,
where he or she has had such experiences,
where everything seems to be occurring at once.
And it feels extraordinarily real.
And you could say, well, that's just an experience.
And it's like, well, sure, it's an experience,
it's testimony, but what else do we have?
I mean, everything that we know about SSRIs, for example,
as a class of drugs, comes from experience,
comes from testimony.
Everything that we know about pain management
comes from experience, comes from testimony.
It's a tool, it's a tool.
So I'd say this can be a kind of metaphysical tool,
if I could put it in those terms.
Watch for or think back on those periods of time collapse
where everything seemed to be happening at once.
Everything seemed to be functioning
with a kind of congruity.
That may be reality.
That may be a wonderful measurement.
That's great, great, great.
Wow, you know what?
This is, we are now, I know you have a busy schedule,
so man, as much as I would love to kidnap you
for probably at least a week to chat with you.
Unfortunately, you have to go, you're doing a talk.
Where is it, the Manly P Hall?
Four o'clock at Manly P Hall School,
the Philosophical Research Society.
Unfortunately, this will have already gone up,
this won't have gone up.
But if everything's happening at once,
you can still avail yourself of it, right?
So yeah, be a good cheer.
I'm very grateful to you for this time.
Thank you, thank you.
And how can people find you?
If you throw my name into Google, Mitch Horowitz,
it'll take you to my website, my email is there.
You can write to me, I answer everybody who writes to me.
You can find me on Twitter at Mitch Horowitz on social media.
I've been writing lately at medium.com,
I'm a contributor there.
A lot of what we've been talking about, I explore there.
And the new book is called The Miracle Club.
Thank you so much, sir.
Thank you, pleasure.
I hope to talk to you again soon.
Likewise.
That was the wonderful Mitch Horowitz, everybody.
All the links you need to get to Mitch
will be at DuncanTrussell.com.
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I'll see y'all real soon.
Got some great episodes coming up.
Until then, Hare Krishna.
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