The Tables Turned: Fifty Episodes of The Mystic Tye

For Episode 50 of The Mystic Tye Podcast, the show did something it had never done. Art Szabo, the designer and creative director behind all of the show’s artwork, took over the microphone and put host Troy Spreeuw in the guest chair. What follows is their conversation, edited only for readability. The words are Troy’s and Art’s, as spoken.

This interview forms the second half of Episode 50. The episode opens with an EFC 2026 update from Troy, Brett Wolfe, and Ken Lane, which you can hear in the full episode.

Troy: Ladies and gentlemen, listeners to The Mystic Tye Podcast, for the very first time and for your listening deliciousness, I present Art Szabo, in his perfect circle hat. Art is the man behind all the art on The Mystic Tye. Your name is your destiny. All the quote cards and the cool graphics, the bit of motion graphics, all of that stuff. Art is the designer and prompt writer that makes all of that possible, because I’m too busy reading a book. I gotta learn me a book. I don’t wanna learn me a whole new programming language.

Tonight we are also joined by my friends at The Gary and Dino Show. It’s a paywall podcast. They are up to almost their 1,200th episode, and that’s the podcast that I famously summoned a demon for, for their 666th episode. Thank you to The Gary and Dino Show. They are heroes of mine. So welcome to Episode 50.

Art: Episode 50. We’ve been working together now for 15 years-ish, and where things have gone, the avenues and roads we’ve gone down, and where things can go is pretty exciting. So this seems like the perfect episode for me to interview you.

Troy: It’s not like I’m bashful.

The Road In

Art: Let’s start with this. Take me back before any of this. Who was Troy before Freemasonry and before the esoteric work? What was your life like, what was missing from it, and what did you hope to gain?

Troy: How far back do you want to go? I grew up in a small town up the coast, in Powell River. I’m not the person there that I am here. I moved here with my partner in 2000 and took a job that wasn’t in the family business, which was a bit unusual for me, because that’s all I’d ever done, that’s all I’d ever known. And I began exploring myself.

In the years running up to before we left, we ran the Next Page bookstore in Powell River for a couple of years. We bought it from a lady who had been running it, and she just didn’t want to do it anymore. My wife and I bought it, and we managed to mostly break even. In the winding up of that bookstore, what you generally do is send back books within the year that don’t sell. Quite a few of the older, magical-leaning books, especially the ceremonial magic leaning books, A Garden of Pomegranates and Regardie’s Golden Dawn, the paperback edition, had been on the shelves too long. We couldn’t send them back, so we moved to the city and I glanced at them.

When I was working in the paint business the first two years here, I took that Golden Dawn book, with my Garfield bookplate in the front, on a paint sales trip across northern BC, and I left it on a train. I read it and then forgot it, like I had completed it, but I left it on the train, not on purpose. Many years later, one of my friends, a local fella, Mike Gordan, I’m at his house and I’m like, “Hey man, if you ever see a copy of this book somewhere in a bookstore, you wanna just grab it for me?” A couple weeks later he calls me up out of the blue. He’s like, “Hey, I got your Golden Dawn book.” I’m like, “Oh, you found a copy.” He’s like, “No, I found YOUR copy. It’s got your bookplate in the front of it.” Ten years later.

Art: That’s a sign.

Troy: So I’ve got that here. Anyway, the first two years the paint business was a mad scramble, and then things settled into a groove. I was reading quite a bit of popular esotericism. Right before we moved to the city I had consumed a book called The Templar Revelation, so I read a lot of conspiracy theory stuff and general esoteric stuff. But I stumbled upon a copy of The Book of Lies, I think 2001, 2002, wandering around here in New West, at the Visions bookstore, which is only a few blocks from where I live now.

After reading The Book of Lies, which is Crowley’s book of Kabbalistic poetry, something in there hooked me. I was like, this guy is going on about something. So I got a copy of The Book of the Law and started studying Crowley in earnest. A couple years later I met some of the local OTO initiates and spent quite a bit of time between here and Seattle gathering the OTO initiations and attending Gnostic Masses, just getting involved with Thelema writ large.

