Tricksy Guruses with Devin Person

This is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity. Welcome to synchronicity, my guest this week is the wizard Devon person, and you know that feeling when you recorded a wonderful, amazing intro, and you just nailed it, and you know you nailed it, and your dog who's with you also knows that you nailed it, and then you realize you weren't recording, well that just happened, and then I just said that exact same thing that I just said, and while I was saying it, my dog started barking, so this is the mythical take three of an intro.

And in case you couldn't tell, I don't really have any pre-planning for these, I'm not even writing notes now, and I just try to recall the episode in my mind's eye and my mind's ear, and talk about it for a little bit. This one though, I do remember as being particularly awesome, I went and visited Devon at his green point apartment, I think it was just last week, just last week, and Devon is a really fucking cool guy, like an incredibly cool guy, and also really a legitimate guy. I'm a wizard, and I say that if you look at him, he looks like a wizard, he embodies the essence of a wizard, and he was kind enough to share his journey into becoming a wizard, and also the practical benefits of being a wizard, and I believe I've said wizard at least ten times now in a very short period of time, so put a pause on that word until I mention that Devon person is a wizard.

But really, he's a super fucking cool guy. One of the things that I'm pleased that we got into as dedicated listeners of this podcast, no. This last episode, I just put out the very sync podcast with Sean, Cass, and Gen Soudini really opened my eyes that a lot of other people are kind of seeing the rampant Huxterism kind of capitalistic urge and drive, and not only the New Age and spiritual and kind of consciousness scenes, but also the psychedelic scenes, the meditation scenes, all of this, it just seems like a lot of people are becoming more aware of it, and you know I've kind of been railing against this for a while now, which I'm not happy that it's so rampant that people are noticing it more and more, but I am happy that at least people who I consider good judges of character and intention are talking about this stuff, and this episode with Devon isn't just about that, but it does kind of get into the crux of what we were talking about in Devon's personal experiences and how he kind of used New Age that scene is kind of like this new corrupted religion in a lot of ways, which is a very interesting take on it, and I think for the most part there's a lot to agree with there.

But the episode's called Trixie Gruzes, because if you're familiar with Gollum from Lord of the Rings, that's where the phrase comes from, and that's kind of what I feel like a lot of people are waking up to, some people are just getting involved in maybe a new community and things seem amazing and perfect and let's be clear, like sometimes you just meet people and they're really cool, and they remain cool and awesome and genuine people for the rest of your life. But sometimes when we revolve around these topics of discussion or interest or trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, we can get our egos involved, and a group of people can get their egos involved, and it turns into something else, and that's where it gets Trixie.

And one of the cool things about Devon is, and we spoke about it, I think it was a little before we jumped on air, is this archetype of the trickster and kind of subverting expectations, and I think if there was a spirit mythological archetype for this podcast, it would be the trickster. And I think synchronicity in its own way, just the actual phenomena of synchronicity is a very trickster-y type of thing, so let's differentiate between tricksters and Trixie gurusis, who maybe are just kind of more falling into the manipulative, baser-level manipulation type things, whereas the trickster can just completely boggle your mind, and not always wonderfully, and not always good and happily, but a very cool archetype. Anyway, I digress.

Devon also mentioned something in this podcast that to me was incredibly poignant, and I didn't delve into it in depth on the show because he was talking about a lot of other interesting things, but this idea of that he envisioned himself in the future as a wise and ancient, very wise wizard, like 800 years old in the future, and he said, "Listen, in the future, I'm going to, it's a spell," he called it, "I'm going to send information to my past self, so my younger Devon's, who are me, and let them know if there's a hard decision to be made, or any decision left or right, up or down, what do I do?"

That he will send those messages about what to do back, and it will be received in the form of intuition. I really just love that idea for so many reasons, and let's just say that if time is malleable and not just as we experience in linear fashion just forward, only potentially pretty powerful, but when he was saying it, it reminded me of something else I had heard where you kind of imagine yourself in the future and kind of envision yourself and connect via chakras or breath or light, whatever you want modality you want to use with that future self and kind of draw it into existence and help to kind of manifest the circumstances and things that might enable that.

It's just cool stuff that it's fun to hear wizards talking about this, and he also tells the story about how he truly came to embody the physical manifestation of being a wizard, which is a very improbable and crazy story. So yeah, it was just a very fun conversation, and big thanks to Sean and Cass from Very Ape and just my good friends for Link, you know, encouraged me to link up with Devin. Now what I didn't mention is Devin and I vetted each other and hit it all hit each other. We just started pounding on each other, crazy, so we just had a fight. That's what we had to do. We hit it off and I think we were both trying to like vet each other and just see like what we're about and the podcast is a wonderful way to do that.

It's just an easy shortcut for finding out who people are. Devin has a podcast. It's called This Podcast is a Ritual, and it's on MindPod Network now. So we're in the process of getting the back episodes up and active, but I believe if you go to the site now, I'm not saying like I believe like someone else did it. I just can't remember if I put up the podcast on the podcast page yet. I think I did. It should just link to his website right now, but we will have those episodes up. Go check it out. Looking forward to amplifying that signal with Devin, just a genuinely cool fucking dude. We're going to have another podcast edition, another very cool one.

This time referred by Jen Soudini, I'll give you the details once it is announcement time, which I believe is next week. Once a reminder of MindPod Network, I don't know what the fuck it is. It's just people say, Hey, I think this person would be good for your podcast network. And I go, Yeah, they do seem like they would be good. And then I add them. It's just, I guess an amplification signal. If you're a cool person, and you know, your intentions seem pure, you can get on the network. We just now like reporting that MindPod offers people. You can increase your conversions and listenership by 52% nope.

Got no idea, but I think it's working. I think that more people are finding other people talking about things they like. And for that reason, I'm pretty proud of it. So, you know, that's all. My mind network is Devin. Just to help a guy though, Devin person, go and check him out. There will be links on this podcast episode notes show notes. There will be links in the sync podcast.com. Mindpodnetwork.com, all of the places you love and consume things related to podcasts. That's it. This is the third one of these I've had to do. Well, really second because of the second take was my dog just interrupted.

Anyway, I'm having a good day. Hope you are too. Lots of love to you and yours without further ado. Here is Devin person. So, thanks for coming on, man. Hi. We're just going to connect the old fashioned way by talking to each other. I have a lot of questions to ask you, but I think what we're talking about now is really interesting. It's at the forefront of my mind all the time, which is kind of this branding marketing of yourself as like a coach or a wisdom person. Or a wizard person. Or a wizard person. You know, where is the line between trying to like genuinely help people and let them kind of empower them to learn about themselves and also or just marketing yourself as a person and who's winning the battle in terms of mass consciousness, right?

Oh, jeez. You really started off with a nice softball. I mean, I think at the heart of it, it's that there is no line because it's constantly blurring boundaries and we live in this world where I think about the idea of like, what percent like what is the degree view that you have on any person. So if it's your spouse or your kids, you see them all the time. You've got a maybe like 180 degree view. They still have a loan time. They still have privacy, but you're pretty aware of what's going on. And if they told you some weird lie, you'd be like, I know you can do that today. Like that's crazy. Yes.

Yes. Yes. You can call them on the bullshit. You can call them on the bullshit. You know, in a traditional village, if you saw people that you lived in the community with, you're like, yeah, I know what I know what's up with you. Like I heard you yelling in your hut last night. What's going on? Yeah, yes. Yes. You know, don't come and tell me what to do with my relationship. Yes. I know, I know your whole family like fuck off. But in a city like New York or in an even bigger place like the internet, we get these fractions. We get like a one degree view of someone and it is a it's a single frame out of the movie of their life.

And is that really what that person's doing? Is that person actually making money at this? Or are they just creating the illusion that they're making money at this? Is this something where they have another source of income? And this is just a hobby that they're presenting as a job. There's all of these complex questions that then make it really hard to evaluate the same way that theoretically in a more traditional society, you could be like, yes, I know this baker, I've had it's bread, I know that there's not rancid grain going into it because, I don't know, like I hang out in there, it looks fine.

