The Basement: Mitch Horowitz | Gandhi, Reagan, and the Occultists History Erased

-Head to https://Superpower.com and use code BASEMENT at checkout for $20 off your membership. Get 100+ biomarkers tested every year, plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod #ad -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. -For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com. #ad Mitch Horowitz spent 27 years inside America's biggest publishing houses — and the whole time, he was the occult guy. PEN Award–winning historian, practicing occultist, censored in China, endorsed by David Lynch. We get into hidden history: presidents, gurus, dime-store horoscopes, and experiments that shouldn't work but do. Some of what he told me, I can't even put in the title. Come down to the Basement and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24AJ Gentile?

  Today I'm talking with Mitch Horowitz. When Mitch was a kid in Queens, he got an astrology scroll from a vending machine. Every adult around him said it was nonsense.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Oh, every adult said it was nonsense, huh? Adults also said the moon lady was real style.

• 0:38AJ Gentile?

  He's spent the 50 years since taking that scroll seriously. He became a highly respected editor at Penguin Random House and won a PEN Award for writing the history of the occult in America. Today, we're covering how occult ideas got into Ronald Reagan's speeches, Gandhi's philosophy, and the dollar bill in your wallet. I promise, it's way weirder than that. Plus, his new book, Esoterica and its Formulas for Tearing Down Your False Self.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Oh, I tore down my false self once. Underneath was another me, handsomer, bigger muscles, better credit. Yeah, I miss that guy.

• 1:11AJ Gentile?

  He also made a calm, friendly case that I might be a left-hand path Satanist. That one got me by surprise. Stick around after the episode. I'll pop back in and untangle the conversation. And it's very tangled. Let's go down to the basement.

• 1:34AJ Gentile?

  Mitch Horowitz, welcome to the basement.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Thank you, my man. Great to be here.

• 1:37AJ Gentile?

  I'm excited. I am excited. Before we get started, why is the occult guy on a Zoom with the Henson family?

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Oh, I was doing a fundraiser for the Philosophical Research Society, and they are an organization dedicated to studying the esoteric that was founded by the great occult scholar Manley P. Hall. And I was told that a couple of members of the Henson family were interested both in supporting the center and in my work, and would I do some sessions with them to talk over occult history and esoterica? I was delighted.

• 2:14AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  I'm a Jim fan, going back to diapers and remaining today, and I was delighted to talk to them, and they are carrying the family flame.

• 2:24AJ Gentile?

  Wow. I thought I heard you talking about Never-Ending Stories, one of your favorites.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Oh, tremendously so. Henson has such an incredible ability to capture the mythical in a way that entrances young kids and adults alike. And at age 60, I'm still finding folds within his work. I just love the man.

• 2:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, you could watch Dark Crystal, I think it came out in 79, and you still see things in it.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  You still see things.

• 2:50AJ Gentile?

  He was such a genius.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  He worked so hard, and not only was there technical excellence in everything he did, but he finds the inner meaning of myth, and he tells the story as an outer story, but you capture all the esoteric lessons and elements within Jim's work.

• 3:09AJ Gentile?

  I need to revisit it now that I'm familiar with yours, because I know I'm going to find new stuff in there.

• 3:16AJ Gentile?

  So the occult, excuse me, this is how I work. I just am.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Go ahead, all right.

• 3:21AJ Gentile?

  The occult, does it start with the Silver Moon Diner, or does it start in Mrs. Shapiro's Sunday School class?

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Probably it starts with Mrs. Shapiro's Sunday School class.

• 3:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  In Belrose, Queens. I remember Mrs. Shapiro telling us, "Halloween, that's all a bunch of nonsense." And I started thinking, no, that's not really true. This is a holiday with roots that go as deep as our own Abrahamic traditions, maybe deeper. And my job as a kid, age eight or nine, was to listen to people say, "Halloween is nonsense." Was to listen to people say, "Oh, newspaper astrology, that's all bogus." Was to listen to people say, "Don't pay attention to the robed guru on Merv Griffin," and ask, "Why? Why?" And I wanted to peel back the layers and discover the history of these things.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Look, newspaper astrology, just to take an example, it's an expression of possibly the oldest religious retention on Earth. It goes back to the third millennia B.C., ancient Mesopotamia. Our Western astrology is not exactly like the astrology being dealt with by our primeval ancestors, but there are some very serious similarities, symbolically, mechanically, in terms of meaning, and I wanted to get at all that. A cynic will tell you, for example, "Oh, astrology has lasted so long just because humanity is a bunch of suckers." That's ridiculous.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Practices from the ancient world have been discontinued by the thousands. The reason we in the Western world retain a version of astrology is because it's pretty damned accurate.

• 5:08AJ Gentile?

  Do you still read Sally Brompton?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  I love Sally Brompton. And with apologies to Mrs. Shapiro, who taught me a lot and also had a habit of banging me on the head with her ring when I didn't get my Hebrew letters correct, which was not infrequent, being challenged that way at a young age, when I had a taste for the esoteric, was, in its way, very refining. It put me on my path.

• 5:31AJ Gentile?

  What was it about the story about the goat and the zazel that interested you?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  You know, it's interesting. You find within the Abrahamic faiths a huge amount of material that we would label occult, stories of giants and spiritual messengers and things that we today call demons, a term that we're conditioned to be frightened of, Azazel being one of them, to whom the Hebrews would make sacrifices in the desert. And what you'll find, if you turn back the pages of Scripture, is a catalog of occult and esoteric topics, not just straightforward monotheism, although that's part of it, but you find monotheism coexisting with a world of myth and wonder that would be at home in any Jim Henson story.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  And for that matter, not all ancient Jews themselves were monotheistic. There were many Jews living in that region of the world who practiced polytheism. We know this because they adopted names of gods other than what we call Yahweh or Jehovah. And eventually Judaism developed into a faith of monotheism, but at its most primeval roots, that wasn't the case. So if you want to find the basis for the occult, look at our most ancient traditions, the ones that we stand on.

• 6:51AJ Gentile?

  I love the theory that Moses could have been Akhenaten. Have you heard that one?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Yes, oh, of course. And Sigmund Freud, of all people, the great rationalist, took that very seriously. He, in his very last book, Moses and Monotheism, propounded on that theory. And people would be surprised if they turned back the pages of Freud. He's supposed to be a great rationalist, and he was a great rationalist. But what we as a culture forget is that rationalism is not conclusion, it's process. Rationalism is methodological replication. So in Freud, the great rationalist, you will find a man who was deeply interested in dream, telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, and even delayed the publication of some of his papers on these

• 7:39Speaker 03

  subjects to avoid public opinion fallout. Get yourself a copy of the collected works of Freud. You'll find several deeply heartfelt and intellectually rigorous papers on occult topics.

• 7:52AJ Gentile?

  That stuff was left out of my psychology courses at school, that is, interest in psi. What do you think, why do you think that was done? Why keep that from us?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Well, Freud's biographer, an Englishman named Ernest Jones, was very concerned that Freud's interest in parapsychology would prove compromising to his efforts to shape psychoanalysis into a recognized medical science. So he had a hand in the early compilation of Freud's papers. He had a decisive hand in our understanding of Freud as a biography, but he didn't fully represent Freud the man. And our notion of psychoanalytic history is too simplistic. We see Jung as the occult one and Freud as the materialist one. It wasn't true at all.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Jung was every bit an empiricist, and Freud was every bit interested in the esoteric, extending to alternate histories of Moses, extending to a very rigorously worked-through theory of clairvoyance, passing in between the psychoanalyst and the patient. And some of this material, as I mentioned, was withheld from publication until after Freud's death. It does all now appear in the collected works of Freud, but we tend to think in categories rather than content, and we think of Freud in the materialist category, so we tend not to see what's in front of our own eyes.

• 9:26AJ Gentile?

  When you think about your medical history, you assume somebody, somewhere, has the whole picture, but that's not usually how it works. I've got lab PDFs buried in three different email accounts, a doctor from 2019 who has no idea what my doctor from 2022 found, and a filing cabinet of paperwork that nobody, including me, has ever actually cross-referenced. That's what excites me about Superpower. It's their job to connect the dots. One annual blood draw, over 100 biomarkers across 21 categories, heart, liver, thyroid, hormones, metabolic health, inflammation, nutrients, the works. That's roughly 10 times what a standard physical check is. But here's the part that actually solves my paperwork problem. It all lands in one dashboard alongside your old records and your wearable data from Aura, Whoop, or Apple Health.

• 10:12AJ Gentile?

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• 10:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's interesting that you bring that up, is so much power goes into the hands of the biographer, the translator, whether it's ancient epic poems or just

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Tremendous.

• 11:07AJ Gentile?

  psychoanalysis, they have a lot of power.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Tremendous. In fact, I often caution people, you show me a traditionalist, and I'll show you a modernist who's just not aware of it, because the wisdom literature that reaches us today...

• 11:22Speaker 03

  It's almost always translations of translations of translations written in an original language that most of us cannot decipher. And in fact, in most cases, we don't even have the originals, even extending to the Renaissance, which in terms of the arc of human history was five minutes ago. We're in a very disadvantageous position in terms of understanding what the ancients were thinking about. We have been reached by threats. We have been reached by fragments. So people need to be very careful about where they draw the line between what's traditional, what's the real thing versus what are modern novelties. More often than we know, we're dealing with modern novelties.

• 12:03AJ Gentile?

  And the translation of the translation, that's really a tradition of the esoteric anyway, isn't it?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  It's a tradition of the whole human story to know ourselves. And so much of the literature that reaches us, whether it's scriptural, whether it's hermetic, which is the philosophy that was written down in the final stages of ancient Egypt, it's passed through so many hands.

• 12:27AJ Gentile?

  There are a little tablet right behind me there.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Oh, brilliant, brilliant.

• 12:30AJ Gentile?

  As above, so below.

• 12:31Speaker 03

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

• 13:07AJ Gentile?

  Isn't that rule 101?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Is it?

• 13:11AJ Gentile?

  Is it?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  It's in there.

• 13:13AJ Gentile?

  Ask constantly, how do I know that's true?

• 13:16Speaker 03

  Yes. And my God, let that be your sword and shield through life. How do I know that's true? We live in a culture of, I heard it somewhere. And peel back just one layer on that and you'll start to ask really vital questions. I mean, my God, I've had incidences happen in my own apartment building and people can't agree the next day on what transpired, much less what transpired millennia ago. We really just have to keep asking ourselves, how do I know that's true? What's the source of that quote? And this is true in mainstream history as well. I'll come upon a quote by Thomas Edison, for example. I'll look for the quote, it doesn't exist.

• 14:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  I'll look for a quote by Arthur Conan Doyle, it doesn't exist. Someone made it up, someone repeated it, happens with William James.

• 14:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  These are all modernist figures. These are, these are people who, who wrote and, and spoke in English and, and, and, and my God, you know, they were living and functioning 150 years ago.

• 14:20AJ Gentile?

  You go through Bartlett's and half of that, they didn't say that.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Baloney.

• 14:24AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 14:25Speaker 03

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

• 14:53AJ Gentile?

  So Silver Moon, paint the picture. Where was the Silver Moon Diner in Queens?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Oh, that was in Eastern Queens.

• 15:02AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  In the town of Belrose, where I grew up, on Union Turnpike, just before it transforms magically into Marcus Avenue.

• 15:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  When you hit Long Island.

• 15:13AJ Gentile?

  I know it very well.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Right, the invisible line of demarcation and.

• 15:17AJ Gentile?

  Right, this is Nassau County, that's.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Right, right. And I grew up in that neighborhood in Eastern Queens. Subways don't go there.

• 15:25AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Way out in the, I suppose as, as far out east as you can go and still be in New York City. And that was the family gathering spot. That was the neighborhood gathering spot. And this was the 1970s. And so the real magic was at the, at the lobby entrance, where you would find the machine where you could insert a dime and get an astrology scroll or have your biorhythm read.

• 15:52AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's right. You put your finger on the thing.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  They didn't have a Zoltar machine, but all but, all but.

• 15:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  You know, they had the computer dating machine, I remember. You could take the form, fill out, you know, what you're comfortable with, what you like, and meet your, meet your perfect mate.

• 16:07AJ Gentile?

  I remember.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Probably no better or worse than anything we do today. And for me, it was just magic. That's where I wanted to hang out. When I got my little dime star scroll at the Silver Moon Diner and I saw these magical signs and sigils of Aquarius and Mercury and the sun, and I wanted to know where did this come from? And I learned that, you know, as I mentioned, these are some of the oldest religious retentions on earth. And just think of it, our primeval ancestors in Mesopotamia, their system was different. The night sky looks different because the earth wobbles on its axis. But I tell you, some of those signs and symbols mean the same thing to us today in the 21st

• 16:51Speaker 03

  century as it did to our ancient ancestry in Mesopotamia. That's extraordinary.

• 16:56AJ Gentile?

  No question.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  That's a sacred language. And it's remarkable to me that you can go through the Western world, ask anyone you meet, what's your sun sign? And not only will they know, but they'll be able to tell you something about it, whether they profess belief or not. I fall to my knees in front of that. That's a tradition that extends back thousands of years.

• 17:16AJ Gentile?

  Even if we are skeptical about astrology, we just can't help ourselves. It's, it's wired into us.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  I'll tell you something funny. There's an esoteric scholar, Richard Smalley, who's been an enormous influence on me. Several years ago, he and I were doing a dialogue over Zoom and I said to him, Richard, why has astrology remained popular after all these millennia and centuries? And he paused and said, well, because it's pretty accurate.

• 17:46AJ Gentile?

  Brilliant.

• 17:47Speaker 03

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

• 18:31Speaker 03

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

• 19:04AJ Gentile?

  You hit on something that is in your book I want to ask you about. Before we do that, didn't your grandfather have an opinion about what was on your scroll?

• 19:18Speaker 03

  My grandfather, who was the very practical manager of a flower shop in Rockefeller Center.

• 19:26AJ Gentile?

  It's good honest work.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good honest work. It's good honest work. And he worked hard and he earned his retirement in Florida. That was the dream.

• 19:33AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  And he earned it. I was reading from my star scroll and he said, does it also say you're a sucker?

• 19:38AJ Gentile?

  Perfect.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  And I understand, I understand, but kids have to rebel. And I said, I'm not accepting that just because an adult figure says it. In fact, because an adult figure says it, I'm going to push and probe. And I had funny experiences as a kid, taking out books of astrology and Pennsylvania Dutch folklore from the Belrose Public Library. Remarkable experiences. I remember when I was a kid, I took out one book in particular, Pennsylvania Dutch folklore. And the centerfold of the book was a pentagram and it had these little phrases dotted around it. Pennsylvania Dutch tradition. And you're supposed to close your eyes, hover a pin over it and bring the pin down on your

• 20:24Speaker 03

  fortune. While I did this, I brought the pin down and it said, a letter, you will receive a letter. I was aged nine, I didn't get many letters. The next day, a letter arrived and it was an overdue book notice from the public library.

• 20:39AJ Gentile?

  That's how it works. Synchronicities.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  It, it gave me pause.

• 20:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  At age nine, I still have pause today. But you get little green lights like that and it deepens your curiosity.