It was a very spiritually formative time. I had grown up non-religious, and I had converted myself to Christianity at 12, and I spent my teenage years as a reactionary Christian. Studying Thelema under the local Thelemites, taking Crowley seriously, meeting Lon DuQuette, all of these things, it didn’t feel that transgressive. It just felt ontologically different than Christianity, and I very much enjoyed it.

But I approached the craft in 2006, 2007, when I lived in East Van, before I moved to New West. John Gibson, who was my Masonic mentor assigned by Grand Lodge, took me to a couple of different lodges. I applied, they turned me down. The next lodge I applied to, a year later, I did get accepted, and I’ve been a member of the Duke of Connaught Lodge ever since. And now, this year, I’m District Deputy Grand Master of District 17. Once the summer is up, I don’t know if I could keep up an hour to two-hour podcast a week, but boy, am I gonna try.

That’s, in broad strokes, how I came to Freemasonry. I was into serious esoteric philosophy and practice far before I got to Freemasonry. And when I discovered it, I was just gonna collect the degrees and move on. I didn’t expect to fall in love with it. I didn’t expect that so many of the men I would meet would treat me as an equal, would treat me as a brother. Disinterested friendship, you’ll often hear guys talk about. I’m probably closest with people in the craft that I have the least in common with, and would have nothing at all to talk to them about outside of the lodge. Now we’re good friends, of course, but many of these people, I don’t know how we would’ve met.

Art: Did you find it difficult when you first joined the craft, having an esoteric background? Was there a conflict between the two?

Troy: No. And there’s only a conflict if you wanna talk about that stuff all the time. I had to tone it down a little, because there are other things to relate to other people about. Through this whole time I was also attending the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle, where 200 of the world’s dorkiest occult publishers and their interested parties, authors and hangers-on, would all attend. You run in circles like that. But that was a whole different thing than Freemasonry.

In Freemasonry, we’re meeting pretty regularly, and then we’re visiting a lot. It takes time, but you get to love going out and hanging out with the guys, doing guy stuff with guys, in a safe environment, a private club environment kind of feel. I did find I was an outlier, but not that much of an outlier. Maybe I talked about it more than I shoulda. I certainly booked controversial guests.

I got involved in Grand Masonic Day, and within five years of joining the Duke I was Worshipful Master, so it was pretty quick. I showed some aptitude for the ritual work, and for acting and leadership and organizing stuff. Grand Masonic Day, I took over, and Wes helped out, and we just kinda did it together for much of the last 15 years. Basically since you and I have known each other. It was doing posters for events like that, which is how we got to meet. I don’t remember how we met. Did somebody make an introduction?

Art: It was through a client of mine. She knew you because she bought paint from you all the time. Renovations. And somehow we connected that way, and I think it’s because you needed a design for an event.

Troy: Didn’t you do the website for Jimmy the Painter? It was Jimmy and his partner that introduced you? Yeah, that’s how we met. When I was at Sherwin-Williams, like 2012 maybe.

Art: It was Jimmy that connected us. That’s right.

Troy: That’s so cool. I had forgotten that.

Why a Podcast

Art: So why start a podcast then? Of all the ways to explore this material, why sit down in front of a microphone? Why did that appeal to you?

Troy: One of the reasons I moved to the city and away from my small town is I couldn’t get my favorite radio station, which was the Buzz of Seattle, which used to carry the Tom Leykis Show. Now, I disagreed with Tom politically, and a lot of people have a hard time with Tom and some of his misogynistic content, and I think that’s fair comment. But at the time, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when I was desperately trying to get out of my little town, I was secretly trying to get Tom Leykis on the radio, because I used to love listening to that. Listening to him produce radio episodes, I got super interested in people with the ability to stand in front of a microphone and talk on their own for 45 minutes or an hour.

Many of Tom’s most memorable episodes, especially when he left and started his own streaming effort around 2009, my favorites are the ones where he just turns on the mic. No callers, no guests, nobody. He just talks. He tells a story or opines for an hour and a half, or engages with his call screener Dino DeMilio and Gary Zabransky, his producer, who are now the Gary and Dino podcast. One of the longest running podcasts in history, closing in on 1,200 episodes now. They’ve been doing it 12, 13 years. The first 400 episodes were daily, and then they did a weekly.

