Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 621: Mitch Horowitz
Episode Date: June 19, 2024Mitch Horowitz, brilliant paranormal author and now TV HOST, re-joins the DTFH! Check your local listings for Mitch's new show, Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction. It debuts June 19, that's tonight! ... You should also read Mitch's latest book, Modern Occultism, available everywhere you get your books! And check out Mitch's other books! More information available at MitchHorowitz.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.
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Hello friends, welcome to the DTFH. I want to thank all of my listeners and all of my watchers.
Those of you who are watching this on YouTube, you have become part of what will be history.
I'm essentially the Oppenheimer of video podcasting. I've split the podcasting atom.
I have blazed a trail into the future. Now if you go on YouTube you will see that there's so many video podcasts whereas there used to be goose eggs, zero, until I started
doing it and I am not proud of myself. I'm a humble man. I follow the lead of
the Silver Angel who comes to me when I haven't had enough sleep or have had too
much speed and the silver angel told me
you gotta go video and I said to the silver angel are you sure if I do that if I start a video
podcast I will be ridiculed I will be banished I will probably be kicked out of my book club and
the silver angel just smiled and I know that smile that smile means that if I don't do what she
says I'll shit my bed. She only comes to me at night. So I did it. And was I
ridiculed? Yes. There was an attempted crucifixion of yours truly in my very own
neighborhood. When the neighbors heard what I was doing they dragged me out of
my house and they tried to crucify me, but because I've been working out
I was able to pull my arms down from those nails
Which is a really interesting thing to think about not to like get into crucifixion territory
But it does seem like if you were crucified it wouldn't be that hard to pull your hands off
But then I guess you just fall forward which would be incredibly painful
The point is I did fall forward but because I have really strong calves from doing a series of hardcore Pilates exercises
with my girlfriends Janine and Lene, I was able to pull my feet completely off of the Crucifix,
do a triple Elden Ring style roll, making me invulnerable to the knives that my neighbors were throwing at me.
And then a leg sweep took them down. They both hit their head really hard.
And they're still in the hospital. I will not press charges. Don't worry, Gary.
And don't worry, Tim. Just please don't try to ambush me anymore and crucify me in my own neighborhood in front of my kids.
Because if you do that, you know, fuck around and find out. Today's guest, Mitch Horowitz, is brilliant. He's written probably
more books than I've read. I would highly recommend The Miracle Club. He's written so many books
on manifestation, on magic, but I know what you're thinking. Some people, when they hear that,
their eyes roll back in their head and they're like I don't want to hear about any manifestation
Bullshit. I'm telling you Mitch his ability to write about the paranormal
To write about fringe topics that a lot of people when they try to write about it
It just comes across as bullshit his ability to apply logic and rational thinking to topics that
normally get completely rejected by the mainstream is a true talent, which is why I'm so happy that
he got his own show on the Discovery Channel, Alien Encounters. If you are listening to this,
if this even comes out on June 19th, check it out. It's Alien
Counters on the Discovery Channel and during this episode we don't just talk
about aliens, of course we do, but we talked about the bigger picture, this
strange reality we all exist in where we live in a situation that at any given
moment the unknown becomes known. And sometimes when
that happens it completely changes everything forever. I mean, we've always
had lightning, I'm guessing, but think of the moment we harnessed the power of
electricity, of fire, of artificial intelligence. It's these moments where
the unknown leaks into the known. The impossible becomes possible. That shock
waves are released through history. Cultural shock waves. It changes the
culture. Physical shock waves. Suddenly we start seeing things we've never seen
before. For example,
for an old man like me, it's a real weird thing to see a self-driving car. No one in
it. Just tootling along by itself as though driven by a ghost. That is still shocking
to me, probably in the same way that it was shocking to see cars when they first started appearing on the scene.
The point is Mitch Horowitz is a master of finding a nice solid balanced point of view
when it comes to stuff that usually is either addressed in a kind of manic irrational way
or in a hardcore skeptical way where it's all refuted.
Mitch is the middle way! So I really hope that you will check out Alien Encounters on the
Discovery Channel. But first, listen to this great episode with Mitch Horowitz. Welcome to you. It's the Duncan Trestle Video Council.
Mitch, welcome back to the DTFH.
Man, I am so thrilled that you have what I always knew you should have, a show.
Alien Encounters.
Tell me all about it.
Thank you so much, man.
I've wanted a show since I've been old enough to talk.
And I've been very public about this in my books,
not to be morbidly disclosing, but because as a seeker,
especially when I'm writing in a practical vein,
you have to deliver bluntness.
You have to deliver frankness, because that's what I'm asking of the reader to be
frank with him or herself, what do you really want? Right? It's
the weirdest thing, Duncan, like, when I was on the set in
Roswell, and we were shooting the show, I got up every goddamn
day, and I felt great. And that usually doesn't happen to me.
Like everybody, days are a roller coaster,
days are a cycle.
And you have to-
When you're shooting something especially,
it's such an intense thing.
Absolutely.
And Gerrida made the observation in his journals
that he found days were cyclical.
Many people find that days are just this kind
of revolving door of different moods, activities, experiences.
Every day was a peak day.
And the weird thing is, I've worked towards a show for,
wow, it must be more than 15 years, more than 15 years.
And like anybody who's done it, I've given to saying recently that development,
screen development is living hell
capped by crushing disappointment.
And everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that.
And I remember once I was telling
Whitley Strieber, author of Communion, who's a friend,
that, and Whitley's worked in Hollywood for decades, he calls it Hollywood. And I said to him,
Whitley, statistically, I could prove that nothing ever gets
made. It's a statistical fact, I don't give a fuck what you see.
And he cracked up because everybody involved knows it
everybody knows it. And yet at the same time, if you didn't go
through all that effort, then the thing that
seems serendipitous would not occur.
The serendipity wouldn't be there without the, call it the advance payment of debt.