You have the firsthand knowledge of who these people are. This is like the idea of putting on personas and presenting a certain kind of limited image. It's really interesting. What blows my... Because you do a lot of this stuff, what you do and we'll get into this in one second as a wizard and just kind of using consciousness and modality and magic is kind of a way of shifting people's consciousness, right? It does seem that the traditional skills of being able to vet someone either in person or analytically going and looking at what they're doing and seeing clinically they've had results or something like that is a less useful tool because of the power of marketing and how we are presented these things, which to me is directly resulted in kind of me dropping out of that and into a more intuitive kind of below the surface resonance or authenticity that you can hear from someone, which truthfully, not right all the time, sometimes you can get totally fooled by that, but for the most part it's been a fairly reliable beacon in terms of finding people who I think are doing authentic things and just to answer my own question kind of like an asshole in here, I do think that right now we are kind of living at a point in time with this stuff where I think the marketing is winning out right now.

Oh yeah, that's everywhere. I mean, we're very much in a magical era, you know, we're in a magical era for good and for bad where, yes, we can all take hallucinogens and break the illusion of reality and then we come back and we're like, oh, it's still broken and now I'm in a world where I'm constantly being marketed and not the way that we used to be marketed at as a population, but marketed at as an individual, there's 20 people sitting in a room figuring out how to get you to take the action that they want, how do they make you click the button and they're splitting reality and they're saying, all right, we have scenario A and scenario B, which one of these things makes the person click the button, which is a very weird thing that's kind of never happened before, like evolution, AB tested over very long periods.

Right, right, when it's not just people, right, sometimes this is just algorithms or things that are set up to just run and become these systems that dictate what's going on and that's the other thing that strikes me about kind of the culture we're in is like, no one has time to process any of this shit. Right. Like there's no time, like where was the gap from when we kind of used our phones a little bit? Where was the gap from like snake on your Nokia to like now where it's like everything that it could possibly be like, I don't remember that exact transition. It happened, though. What, I mean, how do you do the research, I need to go find a documentary on 9/11 conspiracy theories or flat earth and they're going to be throwing so many facts at you.

Do I have the time to go and look up each one of those supposed things and actually realize, oh, they made up the quote from that, that's just like, that's just straight up not real or, oh, that does seem to be a real quote. Do I have the information and background to actually read through that and dispute this thing about the structural integrity of steel beams under high heat pressure like I don't fucking know. And so that's the thing that we have now is a world where two people can be arguing and waving around reams of paper and no one can actually read the papers. It's really, it's that's a really good description of what's going on right now.

I want to kind of fold into this what you do as a wizard, but I wanted to start kind of what was the genesis or impetus I guess I could say for becoming a wizard. You asked the question I was hoping you would ask because I can tie this together very nice. So in 2014, I'd moved to New York. I was going to go to a grad school program for television writing and I realized that it was bullshit. I got to drop out of this. This is way too expensive and it's going to get me nowhere but in debt. And for the next few months, I was thinking, all right, yeah, I'm still going to be a TV writer. I'm going to write these spec scripts.

I'm just doing on my own and I wrote zero scripts and I had to come to clarity moment where I looked at myself and I said, dude, if you're not writing the scripts now, you're going to be writing them when you're 40 and you've moved to Los Angeles and you're competing for jobs with 18-year-olds that are way funnier and have a billion times more followers than social media than you are, absolutely not. If you're not going to do it, then figure out now what you want to do so you can truly invest in that. I love that. And so 2014, I said it was going to be my egg year where I'm going to lay an egg and it's going to hatch and then at the end of the year, I'm going to figure out what this new thing is.

But I don't know yet. I love that. I'm just going to appreciate it. I love that. Not knowing. And at that time, I was working for a website company and I was doing customer support. So I would get emails from people saying, hey, I can't get my image to upload. How do I do this? And I would write them back and I'd say, yeah, you've got to click over here and the upload window will come up and just do the thing. And we had a lot of life coach sites and a lot of meditation, retreat, yoga people, all of these. And those people are fucking assholes. And so I would get an all caps email from someone that is misspelled and irate.

And then I would go look at their website and it's their 10 magical steps, the stress reduction, and I was like, fuck this. And I thought about it and I said, you know what, I really want to make fun of this. I really want to like, I'll be the occult life coach. I'll be this character where, you know, I go over the top and, you know, the answer to everything is a crystal dunked in blood. It'll be this really funny thing. And as I played around with that, I realized a couple of things. One was I didn't want to be trapped in a joke. I thought for a long time about novelty Twitter accounts. Great.

You wrote post modern family tweets for a while and then it went viral and you were on buzz. Yeah, yeah. How much longer do you keep that up? There's no real way to transition and say, hey, everyone, I'm stepping from behind the curtain. It's me, Roy. Yeah. You're me for your writing thing. Everyone's like, nope, you've broken the illusion or done with it. You don't care about this. It's a novel thing one time. Yeah. It's something that you just get stuck in. So I realized that I didn't want to have my whole life be boom ch crystals. And two, I was like, I want to do it 24/7. If I'm going to do it, do it, I want to be my vision is not being the millionaire Tony Robbins type guy that goes on stage and yells under the headset mic and like comes off and then looks at the, uh, the assistant and is like, you are two minutes late.

I'm like, yeah, what the fuck is your, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or it's like rude to the Starbucks person or like, whatever else I would be so much happier being the homeless looking old man that's drinking a cup of tea at the diner and the waitress chats with him and never feels like she's being hit on, never feels creeped out, feels like he's listening and then walks away going, you know what, I got like, I got something from that encounter. Yes. It just her life. Yes. And that was the vision that I aspire to. I'm not saying that I'm hitting that I was going to say, it's a goal. No, I mean, it's a noble pursuit.

Yeah. And I think that's the idea that we've sort of lost is that, you know, faith and God and some of the ideas of religion, not the dogma parts are about if you're reaching, you get to an area where we don't know things for certain anymore and you can keep reaching beyond that possibly to where it's never going to know things for certain. Yeah. And that's where good stuff comes from. We can use that to pull ourselves up. So as I kept playing around with this idea and thinking about how do I be a pseudo occult life coach that, you know, I can really truly embody this, I have been into magic and my own weird version of like magical practice for, you know, over a decade.

And I've been into wizards as like a goofy kind of embodiment of that for the time. I have a wizard tattoo. I did a ritual with that to two when I was moving to New York and I had all my friends draw pictures of it to like give me their energy. Yeah. Cool. And slowly, but surely this idea started to take form of like, I'll declare myself to be a winner. That's what I'll do. And yeah, that's the genesis. That's the genesis. So one of the things I've heard you say is that your job and just to be clear, I don't want to let this get lost in the shuffle. What you're talking about kind of this persona of teacher and life coach, I have another friend who did some web consulting and worked with a lot of those same types of people.

And these were people who weren't famous. They weren't big. They had their little business wherever. I worked with very prominent people who most of these people would like kill to get connected to like, Oh my God, that's like a stalwart. And a lot of those people were the same way. They'd just be dicks behind the scene. They'd be money focused and do unethical things and manipulate and Lord power. And I was like, I had to learn it in a different way. I had to be involved with it to kind of see and my stupid guess was, Oh, I'll work in the nonprofit scene because there's no ego there. Of course, there's the worst he goes, the worst, the worst of them.

So I love that the wizard thing was born out of this kind of noticing this huge cognitive dissonance that these people were doing. But more importantly, what I always kind of blew my mind about that shit is the karmic impact or the down the line impact of saying you're this type of person and not actually being that person. The only reason I don't do that is like the ramifications are huge. It's like you're not playing they're playing for keeps there like that's going to fuck your psyche up if you're going to live that world with that schism. So if you're going to have a split identity where you spend all day every day saying one thing you go home and you do something else.

Yes. I mean, I struggle with that too from time to time. For sure. There's definitely moments where I'm dealing with a problem and I'm like, but I'm a wizard. I should be able to just fix this. And then I have to realize that being a wizard doesn't mean not having problems. I'm still a human being. I'm a person. Yes. And what wizardry is is the way out of it for me. It's when I'm in those depths of self-loathing and despair. It's the thing that reminds me, wait, you can get out of this. Just take one step at a time. It's like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill when she's paralyzed and she's got her big toe and she's like, just wiggle your big toe.