One of the shows after 666 that I also appeared on, I think it was 702, was the longest show they ever recorded as a podcast. Nina and I were in the studio for episode 702, and they went seven and a half hours. We didn’t get on the mic until 3:00 in the morning. Nina was falling asleep on the studio chairs. But it was a blast getting to know those guys, being friends with those guys, being motivated and inspired by Gary and Dino. You should show them some love and subscribe, go take a listen and see if you can handle it.

Anyway, what was the question? What motivated me to do a podcast? If Gary and Dino, those couple of dopes, can just throw on a microphone and talk for seven hours and make it sound fun… They’re pros and they’re really good at it, but they learned from the best. Leykis was one step away from somebody like Howard Stern. Stern was the king of all media, the biggest talk show host in history, but Leykis was number one in LA for years and years in afternoon drive time, in one of the biggest radio markets that has ever been. And it’s never coming back. That’s all gone now.

I don’t know if Tom’s ever gonna hear this, but he’s my hero, if not, again, some of his political views. It’s more about how he expressed himself, and the fact that he didn’t give a shit if people didn’t agree. It wasn’t like bullshit right-wing radio. He wasn’t out there to shock and awe people like Rush Limbaugh, or convert people. It was just expressing opinions in a way that would cause people to talk.

And if I end up doing that… I did it today. I was just apologizing to a brother on Facebook Messenger in Australia, right before we were ready to turn the mics on. He came at me with a bad argument, and I just deconstructed the argument, and I think he felt some umbrage. I wasn’t upset. There’s no context online, right? He can’t see me smiling and taking a piss. I’ve learned from Freemasonry to not do that so much. I was one of those arrogant teenagers. People see them online all the time, but I was the dick who would be an arrogant dick in person, just to get a rise out of people. I think I’ve gotten better.

Art: I would agree with that.

Troy: There’s people in my life that’d be like, “No, you’re still the same arrogant dick.” That’s just because they really know me, maybe. There’s people I’ve offended over the years, no hard feelings. As far as I’m aware, there’s only two people that have upset me so much that they’re beyond the pale, and I’ll be putting linking objects over here on the altar for those people. And they know who they are.

Art: It’s sensitive material sometimes. People don’t like to hear that.

Troy: Some of these philosophical ideas are so transgressive. That’s not my fault. Look, these are just ideas. Crowley writes about infanticide, about murdering little children. He’s talking about jerking off, is what he’s talking about. This is sex magic terminology. It’s Crowley’s stupid sense of humor, tongue in cheek, wink, nudge, and you think everybody gets it. Not everybody’s gonna get it. That guy was raised in a high-control Christian cult. He was not all right, and you read it in his writing, and the way he treated his students and some of his aspirants. He was a cult leader, okay. But you gotta read past the hurt-people kind of stuff and read into the messaging that the spiritual forces speaking through him were trying to deliver. They’ve tried several other times. One of the more famous times, we nailed that guy to a tree for telling us to be nice to each other for a change. And we’re still arguing about that. I thought Jesus had some good ideas. I just wish the people who follow him would actually pay attention to the ideas he was actually talking about.

Fifty Episodes Later

Art: So, it’s 50 episodes. You’ve talked to authors, scholars, practitioners. How have those 50 episodes changed your own practice? Have you adopted anything you didn’t think you would, or discarded something you don’t think is necessary anymore?

Troy: I tell you, I don’t set anything aside. I only add more. And you’ve heard me joke about this before: I’ve never been into drugs, but boy, maybe I should take up doing the meth, because it would be nice not to have to sleep nine hours a night.

There’s real standouts, like talking to Ike Baker. He and I disagree about so much about the practice, and why, and the philosophy behind it. But when you set that aside, which is a lesson that Masonry teaches, don’t focus on the things that separate you. Focus on what unites us. The religion on which all men can agree.