And I'm out in LA visiting my partner's brother, and I get a call from a producer Chris Sanders and he is working on developing with with a production company and Discovery Channel the show anyway long story short the thing came together in weeks you after 14 ball busting effort and tears and you know sitting in public parks saying, I'm a failure. It happened and I loved it.
And I wouldn't...
I mean, that never happens.
I've never heard of that happening.
I don't know any stories of that happening.
It's like the...
What you're talking about, I've heard described as development hell.
And all of us know people who have brilliant ideas and
are brilliant people. And they sell the idea to a network and they get a script deal. And
then in the midst of writing the script, whoever decided that they were going to squeeze the
trigger on the script deal inevitably leaves. And so now a new guy comes in, he studies
what they have. He wants to do budget cuts.
He didn't get the script deal, he doesn't like it and also he wants to like do his things
his way.
And so your script that you just worked on for not just like this six months or whatever
that it was in production, but probably a year of development in your own mind and working
on it and the pitch meetings you took.
Yeah, man, that's brutal.
That's incredible.
So for you somehow, you just, in a couple of weeks,
got a TV show.
Well, dig this.
I read something in one of these self-help books
from the 1950s that always stayed with me.
I must've read this 10 years ago.
There's a book from the 1950s that always stayed with me. I must have read this 10 years ago. There's a book from the 50s called
How I Took Myself from a Failure to a Success in Selling
by a guy named Frank Betker.
Frank Betker.
So Frank was a lifelong salesman.
And he said, there is a natural law
that every salesman knows.
And that is that you make 100 phone calls,
and you get nowhere.
And then seemingly out of the blue
comes that one phone call that makes your season.
But that one phone call wouldn't have come
had you not made the other 100.
That seemed like a waste of time.
And he says, every salesperson can tell you this is true,
and none of us know why.
And I thought, I know that that's correct.
In his own way, and I hate to sound like I'm glibly matching up radically different figures,
but in his own way, G.I.
Gurjev made the exact same observation.
He said there is something lawful about unflinching persistence.
And he meant it in the most literal sense. Now, I would also argue that there are
countervailing measures.
There are accidents.
There are wars.
There are disasters.
There are things that interrupt a life.
But absent that, I do believe in this paradigm
that Gurjeev described,
and I believe in Frank's observation.
I know it's true.
And I know that these serendipitous events
wouldn't have occurred
had I not been screaming into a pillow for 14 years you know trying it's
not a waste of time you know and you know when you're doing it it's in your
best days you know it's not a waste of time I mean it feels right like even
though what you're doing doesn't in that moment maybe produce the results you're hoping. If you just observe the feeling
state of making the thing, regardless of whatever the world is telling you, for some reason that
feels right. You know this is what I'm supposed to be doing and you do it. Isn't that weird? It can
make you feel crazy though because people around you will look at you and think,
my God, you're failing.
This is not going to work.
Yeah.
Because they love you.
They really do.
It's a loving thing.
They don't realize that they're potentially wrecking your future with their fear.
But you know, you can feel nuts.
And I have, you know, I'm a big advocate of various kinds of new thought mind metaphysics
and I feel it's really important that people be frank with themselves about their aim.
Nothing perfumed and nothing that you have to share with anybody else but be super frank.
And I've had instances, I could probably pull out notebooks on this bookshelf behind me
where I wrote down, I've failed. My aim has failed.
I need to go get a new one, figure out what you want to do, become a professional chess
player or whatever.
But this has failed.
And there were such days.
And I always found that when a wish is authentic, it reasserts its pull on you.
It's like you have no right to relinquish it.
It just keeps coming back in.
Right.
Like the tide, no matter what you do.
And if that happens, you're lucky. You may suffer, but you're going to get somewhere.
Yeah. That's my prediction at least. Well, I mean, so this show, I want to reiterate,
the first time I met you, I thought, man, he needs to be the host of a show. I would love to watch that. But this show, I think is so important right now.
Because obviously, there have been many, many shows about aliens, many, many shows about UFOs.
But for maybe the first time in history, now, it doesn't seem like quackery in the way they used to.
We have all the major news networks.
We have the New York Times.
We have countless respected sources saying over and over and over again, that something is being observed that fits the model that we all have for UFOs.
Or at the very least, the same kind of technology we thought UFOs would use. So I have yet to watch
your show. But how much did you get into the modern phenomena that has been, was reported so much,
and then it kind of seems like it's been memory-hold?
Well, I hope there's new stuff coming.
I think, I think we're getting better evidence.
I think, I think we might be
on the threshold of material evidence.
We talk about a fragment of metal on the show
that is, I think, a reasonable piece of evidence
to be argued over.
One of the things I noticed and that I really grooved to
as we were doing the show is that it occurred to me,
seeking people across centuries
have all been having the same conversation about encounters
with unknown intelligences, unknown phenomena, and we're all just using the vocabulary that
belongs to our generation.
So today, somebody would say, a UFO, a UAP, an alien, a tall gray.
150 years ago, somebody might have said spirit, polgeist or gobbled for that matter. And everybody
changes their language to get down with whatever is most
ready made and familiar at their particular cultural moment. And
I was really struck listening to some of these people how they
might describe an encounter with a strange being or strange lights in the sky that would have been radically different
150 years ago, but for the fact that it's describing the same circumstances.
Right.
And it heightened my hunch that a lot of what we are experiencing today in UAP phenomena
Especially like the best documented stuff that really stands up to parsing that really stands up to the checkboxes
That you use when you look for mundane explanations. Yeah, it could be it could be
What might be called interdimensional phenomena or different intersections of time into which we gain peaks every now and then.
And maybe they gain peaks in us.
And maybe they don't wanna be here at all.
Maybe there isn't disturbed running into us
as we are running into them, everybody else.
What do the aliens want and so forth?