And so for me, wizardry is not, I'm never paralyzed. It's just remembering the process of how to wiggle my big toe and the other thing. And what I think drew me to wizardry and what I've continued to find within it as like a rich vein of inspiration ideas is wizards can be dicks. Like that's totally okay. Yeah. Like I am not claiming that I am the Zen enlightened one who is the absolute guru. And I'm just radiating love and perfection. Like a wizard can be disorganized and a wizard can fuck up things and make mistakes. And my spell doesn't work. And like all of that is part of the wizard because it's part of being a human.

And the human experience I think is one where against the odds, shit somehow works out. Which is that's like the perfect description of being a human, right? Against the odds. If you take two seconds to think about, I just think about this a lot just from a social context, like the fact we're not like all fighting and killing each other all of the time is pretty crazy. That's pretty cool. Like it's not breaking down as a reality thing. I mean, if you think about both of our ancestral lineages and I'm not talking just human, I'm talking all the way back as the origins of life, we are the descendants of all the ones that like an action movie, you know, shit was fucked up.

It was not looking good. And then they turned a corner and they're like, there's some food. There's a mate, awesome, like I'm going to make it one more day, I'm going to pass this on and the torch keeps moving. And so I think we've got that in our blood. We do. And the fallibility of being a human is something that I think that's what I've also I was kind of, you know, not giving the credence to analytical stuff, but looking at people who are willing to be transparent in their kind of issues and faults, it's almost this teacher versus student mentality and you don't have to be one or the other.

But as long as you're willing to admit where you are honestly and earnestly on the path, like that, that's something that I think is a big distinguishing factor from people who I think are going to be successful in terms of integrating this into their lives, whether it's a business success or anything like that, I don't know, I don't have the answers for that clearly, but I do know that like that'll keep you okay. So in your like since you've become a wizard, you're into magic. So what did the evolution or like the transition look like from, you know, actually becoming a wizard? Sure. So in 2014, as I was thinking my way through, you know, how does this work?

I started thinking about multiple realities. Yeah. So I was imagining, okay, I'm in this one reality and there's a reality next door to it. That's a little bit worse that when I moved to New York, things didn't work out that well. Yeah. I got a shittier job. My life is just like not as good. And then there's a reality next door to that, you know, on the other side where things are better, I got an even better job. My partner and I are doing much better together. We got a nicer apartment. It's just a slightly better version. And if there's an infinite number of these realities, I assume that there had to be one, if not a whole cluster, another, another infinity, where I'm a wizard.

And I thought, well, if anyone's going to be able to help me out of this situation and guide me on my path to becoming a wizard, it's that alternate reality version of me that is a wizard. And over time, it's sort of transition from being a parallel reality to more one stemming from my moment into the future and the most wizardly version of myself that I could possibly become. I'm thinking about myself on my deathbed and I'm a 300 year old wizard and I am, you know, I've just done everything that I possibly could and there's been ups and downs, but I have changed the face of magic in the 21st century and lived this crazy long life.

And here I am 300 years into the future. So I've got powers that are just, you know, incomprehensible to us the same way that a cell phone would be incomprehensible to someone a hundred years ago. And they wouldn't know what to do with Twitter. And that version of me is about to yoda out and fade out of existence. And in that moment is sending a message back to me and sending me this energy which I am now going to experience as intuition at the moment when it's, should I go left or should I go right? I'm like, I think I should go left. And when I go on a date with someone and then they ghost me, I'm going to assume that's because my wizard self was like, this is a bad road.

This person, you're going to date for five years and you're going to hate each other and it's going to be the worst. Let's just save you that heartbreak. I'm going to just make it so that text didn't send. And in order to get in touch with that version of me, I rented a rehearsal studio in Midtown Manhattan and I lugged a bunch of gear there. And I did a magic ritual, which I think of as performance art for yourself. So I don't follow a specific tradition or lineage. I think magic comes from the mythology that we are born into and our current mythology is very vast. It's like the food court of the mythologies, you know, we're still in the mall.

It's like stage. Yeah, we're always in the mall. Yeah. Like you cannot get out of the mall. You can go to the edge of the mall and then they'll sell you a shirt that says fuck the mall. You're like, yeah, I bought this fuck the mall shirt and you're still in the mall. But we have all these different options. So I designed this ritual, which had a lot to do with sort of, I had a bunch of attributes I'd thought of like, what do I want to embody? And I would pull those out and create a sequence of those and I would give this talk over and over in this room, trying to embody the attributes each time I did some self hypnosis and strip myself naked and put on new clothes that represented this new version of me that I was becoming.

Interesting. I don't know, stared at a strobe light and did a whippet, but I love it. And then that was that. You know, I loved all my stuff home. The funniest part was actually that I was, I'd only booked it for an hour and I got done with all the stuff. And I'm like, what time is it? Oh my God. I have five minutes to get out here. And so in my, I'm a buck naked. I'm like trying to get a rehearsal studio and a rehearsal studio and I spill candle wax on the floor so that I'm using a T-shirt to like scrub candle wax on the floor. I'm like, Oh my God, please do not let a five year old girl and her piano teacher like walk into the room right now.

This door does not lock. So made it made at home and then it was just, you know, back to normal and, you know, working on well, Wizard's going to need a website and I was, you know, I've been thinking about that. But the interesting thing was I was really burning the candle at both ends and just doing way too much. And so I told myself, all right, December, stay home. That's the theme of the month. Stay home. Say no to things. Just chill. Take like a month. Just reset. And I did not listen to that like absolutely failed. And I went out of town with a friend and I have a rare knee condition. It's called pigmented villa nodular sinovitis.

That sounds rare. It's rare. It's like one in 1.8 million people have it. If I go to an orthopedist, they might have heard of it. Right. Like I have to do a specialist. And while I was out of town, my knee flared up and I wasn't able to be like, I'll just go. I sit and rest it. I was like out of town. And so by the time I got back to New York, it was fucked up. My knee was swollen up the size of like a large grapefruit. Just really gnarly, like a pomelo, not even a grape from a pomelo. And it was bad and I just had to work from home for a month. I really couldn't leave the house. I was, you know, I told the universe I was going to rest and then it's like, yeah, you are.

Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, yeah. Yeah. You're going to. Yeah. And so I was really depressed for a couple of weeks. I was just treating it like an extended sick day of like, like this sucks. I'm going to just watch TV and just fart around in bed and like feel bad about myself. And then I finally realized that I needed to not do that. And I googled my condition, New York City. I found a doctor who'd written a paper on it and I was like, well, for a rare condition, let's start with this guy. And I scheduled an appointment, which they couldn't see me for like a month out. And I was really not stoked because the last time I'd seen a specialist, they'd said, it's going to be surgery.

It's going to be, and I've already had surgery once. It's like a weed. It comes back. And so it's going to be a surgery where they're going to take all of the lining of your joint out, front and back. You're going to walk with the cane the rest of your life. It's it can still come back from that. It's just going to be not good. Yeah. So I go in to this doctor's appointment thinking, fuck, it's going to be surgery. And the doctor tells me, no, we're actually doing a trial right now at this hospital with an experimental medication that we've had a lot of success treating your condition with. So we can get you on that trial, but I have to warn you, there's a there's an effect.

And I don't say side effect because it happens to everyone that takes it. It's definitely happening. Yeah. It's going to turn all of your hair white. And I was so stoked. He was shocked. I was like tap dancing. Yeah. Well, when you're off of it, it'll go back. I was like, oh, really, but that was, I mean, you know, I, I drunk dialed the universe and it picked up like so funny. Well, so much of what you said is so fucking awesome, but I think your ritual, your pre-ritual of identifying with your future self, which is the embodiment of you being a future wizard and connecting with it is kind of like a faith spell too, especially when you incorporated in that this is going to be your intuition, kind of guiding you, which gives you the confidence to follow it, which I think is a lot of people's problem.

Yeah. Right. Like, how do I know if I should be following this? What is that? Was the devil speaking to me? Who knows? That really created a pretty massive shift. And it sounds like you were prodding cosmic control center and as anyone who has really done that in their life can attest to, that shit will prod back. Like it is not some static, mythological, non-living idea. It's, it's a thing. And it happens in the weirdest ways. Yeah. You know, that's the thing that magic is real, but magic is not real in the way that fictional magic is presented. Yes. You're going to be the, I did the spell, the knock knock knock, here's your bag of money, sir.

