Brad Phillips doesn’t like to repeat himself. His first book, Essays and Fictions (2019), was about the universally familiar pleasure-pain spectrum of existence, and the various things that bring us from one pole to the other: sex, drugs, desire, family. I didn’t ask him about any of these things, because they’re boring.

Phillips is an artist. He has always observed America at a safe distance from across the northern border in Canada, seemingly fascinated and disturbed by the uniquely American brand of apocalyptic culture. He exists to me primarily as an abstract entity, an idea produced from an amalgamation of Instagram photos, DMs posted between him and followers, oil paintings, and a few audio recordings. I know somewhere there is a real Brad, I know he is Canadian and lives with his wife who is called Cristine. I know he is quite tall, and I know he has many tattoos.

Bertrand Russel, one—if not the only—philosopher Phillips likes and reads, once wrote that he preferred a style of expression that was closer to mathematics than it was to Flaubert or Walter Pater. Terse, simple, clear sentences that get to the point with the smallest amount of words—the most with the least. “Say less,” it’s often said. His online presence does not follow this rule, but flows in the opposite direction, sharing a vast quantity and variety of images and text daily.

Phillips posts videos of his ceiling fan. I have decided that life is like a fan: a spinning blur of mandalas that propels dust and spider bodies into your lungs as you sleep. I catch one blade with my eyes and watch it go round. Everything repeats. Not first as tragedy and then as farce, but first as farce and then again as farce. This cycle goes on and on, a merry-go-round. Time is a flat circle, and the disc is spinning. One day this disc will be thrown in the air like a clay pigeon and annihilated by a man with a shotgun.

I find the neurosis-hunting of psychoanalysis unpalatable. But there’s no doubt that Phillips’ work circumscribes the death drive, even if he doesn’t explicitly talk about it. Phillips approaches an absolute zero, ice skating on Lake Ontario. In his youth, this death-driving was likely done with brisk movements, rapidly alternating between Sonic the Hedgehog and Zeno’s tortoise. At that age you sprint towards death while embracing life with all your heart. As you age, you crawl, half-run over by a tractor trailer, towards the other side of the road.

Now Phillips’ death drive has cooled off, he knows we will never get there. “I am trying to erase myself. Each time I make a painting, I give away part of myself,” he writes. He takes a video through a glass darkly on his iPod touch. It’s another video of the blades of his ceiling fan.

MARCUS MAMOURIAN: Are you religious?

BRAD PHILLIPS: Yes.

MAMOURIAN: Do you practice some form?

PHILLIPS: I do, though maybe “philosophical system” is a more appropriate term, because it’s a religion that doesn’t call itself a religion traditionally. I’m not trying to be coy or anything like that. It would be fair to say that my “religious” practice came from my grandmother, who was exposed to it overseas during the Second World War. She’s 100. My grandmother has taught me a lot.

MAMOURIAN: I often see you in pictures with Gatorade bottles. When did you get into Gatorade? I know a lot of people get into sports drinks as they’re getting sober.

PHILLIPS: I saw a picture of my studio from before I got sober and it was littered with Gatorade bottles, so I must have drank it but I don’t remember. Opiates and sugar do go together like salt and pepper. Once I got sober I basically began to drink Gatorade exclusively, and I still do. I don’t really drink anything else. Other sober people I know get deep into Gatorade. I think it’s a substitution type thing. I have a rare pair of purple Air Jordans that were a collaboration with Gatorade. I can’t wear them. There’s a saying I believe in, which is to trust no one who calls Gatorade by its flavor and not its color—they’re likely cops.

MAMOURIAN: You’ve been posting a lot about conspiracies lately. Does that have anything to do with your new book?

PHILLIPS: I don’t want to talk too much about the book, other than to say I’m extremely averse to repeating myself, and although the first book has done really well, I have nothing more to say about myself, drugs, mental illness, or sex. So I thought, what’s the exact opposite of an autofictive book about depressing shit? That’s what I’m writing now—the opposite. Maybe it’ll bite me in the ass since people responded so emotionally and personally to the first one, but I’ve always been a strong believer in following your instincts. For the most part, at least in terms of art, they’ve never failed me. It’s also just fun to make people up, make up scenarios, do research. That’s all new to me and I enjoy it.

MAMOURIAN: I was recently admiring the David Koresh shirt you made. Waco was before my time so it’s always seemed otherworldly to me, along with everything from the whole post-war cult era. These were all events we learned about in high school sociology, taught as if they had equal importance as the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the storming of Normandy. Did you watch the events of Waco unfold in real time?

PHILLIPS: I’m 46, so Waco happened when I was 19. I had dropped out of a high school a few years previous to that and around that time all I did was smoke weed and watch CNN non-stop, so I saw Waco unfold live on the news. There’s a very elucidating documentary, Waco: Rules of Engagement, that I would recommend to anyone interested in the event. I also saw Columbine unfold in real time and other very American events, like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan or the Challenger explosion. I didn’t attend much of grade school and far less of high school. Television was my most consistent parent.

MAMOURIAN: In your last book you wrote that you had “a ridiculous wealth of knowledge” about the Zodiac killer. You’ve also written about MK ULTRA and the JFK assassination. Are you looking at different events for the new book?