They may wanna get the fuck out of here.
As I would want to perhaps.
You mean like shipwrecked?
Wait, you mean like one of the theories out there
is these things are actually shipwrecked? Wait, you mean like one of the theories out there is these things are actually shipwrecked?
I've never heard that before.
That is so wild.
It's possible.
You know, we have these encounters.
People describe a near-death experience sometimes.
And again, near-death experience, alien abduction, these may be the same conversation.
A lot of experiences feel there's a vital,
in fact, inseparable and a connection
between the question of after death survival
and UFO experiences.
You know, some people describe near death experiences
as very positive.
They're happy to be where they are.
Other people describe it as nightmarish as hell,
but they wanna get the hell out of there.
You know, they're not happy.
And it may be that if we have interdimensional counterparts know, they're not happy. And it may be that if if we have interdimensional
counterparts, maybe they're not happy either. Maybe they wish we would stay in our own fucking
neighborhoods. Wow. Okay, so let me stop you there. That is something Terrence McKenna talked about.
He is he had some wonderful theory about this. But the essence of the thing is
wonderful theory about this, but the essence of the thing is inter-dimensionally or whatever the substrate of reality these these intelligences are in, they really didn't give a shit about us
like any more than we cared about flea, what we care about fleas, less than we care about fleas,
but we figured out to split the atom and that energy release was powerful enough to
cross over into their dimension.
And so it's like, Joe and I talk about this sometimes, the horror that would sweep over
the planet if monkeys figured out how to start fires.
Like oh no, oh no, what are we going to do? Like, what do you do if they just figure it out?
Flint, rocks, whatever it is.
Like, their fires would rage through India.
Fires would rage anywhere there's monkeys.
So, yeah, that was McKenna's theory that we are, maybe once you approach some technological
peak where your technology begins to disrupt alternate timelines
or realities or whatever,
that is where the Fermi paradox kicks in.
Because these things are just like,
they send in the exterminator.
And what's so interesting,
and I miss McKenna so much on the contemporary scene.
The three voices I personally miss most on our scene
are McKenna, the psychiatrist John Mack,
and the philosopher Jacob Needleman.
To get those three together in a room
talking about the UAP question, that's my dream team.
You know, I mean, there are living members of my dream team,
but those are the three that have reported. I want to thank Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH.
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to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you Squarespace. It sounds so far out to people when you say, hey, these flying saucers may be interdimensional,
as if we're going even further out, you know, to the fringe or to the margins.
But in fact, we as a human community have better developed models just conceptions of reality not reality itself
But better developed models for inter dimensionality than we do for extraterrestrial
Huh big problem with the ET thesis is how to span galactic distances
It's it's so mind-blowing we can barely conceive of the vastness of these distances and there are theories
You know we hear about cosmic wormholes.
Maybe you introduce some exotic piece of matter into the locale, and you're able to create
a black hole and travel through it.
But models like string theory, Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum physics
are really more finely developed.
And I would say without getting into too much technical data,
ever since the 1950s, the extrapolations
that come out of quantum mechanics
from people like Erwin Schrödinger and Everett
and other observers, not quite immediate to that era,
demand as a logical necessity, the existence of a multi-dimensional,
multitudinous reality.
It's almost a logical necessity if we're going to accept quantum
data in which basically, on a particulate level,
observation localizes.
What are our senses?
What are our five senses other than the ends of measurement?
We measure perspective, smell, touch, taste. localizes what our senses what our what are our five senses
rather than the measurement we measure perspective smell touch
taste and so on we get it in life we have a sense of of
linear time it could be which is which we know since Einstein
in fact is illusory and bendable.
What if in using these imperfect sensory objects in our atmosphere,
in our neighborhood of awareness,
actually localizes certain things,
maybe temporarily, maybe more than temporarily.
And we are experiencing as an empirical constant,
the many worlds phenomena of which we are only capable of perceiving one
or it would drive us mad.
We just don't have the, the psychical power to do it.
And I started to wonder about this
over the past several years,
as I was going deep down the rabbit hole
into parapsychology and ESP research,
everyone who takes ESP research seriously
and people ought to complain that we need a theory.
There's not a theory. Maybe, maybe the many worlds theory is our theory of ESP, is our theory of UAP phenomena,
is our theory of UFOs. Maybe that's what's going on. We get these links.
The evidence just keeps getting better, and it's replicable, and it's confirmed that it's parsed and it won't go away. Maybe that's our theory. It could be that is more practical than the
intergalactic thesis, although it doesn't rule out the intergalactic thesis. There may be a lot
of things happening in our neighborhoods, so to speak. I think it's important to recognize
that just because now suddenly we're having this new data set related to
the tic tacs, the UAPs, that that whether or not that turns out to be real, it does
nothing to discount all of the stories and experiences that have gone before.
And I think that's really important because it feels like the UFO community has gotten really has put a lot of their chips on the table with this UAP thing. And that in doing so, it's not like they're refuting previous encounters, alien abductions, all of the things that have been studied. But in that, it creates
a sort of tent pole where if it does turn out that what we're looking at is like Oppenheimer
II, that they figured out some new physics or some new propulsion mechanism, and that
they've been testing a new weapon of war, which would really explain a lot. Why do they
show up around military bases? Why
do they turn off nuclear missiles? These are all in the interest of the military industrial
complex. And if I'm testing some new technology, obviously, I'm not going to test it on enemies.
I'm going to test it on my own tech to see, can they be detected? And even culturally study what is happening
and then even signal jam the entire conversation
by seeding out there in the world that it could be UFOs.