Yeah. Yeah. And so for me, I mean, I couldn't think of a better example of, you know, turning poison into wine. How many? Yeah. Here was this condition that had been the bane of my existence for my twenties. It had fucked up. Yeah. So many imagine. Right. I'm like, cool. I'm new in this town. Can't wait to ride my bike as my soul means of transportation. Oh, nope. Can't even walk. Totally screwed. Jesus. And suddenly here it was. And the perfect. It was the box that the gift was coming in. So. So at that point, I mean, that's a pretty big wake-up call and confirmation signal that, you know, you've pursued on something that's meaningful.

What was it kind of like after where you're evolving into becoming a wizard, but you're a wizard at that point, right? Well, so after that, it was months and months and months of uncertainty and doubt, lame initial rough draft work and all of that. I was trying to get my website out. I wanted to get it out by January 1st. That didn't happen. I finally was like, I can't do stuff on my own, like on my own, I just spin my wheels. Yeah, I get it. And so I hit up a friend. I was like, do a photo shoot with me. And we went out and I didn't, my hair hadn't changed. So it was me in suits with bolo ties because that was my like, well, figure out robes eventually, but like, bolo ties is my thing.

Here's my thing. All this will do. And it's so embarrassing to look at those photos now. But we went out in a cemetery on a day when it was like 16 degrees and I kept having to take off jackets and then just stand there and pose and then get back on. And it was like an ordeal. I really think it like unlocked stuff. So I launched the website, I thought I would be writing a book and I did a ritual to like move that along like another ritual and like right after that, I had been, I'd moved to New York with a, with a girlfriend and it had not been working very well. And like a few days after I did that ritual to do the book, I had a dream where I just woke up and I was like, oh, we, this isn't, we got, I got to end this dream.

We'll tell you. Yep. The dream told me. And so I knew because we lived together that I had to like kind of have a plan to extract myself. So I ended up, it, my birthday was coming up. I had your birthday, April 28th, okay, I'm a tourist. And so I hadn't, I'd moved here from Texas. I moved here from Austin. Cool. I was like, cool. I'll go back to Texas and it's my birthday. So I have cache in that town where I can throw a party and I'm going to do a wizard performance. And so I went back and I had a house party and then I did this awesome performance where it was like a party ritual where I had people, we talked about what it means to party and like, what is the actual like magical connotation of that.

And then I gave everyone pizza communion. And so we had a little pieces and then I handed out like 30 of those little cigarette one hitters and had everyone take a toke at the same time. And then we all shot going to beer while this band that was playing behind me, like got into a full blown free jazz freak out and everyone's like jumping up and down and shaking beer on each other and chanting party is awake, party is awake. And then the next day I was like, we're going to take all that magical energy from last night and we're going to do acid. And so then I took acid with 11 friends and then I got back from that trip and I was like, I'm now going to blow up my life.

Like that whole trip was a ritual to transition into this new phase. And so I broke up with my partner and I moved out and I had some of the most difficult months of my life. It was like moving to New York a second time and it was totally brutal. And the whole time there was this promise of being on this medication, but it hadn't started. Right. Right. Right. Right. So I finally go to the doctor and they're like, okay, like the trial is open. We're going to get you on this. And I had just finished a month of sobriety just to do it. Right. And then I was like, Oh, thank God I can like go drink and be a normal person again.

Like I'm single. This is not doing any favors. And when I go to start the medication, they had never mentioned that, Oh, we want you to not drink on the medication. I was like, Oh, fuck. So I'm also started off on a higher dose. So they tell me there could be cognitive side effects. And I'm like, what do you mean? What do you mean? They're like trouble multitasking, fuzzy thinking, hard time focusing. I'm like, Oh, okay. So I start taking these wizard pills every day. And I, you know, like, you know, when you're at a party and sometimes you're telling stories and fire enough jokes and you're really in flow and then other times you're wandering from conversation to conversation and you like stand on the edge of a conversation and you're like, I think I'll be able to jump in and then you can't put your trapped on the edge.

Yes. So I was trapped on the edge for like a month. Oh, geez. And I was like, am I bad at being single? And I just forgot that that's, you know, I was in a relationship. I forgot like how shitty. Yeah. Yeah. Normal question. Yeah. Is New York just hard? And I'm just like not in the thing. Is it because I'm not drinking? Or are these pills fucking me up? And I don't know. And I might be on a placebo, so I really don't eat these pills. And so finally, I finally like broke my dry spell and like got laid and woke up the next day and I looked in the mirror and I had a, you know, stubble and I see the stubble is half white and I'm like, all right, cool, we're on the other side of this and I went down to a lower dose and I started feeling like myself again and that's when James really got magical.

So what started, I am particularly interested in these moments where things get very magical, just so you know, I, the reason this podcast is called synchronicity is in my early song. Yeah. The police. I love my huge police album. Yeah. With one breath. Yeah. With one flow. Yeah, exactly. You will know. Yeah. That's why it's called synchronicity. But back in the early 2003, 2004, I had taken LSD since I've been 15, but I was in college at a music college at Berkeley in Boston and I took acid and didn't come down for three months. Whoa. And it was three months of what I can only describe as an ongoing, never-ceasing synchronicity.

It didn't stop. It wasn't like, hey, this thing happened and oh, this meaningful, oh, another one happened. It was unceasing through the dreaming state and I'm a big weed smoker. So to even recall dreams is a rare occasion for me and I'm still smoking this time throughout for three months and there's- Did you take a massive dose or it just kind of activated something? No, no, no. It just popped something open. I mean, I, I, I've spoken about this liberally, but at the end of it, I went up, I was just in this elevated magical state and then for the first of my life came crashing down back to reality.

And so I went to a psychiatrist or like your bipolar. Here's some lithium. Yeah. The lithium thing with, and it was weird, like I was drawing my dollars and I didn't know why. I was like, what's going on? Went after many years later or a year and a half or two years later, I went to my mom and a psychiatrist and I'm like, I don't think I need these pills. Like I don't think they're doing anything and I don't think what happened to me is like something that happens with me. I think it was an experience. And so I eventually got off it and realized, yeah, it was definitely some weird thing. But why I'm so interested, I just did a whole episode on psychosis and synchronicity.

I'm so interested in those states because there is a palpable visceral feeling to those times. Sometimes you can say it for a very long time. Sometimes it's just a little dose. But I think there's so much when those things happen to learn from it in a practical standpoint too, not just magical, but practical day to day life. So I'd love to hear kind of how things got magical for you. Yeah. Well, I think the one thing that I'd love to throw out is there's a Joseph Campbell quote about the psychotic and the mystic, both swim in the waters of the unknown, are both in the waters of the unconscious, the mystic just knows how to swim.

Yes. And I totally feel like I've definitely had those moments where it's like boom, synchronicity, they're firing off. It's so great. But they're very tricky because the more that I notice them and then I come to expect them, I'm just setting myself up for that crash. Yes. And I've had to even learn the opposite happens where I'll get times now where I'm just feeling really lousy and I'm just really hard on myself and it's like, oh, this sucks. Yes. And then I'll finally have like a moment, like a night off or like, I'm going to come home. I'm going to smoke a little bit of weed. I'm going to close my eyes.

I'm going to do my thing, which is like how I find my ideas. I'd be very into like, I'm not going to use the phrase microdosing, but like single hit of pot and then no stimulus. Don't watch Rick and Morty. Right. That's what you're doing. Go in your brain. Yes. I'll come out of that experience with like the best idea that then leads to the next chapter and I go, oh, now that I look back on my week, my engines were running at 25% because 75% of the power was being directed to birthing this new bad ass thing and I was walking around going, whoa, why do I just feel down and tired and like, what's happening.

