About this episode

Tom and Laura explore the concept of tulpas, their origins, and modern interpretations, including the Philip Experiment and various related phenomena.

This week, Tom and Laura are getting into tulpas — the ancient Tibetan practice of conjuring a living being purely through the power of concentrated thought. They explore how the concept traveled from Buddhist monasteries to 4chan forums (via a very unexpected My Little Pony detour), and discuss the modern "tulpamancer" community that's been trying to will fictional characters into existence ever since. They also dig into the Philip Experiment, a 1972 Toronto study in which a group of regular people invented a fictional 17th-century ghost and then tried to hold a séance with him — with some genuinely strange results. Plus, the Global Consciousness Project's claim that random number generators went haywire before the first plane hit on 9/11, Philip K. Dick's season pass to Disneyland and his very unexpected lunch companion, Alan Moore spotting John Constantine in a sandwich shop, and a comics writer who may have accidentally manifested an armed robbery straight out of a scene he'd just finished writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People in this episode

Hosts: Tom Reynolds, Laura Anderson

Topics covered

• tulpas
• Tibetan practice
• modern tulpamancer community
• Philip Experiment
• consciousness
• fictional characters
• séance

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Global Consciousness Project

Books & works: My Little Pony

More episodes of Wanna Hear Something Weird?

• Bob Lazar is Full of Shit · April 15, 2026 · 1h 0m
• Havana Syndrome · April 8, 2026 · 52 min
• Atlantis · April 1, 2026 · 50 min
• Black Knight Satellite · March 18, 2026 · 52 min
• Disclosure · March 11, 2026 · 47 min
• The Montauk Project · August 28, 2024 · 40 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Wanna Hear Something Weird? podcast page.