When in fact, we're getting ready for World War III
and praying that Putin does something
so that we can demonstrate to the world,
oh, we have a new boot to put on your
neck in the form of these things. So I think to me, it's important to understand this thing your
show is about. And I started off talking about it because I love that the conversation has entered
conversation has entered a gen pop. I love that like Sean Hannity is talking about UFOs. Like this is an acid heads paradise. But also I think we've got to like remember that these
encounters have been happening for all of recorded history and that whatever these UIPs
are, it isn't necessarily when we find out, oh,
it's nothing, it was whatever, doesn't mean anything. There's so many events and examples
that have happened. Now, tell me about this piece of metal that you're talking about.
What metal, what is it?
Okay, dig this. This was brought onto the show by one of my very favorite guests,
a man named Frank Kimbler, who is a geologist
and a professor of Earth science at the New England...
I'm sorry, at the New Mexico Military Institute,
an Army college.
And Frank combed over the Roswell, the alleged Roswell crash site, and those
posited events would have taken place 75 years ago plus.
Frank maintained that there are particular, particulate fragments occupying a debris
field at the crash site. And he painstakingly combed through the debris field
and found a few fragments of aluminum
that demonstrate marks of manufacturing,
that demonstrate marks of having been blown apart in an explosion,
some kind of combustion explosion.
But subject to chemical analysis,
which we did as part of the show,
contracting outside experts in labs,
these bits of aluminum are pure aluminum.
They're not compound aluminum.
Aluminum as a metal is too unstable to be used in aeronautics or
manufacturing as we understand it. We do not use pure aluminum. We use compound aluminum
to add stability to it. Frank contends, look, if I found this at an alleged crash site, if it shows signs of manufacturing and
a combustion explosion, and if according to current chemical analysis, it's not usable
for manufacturing, what the hell is it? And I consider it a legitimate piece of evidence
worth debating, considering, and arguing over that was located at the alleged Roswell
crash site by a trained geologist and earth scientist.
I am excited by it, because people say,
where's the physical evidence?
Where's the ray gun?
Where's the helmet?
Michael, what's his name, the media astronomer,
DeGraff know, he jokes,
abductees should bring back an ashtray.
Ha ha ha.
Gets me every time.
We do have physical evidence that can be debated.
And Frank brought forth a piece of that physical evidence.
There is other such evidence,
none of it conclusive, but worthy stuff that's empirical
that you can hold in your hand.
I held it in my hand.
And let me tell you, when I held it in my hand, I felt chills.
I felt excited as hell.
Yeah.
What about, did you test it for any radiation?
Did you test it for any age testing or anything?
It doesn't matter, I guess, with pure aluminum.
It didn't show up.
I don't believe it showed up any radiation.
And I don't think there was any real age testing.
I mean, it was manufactured stuff.
So it wouldn't be something that would necessarily
date back to antiquity.
He was dating it contemporaneous to the alleged crash.
OK, well, let's just, honestly, what I'm about to say,
if I heard this on a show, I would immediately turn it off. Let's talk about aluminum
But it is like people I didn't know this but I
Wish I could remember the book I was reading but it was using the example of how
Once we figure out a synthesize something, its value quite often drops exponentially because
aluminum, Napoleon used to serve as guests on aluminum plates, his most revered guests.
It was more valuable than gold. It was that hard to find pure aluminum. Now we wrap our hamburgers in it. No one gives a shit about it. But so to find
in Roswell actual aluminum, non-manufactured aluminum, is fucking nuts, I think. I don't
know if aluminum naturally occurs in Roswell, but I doubt it because there'd be aluminum
mines out there. So that is crazy that he found that. And
so just so everyone out there knows, like the aluminum that you have is not the aluminum
they found. I don't even know how, were there aluminum mines back then? Where does it even come
from? Well, it can be mined from the earth, but it has to be compounded with other metals in order
to be stable. Otherwise, even your average aluminum foil,
we just don't use pure aluminum for manufacturing,
but this showed the marks of manufacturing.
Let me ask you this, Mitch.
You're not, I mean, maybe you are allowed to say this,
but sometimes when I like, I know that this sounds nuts.
I'm allowed to be nuts.
Sometimes people will come to a show
and give me a gift and I will not take it home
because I get a weird vibe off of it.
I'm like, man, I don't know what this is,
but and quite often those gifts do have like sigils on them.
And because of my sigil illiteracy, I'm like, look,
I don't have time to pull out the lesser key of Solomon
and find out what the fuck this sigil represents. But even if I did know, I don't have time to pull out the lesser key of Solomon and find out what the fuck this sigil represents.
But even if I did know, I don't think I want to take it home.
I got kids.
Did you get a vibe from that piece of metal or any sense of like something mystical or,
and even if it was just your own subjective projection, did you get any weird vibe?
Well, I wouldn't say that I got a vibe.
I don't know, how do you separate emotion,
mental, physical, I guess it all becomes one.
I haven't felt that excited and that thrilled
with touching a tactile non-living object
since I was visiting ruins in ancient Egypt,
Wow.
hitting the Qabaliya.
So cool, man.
I had a chance to lay hands on an incredibly well preserved bass relief of a bull in a
chamber deep below the Valley of Kings.
So it was preserved You know and as I've written I felt I can only
call it the sensation of electricity going through me
when I held this in my hand I felt that same momentous sense
that somebody might feel upon laying eyes on the Statue of
Liberty for the first time you know making yeah across the
Atlantic. I was thrilled I was thrilled and I think Frank is
a good guy.
He's an enthusiastic guy like me,
but he's an intellectually serious guy.
He's trained.
He's careful.
And I think he has brought us a piece of evidence that really
warrants scrutiny.
There was another person who presented physical evidence
on the show.
And I'm excited about this because the public
wants physical stuff.
Yeah.
A mom, a math instructor, and an athlete from Utah
named Jessica Blunt.
And several years ago, Jessica had the experience of UFO,
what she identifies as UFO flybys.
And she later experienced seizures, bodily lacerations,
and the appearance of apparent radiation burns on her body.
She sent us medical records that we verified.
Wow.