And so, you know, energy can't be created or destroyed. It's always just changing states. So it was very interesting to see how these months that were very turbulent. And I was like, well, I'm a wizard now. Like what am I doing with it? I don't like, you know, I told myself I'd be patient and I could take my whole life to figure it out. What am I going to fucking do? I'm a year into it. And I'm like, where is it coming from? And then it was so funny, I was trying to do stand up actually. And I was doing stand up with the end goal of being better at public speaking and doing wizards. Sure. Sure.

But I was like, I'll do 100 open mics and I'll have this eight month ritual that's based around garl glitter gold, which is a God, a gnome God of humor from the D&D pantheon. So I had this whole thing where each month was a different gemstone and it had a different energy. And I was just using this as like a framing device to move forward and complete goals. Yeah, it gets something. Yeah. Yeah. So the first one was sobriety and the amethyst and so then I kept moving from one to one. And I got like maybe two and a half months into it and I was trying to go to stand up open mics all the time. Yeah.

And wondering why I was depressed and not meeting anybody. Stand up. I'm off. Hmm. Hmm. Um, and I was miserable and I was like, okay, I got to pull the plot like the ritual I'm going to keep doing, but it's no longer about stand up. Yeah. Yeah. And so I asked myself, I'm like, what is, what would a wizard do? You know, what's the wizard thing to do tonight? Oh, cool. I'm going to get stonewalls in the Grateful Dead and doodle in my notebook and work on ideas for the book I'm writing. Great. Um, oh, I see that Genesis Purege of psychic TV is doing a DJ set. I'll go to that this week. Yeah. And so the week that I decided that I needed to focus on wizard stuff and stop forcing myself to go to open mics.

I go to this Genesis Purege DJ set, meet another guy that, you know, when I talk about being a wizard with him out front while he's smoking, it's like, I'm very interested in that. And you know, we have this really rad, nice little connection and a bunch of people at the show was like, the most fine had in months are like, Oh, we're all going to go see psychic TV play on Saturday. And I was like, I got to double down on this. So I go to see psychic TV play that Saturday, run into some of these people, totally hit it off. Me and the guy that was smoking realized we have a bunch of mutual friends and comment.

And he's actually like a real like, like he's like a wizard mentor. He's really on the path. And then we go back to the bar and end up meeting this like whirlwind of a Brazilian computer scientist. And we have this kind of like month long fling. And suddenly my life just went from sitting at open mics, being so miserable to being like so magical just by opening that floodgate and switching my perspective and instead of forcing myself to do the thing that I thought I was supposed to do to just go more with the moment and say, what would a wizard do like what's the wizard like what's you know, even if it's just me by myself, even if there's no audience like how is, you know, what would a wizard do?

Would he get stoned and play with his cat for two hours? Yeah, he would definitely do that. I love this idea of having kind of that framework of bringing in kind of like, you know, it's cool about the wizard. What I think about that is like an archetype. It feels like there's a lot of elements of the trickster, right? Oh, totally. And that's my archetype of choice for better or for worse sometimes. That's okay. Yeah. My cat's name is named Loki. Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. When I was a little kid, I had a book of Norse mythology and Loki was my favorite character. Yeah, it's but I love that you have kind of this framework that you can go to and align with what's going on in your life and what better thing to choose than a wizard.

Like it's such a cool fucking because it works on a few levels. So when I say wizard, everyone knows what I'm talking about. Yeah. In the English speaking world, Harry Potter is a multi-billion dollar franchise. Yeah. Lord of the Ring films close to that. Like if I say wizard, you can close your eyes and picture that. Yes. But also it does not have the same baggage of which, which is are awesome. It's just a different thing. And I think they're gendered. I think there's just two different energies there. And there's so much freedom. People are like a wizard. They're curious. They don't know what's going on.

And they both have expectations and are open to anything. Yeah. They're like a wizard. That breaks my reality and now I want to know more about this in a way that oh, my friend is an occultist or my friend is a stage magician or my friend is a tarot reader. Yes, it opens up. We know those a little bit more. We have, we can put those in a bucket more easily, whereas the wizard is like the crab that keeps crawling out of the bucket. Yes. It can't be boxed in by any kind of understanding of the word because you don't meet wizards. Typically, no one's referring themselves as a wizard. So when you came up with that wizard was what you were going to be.

Did you have any other understanding or context for it than just what the regular person would have like Marlon and I probably knew a little bit more about wizards than the average person. And I thought about magic and what it meant. But there was a couple of key moments. So one of them was I decided to take acid by myself on Thanksgiving and had this idea that I'm like I'm going to create jam and like Thanksgiving is a really good day to take acid on. Yeah, just by myself just doing my thing and I don't play music. So I got to a point where I was like, oh, me just hitting a drum and counter-walling like sounds like shit.

I really kind of feel like like, like I wasn't in the place of creativity flowing. I was in the place of judging what you're doing. What I was doing. And it wasn't a bad trip but I got, I was like, well, hold on. I got to figure this out. I put all my chips on being a wizard. So let's figure out what this means. Well, being a wizard means I do magic and I've done magic to become a wizard. And being a wizard means I do magic. I've done magic to become a wizard. I would just stuck in the middle. Yes. Yes. Yes. And really kind of freaking out. I mean, like it's it's fucking hollow. Yeah. There's nothing here.

Like all I'm doing is like, hey, I'm going to go give the speech about giving speeches and this is an example slide. And it's like, there's nothing to it. It's too meta. It has no meat. It has no substance. Yes. And then suddenly I realized that's okay. It's like in the Dow where they talk about the emptiness of the pot is what gives the pot its purpose. The wizard is the vessel and I am me. And when I got an English assignment in high school to write about Macbeth, I wrote a weird essay about Macbeth. I have always subverted the norm. It always does my own way and I just needed to start putting stuff pouring myself into that pot and it would start to take shape.

And so that was a big realization. And in that moment too, I realized I was like, I'm trying to be the guru. I'm trying to be the guy at the front of the room that when someone's like, Oh yeah, well, what about this thing about astrology? I don't care about astrology, but I felt like I needed to be able to speak to it and be the expert on everything. Yes. And in that moment, I realized I'm not in the front of the room. That's never been where I'm at. I'm in the back of the room. I am the fly in the ointment. I am the class clown that is breaking up the teacher's flow, not to just disrupt it entirely, but making it go in more interesting ways.

And it's like the restrictions give you the creativity. The weird thing that happens leads to the better jazz jam when like, Oh, the drummer lost the drumstick. And I'm here to do this thing that everyone else changed and that made it better. And so that was really helpful for my own development. And then I have a talk that's available on my website called what me wizard where I went and looked at five wizards from pop culture. So they were Gandalf, Dumbledore, Merlin, specifically Merlin from the sort of the stone that Disney cartoon, the Wizard of Oz and Yoda. And when I went through that and like analyze them and you know, what is this?

What does this archetype mean? Why does it resonate with us? What I found is that the wizard is not the hero. Never. Harry Potter, I think is the, is the great example of this. Harry Potter is a millennial fantasy. A character that the reader identifies with is stuck in the mundane world where they're with their stupid family and nobody likes them and they get picked on. And then one day they enter this new world where it turns out that they're actually the most important person. They're insanely rich. They're good at sports and the whole world depends on them. And that's a total fantasy. So Harry, yes, as a wizard, but the real wizard is Dumbledore, Dumbledore has been through the shit.

He already fought Grindelwald. He already did his journey and now he's in a position to help Harry. How does he help Harry? Does he go kill Voldemort for him? No. He gets him hints. He gives him help. He gives him presence. He's there. He's always doing it with a very nice light hearted touch. Yes. He's helping Harry find his way and when Harry needs him most, what does Dumbledore do? He fucking dies. I know. It's going to say because the wizard doesn't do the work for you. And that's what I've had to learn is like, you know, when I see people, I do one session. I'm not your coach. I'm not your therapist.

I'm not going to hang out with you week after week and we're going to work through your problems in lockstep with me lifting the weight, I'm going to give you an experience that becomes part of your life story. And it's up to you to figure out what you want to do with that. I love everything you're saying, especially about the one session. This is literally just piggybacking on the podcast I just did where our friend Jen was kind of having her come to Jesus moment about spiritual materialism, which I've been talking about very, very, I threw an event a few years ago. Oh, we got to talk about that in a second.