• 20:50AJ Gentile?

  I love it. So you just said that every generation has these same anxieties. In your book, I think you mentioned that every generation feels like they're on the precipice.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Always, always.

• 21:01AJ Gentile?

  But we're different because we have a sense that we're in the matrix.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it seems to me, I.

• 21:10Speaker 03

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

• 21:55Speaker 03

  We even have a secular religion around that called Marxism.

• 21:58AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Which is an Abrahamic religion without God. It's a materialist faith, that the change agent will be the working class and then afterwards will come something that someone might call nirvana, or heaven, or the afterlife, and that we call revolution. Whatever comes after it, we don't know. But we're sure that there is this turning point. Anyway, we who live in the West and come from the Abrahamic traditions, we have this kind of messianic or apocalyptic worldview baked into us. Someday, it will presumably occur, but I ask people to take it easy with that point of view, because every generation occupies it. Our generation has something different going on, which I'm very interested in. And that is this notion that we're living in an ersatz reality.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And I think there's something to that because of how universally felt it is. It surpasses culture. Now, dig this. Several years ago, the Barbie movie came out. My reckoning is that roughly the first 20 minutes of that movie is the finest ever popularization of Gnostic themes. The idea that we're living

• 23:05AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  under a false sun, or a false God.

• 23:07AJ Gentile?

  Yes. I hadn't considered that, but yes.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Barbie starts thinking about her own death.

• 23:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  And then she realizes, I'm not really here at all. I'm not living in a real world. This is artifice. And so she begins her journey.

• 23:20AJ Gentile?

  Beyond the veil.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Beyond the veil.

• 23:22AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Now, we've had wonderful movies like that before. Matrix, Truman Show, but this was different. That movie was a hit worldwide. It was a hit in Saudi Arabia. It was a hit in China. Two radically different societies. Saudi is a religiously conservative society. China is an officially atheistic society. And everybody got it. Everybody got it. There are people around the world today who don't get Star Wars. We think those themes are universal. They're not, if one really speaks globally. There are Chinese audiences among whom Star Wars has tested poorly. They're asking questions, this, you know, why does this man live with an ape, and so forth and so on? It doesn't translate, always.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Barbie, this Gnostic-themed movie about a young woman who starts contemplating mortality and realizes, I'm not even living a real existence. It spoke to people around the world. There's a scent trail of some universal truth there. And I think that we, as a global culture, if we agree on nothing else, we agree that something doesn't feel quite right. We feel like we're living in this ersatz reality.

• 24:32AJ Gentile?

  And as a historian, other generations didn't feel this?

• 24:34Speaker 03

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

• 25:11AJ Gentile?

  Do you think there's something to that? Do you subscribe? You do?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  I do. I do. I'm haunted by the idea. I couldn't possibly venture specifics. I'm haunted by simulation theory. If one reads Nick Bostrop's original paper on simulation theory.

• 25:27AJ Gentile?

  Why haunted? Why, what's wrong? Why not?

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Because the logic is impeccable.

• 25:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  And it's possible that we are made up of dots and dashes, rather than DNA. And it's all programming in a certain sense, or coding at the end of the day. And I'm haunted by the possibility that the reason why Gnosticism as a faith has really come roaring back into our world, and is probably the most popular of all the, we'll say, esoteric spiritual traditions, right now in the 21st century, is we all relate to it. We all have a feeling that we're not living as we ought to be living. And I think that that's absolutely correct. Take as an example, around the world today, everyone agrees that war is terrible. There should never be another war. It solves nothing.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  And yet, we keep having them. We keep having them.

• 26:21AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  And we don't live according to our own professed values.

• 26:25AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  We sit in a chair, we read the Tao Te Ching, we read the Beatitudes, we read the Dhammapada. Right on. That's the way to live. I get it. We get up from the chair, everything is lost. Everything is lost. There is a chasm between conviction and conduct, and it is global. We're broken. We're broken as a human community. If we weren't broken, Confucius would be enough to save us.

• 26:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Christ would be enough to save us.

• 26:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Nietzsche would be enough to save us. Marcus Aurelius would be enough to save us. We have it, and we all agree with it. And we don't live by it. It does suggest that there's a brokenness in human nature that's very real.

• 27:08AJ Gentile?

  I always have three books on my nightstand. One is Marcus Aurelius, one is the Bible, and one is whatever sci-fi I happen to be reading. But that's absolutely true. The reason I asked about previous generations is, we talk about, the Gnostic texts come up all the time on the show. So, The Apocryphon, The Book of Philip, Book of Enoch, I mean, these are ancient texts.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:30AJ Gentile?

  Did they know something then, that now we're just all learning as a species?

• 27:36Speaker 03

  I think that the Gnostics, who, like the Hermeticists, existed in late antiquity, they were part of a world that was just transforming into dominant monotheism. And they were resisting monotheism because for them, it didn't cover the basis of man's predicament. This sin and salvation model was insufficient. They sensed something that we sense about this terrible, terrible gap between conviction and conduct. And the Gnostics came to the conclusion, we are living under a false God, in a false world, with false perceptions.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And that's why things never seem to get better. And they too harbored some of the apocalyptic thinking, which I think is intrinsic to our Western or Abrahamic point of view.

• 28:32AJ Gentile?

  I, hang on, I think it's universal. There's a Japanese author who said, every one of us, deep down in our hearts, is waiting for the end of the world.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's truth to that, because we are also so frustrated with the routine sameness of our lives. I remember when Y2K was popular as a subject, people would talk about it, and I would sense that they were enjoying it.

• 28:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  It was this universal snow day. And I would say, well, wait a minute. You don't really want to see supply lines get disrupted. You don't really want to see it tough to refill baby formula, and prescriptions, and diapers. None of us want to see that. And their attitude was always, yeah, but we're so hungry to exit routine. And I really understand that. I feel the desperate.

• 29:23AJ Gentile?

  Fort Knox. Everybody's heard of it. Supposedly, it holds over 400,000 tons of US gold. But the thing is, the last full independent audit of that vault happened in 1953. Since then, we've gotten photo ops, supervised walkthroughs, and a whole lot of, trust us, never any outside auditors, no full inventory count, or no way for anybody outside government to actually verify what's down there. That's not a conspiracy theory. Nobody's checked. And when the backbone of the world's reserve currency rests on a promise nobody can verify, it's worth asking why your own retirement should rest on paper, too. Physical metal in your name doesn't need an audit. You can just hold it. Call Golden Crest Metals and get their free investor kit.

• 30:06AJ Gentile?

  It walks you through moving physical gold or silver into an IRA or 401K, tax and penalty free, or buying directly with cash. You'll also get a free portfolio review. No pressure, no hard sell, just a straight conversation about what you're holding. And right now, Golden Crest's running a bonus, up to $25,000 in free silver on qualifying purchases. Go to goldencrestmetals.com/theyfiles, or text the word files to Metals. That's 63825. To receive free investor kit, a free portfolio review with no obligation or hard sell, and on qualifying purchases, up to $25,000 in bonus silver. All that when you go to goldencrestmetals.com/theyfiles, or text the word files to Metals.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Inspiration that people experience with routine. And so, a turning point, apocalypse, Y2K, call it whatever you wish. It appeals to people, because it seems like it's an exit from this grinding ordinariness that, that we're very often unhappy in.

• 31:04AJ Gentile?

  I love a disaster movie. I love an apocalyptic movie. I think it makes us feel like we're part of a grand opera.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:14AJ Gentile?

  Wouldn't you rather go out with an asteroid impact than just old and sick?

• 31:19Speaker 03

  I see it, look, I see it right here in Vegas, a town that I love. You know, there's Excalibur.

• 31:25AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 31:26Speaker 03

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

• 32:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep. I'm glad that you don't hate on Las Vegas like so many people do.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 32:12AJ Gentile?

  Me too.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  I think it's just wonderful. Fuck the snobs. I, I look at these things and I'm enchanted. We have a view from our hotel at Mandalay Bay

• 32:20AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  of Luxor. I've been to Luxor, going back to Luxor in a year. I love Egypt, and I love the Egyptian people, but I'm thrilled.

• 32:27AJ Gentile?

  And it's kitschy, but it's great.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:29AJ Gentile?

  And there's a Nathan's in Luxor, by the way.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Which one? The Egyptian?

• 32:33AJ Gentile?

  The Egyptian.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Okay. I've been to McDonald's in the Egyptian Luxor, and it's not bad. Let me recommend it.

• 32:39AJ Gentile?

  Really? There's a great scene in your book of at the Belrose Jewish Center where your rabbi shows up wearing a toupee.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:48AJ Gentile?

  Can you tell us what happened with your sister?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  I dig this story. I've told it several times. I tell it because I don't want people to feel hemmed in by their subcultures. Back in the good old days, when I was a little kid, growing up in a traditional Jewish family, we attended Belrose Jewish Center and it became the scandal of the neighborhood. If only these were our problems today. This is what passed for a problem back in those days, that the rabbi started wearing a toupee. And so people had discussions about whether this was appropriate. Isn't a spiritual leader supposed to model self-acceptance? It wasn't put quite that nicely on 251st Street, but that was the basic argument. One day, we were on a receiving line after services where people will shake hands with

• 33:35Speaker 03

  the clergy, have a nice week, thank you. And my sister, my older sister, four years older, was in front of me and, oh my God, I still feel embarrassed talking about it to this day.

• 33:45AJ Gentile?

  I'm embarrassed waiting for it.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel it like I did when I was 10. And she said to him, "Don't you think that's a little ridiculous?" And he said, "What?" And she said, "The toupee." And through very tight lips, he said, "I don't think that's any of your affair." And I still feel mortified talking about it. But I look back on that and I tell that story for a reason. He was right. He was right.

• 34:10AJ Gentile?

  Of course he was.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. I feel very strongly that people in our alternative spiritual culture, which is where I'm from, which is where I spend most of my time, we get hemmed into orthodoxies the way everybody else does. We flee orthodoxies only to recreate them and slam the door behind us as quickly as possible. What I'm really trying to say to people is, just as in ancient myth, strangers, spiritual messengers, gods would sometimes wander the earth disguised as vagabonds, and people who invited them in would receive extraordinary gifts. So do solutions reach us disguised as strangers.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Things that we are ready to reject might be what we need. So if somebody says, "I'm spiritual," well, that may be. Spiritual means extra-physical. But the world we live in can bring you solutions in ways that are disguised as those unbidden vagabonds. So I beg people, I beg people, think for yourself, decide for yourself, don't turn something away because it doesn't fit your cultural image or your mind's eye image of what is supposed to be right. Don't get fixated on the example. I choose the example because it's true and it's particularly vivid. Here was a spiritual leader being talked down because he did something that the neighborhood

• 35:36Speaker 03

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

• 36:13AJ Gentile?

  Does your sister remember that scene?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  I don't know whether she recalls that explicitly, and if she doesn't, she will let me know.

• 36:22AJ Gentile?

  She has quite an influence on you early on, no? Was she, did she bring home Carlos Castaneda?

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Tremendously so. I'm indebted to her for the path that I'm on because here we were, two kids of different ages, growing up in the 1970s, and she would bring home paperbacks from school on Bigfoot and flying saucers and ESP and the paperbacks of the poor beleaguered Carlos Castaneda, which I started reading when I was a kid. I'm astounded that Castaneda is still such a subject of controversy in our culture. Can we not understand allegory? The stories that he told were not forensically verifiable. That is correct. Carlos was a trickster and he created a pass for himself. That is correct. Do we not understand allegory? Did Christ not teach in parables?

• 37:12AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna say the same thing.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  We bring this over-literalism to Carlos and we dismiss him. There's tremendous wisdom in those books, particularly the first one. And I started reading Carlos as a little kid, thanks to my sister Nina, and that too helped put me on my path.

• 37:26AJ Gentile?

  Tell me about the, how your parents' divorce kind of became an engine for you.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 37:36AJ Gentile?

  As personal as you want to be.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  No, no, I'm...

• 37:39AJ Gentile?

  And, you know, we had talked earlier about being on similar paths.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:44AJ Gentile?

  I went through the same thing.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 37:46AJ Gentile?

  I went through the same thing.

• 37:47Speaker 03

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

• 38:11AJ Gentile?

  You were 15. 15, okay, that's hard.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Yes. He had been a legal aid attorney, defending the poorest of the poor in New York City. Very tough work. Long story short, he went into private practice, the private practice failed, it threw our family into financial turmoil, the turmoil boiled over into divorce. It was a very painful time and it was no one person's fault. He was made the fall guy for a lot of stuff, but I never thought that was fair. With the divorce came a whole change of life because, look, we were going to an Orthodox synagogue where the sexes were separated by seating and we started going to a Reform synagogue, signaled a big change in our religious life. But in addition to that, I began looking for spiritual solutions. And when I say spiritual, again, I mean extra-physical.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  I do believe that we occupy this world we can see, this tactile world, and a world that we cannot see, a transpersonal world. And I came to believe very strongly, not only in the power of petitionary prayer, with which I had extraordinary experiences as a kid, continue to today, but I came to believe that there are causative properties to our psyche and that which we believe, our emotionalized thoughts, our thought pictures, have a selective quality to them. And that became a foundational part of my belief and I nurtured that from age 15 up through today.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Testing it, probing it, trying it, denying it, fleeing it, coming back to it. And nobody wants to repeat the suffering that they have been through. But we all would acknowledge that suffering created the parts of ourselves that we consider most refined.

• 39:57AJ Gentile?

  Of course. One more question, but you mentioned another rule that was, don't make fun of people because you don't know what they're going through.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  And I do it all the fucking time, may I tell you?

• 40:11AJ Gentile?

  Me too.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  And I'm so goddamned ashamed of myself. And I say this because what else do we have but transparency on the path? Transparency, verification. I look over at somebody, you know, seated next to on an airplane, I think, oh, they're making noise, whatever. I have no idea what that person is going through. I have no idea that that person might have a special needs child seated two seats down from them.

• 40:38AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  And that they are going through things that I have never had to go through. So for God's sake, can we just take it a little easier on one another? Seems such a simple statement, right? But its profundity appears in application, and I'm always telling that to people. I like, at this point in my search, very simple things because, first of all, we won't try things unless they are simple. And secondly, the profundity and the difficulty and the complexity will not appear until we try them. You know, we all love the Delphic maxim, "Know thyself." Sure, I agree with that. Put it on my coffee mug. Nice refrigerator magnet. But none of us engage in it. You know, we all think we know ourselves. We don't take it seriously. We don't take seriously self-observation. We don't take seriously the dictum not to lie.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Again, here's this chasm between conviction and conduct. Of course, lying is terrible. Well, you know, peel back the layers a little bit. When have I lied in the past 10 hours, 24 hours, what have you?

• 41:38AJ Gentile?

  Another rule, everybody lies.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Another rule, yeah. And...

• 41:42AJ Gentile?

  Well, these rules, people need to read these. They're rules to live by. And I was telling you earlier that I believe every single one of these and I fail at quite a few of them.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Constantly, constantly.

• 41:54AJ Gentile?