As I’ve interviewed lots of different Masonic scholars, guys like Josef Wäges, I got to know Josef. I’ve interviewed him four times this year. He was here for Grand Masonic Day. In getting to know him, you really see the guy has hypergraphia. He can’t stop writing. So what does he do with it? He translates and writes Masonic histories and analytical backgrounds on the ritual, rather than starting a religious cult. Lots of cult leaders have hypergraphia. Crowley wrote a lot. But not Wäges. Wäges told me how many books he’s already got ready to go. It’s insane. He’s like Prince. He’s gonna die and have 50 books in the locker. Lewis Masonic: “Oh, Wäges is dead? Now we get to put all these books out.”

Talking to guys like that who have a real gift, and they’re alive in their gift, working a day job, and he’s brilliant at it too. He was sending me drawings of something he was working on. A brilliant engineer. But he’s more passionate about Freemasonry than anything else. Kinda like Isaac Newton. The founder of the Newtonian method of physics, a cornerstone of physical science, and the dude spent 95 percent of his time thinking about the limits and proportions of King Solomon’s Temple, and knowing the mind of God through the mysteries around what was contained in the Bible.

Exposure to people like that. Dr. David Harrison, one of the more brilliant Masonic historians, lives in England, interested in esotericism, loves tarot. But for him, he’s writing histories of English Freemasonry, and he just wrote this book about Yarker. And Yarker’s important because he’s the one who gave Crowley the Memphis and Misraim and Ancient and Primitive Rite charters to run the OTO under. Guys like this writing these histories, alive now.

We think the occult revival in France of the early 19th century, or in England in the late 19th century, the Golden Dawn and the SRIA being founded, we think those were important times. I tell you, the scholarship that’s been going on since Faivre in the ’70s and ’80s, and now with the academic treatment of Western esotericism? This is it. This is the time to be alive for somebody like me. And I’m super interested in not just reading about this stuff, but actually trying it on.

I don’t demonstrate in public. I’m about to start maybe teaching a little bit in workshops, but for many years I looked up to others to do that. My mentor Lon is always going on about: at some point you look around and you’re like, “Oh, I know more about this than anybody else here. I guess it’s my turn.”

Art: Exactly. We’ve had many a conversation about that.

Troy: My imposter syndrome melts away at times like that. At other times it’s in overdrive, and I’m paralyzed, and the cursor is blinking back at me across the screen for an hour or more, and I drink a coffee, and go make another coffee, or go for a walk, and I come back and that cursor is just blink, blink.

The usage of the AI bots, just to have a conversation back and forth. The guys on the Conspirituality podcast were just talking about spiralism, this old idea of spiraling into your own ideas, and how this tool we’ve created is now a mirror. I think the working tool for AI in the future will be a mirror. The Masonic working tool. It holds a mirror up to everything that’s going on in the world. It puts a shine on it, because it wants to suck up a little bit. It wants you to use it more. That’s how they get you. But if you realize that’s what it’s doing, it can still be a valid tool.

I very much enjoy working through my imposter syndrome and researching stuff. But ultimately, all of it is to share my passion for what I’m doing here. And ultimately I’d like it to pay dividends, like money, so that I could spend more time reading books. Ike’s kind of a hero because he’s full-time now, teaching classes and traveling. I wouldn’t do it the way Ike’s doing it, but boy, that’s super exciting: to be a professional Freemason without having to work down at Grand Lodge. And he’s earned it. He’s the real deal. I might disagree with him, but when you get right down to it, a lot of the practice is the same. It’s practice. You don’t just talk about it. You actually have to do it.

The Next Five Years

Art: You and I have had several conversations over the past few months about the future of Mystic Tye, where things can go, how it can help your personal practice and your goals. Paint the picture: five years from now, where is the Mystic Tye community going to be?

Troy: This podcast will continue to feature people doing the work. And yes, that is authors that have something to publish, or people who’ve contributed articles to major publications: The Rosicrucian, Fraternal Review, Philalethes, these major journals. And I don’t know how many of them are going to continue. It’s a lot of work. Just like our buildings, so many of our periodicals have bloomed, blossomed, and drifted away. So I hope they continue, and I hope that I can continue to be a sounding board and a megaphone to those guys who have ideas about the craft that they’re willing to sit down and publish.

