Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting the intersections of spirituality, politics, and philosophy in an

engaging and accessible way. Before I begin this episode with a scholar, new age activist and writer

Mitch Horowitz, I want to just talk about a question that is very

central to how this year 2021 is going to go. All right, ready? What do you want? That's it. It might not be a

question that you've thought of, but what do you want? How do you

want things to go? What do you want the world to look like? What do you want your life to look

like this year? People are really stuck in looking at the news items, being scared of them, the dark times ahead, the fantasies of technocratic

oblivion, or the overturn of the government, or freaking out about some dude with horns on the

capital or viruses, or just some dumb bullshit that people have said online.

And they're resisting it.

They're critiquing it.

They're calling it out.

But in all of that noise, this question, what do you want and how do you build that seems to be really lost this year or beaten out of us from last year.

My friend Gordon White, who hosts the podcast Roon Soup, he often says that optimism is a spell.

You know, in other words, when you're optimistic, it actually does something to the world.

And I agree, and I think we need to extend that further.

Asking yourself what you want and envisioning the world as you want it

draws optimism into being and into the personal world.

It gives you the impetus and even the tools and substances to build with

and to move towards that world.

So in that vein, it's important to think about what you want for the world and how you want

...