  Like this requires work, vigilance.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it requires, at certain moments, coming face to face with oneself and feeling like you're a stranger to yourself. And that aperture will close. And then, you know, I reach for the TV clicker and I, you know, reach for the beer or the weed and that aperture will close. But for God's sake, let it live. Let it live for a few moments. Don't put it in other words. In other words, just let the remorse be there when you see that gap between self and conduct. And count on the fact that it'll go away and don't worry about that. We're not built to sustain it. But, but don't throw it away when it comes.

• 42:37AJ Gentile?

  So we're always defaulting back to violating these rules. Is that how you described, like, just running one of the programs, the 20 programs that we just run? When you get angry at that person on the plane, you're just running the program eight, which is annoyed?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I came to realize at a certain point that I probably have 20 total responses to life in one variation or another. And there's a nightmare in that. You know, we speak of free will. I'm closer to a pull-string doll than I am to a figure of free will. I do believe in free will, but free will requires development. Decision-making requires development. We hear all the time that wars happen because human beings choose to go to war. That's nonsense. We don't choose anything. We are the equivalent of automatons. We can only speak of choice with development. And that's a long, hard, arduous road, and I'm not sure it even ends anywhere.

• 43:37Speaker 03

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

• 44:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  And we do it anyway.

• 44:09AJ Gentile?

  We do it anyway.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  That's our brokenness.

• 44:11AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:13AJ Gentile?

  I couldn't decide if your book was self-help or if it was a guidebook to the apocalypse.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting. I worked for 27 years in corporate publishing. And I met a lot of authors who ran from the label self-help because they think it's de classe, it's unseriousness. It's the philosophy of the people. I embrace the label self-help. I'm proud of that label. Now, is it a guide to the apocalypse? Yes, in a certain sense, because I believe that we are in a stage of decline. Call it calliuga, call it sleep, call it automaticity, call it what the Gnostics called it, that we're living under a false god or a false deity. There are different terms for it.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  But to suggest that we are beings of free will, making choices, I see evidence for that nowhere. So if that's the apocalypse, then I would have to agree with that characterization.

• 45:13AJ Gentile?

  We're all running that, one of those programs. It's, yeah, it was startling to read in your book. Before we go to break, and I want to talk about your publishing career, we're talking about your dad. Can, tell me about Dad versus Sid.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Well, I was very proud of Dad. At age 12, Dad ran for Congress on a district that bridges the Queens-Lon Island border. It was that Union Turnpike, Marcus Avenue district, and...

• 45:46AJ Gentile?

  The Silver Moon District.

• 45:47Speaker 03

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

• 46:26Speaker 03

  And I loved Sid, but Dad decided that he was going to become the poster boy for anarchy in our borough. And people were worried about crime, and Dad, to his credit, would not play the race card. And instead, he made Sid Vicious into, oh, I don't know, his campaign partner. And so he went around giving talks that Lester Wolf, his opponent, should have been held responsible for a known drug addict entering our country and killing his girlfriend in our fair city. And I remember once he was speaking in front of a group of grumpy Jewish war veterans, and he gave this talk, and Lester Wolf showed up late. Not a smooth move.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  And he had no idea that Dad was doing any of this, didn't know who Sid Vicious was. And so they started screaming at him, "You let vicious Sid into this country."

• 47:17AJ Gentile?

  Vicious Sid.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  The presentation had to stop so Lester Wolf could be told who Sid Vicious was. But again, I write very lovingly, very admiringly about this. Talk about the good old days when these were our problems.

• 47:29AJ Gentile?

  The title of the article was brilliant. It was Dad Fought the Sex Pistols and the Sex Pistols Won.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:35AJ Gentile?

  And now the song is in my head.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  That's how it happened.

• 47:38AJ Gentile?

  And we'll be right back. There's a section in your book called Cast Out. 1997, you're fired, the first two times from your dream job.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:48AJ Gentile?

  Two years in, and it's over.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Beautiful as hell.

• 47:53AJ Gentile?

  What happened through that, that year?

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Well, I worked for many years in corporate publishing. And once upon a time, I was hired by a political press, now defunct, at Simon and Schuster called The Free Press. And that place was flying high, and I was thrilled to be there. I could not get arrested when I was there. Two years, and I just couldn't get agents to submit to me the way that was necessary. And that chokes off your air supply in publishing. You live and die by that.

• 48:26AJ Gentile?

  So you had to wait for submissions? That was your role?

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Oh, I would try to drum up books, and I drummed up some damn good ones. And I'm very proud of a lot of what I published there. But you can only do so much of that. I mean, you really need to be getting a stream of submissions in. And for various reasons, I found it very, very difficult. And I'll never forget it. It's painful to recount, but people deserve to hear it because they've been through things like this, and they'll feel less alone if they hear it. After about a year on the job, I came back from lunch. This was the old days, before email ruled the roost, and we would still get phone messages on those little pink scratchpads. There were no little pink scratchpad messages waiting for me, and my voicemail light was not on.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  And so I quietly closed my office door, and I laid my head down on my desk, and I thought, "I am fucking going to get fired." And within about a year, that transpired. And it was scary as hell, and it was painful as hell. Because a lot of people in publishing got fired. It's a tough business. And I lasted longer than most. I continued to last for many years after that. But I thought, "I am not the guy who gets fired. I am the achiever." That wasn't so. And that was very tough. And so I start looking for new jobs. I have no family money. I live paycheck to paycheck. And let me tell you, I got the highest level interviews.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  John Kennedy Jr. interviewed me for a political magazine he was running at the time.

• 50:00AJ Gentile?

  No shit?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. He offered me a job. He died shortly thereafter in a very tragic airplane crash. And he was a hell of a good guy, let me tell you.

• 50:07AJ Gentile?

  He was going to be mayor.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, I mean, he's American royalty.

• 50:11AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  And you talk to him, puts you immediately at ease, super easy to talk to, was interested in cattle mutilations. It might interest you and your audience to know.

• 50:20AJ Gentile?

  I'm interested in what happened in that flight.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so, what a loss. I had to experience one after another like that, not where something tragic occurred, but, oh my God, I was in the running for an arts and ideas editor at The New York Times, interviewed with the executive editor, Joseph Leleval. Nothing. The editor of Harper's Magazine had a few too many one night, offered me a job, next day, nothing. And so how does it feel when you come so close to winning the gold and you get nothing? You don't even get a bronze. You get nothing. And I thought, "I'm in trouble, and I've got to start going the blue-collar route." So I just started looking in what we used to call the classified ads, like everybody else.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  A backwater, new-age publisher, which has gone through many different names because it keeps getting bought by different companies, opened its doors to me, and I went there.

• 51:16AJ Gentile?

  What was it, which publisher?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Well, it was known as Tarcher Penguin back in my day. We were Tarcher Putnam, then Tarcher Penguin, then the unpronounceable Tarcher Perigee, and which every radio host would call Tarcher Peregrine. And I'd be like, "This was a great move." Anyway, it was a slightly down-on-its-luck new-age press. And I was coming from what had been a very high-flying press, where everything we published would get reviewed in The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times, and so forth. These were different days. And my friends thought I was crazy. They said, "Don't go there." And my attitude was, "No, I believe in a yes, and I believe in walking through open doors."

• 52:00AJ Gentile?

  You didn't feel like it was a step down?

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Oh, it was definitely a step down.

• 52:03AJ Gentile?

  Oh, it was?

• 52:03Speaker 03

  And I felt it intensely. I mean, I went from, "Oh, man, Harvard," to a little correspondence school that nobody has heard of. And it was a very serious step down. But I swallowed the ego, and I swallowed the humiliation, lost a lot of friends. God save us from our friends.

• 52:23AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Why? Because I use the term "friends," resisting air quotes. In New York City, friendships are based on usefulness. Friendships are based on what can you do for me?

• 52:35AJ Gentile?

  Another rule is steel yourself when your best friend betrays you.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  For real.

• 52:40AJ Gentile?

  For real.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  For real.

• 52:41AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:43AJ Gentile?

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• 53:24AJ Gentile?

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• 54:07Speaker 03

  So it was painful. So I use the term "friends" with qualification.

• 54:12AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Oh, people dropped away from me, people abandoned me, people would say, "How you doing?", as though I was in the hospital or something.

• 54:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  But I take seriously a yes. I take seriously an open door. And remember... Messengers come disguised as strangers.

• 54:31AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Be flexible, don't get stuck to your mind's eye image of where you're going. I started to rediscover the occult and esoteric interests that I knew as a kid, which I still had, but they were secondary. They were on the back burner. This job brought them back up front.

• 54:50AJ Gentile?

  Well, hang on, what was your belief system when you were an executive?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Oh, well, most of my career was eventually spent in spiritual publishing. So my outlook was a lot like what you're hearing now, but before that.

• 55:02AJ Gentile?

  Before then?

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I was just interested in politics and social trends and things of that nature. I might go on a yoga retreat now and then, or do something like that, but it was secondary.

• 55:14AJ Gentile?

  It was just New York hustles, really, what it was.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  New York hustle. And in New York City, you don't talk about spirituality too much, or people start to think you're a nut. You know, you can invoke your version of, you know, psychologized NPR Buddhism, but you know, you go beyond that and your tote bag gets revoked.

• 55:30AJ Gentile?

  No, the Moonies were still on the West Side at that time, I think.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right. No, you can't do any of that stuff. And so it wasn't too frequently talked about. And people had your fairly conventional attitudes. It's a bunch of junk, a bunch of nonsense. Don't tell me about your star scroll, you know. Leave that back at the Silver Moon Diner. And so that stuff was backburnered in my life. I began reading into the backlist of this imprint and it changed everything for me. It reignited all my childhood interests. So I read about the different mystical positive mind philosophies. I read about the philosophy of G.I. Gurdjieff. I read all kinds of occult and esoteric and alternative spiritual texts

• 56:14Speaker 03

  that just awakened a fire in me that had gone way down to a little pilot light. And then eventually, eventually, having thought I left writing behind, which was a real suffering for me, I rediscovered myself as a writer. Because to write well, you need that perfect marriage to topic. And I didn't have it. I didn't want to write book reviews for the Village Voice or something like that. I didn't want to write about politics. There were enough guys bopping around town doing that. I didn't want any part of it. But suddenly, suddenly I began to realize that the metaphysical topics and their purveyors, figures like Manley P. Hall, Edgar Cayce, Madame H.P.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Blavatsky, these figures were not receiving fair treatment within mainstream letters.

• 57:02AJ Gentile?

  Well, people don't realize how influential you are with the culture. I mean, if anyone who watched or read The Secret or thinks about manifestation, half the kids on TikTok, it goes back to Manley P. Hall, doesn't it?

• 57:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's remarkable. And the under, these figures are almost like an underground river that feeds so much of our above-ground culture. But they get forgotten, they get disparaged. They are, when they're acknowledged, they're all within mainstream letters. Their reputations and their lives are butchered. But these are people who really lived for something.

• 57:36AJ Gentile?

  Well, how did you know Neville was important?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I knew Neville was important when I first came into contact with his work. I had not heard of him. It was summer of 2003. And this is what reignited my writing career. There was a positive thinking magazine called Science of Mind. And they landed an interview with a major league pitcher named Barry Zito. And Barry became the hero of the 2012 World Series pitching for the San Francisco Giants. Barry uses, or used, a lot of these positive mind methods in his training. Came from his parents. And so they wanted to find somebody they could trust to interview Barry. There was no room to mess this up.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  This was a very important catch, an article and figure. And they asked me to do it, and I hadn't written for years. And I was so thrilled and I thought, this is another open door. This is another yes, take this. And so I interviewed Barry in the summer of 2003.

• 58:42AJ Gentile?

  No anxiety, don't fuck this up?

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Oh, I had huge anxiety.

• 58:46AJ Gentile?

  Good.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  And I read into his background very deeply. And I discovered something, which is that a good article of any kind is an article in which the writer follows his or her own proclivities and finds the connective tissue, finds the connective tissue. You create your own beginning, middle and end. And I wanted to do that with Barry because I was so fascinated with him as a man of mystical beliefs who really took the rubber to the road. Because you have nowhere to hide in athleticism, whether you're a martial artist, basketball player. You have nowhere to hide. You're out there naked.

• 59:24AJ Gentile?

  You can or you can't.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  You can or you can't. And your performance is your only proving ground. And Barry's performance was stellar. And he was so frank and so upfront about the mystical ideas that fed his training, which he got from his parents, Joe and Roberta. And as we were talking, Barry said to me, you must really be into Neville or Neville Goddard. I had never heard the name. And he said something to me about Neville Goddard, this great British Barbadian mystic.

• 59:54AJ Gentile?

  A ball player turns you on to Neville?

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Ball player. Okay, Barry Zito, yeah. And I got Neville's book, Resurrection, which was published in 1966, his last full-length book. And Neville's contention, which he repeated elegantly across his career, is that your imagination is what is symbolically called God in scripture. And that everything that you experience consists of your own emotionalized thoughts pushed out into the world, including my voice right now, including your presence right now. So Neville would say to your audience, there's no Mitch here, there's no A.J. here, these are figments of your own imagination.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  You're just ready to receive whatever this message is through that form right now. It's all rooted in you, as you are rooted in the ultimate. And I fell into Neville's message because he enunciated it so beautifully. And every time I read it or heard it, it was as though I were encountering it for the first time. And Neville became one of the chief influences on my life. So I write the article about Barry. About two weeks later, somebody tells me, Mitch, Joe Zito is on the phone, Barry's father. He wants to talk to you. And I'm thinking, oh, God, because Joe had a really tough reputation. So now I'm nervous and I pick up the phone and he goes, Mitch, this is Joe Zito. And he's, that article was terrific.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Now you listen to me, you stick with this thing. By which he meant writing, by which he meant writing. And it was just what I needed to hear at that juncture of life. Had I not gone to that backwater New Age publisher, had I not read into its backlist, had I not interviewed Barry, encountered Neville, encountered Joe, I wouldn't be seated here right now. I wouldn't be married to my wife, Jacqueline Castell, right now, who we met through our shared adjacency to these topics. What I experienced when I was fired from the Free Press was a failure. And it was emotionally very difficult. I suffered, I suffered. It's not something I want to go through again or wish somebody else would go through.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  But without that suffering would not have come the deliverance and the refinement that I sought. It's just the bargain that life strikes with us.

• 1:02:14AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, Jacques Vallée, Manley Hall, Neville, who was in the slush pile? What kind of work were you getting that you said, no?

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  The only things for me that wound up in the slush pile, and there are a few things I wish wound up in the slush pile that I published, were works that were just lazy, where people weren't really putting themselves through paces to ask, how do I know this? Have I struggled to verify this? Have I really tried to make this happen? And it's tough in publishing because even when you decide, I'm not going to acquire a project unless I get sample chapters and I know those sample chapters are just crackerjack and great. People choke under pressure all the time. That was the most stressful thing for me in publishing. People used to ask me, do you miss publishing? Not for an instant. It did many good things for me.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  But being a writer and being answerable to myself is infinitely more fulfilling than being on pins and needles as to whether somebody is going to meet his or her deadline. I would pay people good money to write on topics that were near and dear to their heart and they would choke. And it was always my fault, you know, never their fault. And there was an exception to that, who I write about in the book. And a lot of people don't hearing, don't like hearing the name of this exception.