I was thrilled by this because shortly before meeting her,
I read a recently declassified 2010 report
from the Defense Intelligence Agency,
and I'm amazed this hasn't gotten more
mainstream media coverage,
because it is a valid and verifiable report
that likewise reported radiation burns
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When Dyson says, ha ha, where's your ashtray?
Well, here's my fucking ashtray.
Tyson, Tyson, not Dyson.
Let me tell you, okay, I've come around with Neil deGrasse Tyson because I, like all people
like me, went through the phase of really disliking him and being annoyed by him.
And I realized what purpose he serves in our culture.
He serves the same purpose my wife serves in my marriage,
which is I will go off the fucking rails, Mitch.
Like I will go down the wrong rabbit hole.
And during the pandemic, I seriously thought
we might, a meteor might hit the earth.
And it was insane, like completely illogical.
And then my wife, in the best way possible,
she said, Duncan, a lot of things might happen,
but it's not gonna be a meteor.
Like, you don't have to worry.
And it felt so good.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, what I like about him
is he's sort of like, when I get too far off the rails,
I just have to listen to his articulation of something.
And even though I still view it as some kind of elitist,
fascist mind control that has the
potential of dissuading people from exploring science. And I don't think that's his intent.
But somewhere in there, something trickles through that makes you feel like unless you've got funding to go to school for decades, you aren't going to even be in the
class of people who can tell what is real from what is false. I don't think that's his intent.
He feels benevolent, but definitely he has that old school scientific, what's it, Kant? Is it fucking Kant? Is that what is that the roots of
this shit? Which is like, we're going to completely invalidate anything that you're saying. And I,
look, I get it's like, he's a power lifter. These, these four poor motherfuckers, they can't do what we're doing. I can't ask, he can't ask a friend,
did the medal feel magical to you?
He, you know what I mean?
He'll be fucking made fun of forever.
So let me ask you this.
I wanna ask you a question apropos of your meteor fears
that your wife dispelled.
It seems to me that when crazy shit goes down,
it's always unexpected. The Titanic, 9-11, the events that triggered the latest war in the Middle East, it's always
unexpected.
Like, holy fuck, who the fuck saw that coming?
And part of the argument that I have with some of the conspiracy people, and I'm part of the argument that I have
with some of the conspiracy people.
And I'm trying to be more constructive towards them
because I think I've been belligerent in the past.
And I told my younger colleagues and then I said,
I said, you know, listen, dude,
I'm gonna try to be more constructive.
You know, I said, I've been too belligerent.
And he said, yeah, that's cause you're stupid. And I said, well, when a man tries to improve himself,
I don't know that calling him stupid
is quite the most conventional encouragement
that we're looking for.
But right, we're going to try here.
But here's the thing.
Some of the conspiracy folk point out to me,
like, 9-11 couldn't have happened this way.
The moon landing couldn't have happened this way.
And my counter to them is, I don't have the have happened this way. The moon landing couldn't have happened this way.
And my counter to them is,
I don't have the specialized knowledge to argue with you,
but I do know that when unprecedented things happen,
it's always incredible.
It's always unexpected.
We don't know what it's like
when a big iron ship hits an iceberg
until a big iron ship hits an iceberg.
We don't know what adjacent explosions might
be like when airplanes hit buildings,
because that doesn't happen.
This is the first fucking time it happened.
So the old rules, the rules haven't been written.
We're learning the rules as we go along,
because this shit is so unexpected.
That's right.
The old rules don't apply.
So that's a generalist approach that I sometimes.
Yes.
Listen, this is, I was just thinking this, like I told you before we started recording,
we're reading this great book called Psychonauts.
I'm going to have them on the show soon.
Great book out there, guys.
You should look it up.
It's a study of sort of the history of drug use in the United States. We're all pretty familiar with
like post 60s drug use. But my God, holy shit, in the 1800s, people were so high-mitch. And they were
scientists and respected. Like these were people who went on to like chair departments at famous universities
who are putting themselves in boxes filled with nitrous oxide for as long as they could.
Actually, who? William James.
William James. Yeah, absolutely. William James was among them. And like, I think even though we all
know Freud was in to blow,, like I don't think anybody understood
what that meant because back then, because this was all new, cocaine was being heralded as this
miracle drug to fight against, they have a great word for it, neurothesanol or something like too
much. Neuristenia, yeah. Neuristenia, depression. And they were saying neuristenia is because like
things are moving too fast
People are getting depressed
Cocaine well water it's available everywhere now with
That's the funniest thing they're like this shit is crazy
Stuff is too intense to get some blow that that that's what they were doing but
and the thing where I really started feeling better as someone who loves psychoactive substances
is that so many years of my life, I had no idea that respected scientists, intellectuals,
philosophers, poets were just getting blasted and saying, this is the, this is helping me do what I do. A famous surgeon
was talking about how he didn't think he could have innovated some of the rules we still have
today for surgery, if not for cocaine. So I'm not a fan of cocaine, I get depressed on it, but still my point is to get to what you just said.
The scientific mind in those days was incredibly open to all kinds of weird shit.
The subjective experience was not discounted as much as it is today, it seems like.
And the experiences that people are having on these substances, nitrous, whatever, are
so interwoven with the zeitgeist that they were living in.
The visions they were having were interwoven with the zeitgeist.
And so it makes me think of time as this kind of river. And we, you know,
like you said earlier, Einstein proved that space bends. People doubted him about that. They had to
wait for an eclipse to prove that like light was... So space is bending, warping, weaving,
changing all the time. This is where quantum physics pops in
and upsets Newtonian physics. So now you have what you're saying, not just the possibility
for a Titanic to slam into iceberg, plane to slam into building, but the possibility of this stuff
that we're all part of getting so warped that physics itself, everything that we understood prior to now,
completely changes. The low level way people talk about it is the Mandala effect. You know, like
history is actually changing, that we're in a warping, flowing, continuous river of creation
that doesn't, it won't be domesticated. And even if you've made predictions, and even if you have
rep, what do they call it, if you can reproduce your experiments, at some point you might not be
able to anymore. And that's the reality. That's true. I mean
Then I like is it likely no, but just the fact that that possibility exists
Yes, everything could change immediately in a second like in a way that we have never ever
predicted or have any precedent for in history. That's thrilling. This episode of the DTFH is supported by Better Help.
