Andrew Sage

Like, well, a lot of most things go through a process like this.

But doing such a thing intentionally and offensively, which is the idea that we're discussing here in a political context, is this offensive reality formation where you literally decide what is real and what isn't.

And if you have hundreds of millions of dollars in a news company at your disposal, this can become easier.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, they are much... It's funny, because, like, occultists, I think, are the people who are often... How many sound clips are you going to use from the conference?

I will later in my written work, but I think...

On that note, I think occultists are a class of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic.

Because the people that are really good at this sort of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element of hiding their awareness of what they are doing.

Because a lot of them know what they're doing.

They just actually keep it more occultic.

Whereas the magicians will not shut the fuck up because there's always a new book to sell.

That was an excellent segue to an ad break, Elaine.

Thank you for that.

And now a word from our sponsors.

On this note, though, Gare, I agree with you completely.

As a former academic and just a healthy level of skepticism going into any magical conference, I sat down, I listened, and I've been to enough conferences listening to magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a cultural figure.

And I think Burroughs is really unique here, but my academic pretense was to sit here and to listen and think about language as a pharmacon, think about Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Lyotard when they're discussing the master narrative or rewriting the master narrative.

But what's unique about Burroughs and why I gave up that...

you know, academic mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we having this conversation?

We could just go read these texts.