PHILLIPS: I’ve written about cults a lot, specifically focusing on two things—one being that Waco wasn’t a cult, but rather an almost hundred-year offshoot of Seventh Day Adventism. Another being Heaven’s Gate, which was the only sincere mass suicide in the history of cults. When I started this new book, the JFK assassination and other very American events were part of what I was thinking about, but now the only component of American culture in the book is MK ULTRA, along with PROJECT STARGATE. Being Canadian, America is like a long movie that I keep rewinding. I would recommend people read a self-published book called Surviving Evil by Karen Wetmore if they want to learn about MK ULTRA.

MAMOURIAN: You’ve written about a theory that artists are more predisposed to precognition than others. Do you have personal experiences with precognition?

PHILLIPS: I haven’t had precognitive experiences other than guessing the exact time—my wife Cristine and I bought Russel Targ’s book on remote viewing and practiced doing it for quite a while and had genuine results. Targ designed an app called ESP Trainer, and I’ve become extraordinarily good at it. We began to time our walks back from the gym, and then ask each other to guess the time. I think I’ve guessed the time to the exact minute about a half dozen times now.. But those are self-assigned instances, and I’ve never had anything happen beyond that. Although when my father died a long time ago I was visiting my mother, and the minute she picked up the phone, I knew that she was about to be told my father was dead. That was in 1996.

MAMOURIAN: The Simpsons famously “predicted” Trump’s presidency, along with the Siegfried & Roy tiger attack, The Higgs boson, Ebola, COVID-19, smartwatches, autocorrect—the list goes on and on. I read a theory that those aren’t precognitions per se, but instances of chaos magic, whereby the collective consciousness actually brings something or some event into existence through their very thinking of it—in this case via their exposure to it by watching The Simpsons.

PHILLIPS: Eric Wargo’s book, Time Loops, discusses something similar. A lot of people who claim to precognize an event—often very notable events—will say they saw 9/11, the Challenger explosion, The Oklahoma City bombing. But Wargo’s theory is related to the multiverse. He proposes that instead, people are precognizing themselves in an alternate dimension maybe months, maybe seconds ahead of their “reality,” and witnessing how they learn of the events, i.e. they’re seeing themselves read about the bombing in the newspaper. This makes sense to me, because I do believe in the theory of the multiverse. 5-MeO-DMT did a lot to confirm my belief in the multiverse.

MAMOURIAN: There are quite a few TV shows right now, along with other forms of broadly accessible media, that are popularizing a general multiverse theory. I feel like I’m hearing about it more and more. We’re all looking to slap a systematic framework on the chaos and seeming meaninglessness of the world.

PHILLIPS: The multiverse, like most interesting things in theoretical physics, can never be proved, at least not with the applied mathematics available to us now, although people are making more progress via something called eternal inflation. It’s similar to simulation theory. I believe in the idea that there are multiple versions of myself in parallel dimensions living out separate narratives based on decisions I made in my life. Like I was offered a basketball scholarship but dropped out of school so had to turn it down. I do believe—I’ll probably sound like a nutjob by the end of this—that there is a version of myself that went to college and is living out the narrative of that life. The precognitive model proposes that there are versions of us in the past and the future, which is something I can also believe. But the multiverse theory is that there are constantly replicating, essentially infinite versions of ourselves occurring in different dimensions daily. My “spiritual” beliefs definitely include a very concrete belief in reincarnation.

MAMOURIAN: Are there projects researching the reincarnation idea similar to those dealing with precognition and remote viewing?

PHILLIPS: At the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies, they’re investigating children having different memories of themselves as someone else from the past. UVA has been able to track down the people these children are describing and verify that they are in fact real people killed in military accidents like a hundred years ago. I’m also interested in cases where someone who receives an organ transplant takes on the characteristics of the donor. Like a man in his fifties gets the heart of a high school football player who died in a car crash, and then takes on his interests. It raises an interesting question about where the “self” is located—are the brain and the mind separate; is there a soul; where are “we” located within our own bodies; can our personalities exist in our liver?

MAMOURIAN: I listened to a recording of you reading from your upcoming book, which features the story of John Lang. Did you have to research gang stalking to be able to tell that story?

PHILLIPS: The Karen Wetmore book I mentioned talks about gang stalking a lot. I know there’s some Vice thing about people who believe they’re being gang stalked, but I think they’re likely just people with delusional disorders. We’re already being regularly stalked enough that only people who threaten the government would be gang stalked in my opinion.

MAMOURIAN: I saw you recently started a Patreon with Cristine, and part of it entails you sending people chapters from an unpublished manuscript, and Cristine mailing poems. What’s the story with that 76-page novel you wrote back in 2015?

PHILLIPS: I wrote a manuscript for a book in 2015 before I had a deal to write Essays and Fictions. Once I got offered the chance to write a book, I wanted it to be something different. So the unpublished, unedited one is fictional, whereas my other isn’t really. Or, it is and isn’t. Cristine’s poems are great and people love them—her book sold out very quickly so it’s nice to let people see her new work. It’s a way to make a bit of money and a way to democratize the dissemination of artwork.

MAMOURIAN: Your work is often referential to other media—film comes up frequently. Are there particular works that have been especially influential for your art?

PHILLIPS: I always feel like an asshole when I say that I don’t think any thing, person, or object has ever influenced my work. I appreciate a lot of stuff for sure, but in terms of being “inspired” or “influenced” by anyone, I would say nothing has. Maybe America has. Pain has, love has, suffering has, sex has. But that’s it.