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That's thrilling.
It is absolutely thrilling.
And where to begin?
One of my intellectual heroes, as you know,
is the ESP researcher J.B. Rhine.
He started our psychology lab at Duke in the 1930s.
And J.B. was asked by an interviewer,
is ESP real?
And he said, I would put it this way.
ESP occurs.
It occurs. And he was very interested in replication, because he was a mainstream scientist. real and he said I would put it this way ESP occurs it occurs
and he was very interested in replication because he was a
mainstream scientist statistician that was his job.
But it's no less real for not being replicable you know as
as angle famously wrote if it's real it's rational if it's real
it's rational where's the's real, it's rational. Where's the empiricism?
And we have so much empiricism that we almost
don't know what to do with it.
So we deny it.
Like you were talking about Einstein
and the proving of Einstein's theories.
In our very own era, astronauts, although they're
moving nowhere near the velocity of light speed,
actually demonstrate minute but measurable reductions in the aging process.
It's as real as it gets. It's classical Einstein, and he wasn't kidding. He wasn't kidding.
And apropos of what you were saying about the Mandala effect, it's really not much different
from the many worlds theory that was pioneered in the 1950s to understand quantum
physics.
Right.
It could be, it could be that at every instant, including this one right now, we are completely
reimagining who we are, what we are, past, present, so-called future.
If you ask me, Mitch, where are you from?
I'd say, well, I'm from Queens and my father did this and my mother did this and then we
moved and we had a dog.
It's all true, but it may be something that's true instant at this particular instant
And I know that's real for not being so in the next instant. We're reimagining things constantly, but we
Perceive in singularity because we can't deal with life
Otherwise, we five sensory beings are built to think
in a linear orderly way.
Death is real.
I'm only gonna say these words once.
I know exactly what my past was.
And it seems as real to us as in fact time does.
But for the fact that we know time bends.
Time is, the arity is not absolute.
This, so this, this is, I love this topic so much.
And to me, though I don't really care for the book,
I respect the book, The Denial of Death.
It seems to me like a quick fix.
It's, and it's sort of simplifying humanity in a way.
You can't just pin everything on people being afraid of death, but the premise being And it's sort of simplifying humanity in a way.
You can't just pin everything on people being afraid of death, but the premise being
like a lot of neurosis, a lot of people freaking out.
It's just all because we are just at the precipice
of an unknown that is death.
And so people are freaking out.
Well, I think it's more to the point.
It's the denial of impermanence. This is what you're talking about.
It's the denial of the fact that no matter what, the sum total of all human wisdom,
intelligence, discovery exists in a biocomputer that is incredibly fallible and that because of this we all are
agreeing on some reality and that's the game that we all play. This is the year,
this is the our history, this is good, this is bad, and we all kind of agree on
that. That's default reality. But this is all a shared agreement
that is being stored on hard drives
that are not just fallible,
but susceptible to infiltration.
And that is something that's really scary
when you consider the possibility that if,
this is a bio computer, very complex, beautiful,
incredible thing, nothing quite like it.
But it can we already know it can be hacked.
Watch late night TV, watch any commercial.
You're getting hacked by makeup companies, fast food companies.
All of them have psychologists that are know exactly
how to like plant shit into your mind.
It's going to make you want an Oreo in a couple of weeks.
That's that that, and that, that, um, form of manipulation is relatively brand new. But
whoa, man, with neural lace, with a, with a real reality that we're all going to be connected to
machines, suddenly a whole new potential emerges, which is to your point, which is that theoretically, human memory
itself could just be transferred.
Whole new life, whole new idea of history.
We know China is working on these weapons, man.
Hardcore mind control weapons.
Just imagine that.
The X, fill it in with however this would happen. You're a soldier, you're fighting. And
suddenly, you realize, wait, why am I fighting my comrades? I'm
part of the CCP. You know what I mean? Because they've just
replaced your entire memory banks with like you've lived in
China your whole life. I mean, whoa, what a powerful weapon.
So I'm sorry, I'm rambling a little too much, but
the point is that reality is not as stable as most people seem to want it to be.
I mean, as McKenna said, every half the planet
at any given moment is in like a deep hallucinatory episode
called sleep.
I mean, that is so trippy.
Whenever the fucking planet turns away from the sun,
we fucking like start yawning and like collapse
and have insane hallucinations that feel real.
And so just that alone should, I think, make you feel a little suspicious of whatever you're
experiencing as waking life. Maybe that isn't quite as real as we think either.
Absolutely. And I mentioned Gurdjieff earlier. Gurdjieff's main contention is that humanity
is asleep. And he meant it in the most literal sense, not as a metaphor, not as some sort
of a pretty way of describing our own awareness. But he well sure you're doing stuff when you sleep, you know you're you
you eat you you might even get up and go to the bathroom is
still be in a sleepwalking state. But we are so hypnotized
and so without understanding of our own nature that we are in
fact asleep. A Jacob Needleman
told me this story. He wrote about it in one of his books, a book called The Indestructible Question.
During the Second World War,
there was an Austrian military doctor
who was experimenting on foot soldiers with hypnosis.
And one foot soldier, young man, early 20s,
probably like a corporal or something,
was subject to hypnosis. And the hypnotist said to him, and one foot soldier, young man, early 20s, probably like a corporal or something,
was subject to hypnosis.
And the hypnotist said to him,
I'm gonna bring you out of hypnosis
and in about 15 minutes, I'm gonna clap my hands.