I may even start bringing on some self-published guys. There is a lot of self-published schlock, so it’s hard to decide which of those people to feature. But there is some of it that I would wanna feature. I want authors, Masonic speakers, Masonic culture contributors to reach out and get on The Mystic Tye, because I want this to be the first stop for people doing that kind of work. I’m getting ahead of it with Lewis Masonic. I believe Macoy will be publishing new stuff too, and I’m gonna be featuring all of those authors and having the items here in stock.

As far as community building, I want this to be a place where like-minded Freemasons, people who can see past the particulars of their own faith tradition and look beyond that to the religion on which all men can agree, look for practices that will boost their own communication of deity with their soul. That’s really the goal.

And pursuant to that, we’re gonna start holding events in person beyond the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference. I may spawn more events like that, maybe take it on the road a little bit. I’m gonna start holding a monthly online class, probably focused on the tarot and Kabbalah, a combined class on the rudiments of much of the Western esoteric tradition since the Golden Dawn, which I haven’t presented publicly since 2009, 2010. I think I last did it at Grimoire’s Books when they were still open here in New West. We’re also gonna be hosting some in-person salons for supporters and subscribers, here in the Lower Mainland first, and then we may take that on the road into different parts of Canada and the West Coast.

I’m also gonna make myself available to travel and speak. I wanna get back to what I was doing before, traveling and speaking, not just about the art of memory, but other things that I know enough about to talk about authoritatively in a lodge environment.

If you’re interested in this sort of esotericism, without a cult leader, without a dogmatic attachment to particular religious codes, if you’re interested in exploring, come along with us on The Mystic Tye. Get involved on our Patreon. Get involved in our community on Facebook. Get involved with the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference, and to a lesser extent Grand Masonic Day here in Vancouver, though I’m not running that anymore now that I’ve got a Grand Lodge position for the year.

And if you’re not already a Freemason, find an open-minded lodge in your area and join it. Or if you’re in a jurisdiction where the old ideas of faith still hang on real tight, go join an irregular lodge or some other kind of organization that gives you the fraternal feeling. Same thing if you’re a woman: find yourself something that will get you degrees of initiation and take you seriously as a human being, because English Freemasonry won’t necessarily do that. We have our ways of doing it now.

In another year we’ll be talking about episode 100, and maybe I’ll try and have as many of my previous guests in one Zoom room as I can. So many of the people I’ve talked to, like having Arturo de Hoyos here, getting to take him out for dinner a couple times. These are the circles that I’m running in. When I got started with this project, when I got started in Freemasonry, never in my wildest dreams. But these people are just people. I got to watch Trevor McKeown get installed as Master of Quatuor Coronati Lodge. Hopefully I’ll get to see Adam Kendall get the same. It’s very exciting to see guys doing the work get the recognition.

Scholomance and the Tangibles

Art: Let’s talk about the tangibles that might be coming down the pipe. Where else do you see things going for Mystic Tye, and where does Scholomance fit in all this?

Troy: The Scholomance Project was the first project I had, but as I got further involved in Freemasonry, I wanted to talk more to Freemasons about Freemasonry. The Scholomance Project was more about hardcore occultism, Western esotericism, magic, and that sort of stuff. That end of the podcast space is full of mage wars. It’s always very schismatic and difficult. I never wanted to get involved in any of that. I just wanna highlight people I think have great ideas.

The last couple interviews I posted, I did with Jaime Paul Lamb, his non-Masonic book Daemonic Astrology, which is not about demons. It’s about the daimon, as in the Greek philosophical daimon, or higher genius. Jaime and I had a really good conversation for season two, episode one of The Scholomance Project. And then Lon DuQuette came on and talked about young Aleister Crowley, a screenplay converted back into a novel, maybe graphic novel. That day we were having that conversation, his agent actually called him in the middle of the podcast we were recording. I had to edit that out. It was quite amusing.

Other tangibles: there’s gonna be local meetups. I think we’re gonna do one this fall at least, maybe one around Christmas as well. I’m gonna do scheduled online classes on the rudiments of tarot and Kabbalah, with a fun approach, how I was taught: take your work seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. I know there will be a new edition of the Chicken Qabalah coming out in the next little while, and that’s my favorite book on the Kabbalah. I use many of Lon’s ideas from that to teach it. Especially for people who haven’t really been exposed to Hebrew letter and number, it’s just a brilliant way to learn that mysticism and then apply it to the tarot, which is just a reflection of the exact same archetypes.