• 1:03:41AJ Gentile?

  Go ahead.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  But that was Tucker Carlson. I knew Tucker when we were relative kids. And I signed up Tucker to write a book. His career was just taking off, didn't work out. One day at my desk, I got a handwritten note and a check for $10,000 from Tucker. And he said, look, I'm very sorry, I just, I can't do it. And one and only time in 27 years anyone's ever done that. Taken the responsibility on himself, returned the dough, and you part with a handshake. But the toughest part of publishing, and I suppose this goes on everywhere. This goes on in hospitals, this goes on in every workplace, is that people just will not say, I had an accident, or I couldn't do it,

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  or I made a mistake, I failed, whatever. And that was a tough part of publishing for me. I don't want to depend upon somebody else to row the boat. I want to row it myself.

• 1:04:37AJ Gentile?

  I think your publishing career shows up almost as rule number one, is do the work and do it on time. I mean, it's right there, number one.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  Amen. And if you can't, then be open about it. Go to the person to whom you owe it and you'll fix it together. Just don't run away.

• 1:04:56AJ Gentile?

  Can we connect Manley P. Hall to Ronald Reagan?

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:59AJ Gentile?

  Let's do that.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  They knew each other.

• 1:05:01AJ Gentile?

  They did?

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

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

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  I did a textual analysis of Reagan's speeches. And I found that from the earliest stages of his political career in the 1950s, when he was a spokesman for GE, up through the second term of his presidency, he was adopting not only ideas but specific phraseology from the work of Manley P. Hall, particularly from a book called The Secret Destiny of America, which is kind of a mythical retelling of American history. And Reagan would talk about this. He spoke about this at the centenary of the Statue of Liberty. He spoke about this in front of CPAC. He spoke about this in front of college audiences, commencement addresses.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

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

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  And he said, "Well, you know, I'm not supposed to talk about it, but Governor Reagan, you know, he's there in the office with Manley Hall." And then when Reagan was running for president, he would come on the tube, and Manley would sort of laugh a little and say, "Ah, yes, we know him." And a woman named Pearl Thomas, who was librarian, confirmed this, but it wasn't something they liked to talk about because Manley Hall was not a star chaser. He didn't like to try to associate himself with political figures or bold-faced names. There's something I really admired about the man. He lived in Hollywood most of his adult life, but he never kind of chased after celebrity status. He lived a very quiet life. Anyway, best of my knowledge, he and Reagan had had friendly meetings, and dead to rights

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  certain, as a dead to rights certainty, based on direct quotes, Reagan was drawing upon the work of Manley Hall in his own speeches. So, people say, "Oh, the Reagans, you know, into astrology, numerology." Yeah, that's true. And it went deeper than that. Went deeper than that.

• 1:08:16AJ Gentile?

  And do you remember any specific examples from Reagan?

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

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

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  whose job it was to nudge the New Republic along on its path to experiments in self-governance. And I remember, I first got onto the scent trail of this because a talk show host in New Orleans said to me, "Did you know that Ronald Reagan believed in secret spiritual masters?" And I said, "No, I didn't know that," somewhat skeptical. And he sent me a newsletter from some congressman who had written something about it. And the newsletter from the congressman identified an article that Reagan wrote for Parade Magazine in 1980 on the topic of what the Fourth of July means to him.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  And he wrote the article on a legal pad in longhand. And I got hold of the article, and my blood ran cold because I realized, oh my God, this is telltale phraseology from Manley P. Hall. And I began to track it, and I tracked the story that Manley told, which is a story of questionable vintage, but he certainly thought he was repeating something that had historical verity.

• 1:10:07AJ Gentile?

  Did he ever name that guy? Because he shows up in the Count of Saint Germain myth.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:10:12AJ Gentile?

  Which connects to theosophy and all of that.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. He called him the unknown speaker.

• 1:10:17AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  That was the term.

• 1:10:18AJ Gentile?

  It's a great story.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Unknown speaker. I tracked down the etymology of the story, and I'm fairly sure that it comes from a mid-19th century work. And it was told in a way that was intended to be fanciful. It was written by a guy named George Lippard, who was a friend of Edgar Allan Poe. And he was trying to capture something of the fiery eloquence at the time of the Revolution. And he acknowledged that the story was invented, but he felt it was parabolically true, mythically true. Manley felt that the story had historical verity. He repeated it. Reagan repeated it. Reagan even says, in front of CPAC, "I have to admit, I've never gone through the trouble to verify this story, but I believe that it's true. I've spoken to the man who told it to me."

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  I think he's referencing Manley P. Hall. And there it is. There is deep-seated esoteric history. You've got to remember, during Reagan's lifetime, Manley P. Hall was an unknown. He's known today. He's known throughout the internet today, but back then, this was a real figure from underground culture. And there's Ronald Reagan quoting from him.

• 1:11:26AJ Gentile?

  How does Manley Hall connect to Napoleon Hill?

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know that Manley Hall would have liked the work of Napoleon Hill because Manley was discouraging of an acquisitional approach to spirituality or to self-development. I don't share that critique of Manley's. I think Napoleon Hill, despite his own checkered biography, which I've written about, was a tremendously shrewd observer of human nature. And I reckon that Napoleon Hill and his book Think and Grow Rich, which I recommend, saved my own life because I was fired twice in publishing. The second and last time was in 2017. Now, my company was bought out by Random House. This was in 2013. And I thought, "Oh, man, they're going to come for me."

• 1:12:14AJ Gentile?

  Here we go again.

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  Here we go, yeah. And so, I did something that I recommend to people. I had known Napoleon Hill's work for years. I had published an edition of Think and Grow Rich since 2004. But I, like many people, thought, "Ah, you know, I don't need that self-help stuff. I know all these exercises. I'm an expert when it comes to this stuff. Come on, bring on the big boys." I was wrong. I was wrong. I decided, feeling that my job might be in danger, and I lasted another four years. Took them a while to find me. But I decided in 2013, you know...

• 1:12:50AJ Gentile?

  Was that when you were the best-kept secret in the company?

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  That's when I was the best-kept secret in the company.

• 1:12:54AJ Gentile?

  You don't...

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  I remain so. I thought to myself, "There's no such thing as a merger. There's a buyout."

• 1:13:03AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  And buyouts result in layoffs, and those are the hard truths. And so, I started to think, "I'm going to need to contemplate a career post-publishing because I ain't going through this again." And I recommend this to everybody who feels they are at a crisis in life. I got a copy of Think and Grow Rich, a book that I was on very familiar terms with, but I did something different. I did every exercise in that book as though my life depended on it. And when they came for me in fall of 2017, I was ready. I was ready to embark on my own independent career as a writer, speaker, television host. I was ready. And I attribute a lot of that to Napoleon Hill's work.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  People don't know Think and Grow Rich. They only believe that they know Think and Grow Rich because of our "I heard it somewhere" culture. The book has an element of mind metaphysics in it. It has an element of mental causation in it, but it's a very action-oriented book, and it is a book filled with shrewd observations about human nature. And I cannot recommend it highly enough.

• 1:14:12AJ Gentile?

  What do you think we're getting wrong about it?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  We get things wrong because we think we're too sophisticated for books like Think and Grow Rich. I'm supposed to be embarrassed, sitting on the New York City subway, carrying my copy of Think and Grow Rich. How gauche. What are you going to read next? Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People?

• 1:14:31AJ Gentile?

  That's next on my list.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

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

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  though your life depends on it, and things will happen. I state that from experience.

• 1:15:20AJ Gentile?

  I agree. My copy's probably 30 years old. I still have it. Did you connect Napoleon Hill to Marxism at some point?

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  It's very funny that you say that. There was a lawyer from the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Best editorial note I've ever gotten. He, he wrote in the margin of one of my manuscripts, because I was doing a book in conjunction with their foundation. Napoleon Hill was not a socialist. It was a very dry comment. I think what I was doing was I was comparing Napoleon Hill to the work of someone who was a socialist, and that's Wallace D. Waddles, who wrote The Science of Getting Rich, which was a primary source behind the book and movie The Secret. What people don't understand about Wallace D. Waddles, and what I've, what I've written about in connection with his life, he's a beautiful man. He was a democratic socialist, and he believed that each individual could liberate him

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  or herself from the machine by using these mental paths to wealth, and could create kind of a society of benevolent anarchy. I guess today, we might call him an anarchist or a libertarian, but he saw himself as a socialist, and he saw himself in the march of progress, and he saw his methods as methods that would liberate working men and women from the machine. He's a beautiful man. Ran for office three times on the ticket of the Socialist Party USA.

• 1:16:43AJ Gentile?

  He did?

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and was gonna run for office a fourth time, but unfortunately, he died of tuberculosis about a year after Science of Getting Rich came out. Beautiful man. And he was the real thing, Wallace D. Waddles. He was a real idealist, and I think his methods are among the most wonderful that you'll find in the whole mind metaphysics genre. He was, and I've written extensively about this, and let me tell you, this is a hard one argument. I wrote an article recently on the German idealist, FWH Hegel, called Hegel and the Validity of Pop Metaphysics. Wallace D. Waddles was a legitimate interpreter of the metaphysical ideals of Hegel as a philosopher.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Ideals that got flipped by Marx into materialism. We sometimes use the term dialectical materialism. Hegel had nothing material about him. He believed that the driving engine of life was the metaphysical. Wallace D. Waddles took this argument, along with the notions, concepts, theories of other idealist philosophers, and he rendered it into a slender program in his book, The Science of Getting Rich. Again, kind of a gauche title that lettered people don't want to be associated with, but a memorable title.

• 1:18:01AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  I always tell people, when you're, titles are very important. They're critical. When you're looking for a title, the early pioneers of self-help were masters. Think and Grow Rich, Science of Getting Rich, The Game of Life, How to Win Friends and Influence People. You cannot forget these once you've heard them. They're outrageous.

• 1:18:20AJ Gentile?

  We spend more time on our titles than we do on our episodes sometimes.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  And well, you should. Well, you should. Books are made or broken by titles, and I always tell people, be audacious, but live up to it. Live up to it. Make a bold promise, and then deliver on the bold promise. Or use something really basic. If you want to call a book The Tarot, okay, that's sufficient. If you want to call a book Lincoln, that's sufficient. But if you don't have something that's instantly recognizable, you're gonna have to make a bold promise, especially to readers who are just being pulled in all different directions at once. So Waddles writes this book, The Science of Getting Rich, which seems very unsocialistic in its framing, but he had a point of view that was totally original and, and, and valid,

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  and I think really sincere in its iteration of Hegel's metaphysics. My article, Hegel and the Validity of Pop Metaphysics, very hard one piece, came through very deep reading of Hegel. It's available for free on Substack. I'm proud of it. And I'm proud of Wallace D. Waddles. I was probably comparing Hill to Waddles, and that's what engendered that remark.

• 1:19:31AJ Gentile?

  Would, would Waddles work now? Would his philosophy work now, like in our society?

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  ... of consciousness, awareness, judgment. And I would say it was one of the happiest weeks of my life. It was extraordinary. Recommend it to anybody.

• 1:19:49AJ Gentile?

  Well, your, your motto for a while was try, and then Monroe changed it a little, didn't it?

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  Did I?

• 1:19:58AJ Gentile?

  Well, didn't something tell you to?

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:20:00AJ Gentile?

  Do less?

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Yes, you're very right. You're very right. My motto is try.

• 1:20:04AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  And it'll always be in my bones, but we were, as you rightly hit on, at the Monroe Institute, as the ultimate exercise, we were invited, using this sound technology, to go into what might be called a transpersonal state and ask five questions in order of descending importance. And I asked for direction about what to do with my life, my work, my career, and the number one response I got back was do less.

• 1:20:37AJ Gentile?

  Amazing.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  Do less. And it was jarring for me, because my modus operandi is activity.

• 1:20:49AJ Gentile?

  A book a year.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:51AJ Gentile?

  Podcasts, TV. You're always going, man.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  I'm always going. I'm always going.

• 1:20:56AJ Gentile?

  Which is not, not ideal.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I had a health episode earlier this year where I was hospitalized because my hemoglobin tanked, and we're still trying to figure out what happened and why, but it was scary as hell. And when you get a message of wisdom and you don't listen, you can do whatever you want, but that message will take it out of your skin. And it got taken out of my skin. And I'm fine now, and I'm doing much, much better. But do less was a dictum that I really had to abide, and I was listening intellectually, and I wasn't listening emotionally. This is, again, why I believe in very simple ideas, because profundity only appears in application. Now, am I doing less?

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  I think I am trying to dedicate myself to things that will make a great deal of difference if they succeed. I'm not running around as harried as I was. This is probably the longest stretch of time I've gone without fully throwing myself into a new book, although I've got one coming, and traveling.

• 1:22:05AJ Gentile?

  The yoga of?

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  The yoga of money.

• 1:22:07AJ Gentile?

  Yoga of money, that's right.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have to get back to that. But I, I, the travel and, you know, engaging in exchanges like this, these things are renewing for me. I'm not sitting down pounding away at the keyboard or prepping for a shoot. They're more natural for me. And so I've started to abide do less, although I'll always hang on to try as my, as my motto, because it, it not only pertains to work, but it pertains to spiritual experiment.

• 1:22:39AJ Gentile?

  I think those can live together, can't they?

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:22:43AJ Gentile?

  Is that what made you promise to talk 10% less?

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Well, talking 10% less is something that will benefit everybody's life. Because most of the time, most of what we say is just the chirping of cicadas. It's so unnecessary. I think that if people want an immediate technique for improving self-image, silence. Just say less. Don't overcompensate. Don't walk into a room and immediately start trying to influence things. Listen more carefully to what's going on. Don't throw yourself into relationships too quickly, or invite someone or something in too quickly. There is almost nothing in a person's life that won't be improved by talking at least

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  10% less.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

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• 1:23:59Speaker 04

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• 1:24:30AJ Gentile?

  When you came back from Monroe, I think you went on Duncan's show and there were things that you didn't, that were so intimate that you didn't want to talk about them. Have you ever shared those?

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  Well, do less was one of the things I wanted to talk about.

• 1:24:43AJ Gentile?

  Was it?

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43AJ Gentile?

  You didn't tell Duncan?

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  No, I didn't want to go into the specific messages that I had gotten because they felt too raw, too fresh, and I needed to sit with it for a while. I do disclose things. I encourage people, it's ironic because I encourage people not to disclose things. If you put something out there, if you put a wish out there, someone will destroy it. Someone will take it from you. I, with certain boundaries, tend to be very disclosing because I want to be transparent. We have a crisis of transparency among spiritual communicators. Spiritual communicators, and I know this from 27 years in publishing, having worked with

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  a lot of the household names, they're as weak as I am, and they're not the same people who appear when the camera's on, or when the microphone's on, or when the audience is assembled. And they ought to be, because to hide for the sake of theater is to misinform people that someone lives on a higher level, or a higher echelon, and that's not true. And it's more than just a problem of misleading the audience member. That's problematic by itself, but there's a greater problem.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  And the greater problem is, it conceals the severity of the odds that face all of us in matters of self-development. I am not hopeful about humanity. I am not a lover of humanity. I am a lover of individual people, very few in number.

