Hi, friends. This is Against Everyone with Connor Habib. Welcome to part two of The Problem with Magic,

my conversation with hosts of the Weird Studies podcast, J.F. Martel and Phil Ford. You don't have to

listen to the first part to listen to this part, but of course, it helps. When people say the world is changing rapidly, I mean,

it's such an obvious point, and that feels to be true to all of us. But I think very often,

it feels incomplete and it feels like a trite assertion now. And I think that that's because people are

often just referring to economics and geopolitical stuff, national politics. But shifts in

perceiving time are happening and space and truth and memory and heat and sound and community and all the

senses. So as we talked about on the first part of this conversation, people are turning to

new ways to grasp with all this shifting around that are really just old ways,

which is magic, witchcraft, astrology, divination, spellcasting.

And when I say turning to that, I mean in art, in just major media, because people just need to see presentations of magic to even

sort of cope. Well, anything's possible if magic's out there. So that makes me feel better.

But people are also just trying to use magic to direct their reality or predict the future or whatever.

So we talked about, obviously, this conversation is called The Problem with Magic, what the

issue with that is in the first part of this conversation. Let me present a question here that maybe sums up the totality of this

conversation, which is, what does a spiritual approach to the world look like that is not magical?

So if we are going to admit, finally, that materialism is not working for us,

what would a spiritual worldview that does not need us to do magic or accept magic look like to us?

And what are the tools of a spiritual world that is neither materialistic nor magical?

This requires a lot of waiting through, waiting through old materialistic worldviews, first of course, but we see that everywhere in lots of different disciplines, and I'm glad people are doing it.

But then also, especially waiting through some of the bad versions of the worldview of magic and

witchcraft, and especially how that figures into power. But, I mean, to me, it's just a purely

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