And we’re gonna do a collected proceedings from the previous ten years at EFC, some of which we’ve already published on this podcast. This year we’re gonna capture it all, and we’re gonna put it out as a published proceedings, for people who want a physical copy of what goes on. I’m not sure what format, whether it’s gonna be a hardbound book or a periodical, but that’s something else we’re working on. I’ve talked about it forever, but I’ve recorded everything.

EFC 2026

Art: Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference is coming up September 19th in Seattle. Plug that for a few minutes.

Troy: Fifty bucks. $50 for a ticket. If you went to a circus and saw a five-ring circus with entertainers of that quality, you would expect to pay… it’s funny, I say those words and I wanna recite Danny Kaye’s line from White Christmas. “You’d expect to pay $6.60 or even $8.80 to see a powerhouse like Wallace and Davis.”

With the number of bookings we’ve had this year, which has just shocked me, we may even sell this thing out. We may have to close ticket sales in advance. So don’t wait to get your ticket at the door. And if you can’t make it, still buy a ticket. You don’t have to go. Buy a ticket, print it out, frame it, put it on the wall, and then buy some of the books you hear us talking about, put them on a bookshelf, and tell all your esoteric-leaning friends that you did go to the conference.

You will meet the nicest people interested in esotericism at the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference. You will meet some very unusual Freemasons there as well. And we’ve had Freemasons of my particular philosophical interest that have had a hard time in the craft, and I’m gonna be talking more about that too. There was a guy who was recently charged under the Masonic Grand Lodge of Oklahoma, and it’s a travesty that a basic liberal philosophical tenet like freedom of conscience isn’t being respected in that jurisdiction. But I’m not gonna talk about it until the trial is over.

Like I remind the younger members of the craft: take what you can from the old guys. It’s nice to have the relationship with the old guys. You get a lot to learn from those guys. But if they get in the way of what you’re trying to build in the lodge, make the big plans anyway, because they’re gonna die, and you’re gonna be left behind to run the craft the way you see fit. And then when you’re 50 like me, or 60 or 70, and those young whippersnappers are in there telling you what’s what, and they wanna build a lodge with AI in the astral, you can just be like, “You crazy kids,” and shake your fist at them. But secretly, it should warm the cockles of your heart that anybody gives you shit enough to fight with you about this stuff.

Art: That is an excellent statement right there on where things are at now. I totally agree, 100 percent.

The Creative Process

Art: I’m wondering if we should touch on the creative process a little bit, since you brought up the agent AI part of it.

Troy: Here’s what I can say: it’s like using the internet like you would use spiritual forces. You ask out, and then you get the answers back. And once one is communicating with spiritual forces beyond themselves, one could see the comparison. Now, it’s important that you don’t lose sight of what you’re trying to do, and you don’t want it all to be just a giant ripoff machine either. I think there’s gonna be a reckoning around that in the next little while.

But the process back and forth, it’s like, “Hey Art, here’s an idea. Here’s some keywords. What can you do with this?” And then you come back with the Mystic Tye logo, for example. Or the show covers. And then we stumbled across this parchment and faded black with splashes of red art motif, and we do that for a while, and it’s really cool.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the guys in Organist, brilliant musical folks, and I was in the studio with some of them the other day. The engineer at Little Red Studio is hot-keying around his producing environment, and here’s a guy who’s doing exactly what he should be doing. Seeing Justin Hagberg put these 70 tracks together… wait until you hear the new release coming from Organist. It’s no different than giving Art, “Here’s some of my broad ideas. Now go make some art. Your name is your destiny.” And you come back, and it’s just, wow. Or sometimes it’s like, “Nope. Go try this again.” And then, “No, that’s really good.” Years ago we stumbled across the logo we’re back to using for EFC, the square encompassing with the I in between.

Art: We should have just used that from the beginning. I knew that we were gonna circle back to it eventually. It was the best one. It identified it the best.