I want to hear what you're saying. It's one of my favorite topics, but it is this moment where like you just kind of recognize that like our people just doing this to boost up their own insecurities or trauma they're trying to heal our ego. And even just in traditional Western medicine and psychiatry and psychology, like that is not something that has an end because humans don't fix themselves completely because our psyches don't work like that. And that's the fundamental part of our movies don't end. Yes. The rom-com ends when they get past the stuff, keeping the part. Yeah. No, the movie starts in real life when you're like, great, now we're together.

How do we navigate this partnership through the rest of our life and all of the turmoil that we're going to have to encounter? Yeah. It's really, it's a very important thing. And I mean, I think it gets to the crux of what I think is happening in every realm of society and culture is that this drive of capitalism and corporatization and kind of systemic corporatization has seeped into literally every aspect of our lives, including the ones that are supposed to be our bastions of hope of our beacons of light. It's especially infiltrated those. So when hearing you talk about this stuff and saying like, yeah, like, you know what?

This is truthfully the mystics path. The mystic isn't there to talk about how great they are and be this similar. They want to show you that what I'm doing is surely possible for you and everything else. And that's just, it doesn't pass business muster. Do you know what I mean? But it does pass like Socratic muster of like, this is genuinely helpful. Yeah. And that's truthfully like, I hope that becomes more prominent in time, but you know, there's not a lot of wizards out there doing that. You know, I mean, like part of this is something that I've always done. I remember that when I would go travel, I went to like, I lived in Argentina for two months when I came back and people were like, how was it?

I'm like, it was really fun and really difficult. Yeah. You know, I struggled a lot. It was very hard to be in a city where I spoke okay Spanish, but couldn't express myself fully. Yes. Didn't have my friends. And I see so many other people that have to come back from traveling and they're like, Oh, mate. It was wicked. And I'm like, there was really no hard part for you. Like maybe you're a better person than I am. But I just want to be honest about that. Yeah. Because if somebody else goes traveling, I don't want them to feel fucked up on a loan. And they go and it's like hard. Well, it's hard because I want to be real about I went and I was fucked up in a loan and it was hard.

And so with the wizard thing, I think it's so funny. I built, I mean, I changed my name. I changed my appearance. I wear a costume and I'm more my true self than I've ever been. And I used to think about the people that were going to challenge me. They're going to be like, Oh, you're a wizard will do a fireball and like, you know, heckle me. Yeah. And I found that it's the exact opposite. I don't need to have magic tricks. I don't need to have any prepared thing. I'm just honest. When I do my subway wizarding thing and someone's like, so you're a wizard? What are you doing? And I'm like, well, I got you to talk to me for one.

Yeah. That's a miracle on the New York. Yes. Yes. And I'm real. I'm like, I'm dressed as a wizard because I wanted to create a magic experience for you. I'm not pretending that I have powers, I'm not playing a character. I'm just myself. And I know that these robes signal something to you the same way that and eat here with an arrow sign. Yeah. Let's, you know, there's a restaurant. Yeah. Oh, man. But I wanted to jump back to the spiritual materials and thing and throw a, you'll probably appreciate this, but could be controversial here your way. I think New Age is the religion of capitalism. It is because think about any other religion, they have tons of problems.

You can go to church for free. You can go to church for free. There's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do for free. If you want to be a Christian, you can buy one book. That's it. Like you don't have to buy a new version of it. You can get an old Bible and you're like, I'm good to go. But think about New Age. You've got to take a workshop. You've got to take a seminar. You've got to go to a retreat. You've got to go to the church, which is the New Age store and buy your special candles and have the words that the prayer you're going to say about them and the sage and all of the stuff and the crystals.

It's so much about objects and transactions. It's very hard to be a New Age person. If you were like, I am a follower of the New Age religion, which gets complicated. How do you define New Age religion? Yeah. There's a great book on that called New Age Religion as a Mere of Western esoteric thought. That's my kind of book. By Vooter Hanegraaff. That sounds amazing. Who is the head of esoteric studies at the University of Amsterdam and it is amazing. That sounds really good. It's so cool to see someone who's not fully in the mix. I think that birds like you would be like, "Okay, you could read all these books and they all think they're doing their own thing.

Here's actually how they group and they cluster." But you can be a pagan. You can follow these different practices that don't necessarily cost money and have you buy everything. But for New Age in general, there's not a free church service that you can just go and be a part of. It's paying for the sound bath. It's paying for the yoga of class. It's always going to be pay to play. Yeah, it's very, very weird. This is something I bring up constantly is the little Socrates v. Sophis where he thought it was blasphemy that people were charging for wisdom and things like that. I do think that New Age material and consciousness studies and now even psychedelics, we're in the nexus of capitalism ramming into all of this stuff.

The religion of New Age, you're absolutely right. You have to purchase something. The beauty is now, although nowadays, I can't imagine getting exposed to this stuff for the first time, but back when I was getting into it late '90s, early 2000s, the internet was free and you could find stuff and maybe it was more than four websites, but it wasn't totally dominated by corporate stuff yet except AOL. You could get exposed to prominent thinkers and go back in lineages, which is how I like to vet things usually. Where did this person come from? Where did this person come from? Do they end up for the money?

I mean, it's really a cogent point that the personality type that's attracted to being a New Age thought leader also is a stone's throw from doing anything to tell people how to be. Again, I've found more and more, and we're talking about this a little bit, about the podcast network. I am constantly being put in position where I don't have to take a lot of action, but I have to reassess who's on a network, who have I said I'm associating with, what are their activities, what are their intentions, recognize that there's leeway, recognize people deviate and might get a little more egoic over a certain period of time if success is coming towards them, but also really try to get clear about what the intentions are and motivation for them doing that.

It's you're a wizard because you're fulfilling your impetus to be a wizard. You're not fulfilling my impetus to attract attention and have conversations. I like connecting with people and I decided to become a wizard because I thought if I became a wizard, my life would be more interesting that I would get opportunities to chat with interesting people like yourself and that I could use the idea of being a wizard to do fun things and to hopefully help people along the way. That's my, yes, I would love to make money and we all got to suck the devil's dick at some point, but my thing was I wanted to lead an interesting life and I wanted to be able to pursue the opportunities that would come from setting up this flair that says, I'm a wizard and there's people out there that go, fuck yeah you are, they reach out to me and that's what I want to talk to.

There's people that it resonates with and there's people that it doesn't and I see that every time I go out on the subway where I can be on a train car and no one even looks at me and then someone gets in and they're like, what is happening? Oh my God, I have all of these questions. I'm loving this. They're clapping. They're smiling. I'm like, great. What does my success rate have to be for me to be happy? Do I need to have 100% of people? No, absolutely not. I would be fine with 1%. 1% would actually be insane if 1% and it's like great. Yeah. For every 100 people, if one was astounded. I mean it's really, it's a very cool and magical thing to do which is to fundamentally change your appearance unconsciously and consciously to actually, but what I'm talking about is you're being authentic.

You're pursuing being a wizard for your desire to engage with people, right? Whereas the difference is a lot of people want to be known for I'm the meditation guy. I'm just like a deluxe guy. I'm the micro-dosing. I'm whatever it is. That I think is where we get into this tricksy, tricksy, like golem, but we get into- Oh, a tricksy. Yeah. Trixie gurus is. Exactly. That's what I'm calling this episode 100% now. I am 100% doing Trixie gurus is, but it really is like you really, I see so much of that. Now to the point we're just in this last podcast we recorded, my friend Jen was like, that's all she was talking about because she'd clearly been so exposed to it by being in this new age world for a long time, that it's like it becomes nauseating at a certain point.

And yeah, man, I just think it's refreshing when I meet people like you who are doing this to engender, like contact, community, fun experiences. It's about the friends you make along the way, right? That's the truth. I mean, I think more and more, the magic is connection. The magic is human beings talking to each other and talking to each other in ways that this is still moderated. This is you and I creating a piece of content that goes into a content platform and somebody else finds, but my voice is still entering someone's ears and that is a connection. And for you that is listening to this, I am open to you connecting me back, reach out and tell me that you heard me on this podcast and I will do my best to respond to you and we'll make that magic happen because the only way we get off this rock alive is by coming together and recognizing that we don't want to be on the bleeding edge.

We don't want to be pushed towards the cliff. We want to go and do our own thing. We'll create our own little island and hunker down there for as long as we can hold out. I love everything you're saying. I'm really glad I took the time to connect and Sean and Cass recommended it because they were like patient zero. They were the ones that first reached out and yeah, I don't know if you've heard the story before, but I thought I thought they had a vape podcast so this article about me goes viral about chill wizard wants to weed smoking wizard wants you to join this chill quest. And I'm so stoked.

Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Also, so funny. I was doing a Kickstarter spell to shift my reality and fund my first book, this magical artifact and when I wrapped my Kickstarter, the day it ended was the day this article went out and no one could donate and no one could like get the book. And I was like, that is too funny. Like who cares about could I have made another thousand dollars like whatever this is worth it. And so I get an email from very vape podcast and I'm like, yeah, this is so cool. Like this is the first attention, you know, someone wants to connect with me. But do I really want to be on some weird wannabe Joe Rogan's like vape podcast?

Like, I don't, I don't know, man. And then I clicked it and I was like, ah, it's the American Jumbo people. Oh, yeah. Totally. Totally. And then I went and hung out with them. I did their podcast. And at the end they're like, we got to come clean with you, man, like we just wanted to be your friend. Yeah. Yeah. That's how they do it. We thought you seemed cool. Like we wanted to hang and I was like, that is an inspiration. I'm going to take with me forever. That's the goal of it. I have a podcast because I want to be able to meet people I'm interested in and I want to create a community of listeners who can find value in these things together, that we can support each other in this discovery.

I don't want it to be a top down hierarchy. My job is the wizard is like, I'm easy to spot in a crowd. You know, if you're like looking to meet up with your friends at the festival and they know that you know they're hanging out with the wizard, you can spot them. Yeah. That doesn't mean I'm, I'm leading them. That just means I'm making the visible destination. Mm. Dude, I, I love it and I love that you have a podcast now and I'm going to do everything I can to support it. And you're keying into probably what I didn't know at the time when I started mine is the act of doing it really radically changes your world.

You then have that in the same way that you use being a wizard is you have that ability to go and connect with people who you just think are cool or doing interesting things, which is the only reason I have this podcast, like the only reason. I mean, you know, I'll go into plug mode a little bit here, but that's, that's what my podcast is all about. It's called this podcast is a ritual because if you listen to it, you are now in a reality where you've listened to this and you have left behind the version of you that looked at the link and goes, uh, later and then never comes back to it. So now you are part of the community of people that have listened to this podcast.

And this is an object. It's a series of audio recordings. I have not created all of them yet. I'm still young, but eventually it'll be a final yes amount of it that exists in the world. And then it will end and then I will end. And if the world doesn't end, there will be future digital means that will be crawling and excavating old servers and trying to figure out what was life like in the 21st century. And they'll listen to it. And my belief is that all of us can work together to move towards the best possible future we can. I really love this idea a lot. It's a download I got when I said I was in synchronicity land.

It was literally it felt like I was jumping from world to world for moment to moment. And I very much subscribe to the idea that when you draw people into a podcast or ritualistic thing, whatever it is, you are fundamentally shaping reality in a different way. And if you get enough people kind of subverting their regular modes of consciousness, that's how you do it. Yeah. I mean, if someone goes and listens to my podcast, they're part of the magic ritual. We say magic words in every episode. If anyone's listening to this, check out the opening ceremony. That's where I lay it all out, and I issue you into it.

And then the idea is that I wanted people to take ownership of being part of not a fan base, but participants in that, because if nobody listens to it, then it stays small. But if people listen to it, if they tell their friends, that is them doing magical actions to grow this thing. If they support me on Patreon, that money goes to us growing this podcast together to then to the point where if this becomes big enough, we can do awesome stuff. We can pick one participant and be like, I'm going to fly there and I'm going to do a wizard ceremony for you in your hometown that will make your life better.

And we will start helping each other and we'll crowdsource stuff. If we have a thousand listeners, that's a lot of human attention, energy, and power that we can start directing amongst ourselves. We can start pulling it and saying, let's help this person with this thing. Let's help this person with this thing. And we can kind of, they can help steer the ship. I'm just, I love this and something you said in the earlier really resonates with me is that I've recently gotten comfortable with the idea of just letting things evolve, right? The way you put it is the egg, that really is something that I've gotten more comfortable with this year.

And this year in particular feels like letting these things emerge and happen and very much what you're saying is kind of what I am seeing emerge, which is building these real communities of people and recognizing, I was just talking about this with Seanica, so saying, you know, like, I'd like to live in the world where if we know each other and one of us is going through a hard time, whether it's our immediate friends or family, but we can reach out to people, they don't have to send us a shitload of money. But if it's like five bucks here, 10 bucks there, and we got people through hard times and that safety net of the community is there, like, that's a world that seems pretty fucking cool and is antithetical to what's going on right now, at least for most people.

Yeah, man. Yeah, I mean, I think we're waking up to this. And I use that phrase very carefully because I think we hear a lot of like, oh, we're waking up to this new era. We're all going to go to birth. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not saying that, but I think there was a period where in the 1950s, you had a very clear, dominant culture that in the '60s we rebelled against. Yeah. There was this idea of like the black and white '50s with the crew cut and the tie and the suburban lawn. Yes. And the teen said, no, we don't want that. We want the Technicolor tie-dye acid freak version of this. And we're going to go explore our own creativity.

And for a long time, we've continued to have this idea of like the authority, the bad guys are the ones that are black and white and telling you, you've got to do things our way. And the good guys are the ones being like, follow your dream. You've got the power within you. Yes. But you know what? It's been co-opted. Yeah. Exactly. You know, think different. Just do it. Like see it everywhere. Yeah. All of the corporate beings, they realized, oh, we don't have to just tell people like buy and consume. We can tell them to. Attach ourselves. Follow their dreams right into our checkout lane. And that's what's happening.

And so just being in New York, if you look at the ads, everyone's telling you to create novelty. Yes. Everyone is telling you that your purpose as an individual is not to be a good friend or lover or partner or community member. There's no collectivism anymore. It's all about your job is to generate novelty. And someone who is doing it and is awesome is coming home from their day job and they're working on their creative thing. They're doing their podcast or their YouTube series or they're painting their things. And that's okay. Like it's good to follow your passion. Yes. But the even cooler person is the one who's figured out how to monetize that.

And so that's the dream is that you're a sucker if you have to work a job. Yes. Because that's lame and you're awesome if you figured out how to free yourself from that. Yes. Which then creates this horrible situation that I think we were talking about earlier, where when you don't have the degrees to see someone's whole reality, you end up with the whole weird ugly side of the internet that is, what is it? Like drop shipping. Where it's drop shipping is hard. It's really hard to make a lot of money off the drop shipping. But now people make money selling other people that you can make it make it off a drop shipping.

The same way that they'll sell you a pickup artist course or life coaches teaching other life coaches how to teach other people to be life coaches. Yes. If you have a structure like that, it takes a very clear shape, which is a pyramid. Yes. Yes it is. And it is endemic to literally every mode of business or commerce that I've encountered to date. I do think there are people who do a very good job of navigating it. But I also find that a lot of those people have their creative projects fundamentally separated from those other modes and not because they're not successful or good, but because they do it for their sanity.

And it's also just like a numbers game too. Not everyone can be the famous painter. Not everyone can be the famous uber famous podcast host. But I think- I have a day job because the world is not ready for wizards. Yeah. Talk to me at the end of the 2020s and, you know, that's a world that I'm aiming for where people go, wait, you didn't talk to a wizard before you started your business? What are you doing? What are you even thinking? But right now people don't know they need wizards yet, so we got to spread out one podcast interview at a time. And we are. And I think we're moving into a very interesting period of time.

Just even in this state, I'm a, like I mentioned, a big cannabis person. And that is going to radically alter the way people think on this coast and what it does for the rest of the thing. I mean, when cannabis, not everyone's going to start smoking weed. Not everyone's going to be doing edibles, but it's going to affect so many more people. And that'll loosen your reality for you a little bit. If we do it right. Well, they're doing it in the most New York way ever. Did you see what they're doing? No, I mean more, not just not just the law, but I mean more generally where I just finished this book, The Case Against Sugar, and it was talking about just how sugar ramped up.

And they were mentioning the same thing happened with tea and chocolate and coffee where these were consumed in small doses by indigenous people. And then when our culture got them, we're like, how can we max that out? As much as possible. And the dangerous thing for me about pot is it's really hard to max out pot. You could fucking get up a tolerance where you can just eat edibles all day, every day. And now it's doing the same thing as a cup of coffee is for someone who needs 14 cups of coffee to make it through a day. And I am one of those people, Jeff, full disclosure, I pretty much will smoke or take edibles every single day.

I've found one thing that really changed my consciousness is the same thing from like if you've eaten farm to table or go to a farmer's market, the closer you can get to the source of these things, then it becomes its own form of consciousness that you still have to maintain your relationships with. There's not like that it's all the way better, but I think it's going to have to be like you said, done in the right way, navigated in a way that allows this kind of plant consciousness to benefit people and because it's a seductress too is what you're getting hanging on. Wheat is a seductress. She's a sweet, sweet seductress and you many, many a wise man has been tempted to go down to excess.

So yeah. So I'm not trying to judge like anybody is free to do it. Of course. Of course. But I, my concern is that we don't lose the power because I was talking with friends about this recently. If you read stuff from the 19th century where occultists were discovering hashish, they describe it like the way we describe hallucinogens. They're like, I entered another world of astral elementals and saw the one bright source with my open eyes. And yes, the romantics and their poets and there's time in that way. But can I, can I throw a little wizard magic or please throw as a magic? So what I would love for you to do is take a very brief pause from smoking, maybe a day, you know, whatever is in your capacity and your interest to do so, but just take enough of a pause to your tolerance kind of dips a little bit, yes, and then take one or two small heads like not monster bong heads, just like a token to a very small amount and then close your eyes and listen to some ambient music and do nothing and just do that experience because the first time, I mean, like, like, I've been a hardcore stoner a lot and it's always the first token of the day that's the real time, you know, that's the one that gets it going.

Everything else is, it's chasing the dragon. And it's a really wild experience doing that minimal thing because, like, you know, don't have, you know, if you're not working, you're not talking to friends, you're not watching this, you're not doing all the other things that we add to the pot experience and you're just having the pot experience for me, first 10 minutes are very, like, I get in my head and I'm like, did I take enough of this work? Well, I think, well, I'm thinking about too much of the product is worth it. When I have to watch that spiral, like, 10 to 15 minutes in, it changes and you really start to see things and it really comes up and it's, like, it's like someone's just hanging and like, you know, you've been, like, stumbling over and over and over and over.

What if I look at it from this way, you're like, oh, fuck, that fixes it, doesn't it? And you're like, oh, shit. That is what you're describing is probably what I think has been the most productive benefit in my way of it allowing me to look at situations for a more multi-personing time. That is the one thing that probably keeps me coming back more than anything else. I like, so I inadvertently, over the past month, six weeks really, I smoked consistently for 15 years straight, every day through the breath of my son, through everything. I was forced to take two breaks because I got sick at a sinus thing and I had a stomach thing and I didn't want to smoke and I wasn't smoking for two, three weeks and I was experiencing just what you're saying and I was like, I wasn't smoking one hit but I was taking, like, a small, long hit and then I was like, holy shit.

So I really rebalanced, I came to the city today and smoked with them, but I really have kind of rebalanced in the past, I haven't been taking edibles every day, I haven't been doing it and it feels a lot better and it feels like there's a more reverent kind of experience with it and yeah, I totally get it. Small, not like a tiny, like little pop, but like a small, ish, decent sized hit and then holding it. Yes. Like, man, the holding it will fuck you up so much more than the quantity. It really is. I love it. It's great. Dude, I, we're going to wrap this up but I'd love to do another one sometime soon because it's super fun.

I end with three quick questions that seem trivial and then one kind of open ended one. Okay. Let's do it. First question. What's your favorite color? Purple and green. I love that you gave two. What is your favorite number? 420. I love it. That one was hard for me because on my podcast I've created a series of gates based on what I call the magical numbers of Western culture. So 1369, 420, 666, there's a few more. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well 13 is my favorite number. What's your favorite animal? Flying squirrel. I love that you have these. Last question, what's a practical tip that's helped you in your life that you could share with people listening, anything?

Oh, I mean, aside from my weed wisdom, that's such a great question. I think the thing that's really helped me has been finding a few small habits that you can do and I mean small. I mean, you know, wash your face when you get up and brush your teeth before you go to bed. Or, you know, I've added a little bit more, to make it a little bit more magical. Like I do, you know, I put some oil on my hand and I do a, like a gesture when I'm waking up, the signal that I'm waking up and I do this other thing before I'm falling asleep. So that way when my mood goes off course, I'm not like, oh, I'm supposed to go run today or I'm supposed to be creative today or I'm supposed to do this other big thing that when I'm feeling like I want to wear sweatpants and binge watch TV and like hate myself, I'm not going to be able to do those things.

But I can either keep doing those little like maintenance routines just to fucking do them, just like the lowest lift version or when I'm kind of reaching the end of my like, all right, I've covered in Cheeto dust, I've been lying in bed for three days, I'm really not like, I need to get out of this. I have clear first steps to get back, back on. And it didn't happen overnight, it's taken a while to build those up, but seriously, very, very small, like repetitive, like, you know, don't over-complicate it, don't make, here's the 18 things I'm going to do every day. And I think a morning thing and an evening thing.

So like, if you do your morning thing, your day's already off to an okay start because you did, you just, you did that and that's fine. And if you do your evening thing, even if you've had a bullshit day, you can say, I'm going to do my evening thing. And that's going to set me up for when the alarm goes off tomorrow. I'll be a little bit more on track than if I just like passed out in bed with the TV on and I didn't do that one little thing. And then it's also when I, you know, when I or when anyone gets into those negative head spaces where you're kind of being a bully to yourself, you're not going to think your way out of that trap.

That's what it tells you. It's like, if we just think about more, then we'll figure it out, we'll bring the solution. And instead, it's about thinking about a date in the future, not too far away. Like if it's a Monday, I always think of Wednesday. If I'm having a bad Monday, like I'm like, today was kind of shitty earlier. I was like, I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed. And I'm like, check back in on Wednesday and think about that Wednesday. And odds are when you check back on a Wednesday, you'll be like, Oh, I can look back and I can see how I was just stuck in my bullshit. And it's okay. And it's just these things that you can do to sort of loosen, loosen it up.

You know, it's like you got the pickle jar. You got to bang it before you try and turn it. If you just keep trying to turn it, it's not going to pop up. I love that analogy. It's the pick the banging of the pickle jar. It's not the constant turning, dude. I love that. Dude, this has been amazing. This has been so fun. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. All right, bud. Peace. Peace and love. Peace. Peace. Well, thank you very much for listening to that episode past the music, if you will. That was Devin Person. Go check him out. He's a wizard. He does one-to-one consulting sessions.

All of these other cool things. Just a genuinely nice human being. And I've only met him once, but I've heard him talk before and I know people who I love and respect they like him do. That's enough for me to know. He's a good dude. Go support your local podcasters. Give five-star reviews to podcasts you enjoy. Who knows if that helps? I think there's probably has to, right? More positive reviews means more to someone. It doesn't mean your podcast is any better than it would be if you didn't have the reviews, but, you know, people like feeling good about themselves. So go and do that. Could be for this podcast, could be for any podcast, but if you're like, you know what, I kind of like this, I think I'm going to review it.

Like for instance, I audible. After every week they ask me, they say, "Hey, would you do it after every week?" After every month, when I'm done reading a book, they go, "What do you think of this book?" You know, most of the time, if I've invested a long time, it's a good book. Give five-stars. This little review, I do that with the Ron Chernow books. The Frederick Douglass bio, by the way, is fucking awesome. Go check that out. That's a recommendation. Uh, that's it. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next week. You might need MIDI if you ever hairspray your bangs into a waterfall, layered slouch socks, tight as crunchy to the bottom corner of your t-shirt, or tried to go for a run with a CD player.

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