And when I clap my hands,
after you've come to your normal state,
you're gonna raise your left leg.
So he did it, brought the guy to his normal state,
clapped his hands, and the guy raised his left leg. And the did it brought the guy to his normal state clapped his hands and the guy raised his left leg and the
hipness to said to him why did you just now raise your left
leg and the guy said well. I had an it sure that there was
something under my foot above a he rationalized his
traumatized behavior and that's us that's it you know anxiety
and we project backwards why do it you anxiety and we project
backwards why do I feel anxiety well because my mother didn't
you know by me that you know, gun be you know doll I why did I
just you know exploded somebody why am I eating when I'm not
hungry. Well, it's because because because because we are
automatized beings with no more
selectivity in our lives
than a pull string doll who repeats, say 20 different phrases.
That's the horror of our lives,
but it's not without possibility.
It's not without possibility.
That's why I crack up whenever the latest
Ted Talk neurologist is explaining,
you have no free will, free will is an illusion.
Right, because you're studying the box.
But there are beings, and sometimes we're
among them, who exit from the box,
even if only temporarily.
And that exiting, as you were saying earlier,
is no less real, even if it can't be repeated.
That's right.
And how do you even quantify that?
That's the problem is like, you know, the quantification,
the entire methodology that has given us
all of the incredible advancements that we have
is built on the backs of people who had visions,
built on the backs of people who had inspirations
while they dreamed, built on the backs of people
who are on so much pharmaceutical cocaine.
And you know, like this is coming.
So it's like these technological icebergs, I guess you could say, are poking up into
default reality.
Underneath, they're just floating in drugs, delirium, mania, sleeplessness, religious fundamentalism, visions from God.
But we can't talk about that. We talk about the quantifiable thing. We can't talk about
the fact that these things are emerging from human consciousness that has quite often been.
Look at Newton. He had mercury in his hair.
He was so out of it.
He's playing with mercury, studying the temple of Solomon.
It's like-
That's right.
Translated in the Emerald Tablet.
First English translation came from Newton, actually.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I think that's why people like us
do get a little like sand in our diaper
about Neil deGrasse Tyson, because he's like giving this impression that scientists are
these sort of rational gentlemen who like stand up for the truth when their entire lineage
is maniacs who are testing on themselves.
That's the other thing like that.
They would quite often just be like,
let's see what happens if I inject dog cum into my body.
Hold on one second, Mitch.
I gotta switch cameras.
So, you know, I want to comment on like two different things.
You had mentioned Emil Durkheim's denial of death.
And we look at figures like Durkheim and maybe Eric Fromm,
who wrote the famous book, Escape from Freedom,
about the psychological triggers of fascism.
Other people at that time, they were,
they were people of great humanity,
and they believed in and they wanted a better,
more rationally just organized human polity.
They were, they were democratic socialists, they were Freudians, they were a better, more rationally just, organized human polity.
They were Democratic socialists.
They were Freudians. They were humanists.
They were men of science.
They gave a shit about humanity.
But reading them today feels to us almost too elementary,
like, oh, my God, you know, you're gonna tell me
that fascism is because I want a big daddy?
Well, yeah, I believe that. I understand that.
But authoritarian and fascist politics occur in so many different settings
at so many different times, including in societies and households
where people already have a big daddy.
And I don't know that it holds up.
And our fear of death, well, of course, no argument there.
But we read these guys today, and it sounds elementary to us.
And they needed to take greater account of the ineffable.
And that's the flaw of modernist letters.
Modernist letters, for whatever reason, decided that all the antecedents to life need to be
studied, parsed, considered, but none of them are going to be extra physical.
None of them are going to be metaphysical.
If you're a Freudian, you got trauma.
If you're a Marxist, you got economics.
If you're into, you know, Einstein and the new metaphysics,
you got time space.
Let me tell you about store germ theory.
William James, self-image.
All these rational antecedents,
and they're all good and worthwhile
in terms of understanding our world.
But these guys almost by cultural dent
excluded the metaphysical, which is why their books today,
some of them at least, I'll exclude Wilhelm Reich,
why those books today that came out very loosely
out of the Frankfurt School seemed to us
like tepid old tea that we don't wanna drink anymore
because they don't take enough into account.
And I think my issue with Neil deGrasse Tyson is that it may
be just personality.
I don't like his smirk.
You know, we have different styles.
But remember, when Jacob Needleman was alive, and I
guess I'm just thinking about him a lot today, this is a guy
who dedicated his life
to studying esoteric symbolism,
the inner meaning of religions.
And I said to Jerry one day,
what is the meaning of the numbers
of loaves and fishes in the gospels?
And he said, I don't know.
And I'd like to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson
say that one day publicly, I don't know.
That's what he was saying. Ah, They're not allowed. Well, I mean, it's also, you know, it's a he's an entertainer.
Like, that's the other thing.
Like, you know, there's like so many scientists no one will ever know who don't watch who
knows what the fuck they do.
You know, like they're hyper specialists studying like the perpiscis of some, you know, swamp
thing that no one will give a fuck about. they're hyper specialists studying like the perbiscous of some, you know, swamp thing
that no one will give a fuck about, but that's their whole life's work. And there's something
in it that's cool, but I agree with you, man. And I think that the, to me, where the danger
in anesthetizing or I'm sorry sanitizing science is that it produces a version of scientists that doesn't seem to match the greatest scientists and that's the
problem. So people begin to doubt themselves when they're having these
intuitions to do bizarre studies or try weird things or
think about things in an insane way because of that smirk. It's not Neil deGrasse Tyson's fault.
He's trying to get everyone to calm down. He's the dude in the car trying to get us to the concert
and we got too high. And he's like, guys, I know how to get there. And I think he's benevolent.
But if you're watching that and you are some promising young
philosopher scientist, and you think because you've like
eaten hash and saw some vision of a new way of doing
something, that almost invalidates it.