Troy: We have some amazing designs that you’re gonna be seeing on merch. Maybe a collab with Fraternal Ties. Brother Gomez is busy, but he insists that at some point we’ll do something.

Art: One thing I wanna say, as the creative director, now that we’re talking about agents and using AI. It is really important that everyone knows that the process I use has a source of truth, and that source of truth comes from the podcast transcripts. I am a multimedia specialist. I have expertise in AI, I also have expertise in branding, and it’s very important to me to use it as the middle process. What I mean by that is it’s for ideation and iterations only. Everything that we put out always has a human touch going out. Every single thing.

When I came up with the Mystic Tye branding, at first it was my design, and I spitballed back and forth with AI for ideation and different variations. When I wanted to rebrand Mystic Tye this year, I took it in a completely different direction that I felt made more sense. And AI agreed with me.

Troy: And if you’re browsing around the Facebook page or the Instagram page, or, God forbid, Bluesky or X, you will see in the coming weeks the animated logos going out, which are really top-notch and a lot of fun. Thank you for that, Art. I appreciate all the love and care and attention you put into this stuff. It’s been a joy and a blessing to discover you and get to work with you, and I can’t recommend you enough. That being said, people, if you are looking to get a website built or, God forbid, start a podcast, you could do worse than talking to Art and getting him to quote you some creative creativeness. As long as your project doesn’t conflict with mine. How about that?

Signing Off

Art: It has been extremely rewarding running this rollercoaster with you, and I’m excited to see where things go in the next five years.

Troy: Bet you never thought I’d get to doing a podcast a week, did you?

Art: No. And I’m so impressed. There’s a lot there. So go back, listen to the episodes. I’m gonna be putting out nostalgic episodes here and there so people get reminded of the guests that we’ve had. There’s some amazing material there. Possibly a Substack coming down the pipe.

Troy: Oh yeah, we could do a Substack. I got some good Substack stuff. I’d have to write more. It’s not that I can’t write. I would just talk, and get the transcriber to transcribe it.

Don’t forget to go to mystictye.com and sign up for the newsletter. We’re not gonna spam you. We will send you content weekly. All of the content we’re generating is us. This is us making it. The agents we use help us make this stuff, but it’s all us, and we’re training the agents on the stuff we make, including the transcripts. It creates amazing, irreverent, fun stuff that you’re not gonna find anywhere else, until the internet steals our stuff. So before the internet steals it and sells it for a penny, come on over and sign up and get it for free on The Mystic Tye newsletter.

And consider our Patreon. I’ll do a tarot reading for you. You could have me at your party to do tarot readings for you and your guests. Or you could meet me at the Arcana Spirit Lounge, where I’ll read your tarot down there. I gotta put a napkin down, because the tables always get sticky from the drinks. What a great spot that is. It’s kitschy like a tiki bar. I hate it, but I’m strangely drawn to it.

Last time I was there with a PhD student who studies Hebrew every week, a woman Freemason who spotted a Russian spy at our last major event, and a couple of other guys. I read everybody’s tarot cards, and it was a blast. We weren’t fortune telling. We were just cutting the tree of the universe across and counting the rings, as I would say to people.

Art: I like that. I’m gonna make a T-shirt with that on it.

Troy: It’s been a long day. I was out selling forklifts all day. Please, people, subscribe to my Patreon so I don’t have to sell so many forklifts.

Art: Yes, that would be awesome. And don’t forget: go to mystictye.com, sign up to the newsletter, and Patreon, of course.

Troy: Go subscribe to the Mystic Tye Facebook page, the Instagram, and don’t forget to check us out on YouTube. Many people didn’t even know I started dropping these as videos, at full length. Some of the stuff I said to Alex Rofaila and then edited out, or Josef Wäges… the first couple of times Josef and I talked, man, there was some pretty bombastic stuff going on, and people don’t even know. I’m gonna post it in the Patreon at some point.

Art, thanks so much for… wait a minute. Troy, thanks for being here on The Mystic Tye today.

Art: Thank you for having me. It’s been a rewarding, amazing 15-year journey, and I’m looking forward to the next 15 years.

Troy: Thanks for inviting me to inflate my ego. This was wonderful.