• 1:26:24AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  Because I think humanity is in horrendous condition, and when I say, "Prepare for the day when your best friend betrays you," I mean that, and that's painful. And I don't like stating such a thing to people.

• 1:26:38AJ Gentile?

  If you live long enough, these rules come true.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  They come true. And my wish, my deepest wish, is for the happiness of the reader. But you can't have happiness, you can't have ideals, without being very direct with people. And spiritual communicators must be, if they're really going to be serving the human exchange, more direct about their own frailties. So I try to be transparent.

• 1:27:06AJ Gentile?

  In your book, and in a lot of your work, I see a fascination with people who have these manufactured personas, whether it's Plavatsky, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18AJ Gentile?

  You're the leather jacket tattooed self-help guy.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:23AJ Gentile?

  Is this a persona? How much of Mitch Horowitz is the leather jacket guy?

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  I often...

• 1:27:28AJ Gentile?

  Are you exempt from it?

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  I'm not exempt from anything. I tell people that if you decide how you want to be in the world, and you pursue that in terms of environment, selfhood, that's not wearing a mask, that's dropping a mask. The mask is conformity. I realized that at a certain point, I had left a part of my existence behind. I had left behind seeing Black Flag when I was 17 years old. I had left behind what thrilled me when I was a kid. I left behind hearing the Dead Kennedys sing "Holiday" in Cambodia at age 15, and knowing what truth was. And so I began to reclaim that.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  And if that chafed with new age culture, I don't really care. And if I'm invited to a new age center where everybody wears white, and I'm walking around like this, which is just Monday for me, I don't really care. It's who I am. I got a letter once, I still, I get goosebumps thinking about it, from Peter Chris, the first drummer in Kiss.

• 1:28:33AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  Because I had written about something Peter said in one of my books. He made a fascinating observation. Peter said that the bandmates were, you know, they were looking around for a sense of identity when they were young, in the early 70s, and when they came up with the makeup, he said it was the most incredible thing, because it wasn't like we were hiding, it was like we were revealing ourselves. And he said that Gene Simmons had confided to him one day, that putting on that demon makeup was for him so self-revealing, that if he could, he would never take it off. And he said that he noticed that when Gene put on his makeup, the roadies, and even audience members and everybody would sort of step around him a little bit.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  And he said, "You know, we became ourselves. We became comfortable, we became relaxed, we became familiar with ourselves for the first time. We weren't hiding, we were revealing ourselves." And so I wrote about this in a book, and then I heard from Peter, and I got hysterical with joy. And I take that as truth. And I want to suggest to people, I want to suggest to people, whatever walk of life you're in, are you really dressing, acting, comporting yourself the way you want? And I'm not saying you should act on it immediately, but know your preferences, know your preferences. Get up in the goddamn morning and ask yourself, "Is this what I want to wear? Is this who I want to be?

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Is this how I want to sound? Is this how I want my hair to look?" Or whatever it is. Just know. You know, we never even ask ourselves. We're so suffused with peer pressure, and with cultural conformity, and it gets its claws inside of us, to the point where we can't even talk to ourselves using authentic phrasing that belongs to us, the individual. So know your preferences, start there. It's not hiding, it's revealing.

• 1:30:30AJ Gentile?

  That's perfect. I got to spend two days with Gene on a job, and boy, I just ate it up. I just picked his brain every minute of those days.

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  That's fantastic.

• 1:30:43AJ Gentile?

  He was amazing, he was great to me.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  I love Kiss. And I am forever a 15-year-old boy, and proudly so.

• 1:30:49AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  We saw Kiss at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and, oh my god.

• 1:30:54AJ Gentile?

  I think, doesn't Ace show up in your work here and there as well?

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I love Ace, I love every one of them.

• 1:31:01AJ Gentile?

  Just admit, when they took off the makeup, it was jarring to remember that first...

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  It was a traumatic experience.

• 1:31:07AJ Gentile?

  It was, it was. I'm still not used to it. So the book is aimed at the false self, and we've kind of, we talked around it a little bit today. When was the last time you caught your false self kind of running your personality?

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  When I talk about things like service, or when I start finding myself using language internally that belongs to the external spiritual culture. That's why I'm very careful with words like "love," or "peace," or "service." I don't want to see anybody using terms that come out of the Bartlett's Book of Divine Quotations, or that sound like they belong to a business plan from Silicon Valley 25 years ago. I want to know what I, and what the individual, wants. Let's start there, let's start there. Doesn't mean you can act on it immediately, but I write a lot in the book about knowing

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

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

• 1:32:37AJ Gentile?

  "I want to be rich, so I can start a charity. I want to be famous, so I can influence..." That's dishonest.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Right. It's dishonest. Unless one really means it, and if you really mean it, well then, bravo, be my guest.

• 1:32:50AJ Gentile?

  So if you want to be rich, just say it.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Know that you do, say it. And for god's sake, money does a lot of good things. It educates children, it takes your family members on trips, it replaces the roof in a house, it's necessary. So let's start from stark honesty. A wish, if it's authentic, should feel a little embarrassing, because we are so induced by our subcultures to use a language that is not our own. We were talking about this earlier with the idea of quoting from translations of translations of translations of wisdom literature, that we can't even access in the originals, the originals may not exist. We call it tradition, it's custom. It's not always custom, often it's habit.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Let's give ourselves a break, give ourselves a break in private, dispense with habit, dispense with custom, and in an atmosphere of exquisite privacy, within your own psyche, the only domain of privacy left in our interconnected culture.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Speak to yourself for real about what you want. I'm not saying you're gonna act on it immediately. I'm not saying you're even gonna like it. But at least know, don't be a stranger to yourself. Because I think past a certain age, maybe age nine, a kid is so suffused with peer pressure that the outer world and its subcultures just get their claws in us and we can't even talk to ourselves in a real way anymore within. I also counsel deep privacy. Because if you arrive at your wish, and it's something I hope a person does, and you share it with someone else, they will destroy it.

• 1:34:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  They will, because it's not what's inside them. And we as a human community just love making rules and we love slamming doors on one another's fingers. And I can't tell you the number of times that people who have spoken to me of service and love and I'm your best friend. I've still got the shivs in my back from those times. So let's let the pretty language go for a minute. Let's let the pretty quotations and the customary ideas that divines all over the internet can repeat. Let's let that go for a minute. Forget the comments section. This is about the individual. What does the individual want within his or her psyche?

• 1:35:09AJ Gentile?

  Well, can we just quickly go through the nine steps? Because people need to know that your book is, it's a practical guide. We've got the nine steps is the wish. Ask what you truly want. Ends, not the means.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting to me because you're not focusing on, I forget what you even use in the book, but it was if you're picturing yourself playing in an arena.

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:38AJ Gentile?

  You don't picture the guitar lessons. You focus on the arena.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  And in conjunction with that, I would say that we can't choose the conditions by which something reaches us. And we have to be flexible about those conditions. I did not plan on getting fired and hired by a new age publisher. That wasn't in the business plan. But that's what allowed me to rediscover myself as a writer. And that feeds into what I was saying about parables and myths in which gods, spiritual messengers, genies come to you as a disguised stranger, an unbidden stranger. Let those strangers in. We throw away incredible miracles, incredible gifts, because they don't fit our mind's eye picture

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  of what we think we want. The philosopher Jacob Needleman was a mentor to me. And he once said to me, "What do you do when someone offers you a gift?" And brilliant student I was, I stared at him blankly. And he said, "You accept it. You accept it." And we throw away extraordinary gifts all the time because they don't fit our mind's eye image. So flexibility.

• 1:36:52AJ Gentile?

  That was, that was one that was very striking to me. Speak it, hold the wish, say it out loud to yourself.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:59AJ Gentile?

  The talisman.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01AJ Gentile?

  So write it down, protect it.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:37:04AJ Gentile?

  And hide it.

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  Write the wish down. Write a well-focused, passionately felt and exquisitely honest wish down on a little card or something. Put it in the old clear packing tape. I'm a big fan of clear packing tape.

• 1:37:20AJ Gentile?

  I see that.

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

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

• 1:37:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02AJ Gentile?

  Step five is rehearse it, run it through your mind.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Live with it.

• 1:38:06AJ Gentile?

  Live with it.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:07AJ Gentile?

  Pray for it. Petition whatever greater force you seek, if none appeal to the infinite matter of chaos. Hypnagogia, hypnagogic state. That's interesting as well because once again, we're in practical application.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19AJ Gentile?

  So for those who don't know, what is the hypnagogic state?

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Hypnagogia is a deeply relaxed state that we all enter twice a day, just as we're falling to sleep at night and just as we're coming to in the morning. This is a state that was first described, although not in that term, by a French mind theorist, Emile Coe, who was very popular in the early 20th century. He's a hero to me. Coe is famous for having prescribed a mantra, "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better." And critics would howl and make fun of him and say, "How could anything so childish make any difference in anybody's life?" But what they missed was how Coe prescribed using it. In this state of hypnagogia, a term that didn't come into use

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  until several generations later in the 1980s. Coe died in 1926. Hypnagogia is this exquisitely relaxed state that you enter again, just as falling to sleep, just as coming to. It's a state of bodily heaviness, heaviness, almost bodily paralysis. You may experience waking dreams. You may experience hallucinations. Your rational defenses are lowered, but you still have active cognition. Use that time. Use that time to say a prayer. Make a visualization. Make an affirmation. Coe called this conscious auto-suggestion.

• 1:39:51Speaker 03

  It's a kind of self-hypnosis. Now, he was very adamant about not being a spiritual figure. He was trying to separate hypnosis as a therapeutic art from anything to do with the occult or esoteric. So be it. So be it. But...

• 1:40:08AJ Gentile?

  But in that state, you are very suggestive.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  You are very suggestive and it has proven in the 1970s and 80s in experiments called the Gansfeldt experiments, which are bulletproof, to be prime time for telepathy. That if you induce someone into this state of relaxation, this semi-sleep state, statistically incidences of telepathy spike. And this data has been published, pondered over, meta-analyzed to the ends of the earth. It's unpolluted and it's bulletproof. Even, even the best skeptics agreed and we have precious few of them today. And you ain't gonna find them on Wikipedia.

• 1:40:47AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  Anyway, there is an extra-physical aspect to this state. And it's so simple. It's so simple. Because everybody answers it twice a day. Use that time to run your wish through your head. That's a period of special suggestive power. I believe a period of unique, extra-physical possibility. And a lot of people who suffer from grief will describe the early morning hours as the toughest time of day. And that's because our rational defenses are down. And things that we're afraid of or grieving of, they grip us when those rational defenses are down. And then the workday comes and we realize, "Oh, this wasn't so bad." So hypnagogia can be a fearsome time,

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  but it's also a time of great potential if we use it. So use it to repeat one's wish. When those rational defenses are down, there's the possibility of a real penetration.

• 1:41:44AJ Gentile?

  And step eight is silence.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:47AJ Gentile?

  How does that work?

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  The, first of all, we talk about things in order to dilute them. We talk to our shrinks. We talk to our friends. He said, she said, to dilute them. And sometimes that's necessary. But you don't want to bring that quality of dilution to your wish. Keep your wish silent. If there is one law that runs through occultism, it is the power of silence. There's great wisdom in that. We talk to dissipate. We talk to disperse. We're silent to concentrate, to focus. You'll see that law repeated in nature. We can wave air currents with our hands, but a focused air current can have the power of a bullet. As above, so below. Abide that in the psyche.

• 1:42:31AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about how you maybe have convinced me I'm a left path Satanist.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:42:40AJ Gentile?

  So I think you use occult, esoteric and Satanism as a way to kind of badger people. Because you, because you won't disavow, you say, "I'm a Satanist," and that's that. And you kind of leave it there without a definition. Because when I hear your definition of those words, it's like, "I might be Satanist too."

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  What I'm trying to do, and I'm trying to do it as transparently as possible because I do write a lot in the book about the historicism behind this, is I am trying to push back at centuries of conditioning around our religious models and ideas. For example, if I use the word demon, everyone has the same association with that word. Something evil, scary, terrible, that will possess you. Well, the original Greek demon or Latin daimon was a neutral term. It just meant a kind of worker bee spirit, like a djinn or a genie in Arab culture. We use the term angel and we all have the same association. I may as well be using the term Snow White.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Everybody sees the Disney cartoon, even though the myth of Snow White is centuries older than the Disney cartoon. So angel is Greek for messenger. And that's benign, whereas the other is bad. All I'm trying to do is to take a sledgehammer to this conformity and conditioning. The early Hebrews had a concept of Ha-Satan, or the Satan, which was sometimes translated as the adversary or the prosecutor or the disturber. This is the friction of creativity without which we wouldn't be ourselves. This is the friction that refines us when we suffer. I talked about the experience of being fired

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  and what that led me to. The mythical, although I would say also veritable force of those experiences is what the primeval Hebrews referred to as Ha-Satan. I am trying to strip the bark off of these conformities and give people a vocabulary that is their own, that is free from centuries and centuries of customary usage. I am trying in esoterica, although as you rightly said, it's a very practical book. It's a very hands-on book. Underlying the techniques and the practicality is my effort to...

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  Strip away centuries, if not millennia, of customary usage and try to recover the threads and the fragments, because that's really all that we have, of our earliest spiritual practice among our most primeval ancestors, even including Neanderthal men and women who did have a spirituality that would be somewhat recognizable to us today. I want to get to a sense of this fragmentary realization and what it meant, best as we can tell, to the deep ancients before our conformist acculturation process got hold of it.

• 1:45:58AJ Gentile?

  People don't know that Neanderthals had art and music and all that.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  It's extraordinary.

• 1:46:03AJ Gentile?

  It's amazing.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Neanderthal men and women had statuary, which in the mid-19th century got termed Venus figurines. They're little bulbous female forms, and they are thought to have been either a mother goddess or a fertility goddess. They had talismans, things that we would recognize, like eagle talons or bear claws that were presumably for help with the hunt. We would look at these things in the 21st century, and we can recognize this statuary, we can recognize these talismans. I'm wearing a scarab around my neck. And it's extraordinary that these are our closest pre-human ancestors, a lot like us, but not us, not us.

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  And it suggests that spirituality itself, extra-physicality, is not conditioned, it's realized. It goes back to pre-human history.

• 1:47:00AJ Gentile?

  I think people will be surprised to know that you have a great respect for Catholicism.

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  I do.

• 1:47:04AJ Gentile?

  And really, most religions you speak very highly of. Didn't you say that Catholicism was closest to the most perfect religion or something like that?

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  The universal religion.

• 1:47:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  We have to remember, first of all, I love Catholicism, and I would never say a word against Catholicism, which always surprises people because they think, "Korowitz is so heterodox." And I may be heterodox, but I also have ideals. And I love that tradition, and I feel in some ways that tradition saved my life. It's not my commitment.

• 1:47:33AJ Gentile?

  How did it save your life?

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  I went through a time of terrible emotional suffering, and I practiced a very steady act of saint veneration to Saint Jude. And I feel like there was a real opening in my life on account of that. Now, my approach is that Catholicism is a kind of vessel of the universal religion. By which I mean, this was the final outcropping of a Roman culture of faith, which itself was the final outcropping of Greco-Egyptian religion. The Egyptian, the Persian, the Mediterranean faiths,

• 1:48:18Speaker 03

  North African faiths were reconfigured within Hellenic culture. Hellenic culture was reconfigured in its final expression by Rome. And Catholicism with saint veneration, with the boy savior, the earth mother, you can call it Isis and Horus, you can call it Mary and Jesus. It was a vessel for this universal religion. And I think that in quarters where you find hatred or conspiracy theories for Catholicism, it's because of that, because it's that last vouchsafing of a universal faith. And I enter it and I approach it as such.

• 1:49:01AJ Gentile?

  I believe you, I'm not very religious, but I think Saint Michael saved my life, and I've been wearing his shield ever since that day.

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  I noticed that. I was going to ask you about that very thing, yeah.

• 1:49:10AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I was going through a hard time, and I just found myself in a Catholic church and suddenly felt better. The church was empty, and I was in Saint Michael's Row. And I just, I don't know, I felt something.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  One has to listen to these things. Again, it's the disguised stranger coming to us. I discovered the miraculous metal, the image of Mary from Visions by Catherine Labarre in a bookstore in New York City that was run by the Pauline's. And they are a devout order of nuns who maintain a media ministry. Now, unfortunately, in our world today, bookstores like the Pauline's bookstore have closed in New York City. Somehow, I can spend $40 on a pretzel at a concert, but I can't support the Pauline's. And the tragedy is, if you don't have those places, someone's not going to discover Saint Michael or the miraculous metal or Saint Jude.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  And of course, we could be talking about any number of faith traditions. And we just piss away so much money in this society. I hear about this place closing and that place closing. Plenty of money around. We just piss it away in places that don't matter very much.

• 1:50:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23AJ Gentile?

  Well, then, what is Satanism to you? What is everyone getting wrong? Because I don't hear anything evil.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  And I do think that one can seek a relationship with the being whom the ancient Hebrews called "hasatan." Or in the Bible, there is reference, as we were discussing earlier, to the so-called demon, a word we're not supposed to use, "azazel." And I think that the individual is much freer and is possessed of much greater options than he or she believes. Most people will hear this and reject it outright. Most people will hear this and say, "He is leading us into perdition. Don't listen to this guy, this goes to a terrible place." How do I know that?

• 1:51:51Speaker 03

  That's centuries and centuries and centuries of conditioning speaking. Again.

• 1:51:57AJ Gentile?

  I can't use Satanist in the title of this episode.

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  Cannot.

• 1:52:00AJ Gentile?

  I cannot.

• 1:52:00Speaker 03

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

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  And even people who don't like me and don't like my ideas, maybe, maybe, they'll capture a glimpse of the fact that if there's some guy out there on the margins saying the things I say, it affords them more room for their own search. And I'll settle for that.

• 1:53:00AJ Gentile?

  Have you ever lost any speaking gigs or anything because you refused to, you have?

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I was kicked out of a New Age organization with whom I had years of gainful collaboration. I had written a book for them as a fundraiser. I had nothing but friendly relations, and somebody there started a whispering campaign against me. Next thing I knew, I was expelled. I was scrubbed from the website and so on. There was a Freemasonic lodge that canceled to talk on me. These are only the things I know about. I'm sure there's lots of other things I don't know about. But the fact is, when I look at people I admire, people whose shoulders we stand on, they suffered far greater calumny than I have to defend their own beliefs. I spoke of becoming a writer because I wanted to defend the lives of spiritual messengers

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  who I thought were disparaged in the mainstream. Those are my heroes. I'm not going to run from expressing myself.

• 1:53:59AJ Gentile?

  Those expulsions were probably useful then. You had no use for a group that wanted to throw you out?

• 1:54:05Speaker 03

  They've certainly proven useful in that they put a person face to face with what he or she believes, what free expression means. We all say, "It's just like we're all against war. We're all for free expression until we don't like it."

• 1:54:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  And so, it teaches you something about humanity. Last night, we were watching an episode of The Twilight Zone, famous episode, "The Shelter," where neighbors burst into the guy's bomb shelter. And there goes Rod Serling in all of 22 minutes exposing us to human nature.

• 1:54:34AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  So you learn something about human nature, you learn something about yourself. And in that sense, it's painful, but it's educative.

• 1:54:43AJ Gentile?

  That episode captures human nature perfectly, the paranoia and how people turn on each other. A lot of my content is based on Rod Serling's work. What does it mean to walk the left path?

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Well, the left-hand path, as I use it, is a spiritual path that emphasizes individualism, the individual wish, self-recreation. You might say that it focuses on "my will be done" versus "thy will be done." And some people hear that, and they don't like it. And I understand that. But let's take a breath. Most of the time, what most of us are seeking in the spiritual search is some sense of agency, of power, not force, not force, power, to see through our wish for expression in the world. And we sometimes perfume it, saying, "thy will be done," with the right hand,

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  but with the left hand saying, "I'm really open, it comports with my will." And I really believe in the individual. I believe in the ability of the mature, sensitive individual as a person to identify his or her own path in life. And I believe in ethics, which arise from empathy. And most people don't have it, regardless of how pretty they talk. Ethics arise from the emotions, and you have to have fine emotions to really even understand what ethics are. I write to people with ethics, and that's to whom my appeals are made.

• 1:56:15AJ Gentile?

  It's another rule, is that don't underestimate the power of emotions.

• 1:56:18Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. World stands on them.

• 1:56:22AJ Gentile?

  A couple of questions I want to go off-script for.

• 1:56:27AJ Gentile?

  Horoticism. From your book, you said, "We don't have Buddha, we have Buddhism." "The teacher becomes the teaching."

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:56:36AJ Gentile?

  And the teaching calcifies. So you've written a lot of books, and one day, there's gonna be a horoticism. And what will it get wrong about you?

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:56:47AJ Gentile?

  When you're gone?

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  Well, I'm referring to the fact that there is in life a descending octave, and there's no getting away from it. Right. We don't have Buddha, we have Buddhism. We don't have Christ, we have Christianity or Christendom. What, if there's a horowitz-ism, will get wrong is it will bring orthodoxy to these ideas. It will close them off. It will slam the door closed. It will say things like, "Live for yourself," without being uncomfortable with that statement, as I am, even as I believe in it, from a more complex point of view than a later version might hold. The truth is, all these traditions are the same in the sense that we cop to ideals,

• 1:57:31Speaker 03

  but we live according to what makes me feel safe, what makes me feel unsafe, what title can I claim that makes me sound like a hero, while puts the other person into an uncomfortable little box. So unfortunately, due to this descending current of humanity, pretty much every tradition winds up, winds up, despite its pretty language, being a statement of "I like and I don't like." So I can't expect if there's ever an iteration of what I'm into, it'll be much better. If it is, I'm wrong about human nature, and human nature is better than I think.

• 1:58:08AJ Gentile?

  I don't think it is. Though with so many religions, it's, "Follow this book exactly, and you'll end up in paradise or whatever with your rules." It's, "Follow this exactly, and it's gonna hurt anyway."

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  It's gonna hurt anyway, but you may be happier at the end of the day. And you may express yourself more at the end of the day, and you may spend less time falling asleep at night with chips on your chest, or complaining week in and week out to the shrink, and expressing yourself, and doing more that makes you feel vital.

• 1:58:41AJ Gentile?

  There's only one person on the earth besides your mother who's allowed to call you Mitchell. Tell me about Paul Krasner.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  Oh, may he rest in peace.

• 1:58:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  Paul was an old hippie and beatnik, and I got this PEN Literary Award in Oakland, California, and they were giving Paul a lifetime achievement award. And he was in declining health at the time, and he walked up to the podium, and he was limping, and he got up to the podium, and some of us, including me, were giving him a standing ovation, and just with the most impeccable comedic timing, he said, "Why was it everyone standing?" He was like a Lenny Bruce kind of figure. And I don't know, you know, he used to call me Mitchell, and I just put up with it. I don't let producers call me Mitchell.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  So Paul Krasner and Mom were the only ones who could do that.

• 1:59:38AJ Gentile?

  That's rare company. There was another anecdote that I found interesting. Whose memorial was it where the widow came up to you?

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:51AJ Gentile?

  And gave you a word?

• 1:59:52Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  And I've tried to abide that, because when I write about controversial themes, those themes are always very foundationally grounded in a really searching historicism, and I hope in a really searching ethics and spirituality. So I took that to heart, although I took it into a different neighborhood than the ones that those guys worked in.

• 2:01:00AJ Gentile?

  So you're always thinking standards with your work?

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  Always, constantly. I will never write down a word, never write down a quote, never write down an idea without suffering it. Test the idea by suffering it. Test the idea by suffering it. And I really try to live with things, and I try to ask myself, rather than repeating a quote, or a story, or reciting something from memory, "This was in the Bible, that was in the Bible," go back to the source, and you might be very surprised, not only at what's really there, but at how these things differ according to different traditions and translations. Reckon with that, live with that.

• 2:01:40AJ Gentile?

  I like the standard story because I have a saying here that drives everybody nuts, is, "We never phone it in. We never phone it in."

• 2:01:47Speaker 00

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• 2:02:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43AJ Gentile?

  How does, your book has financial advice. How does a youth Democrat socialist accountant?

• 2:02:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:02:50AJ Gentile?

  End up telling me to buy index funds, which I do.

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  Right, oh, good. Bravo. Your kids are gonna be very happy for that, I can assure you. It's so funny. Man, I was a treasurer of the youth section of Democratic Socialists of America.

• 2:03:05AJ Gentile?

  Not an easy gig.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

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

• 2:03:35AJ Gentile?

  Nope, they won't let it hap-- Q, Q, Q all day long.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

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

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

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

• 2:04:48AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  That's from people who want to take commissions from you. Park it in the boring old S&P 500. Be chill. It will go down, it will go back up. We watched it during COVID, it was very rough. Stand your ground, you will be happy. That's my advice.

• 2:05:05AJ Gentile?

  It's great advice. Here's how I diversify: S&P index, aerospace index, healthcare index, that's it.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:05:12AJ Gentile?

  I don't own any stocks.

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  And that's where Elon's money is.

• 2:05:16AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:05:16Speaker 03

  That's where Zuckerberg's money is, that's where Sam Altman's money is. It ain't going down.

• 2:05:21AJ Gentile?

  It's not.

• 2:05:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:24AJ Gentile?

  So are you a capitalist? I can't, I don't know where you want— Marxism, socialism, Marxism, you're reading Lenin?

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  I do read Lenin.

• 2:05:32AJ Gentile?

  What are you trying to learn from Lenin?

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  What I grew to in Lenin is even though he was an ardent materialist, he was into self-development.

• 2:05:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  And he really believed in the self-development project, as did a lot of people in his generation of Tsarist Russia. Tsarist Russia created its own demise. Not only was it a horrible system of governance that didn't allow a middle class to flourish, didn't really facilitate the conditions where people could own property and have some degree of freedom of search, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But Tsarist Russia made a faithful decision, which is that if we want to modernize, we need some sort of a professional bureaucracy. We need people who are educated, who can run the civil service, and we need, of course, engineers and doctors and scientists.

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  So they started educating small clusters of young people who hated the regime and the government, and one Vladimir Lenin was among them. And Lenin doted upon a mid-19th-century novel by a Russian existentialist writer titled "What Is To Be Done?" He later named his own pamphlet, "What Is To Be Done?" after this novel. And within it appeared a character named Rachmatov, who believed ardently in self-development. He was kind of a Russian hardcore version of, oh, I don't know, I guess you'd say an American up by the bootstraps-type figure. And this inspired Lenin, and I like the Russian writers and existentialists

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  because their point of view is expressed from a country that has been steeped in difficulty for many, many generations, stemming from a Tsarist system that was truly backward and that the public hated. And so these writers were as realist as they come. And Lenin doted upon ideas of self-development. He also liked the novels of Jack London, where the rugged, radical individualist was always the hero. And so I'm always interested in learning about the background reading of great figures. I'm not a Leninist,

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  but I'm interested as hell in his life because it was a difficult life, and it was a life animated by a singular goal. That goal succeeded. That goal also turned into a nightmare because it succeeded with autocracy, paved the way for Stalin. But I find Lenin a fascinating figure.

• 2:08:07AJ Gentile?

  I think that's allowed. I mean, every time I put out a video about Hitler, it's a banger. That doesn't mean we endorse it.

• 2:08:14Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 2:08:14AJ Gentile?

  It is a fascination.

• 2:08:15Speaker 03

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

• 2:08:54AJ Gentile?

  Well, tell that story of the struggling young lawyer in London.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  Sure, absolutely. Nobody's interested in it. They're interested in Hitler and the occult, but Gandhi and the occult

• 2:09:01AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:09:02Speaker 03

  is much closer to the bone in terms of truth.

• 2:09:05AJ Gentile?

  And then I want to talk about the founding fathers in the occult.

• 2:09:07Speaker 03

  Oh, by all means. Gandhi, as a young man, was studying to be a lawyer in London. And in 1889, things were going terribly for him. He was isolated, he was lonely, he failed his matriculation exams. Try being a vegetarian in London in 1889. It's not very fun today, much less then. And he was lonely and isolated, and he met a couple of students, followers of Madame H.P. Blavatsky, who had fled India in the face of scandal. Madame Blavatsky was this mysterious, world-traveled Russian occultist, both loved and damned. I love her. And she was living in the Notting Hill section of London, where she was completing work on her—

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  she had actually just published her magnum opus, "The Secret Doctrine," two-volume occult cosmology.

• 2:09:59AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  Gandhi was very nervous about meeting her. He was invited to meet her, went to meet her, and he said, from that moment forward until his own assassination, he recorded in interviews, letters, articles, that meeting Madame Blavatsky, the high priestess of the occult, ignited his first stirrings of a philosophy of human universality, of civic equality, of the equal footing on which all religions should stand. Theosophy had and has as its motto, "There is no religion higher than truth." Gandhi later said, "All religions are true,

• 2:10:43Speaker 03

  and all have some flaw in them." You could hear within the theosophical motto an echo of Gandhi's— within Gandhi's maxim.

• 2:10:52AJ Gentile?

  How did she learn about him?

• 2:10:54Speaker 03

  Oh, listen, he was an unknown young kid studying law in London, and a couple of her followers asked him one day if he could help them read the Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit. And he said, "I could barely read the original Sanskrit myself. I wanted to get away from the Hinduism of my parents. I thought it was a bunch of superstition and nonsense. I was not interested in a religious text, but I was very lonely, I was very isolated, and if these two guys wanted to be my friends, I would agree to it." And then they asked him, "By the way, would you like to meet the high priestess of the occult herself, Madame H.P. Blavatsky?" And he was shocked and said, "I was in—" —

• 2:11:36AJ Gentile?

  You put the chain of events from asking for a translation to throughout the empire.

• 2:11:40Speaker 03

  It's just remarkable. And he knew Madame Blavatsky as this anti-colonial activist from the old country. So he felt sympathy, and he went to meet her, and she gave him a copy of a shorter book of hers called "A Key to Theosophy," and it speaks of human universality. And Gandhi said this was the ignition point that launched his philosophy. So everybody wants to talk about Hitler and the occult, and it's so exciting and so forth and so on. But Gandhi and the occult is a much closer-to-the-bone version of historical truth that's unknown. If you get a biography of Gandhi today, you'll be surprised if there's three lines about Madame Blavatsky in there, despite how formative she was on his development.

• 2:12:25Speaker 03

  We've written it out of history.

• 2:12:27AJ Gentile?

  What did he take from her that, practically, that we can see?

• 2:12:32Speaker 03

  Her key teaching at that time is that all of humanity's religions grew from one underground occult source that we've lost track of. And she referred to this as "the secret doctrine." And all of our religions, all of our ethical philosophies are like trees that spring up from this underground water source. And so he came to feel, if that's true, and he felt that it was in fact true, it also means that our differences are simply surface differences, and that all religions, all beings, whatever their caste or background, are essentially equal.

• 2:13:16Speaker 03

  And he credited her with that realization. It fomented the largest democratic revolution, non-violent democratic revolution in human history. And here we are, nobody knows about it. Madame Blavatsky died an American citizen. She was very proud of being an American citizen. Nobody's heard of her in our country, or if they have, they're like, "Oh, that charlatan, that fake. The story is so much deeper." And this is how history gets neglected.

• 2:13:44AJ Gentile?

  And she died young, didn't she?

• 2:13:45Speaker 03

  Fifty-nine years old.

• 2:13:46AJ Gentile?

  Oh. So what do people get wrong about her in theosophy? Because when I think of ancient Egyptian religion, Sumerian, Catholicism, it sounds like she might be on to something.

• 2:13:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. They think of her as a fake. They think of her as a charlatan. They think of her as a purveyor of phony, mediumistic tricks. And what they don't realize is that our world would look radically different today without Madame H.P. Blavatsky. Her influence traversed the globe in the late 19th century and resulted in the culture of spiritual search of which I am a part today. She and her colleagues reignited Buddhist practice in the East, where it was withering, in the nation of Sri Lanka, even in Japan, in far-flung parts of India,

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  where Vedic practice, Hinduism, Buddhism, were being chipped away by the well-funded machinery of colonialism. She and her compatriots not only revived the traditional faiths in the East, but they sent shockwaves throughout the world conveying the message that there is a secret doctrine, there is an esoteric search, there is an unknown esoteric core to religions, and that it's the birthright of every individual to search for these things. It was almost like a worldwide seismic version of what Henry David Thoreau was trying to get across in Walden.

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  But it played out on this global stage, and it created the culture of search that I'm part of today.

• 2:15:31AJ Gentile?

  What was so attractive about her? Because you talk about Thoreau, where I don't consider him an outdoorsman at all. He's writing about the outdoors, but he wasn't much of an outdoorsman. But Madame Blavatsky, she lived it.

• 2:15:44Speaker 03

  She lived it. She was born in Tsarist Russia. She was part of minor nobility, but she suffered so much harassment that she had to travel in order to search.

• 2:15:53AJ Gentile?

  Why harassment?

• 2:15:54Speaker 03

  Oh, look, in Tsarist Russia, I mean, Paradise Lost was banned under the Tsarist regime. The idea of anything that went outside the Orthodox Church was above ground, considered verboten. And so she traveled the world, as she described it, searching for esoteric truths, came to the United States in the early 1870s, was fascinated with spiritualism and seance and midnight raps, not because she thought it was the real thing or the real McCoy, but because she said, here is an opening. Here is a culture that is experimental. Here is a culture that, for all its contradictions, protects the individual search for meaning.

• 2:16:36Speaker 03

  And so she felt that the soil of the United States at that time was the place from which could spring a worldwide revolution in spiritual search. And she told of being advised by these mysterious adepts from the East, and people felt she was inventing it, making it up. But dig this, dig this. Americans at that time, Westerners in general, had not really heard much about gurus and swamis and robed adepts from the East. These things were completely alien to Americans. India was considered as distant as the surface of another planet. And when such teachers, who were altogether real, did begin to come to America in the

• 2:17:19Speaker 03

  1890s, then later in the 19th century, we Americans were able to recognize them because of her narratives. Her narratives made it into the press. Her narratives were sensationalistically treated by the media and thus introduced everyday Americans to things they might not have recognized. So when the Maharishi Mahasayogi came to the West to teach transcendental meditation in 1959, Americans could place him immediately, and people a generation earlier from him, because of the narrative that she introduced.

• 2:17:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:17:55Speaker 03

  We knew, we understood something, I get it, I get it. This is one of these holy men from the East. That was an alien idea to Americans in the Victorian Age.

• 2:18:04AJ Gentile?

  So how about the occult with the founding fathers? Because it's there, isn't there?

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  Oh, it's absolutely there. Look for it in the connection of many of the founders to Freemasonry, an initiatory esoteric organization that uses symbolism as a means of teaching ethical development, emerged above ground for the first time with the Grand Lodge of England in the early 1700s, but has roots that I think go back to the cathedral builders, who used symbolic and mnemonic devices for memory as they were recording symbols into the great cathedrals. I think occultism emerged in different ways, I beg your pardon, Freemasonry emerged in

• 2:18:50Speaker 03

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

• 2:19:28Speaker 03

  This includes George Washington, this includes Benjamin Franklin, this includes Paul Revere, John Hancock, an outsized number of Washington's generals, an outsized number of the signers of the Declaration, the framers of the Constitution. And this is very important. People look for this conspiracy narrative in this. Look somewhere else. Masonry was a radically ecumenical organization, at least according to ideals. Anyone who believed in a creator could be a member. And it fostered a protection of the individual search for meaning, albeit within a clandestine brotherhood.

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  Some of these ideals, as they eventually got translated into law in the American colonies and finally codified into the Constitution, were encountered by the early founders and framers due to their affiliation with Freemasonry. We forget how agrarian a nation America was, how rural a nation America was. We didn't have hospitals and cathedrals and libraries. We had farms, business, a grange. To affiliate yourself with an initiatory order, a clandestine initiatory order that

• 2:20:52Speaker 03

  used rite, ritual, occult symbol, that was a huge commitment for an individual in an agrarian nation. It was a conveyance of ideas. It stands to reason. There were so few ties outside of family, church, business. To attach yourself to initiatory order of that type in a rural society, I think, has to be seen as a real arterial influence in a person's life.

• 2:21:18AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:21:19Speaker 03

  So I am not a Freemason, but I am a great admirer of Freemasonry because I believe that affiliation introduced or helped introduce ideas into colonial life that were later codified into the Constitution.

• 2:21:34AJ Gentile?

  How about Wallace's influence on the Dollar Bill?

• 2:21:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely wild. People want to talk about occult influences. Look at the back of the Dollar Bill, the mysterious Eye and Pyramid.

• 2:21:49AJ Gentile?

  The awesome.

• 2:21:50Speaker 03

  With the Latin maxim around it, Aniuit Septus Noos Ordo Seclorum, Providence smiles on our New Order of the Ages. It is not a Masonic symbol per se, but I think it's fair to say that it's a leaf from Freemasonry. It's inspired by Freemasonry. By the way, the subcommittee that designed that beautiful, alluring symbol was chaired by none other than Benjamin Franklin, himself a Freemason.

• 2:22:17AJ Gentile?

  We see the square and compass on the bill as well?

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  Yes. And I think that the ideals behind the image, while it's not a Masonic image, were Masonic to the core. These framers wanted to associate the New Republic with the great civilizations of antiquity, Rome, Greece, Egypt. Sparta. You see it in our architecture. Just walk around DC. It's a temple to esoteric imagery. My God, the Library of Congress, you know? And you see it in other cities as well, Chicago, New York. They wanted to associate the New Republic with a great chain of civilizations that probed the search for being, that saw themselves as expressions of Providence, that in some

• 2:23:05Speaker 03

  cases really did protect the individual search for meaning. Rome could be a brutal conqueror, but Rome also afforded conquered peoples religious freedom and not infrequently incorporated some of their religious views into its own gods and rites and rituals. And there were a very high set of ideals behind the design of the Eye and Pyramid, one of them being that material sustenance is incomplete without inner knowing, or the Eye of Providence. Now, this symbol, which is the, on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, the

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  obverse being the more familiar eagle with the olive branches and arrows clutched in its claws, this symbol was unfamiliar to most Americans until during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, himself a Freemason, and his Secretary of Agriculture, later his Vice President, Henry Wallace, himself a Freemason, as well as a theosophist, I should add. They came up together with the idea of minting that symbol, God smiles on our New Order of the Ages, into some kind of coinage, which they thought would inspire Americans during the Depression.

• 2:24:28Speaker 03

  And Wallace associated New Order of the Ages with New Deal of the Ages.

• 2:24:32AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 2:24:33Speaker 03

  And eventually, they determined to place the symbol on the back of the US Dollar Bill. And in the US Treasury, you can find records, I write about this in my book, Occult America, you can find records of Roosevelt's own handwriting supervising the placement of the mysterious Eye and Pyramid on the back of our Dollar Bill, where it appeared for the first time in 1935. And for the very first time, the mass of Americans became familiar with this esoteric and, yes, occult symbol that previously had been just used for official business and was relatively unknown. I think it's one of the most beautiful expressions of ideals at the founding of this nation.

• 2:25:16AJ Gentile?

  So occult, we're really just talking about hidden knowledge?

• 2:25:20Speaker 03

  Hidden knowledge.

• 2:25:21AJ Gentile?

  Nothing more.

• 2:25:22Speaker 03

  It's hidden, it's secret because it was left to decay, it was left to neglect. Is there a hidden history? Of course there is. We're talking about Gandhi and Blavatsky. You won't learn about that in most biographies of Gandhi. You'll see maybe scant mention of Madame Blavatsky, if that at all. It's not hidden because it's concealed, it's hidden because it's neglected.

• 2:25:46AJ Gentile?

  I'm going to change gears for a quick second. I think I saw in one of your books, maybe this one, mentioning Daryl Bem's work?

• 2:25:53Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm a big admirer of Daryl Bem, great parapsychologist. Daryl is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University. He conducted an extraordinary decade of experiments, which he published as a paper in 2011. And these experiments were into the question of precognition. And he found evidence of precognition in a very stringently designed series of experiments in which people were shown images that were meant to elicit a bodily response. They could be violent images, or they could be erotic images. And what he found was that moments before the image was displayed, the bodily response

• 2:26:38Speaker 03

  would begin to manifest, like secretion of sweat, or adrenaline, or something of that nature. But in these experiments, he also included two radically and remarkably innovative experiments, which caused tremendous controversy, and which have since, skeptics be damned, been widely repeated and validated in meta-analyses. Daryl found evidence for what I'll call cognitive retrocausality. In short, in short, he found that if people were given very simple memorization exams, they would get your average score, nothing surprising, nothing out of bounds.

• 2:27:20Speaker 03

  If you introduced a wrinkle to the experiment, and you asked subjects to continue studying after the fact, after they took an exam, their scores would spike by a slight statistical degree, but actually a significant statistical degree.

• 2:27:38AJ Gentile?

  Beyond random.

• 2:27:39Speaker 03

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

• 2:28:01AJ Gentile?

  In time.

• 2:28:02Speaker 03

  In time, of people's functional ability, in this case cognitive ability, on memory exams. And of course, there were howls of protest, even though Daryl's paper was heavily vetted and published in a standard journal of social psychology with no sympathies towards his thesis.

• 2:28:23AJ Gentile?

  That's true, he just said, this is what happened.

• 2:28:26Speaker 03

  He said, this is what happened. He documented it stringently. There was so much calumny directed against him, so much misinformation, and you can read it on Wikipedia.

• 2:28:36AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  The home of misinformation about parapsychology, the home of it. Great place to learn about the Napoleonic Wars, terrible place to learn about parapsychology. It spiked. That's due to activist editors who are dedicated to discrediting any parapsychological studies, regardless of excellence in methodology and replication. And these are facts. That's why my books are heavily footnoted, and I ask people to go to my footnotes, look at my footnotes, and hold my feet to the fire if I am exaggerating, because that's not my wish.

• 2:29:10AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's detour for a quick second. Why is there a professional skeptic industry? Why is that useful?

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  It seems to me that the ultimate sin within Western intellectual culture is to say that anything extra-physical, or spiritual, or religious, has any empirical, concrete impact on our normal, tactile world. You can talk about religion in terms of myth, meaning, theology. The minute you cross the bridge of suggesting that anything extra-physical, let's say precognition, has some actual impact on our world, regardless of how stringently the evidence is gathered, vetted, analyzed, replicated, you are cast out.

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  That is the one unforgivable sin within opinion-making, lettered culture. Primary reference material, Wiki first and foremost, social sciences, mainstream journalism, mainstream letters. It's a point of view that's unsustainable, because the evidence is just so strong. We could do a whole show on Daryl's research. It's extraordinary, and its replication has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that these were not chance hits or accidents. His research has been proven confirmatory in a meta-analysis involving 90 trials in

• 2:30:44Speaker 03

  33 different nations in 14 different labs. We don't even have that kind of data for aspirin. And these numbers are hardcore numbers. Doesn't mean that every experiment replicated his work. It did not.

• 2:30:57AJ Gentile?

  It did not.

• 2:30:58Speaker 03

  But what a meta-analysis does is it doesn't seek uniform replication, it seeks to mitigate against accident or happenstance. And as that goes, his data is bulletproof and replicated. I urge people to go into my footnotes and tell me where I'm exaggerating. Tell me where I've stuck my neck out too far, because I am as dedicated to verity in describing these results as pseudoskeptics are to spiking them. So, hold me, hold my feet to the fire. What Daryl discovered is extraordinary, and he, and Dean Raden, and other people who work in the parapsychology field, who are few, they are people of methodological excellence.

• 2:31:42Speaker 03

  And there is a professional skeptic apparatus, or pseudoskeptic, or pseudo-rationalist apparatus, that cannot tolerate it. And they cannot tolerate it for reasons of sentiment, which is because the data doesn't mean anything to them, and in most cases, they don't even know the data. They can't tolerate it because they will not accept the divide of extra-physical effect crossing into tactile world. They don't believe in the extra-physical. It's a matter of religious, secular religious faith for them. They're materialists.

• 2:32:17AJ Gentile?

  I've seen critiques of your book that I've read, and I've read, this guy didn't read the book. This is a critique, he didn't read the book.

• 2:32:24Speaker 03

  And won't debate me.

• 2:32:25AJ Gentile?

  Won't debate you.

• 2:32:26Speaker 03

  They run from me. I have challenged any number of credentialed skeptics to debates. They run, they run, because the data is tough. It's hard won. It's not easy to get your mind around this stuff. You really have to go deep into this data to understand its validity and replication. And if you're going to do a hit-and-run attack, I'm not the guy you want to be sitting across from.

• 2:32:52AJ Gentile?

  No, you're not. And it's so astounding, because we've all had synchronicities or coincidences, we've all experienced it. They have as well, and they're denying it.

• 2:33:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:33:02Speaker 00

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• 2:33:56AJ Gentile?

  So, tell me about manifestation in the future if I'm a Thai boxer.

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  Oh, this is very interesting.

• 2:34:04AJ Gentile?

  This is wild.

• 2:34:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a Thai kickboxer named Spencer Hanley, champion fighter, and he was nine days out from a championship bout. And he said, I'm feeling really good about my training, but I wonder if you could recommend something that will strengthen my mental game? And so I gave him an exercise, very simple, very ordinary exercise, called the 30-day mental challenge, which just involves directing your thoughts, to the degree possible, along productive lines for 30 days. I'm simplifying it, but that's the basic gist of it. And so he said to me, well, look, I like this, and I'm going to do it, but this is 30 days.

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  I need something that's going to prep me for a fight that's nine days away. And I said to him, Spencer, this will prep you for it. And I walked him through Daryl Bem's research, I walked him through the replication of the research, I walked him through the warranted belief that Daryl's research deserves. And I said to him, working on your mental game after the fight is very likely to have a cognitive reach-back effect that improves your mental game during the fight. And I said, if nothing else, I can assure you, your opponent's coaches are not talking to him about retrocausality.

• 2:35:26AJ Gentile?

  They're not.

• 2:35:27Speaker 03

  I promise. And so, so he did it. And you can watch the fight on YouTube, it was a championship bout outside of Houston. He came out, I don't know why, he was wearing a Hawaiian lei around his neck.

• 2:35:41AJ Gentile?

  Very relaxed.

• 2:35:42Speaker 03

  Right, relaxed, at ease, in good humor, respectful to his opponent, but he was in command from the bell. He was in command, and he won handily. Now, for his entry music, the fighters can choose their own entry music, and usually they'll choose this ear-bleating drill rap or techno-metal. He chose the Belinda Carlisle song, Heaven is a Place on Earth. And one of the ring announcers said, the fact that he's coming out to Belinda Carlisle makes me so happy. This is the simple truth. Two days later, I had not written about this, talked about this, mentioned this to anybody. Belinda Carlisle, who I've been in love with since age seventeen.

• 2:36:24AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:36:25Speaker 03

  Leaves me two voicemails telling me, "I just want you to know, I've been reading your work and I really like it and I'm a fan and, you know, bravo to you for what you do." I mean, I, dying happy, three, two, one.

• 2:36:40AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:36:41Speaker 03

  The whole confluence of events was just extraordinary. That's the only way I can describe it. There are these hidden tendrils, and when we catch a glimpse of these hidden tendrils, we know that, that life is not just cognition and motor skill, it's, it's something else.

• 2:36:57AJ Gentile?

  It has to be.

• 2:36:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:59AJ Gentile?

  I just think it's so funny that we've got Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, but there's always room for Belinda Carlisle.

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  There is always room, and I love her. Listen, she came out of punk, the Go-Go's came out of punk, so she's from the neighborhood.

• 2:37:13AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna say that. Anyone who says the Go-Go's didn't rock is wrong.

• 2:37:15Speaker 03

  Oh, totally.

• 2:37:16AJ Gentile?

  Come on.

• 2:37:17Speaker 03

  I love them. They upended things when I was sixteen, seventeen.

• 2:37:20AJ Gentile?

  We had, all had them on our walls.

• 2:37:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:23AJ Gentile?

  There was something in the rules that really struck me.

• 2:37:31Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:37:32AJ Gentile?

  And it was about forgiveness.

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  (laughing).

• 2:37:35AJ Gentile?

  You know what I'm talking about?

• 2:37:37Speaker 03

  Don't come to Horowitz for forgiveness. No, I, I'm not against forgiveness, but I'm against it as blanket rule. I think it gets presented to us.

• 2:37:44AJ Gentile?

  I liked it, is if someone causes you trauma, you have no, you don't have to forgive that.

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  You don't have to forgive it. You can abide. I counsel abiding versus forgiving. I think that forgiveness through conditioning has been presented to us as this indispensable spiritual law, and I dispute that because I think it can tear a person too. When a person has suffered trauma, as, as we all have, let that be refining, let that be a go to something better, let that be a, a profound realization that hits me with the force of never wanting, if I'm, if I'm able to visit such a thing on another person. But forgiving, if it comes natural to you and you so wish, then by all means, but I

• 2:38:36Speaker 03

  don't think forgiveness is this absolutely necessary escape hatch, or this must pass through tollgate before going on to something higher and greater and better. I don't see it as a spiritual law, I don't see it as an ethical imperative, I see it as an idea that might fit some situations and not others, and although I venerate the twelve steps, and I venerate modern teachings like Course in Miracles, the channel text, and I recognize...

• 2:39:06AJ Gentile?

  You've narrated the twelve steps, haven't you?

• 2:39:08Speaker 03

  Yes, I have. One of the proudest acts of my career.

• 2:39:11AJ Gentile?

  It should be.

• 2:39:12Speaker 03

  One of the proudest acts of my career. I love Bill Wilson, and I venerate the twelve steps, but I don't want people to feel blocked off from spiritual paths like that if forgiveness presents a problem. I understand the rationale, and if it works for the individual, I am first in line to shake that person's hand, but I don't want people to feel like spirituality has rules that make it necessary to pass go before you can do something else. I think that suffering can be a, a goad, it can be abided, doesn't have to be forgiven.

• 2:39:45AJ Gentile?

  There's gonna be a lot of people who are kind of happy to hear that, 'cause they're, maybe it's a woman who was attacked, and she feels like, "I'm not a good person because I can't forgive what happened to me."

• 2:39:58Speaker 03

  And my heart goes out to that person, man.

• 2:40:00AJ Gentile?

  But you are, she is.

• 2:40:02Speaker 03

  She is, she is. I have witnessed seekers torn in two because they're told, "You have to use this language, you have to use the language of forgiveness, or service, or thy will be done, or something else, or non-attachment, non-identification, personality versus essence." These things, as I see it, are all, they're artifice, they're human constructions. All religions have been created at the hands of human beings, and they all derive from a certain time and place to whose needs they responded.

• 2:40:41Speaker 03

  So, most of our religions, for example, came out of highly stratified caste-based societies, where a person had no greater likelihood of exiting the caste into which he or she was born than walking the surface of another planet. And the religions, Abrahamic religion, Vedic religions, sought to compensate for that by forecasting deliverance in some future state of being. That is a response to the predicament of an age and an era. All I'm really trying to say is, verify, question, ask again, "How do I know that's true?"

• 2:41:23Speaker 03

  The individual could go on to extraordinary ethical development and happiness without forgiving, and shouldn't feel chained to that as a must-do or an infallible law. It's conceptual, it's not legal, and I want people to feel a flexibility.

• 2:41:41AJ Gentile?

  That's nicely said. Um, what about the rule about the death of your tormentor? That's, that's a striking one.

• 2:41:50Speaker 03

  People suffer. People suffer at the hands of bullies and tormentors, and sometimes they just can't find a way out. And I just want to say, William James, the great American philosopher, used to say to people who were suffering suicidal thoughts, "Can you stand it one more day? Can you stand it just one more day?" Because extraordinary turnarounds occur, remarkable things happen. And what I want to say to people who are suffering from a tormentor, first of all, get away from that person. If you absolutely cannot get away from that person, or for the time being, you cannot get away from that person, keep in mind, extraordinary things happen all the time.

• 2:42:33Speaker 03

  Just as we are visited by catastrophe, we are also visited, visited by just remarkable, unbidden good news and tidings. A bully, a tormentor, a cruel person, could they just disappear? Could they just die? Could they exit the scene? Absolutely.

• 2:42:53AJ Gentile?

  And that's okay?

• 2:42:54Speaker 03

  Yes, that's okay. Don't trouble yourself.

• 2:42:57AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  Feeling that that's not okay. We live in a world of extraordinary suffering and catastrophe, most of it unbidden and undeserved, and we live in a world of extraordinary good news and remarkable tidings for which we are in debt. If you are suffering at someone's hands and that person disappears, go on with your life and be better to your neighbor, but don't give up a sense of, I don't like to use the word faith, 'cause I speak in terms of persistence more than faith, but it's warranted to persist in the verite, that that person could disappear all of a sudden,

• 2:43:39Speaker 03

  it happens all the time, and you will be free, and you will rediscover yourself as a person of good humor and relaxation, and I wish it for everyone who's suffering.

• 2:43:48AJ Gentile?

  'Cause there were a few rules that spoke to me, because being a, a bright student in the New York public school system was not great for me, early on, so lesson forty-two was, um, learn to fight.

• 2:44:02Speaker 03

  Not a bad idea.

• 2:44:04AJ Gentile?

  So, I did that.

• 2:44:05Speaker 03

  Good for you.

• 2:44:06AJ Gentile?

  Did you? Were you bullied?

• 2:44:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I was bullied.

• 2:44:10AJ Gentile?

  Of course, of course you are.

• 2:44:11Speaker 03

  And anybody who's different gets bullied.

• 2:44:12AJ Gentile?

  There's anger in your list. Righteous anger, but I, but it's there.

• 2:44:16Speaker 03

  There's definitely anger in my list. Anger is part of life, sorrow is part of life, extraordinary joy is part of life. I mean, my God, last night, this is why I'm so glad you brought me to Vegas. Last night, my wife, Jacqueline Castell, and I, um, we repeated our wedding vows at the Graceland Chapel with Elvis officiating.

• 2:44:41AJ Gentile?

  Perfect.

• 2:44:42Speaker 03

  You should have seen the smile on my face.

• 2:44:43AJ Gentile?

  Perfect.

• 2:44:44Speaker 03

  It's a dream come true. Um, when I was twelve years old, I had tickets to see Elvis live. He died five days before the concert.

• 2:44:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 2:44:54Speaker 03

  I cried and cried. Now, all I'm really trying to get across is, do I evince anger? I do. Do I evince incredible joy? I do. Last night was a night of joy, to have Elvis officiating at our wedding, and I could tell you this, uh, he played, and we sang with him, "God Save the Queen," the Pistols version, yeah.

• 2:45:19AJ Gentile?

  You just gave me chills. Elvis singing Sex Pistols is amazing.

• 2:45:22Speaker 03

  Sing "God Save the Queen" with Elvis Presley, um, that was a moment.

• 2:45:28AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, let joy flow, you know, let anger flow, but let ethics flow too, let reciprocity flow too, let empathy flow too. We're human beings, and we live under a myriad of laws and forces. Don't tear yourself apart, learn to live better within them.

• 2:45:46AJ Gentile?

  So, I'm gonna, I'm gonna challenge you now, 'cause you don't have much hope for humanity, I'm gonna challenge you to give us a little hope and land this plane for everybody listening. Can we, can we use your work to land on a positive note? Because there's a lot of positivity in it.

• 2:46:05Speaker 03

  The individual can.

• 2:46:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:46:07Speaker 03

  The individual can. I place no stock in humanity as a whole, dare say, I don't love humanity as a whole. I see humanity, uh, talking one way and conducting itself another, and that's true of most individuals as well. But the individual to whom I appeal is the person with a fineness of emotion, with the fineness of a search, who's capable of holding a question. That's the individual I love and wish to encourage, and that person can find him or herself, I hope, uh, within my work, if it's worth anything.

• 2:46:40AJ Gentile?

  It's worth quite a bit. Mitch Horowitz was here, everybody. This has been a joy, thank you for coming in.

• 2:46:45Speaker 03

  Thank you, my man. Pleasure.

• 2:46:48AJ Gentile?

  That was Mitch Horowitz.

• 2:46:51AJ Gentile?

  I did my best. He's a smart guy. He has a lot of theories and stuff I don't really know that well. Before we started, I had my research out. And, you know, he's an occult guy. So you would figure that'd be easy to prep for. And then the more you learn about it, the more you realize he's just wicked smart. And he's a lot more than an occult guy. There's psychology, parapsychology, all the history. Really hard to talk to a guy with that broad amount of knowledge. So I joked with him, I said, why couldn't you just be a physicist? This would be so much easier. Because it's hard to keep up with him. But I tried. At the end, I asked him for hope, because it was kind of a dark

• 2:47:36AJ Gentile?

  conversation in parts. When he says that he has no hope for humanity, he means it. And we hung out afterwards for a while. We have a lot in common. Both from New York City and moved out to the island. We hung out at the same punk rock bars when we were kids. So we bonded. You know, we sat out in front of the studio in our black shirts, you know, two middle aged guys smoking cigarettes. And it was perfect. So I felt like I got to know the guy a little bit. He's not as dark as that. So let's think about his hope statement for a second. All he gave me was three words, the individual can. So let me work back to that. His resume checks out in 10 minutes. That Reagan claim, that was

• 2:48:20AJ Gentile?

  crazy. Mitch says Ronald Reagan spent his career borrowing ideas and exact phrases from occult scholar Manley P. Hall. No question about it. He did it. He even told the Count of St. Germain story, which I think Mitch kind of debunked, but nobody really knows. I think it might have been the Count of St. Germain. The Gandhi story holds up too. He was a lonely law student in London. He meets Madame Lovatsky, the most notorious occultist alive, and credits the theosophists with sending him back to the Bhagavad Gita. Now, that's in Gandhi's own autobiography. I didn't believe it either. She's in there. And the precognition research, those studies are real. I talked about them before with Eric

• 2:49:01AJ Gentile?

  Wargo. And he has more. If you go back and watch that episode, he's got more and more and more proof that somehow the future reaches back to us. And that story he told about the fighter, like manifesting for 30 days in the future after the fight's over. I don't know. It's such a compelling story. I'm going to try it. I don't know what to manifest yet, but I'm going to try it. Well, skeptics reran all those experiments we talked about, Darrell Bem and some of those, and mostly came up empty. But that fight isn't over because some of them, some of them reproduced the same results. So the individual can. And Mitch told me twice, he doesn't love humanity. But I also watched him quote William

• 2:49:43AJ Gentile?

  James to anyone thinking about giving up. And then he renewed his wedding vows just yesterday with Elvis officiating. I mean, is that a guy who's really done with us? It's not the guy I smoked a cigarette with. Now, his rules in his new book, I believe every rule in that book. I wish he'd let me just post the rules so you can see those. I kind of wouldn't be fair. I don't know how much the book is. It's worth it. The book is, it was very surprising. A lot of the occult books are just kind of a dense, heavy read. This felt more like a very grounded self-help book. But the rules were really

• 2:50:25AJ Gentile?

  great. And they're super simple. I've mentioned a couple of them on the, on the show. But it's stuff like, don't be an asshole. Learn to fight. Don't tolerate bullies. Pay your bills on time. Don't loan money. Just give it away or say no. A lot of that stuff, like super simple, basic rules. I believe every single one of them. And I fail at a lot of them. But I'm still trying. Because if you follow those rules, you're a better person. But he said failing is the point. Esoterica is with a K. It's out now. Mitch's essays are free at MitchHarowitz.substack.com. And everything I mentioned is linked below. The Moreau Institute tech is my gateway process episode. You can check out the basement

• 2:51:06AJ Gentile?

  conversation with Tom Campbell, who invented Hemisync. And we've got an episode on synchronicities. Check out Eric Wargo. A lot of that was covered here as well. We're starting to build up quite a library of this weird, cool stuff. That's why I did this. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. I hear you. No cats in the studio.

• 2:55:27Speaker 00

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