You're not going to even try because you are a
blasphemer. This isn't how science is done. Science is done in this clean, beautiful way.
But they were all maniacs, crazier than maybe even comedians. Like, do you know how insane you have
to be to inject yourself with animal jizz? Like, you know, that's a crazy, crazy thing.
And did it work?
No, it didn't.
And now we know don't inject yourself.
Now we know.
But you have to be crazy enough to be like,
you know what, it's worth a shot.
Honey, get the dog.
I wanna see if this is gonna give me more energy.
But yes, I agree with you, man.
And I love your work because the challenging aspect
of this conversation is if you veer too much
into the ineffable, if you veer too much
into the metaphysical minus the reproducibility,
the quantification, then no one wants to hear it.
It's the translators like you, I think, that do the world a really great service,
because we all need the reminder that, hey, just because this scientist or that
scientist raises his eyebrow at ESP, UFOs, whatever it may be, that doesn't,
it's not a very scientific thing to just believe it's not true. You need to do
your... You need to dive in. You need to trust your instincts, right? And so to convey that to
people in the way that you do in a very astute way that is really rooted in... I can't even
imagine how many books you've read, my friend, but it's really
rooted in like, logic. I love it, man. And I must ask, do you have a little bit more
time?
I do.
Okay. Having, did you have any moments in the course of this show where where you begin you began to do a Neil
deGrasse Tyson smirk. Did you have any cynical moments like
when I did a show with Rogan, where we it wasn't aliens was
everything weird. And somewhere along the way, I think we both
started feeling like a little deflated. You know what I mean? Because of our optimism, we wanted proof, we wanted the thing. And something
about being so naive, maybe that we thought that we would find
it. And then, you know, realizing that some of the people
we were talking to, definitely whatever they they experienced
something, but a lot of the times it felt completely
just not real. Did you have any moments like that? We're like, ah, fuck, man, this is a waste of
time. I this is we're barking up the wrong tree here. Yeah, absolutely. There were two
two encounters in particular where I felt like the experiences were bringing to the table such ready-made language, such common language that you could just pull off the
shelf.
Well, this was a lizard man and this was a tall white and this was a gray and it was
this kind of a craft and they were from this galaxy.
And this stuff is all mixed up in
the subculture you oppose you know Whitley Strieber to a
very significant extent lay down the template. So this is
the kind that everybody sees and it's interesting as hell
that it looks a lot like the guy that Alistair Crowley saw
yeah, when and that's intriguing as hell, but when
it starts to become a cookie cutter, you know, all but
literally and sometimes literally, it's boring because
this is just deferring to cultural custom. You know, I was
telling somebody during the show that in 1893, President Teddy
Roosevelt published a memoir called The Wilderness Hunter
about his experiences hunting across different continents.
And he was hunting in the early 1890s
on the borderlands of Idaho and Montana,
which was real wilderness at that time.
And he encountered a trapper who told him
a blood-curdling fucking story
that we would recognize as a Bigfoot story.
Right.
Roosevelt called it a goblin story.
And it was funny to see the use of that word because
it seems so antiquated just today, but he didn't have
words like yeti or sasquatch.
What he reached for and I respect that because that's
what was available, but he didn't rely on it. He used the
word once and then he tells the story as it was repeated to
him and it's blood curdling because of its specificity.
When people step up and instead of specificity,
they're just using wordy words, you know,
like, oh, he was a tall gray,
and then there was this happening and that happened.
I'm like, I just saw this the other night
on the fucking X-Files repeat.
It's boring, it's boring, and it's deflating
because that to me is just ladling the cultural soup.
And you're not learning, you're not discovering anything.
When you read Whitley Strieber, for example,
I often tell people, if you haven't read
Kimmy Youn Read the Thing,
there's an originality to the voice.
And by the way, I'm not making a comparison.
This was true of Joseph Smith too.
When Joseph Smith received or wrote or whatever he did,
the Book of Mormon, yes, when Joseph Smith received or wrote or whatever he did, the Book of Mormon,
yes, it draws on scripture. Yes, it draws on folklore from central New York state.
But there was this originality to it that made people say, holy shit. Yeah. More of that. So I
get deflated when there's too much absence from that. Then the well water gets brackish and dirty
and it doesn't taste right when it's just
cultural forms. Yeah, yeah, and that is a strange position to find yourself in if you're talking to
people like that because you don't want to humiliate them and you don't like it. You're coming on the
show. You don't want to like attack them. And so some part of you is just thinking like, you know,
shit, this is like you, you just wanted to get on a cool show.
You wanted to talk about aliens and you got in somehow and you've been doing that as a
practice.
Like, they worm their way in and they completely, like you say, they make the water brackish
and they're like, they're worse than, I don't know, what's the word, the conspiracy people,
they're worse than people who are intentionally
trying to warp the truth to divert.
They're just warping the truth.
It's cynicism, they wanna be an influencer.
It's very hard for me to tell
whether they believe what they're saying or not,
but they give me the feeling of being lied to, and I just go to sleep. It's like, this is so
uninteresting when there's so much interesting shit going on out in our world. You got to tell
me about like a little green man with a laser gun. You know, it's like, we've been there, you know.
I cannot wait to watch Alien Encounters, Mitch. This is so exciting.
So it comes out tonight, you say?
It comes out... Tomorrow night.
It comes out Wednesday, June 19th on Discovery,
at 10 p.m. Eastern, 10 p.m. Pacific.
And then later this summer,
it's going to come to Max and Discovery Plus.
Hell, yes.
Yeah.
Congratulations, my friend.
I will be watching tomorrow night.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
All right, my man.
Thank you so much.
That was Mitch Horowitz, everybody.
Check out Alien Encounters on Discovery Channel.
Thank you so much to our wonderful sponsors.
And thank you for listening or watching.
I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna.