The Skeptic Metaphysicians

MICHAEL J: Just like Scully and Mulder from The X-Files, a skeptic metaphysician is caught between two worlds: the allure of life’s metaphysical mysteries and the grounding force of scientific scrutiny. It’s a quest to peel back the layers of the wound seeking to find what’s real, what’s illusion, and what lies in the realm of endless possibilities. 

Now, imagine embarking on this quest with your life partner and turning it into a dynamic, award-winning show. Meet Will Rodriguez and Karen Insley, the real-life husband-and-wife duo behind the Skeptic Metaphysicians. 

From unraveling metaphysical enigmas to exploring spiritual awakenings, they dive deep without making it cringy. Their contrasting views—one is a true pragmatist, and the other is a wonder-filled explorer (I’ll let you figure out which one is which)—make them the perfect guides for today’s journey into the great unknown. 

So buckle up, put on or take off your skeptic glasses, and let’s see if we can make this into an amazing journey of realization, loving, longing, and all that kind of cool stuff.

Will Rodriguez & Karen Endsley have talked to people deeply entrenched in the spiritual, metaphysical, mental health and self-help worlds. Whether your interests lie in the metaphysical or the spiritual or even grounded in the three-dimensional world, their show will help you explore the endless possibilities of self-growth — tinged with a hint of the supernatural.

MICHAEL J: So, for the audience that is watching and wondering who is who. Will, you are more on the skeptic side. And Karen, you’re more on the “I’m a believer” side.

WILL: Yeah, that’s fair. 

MICHAEL J: I think that’s the way we’re gonna approach it today. So how did the show get started? And how did you guys team up to do it together? We’ll start out with that.

WILL: Well, the show started during COVID, like everybody else. I was under a lot of stress, and I decided, let’s not mince words, I had a nervous breakdown. I had an existential crisis where I had to look at myself in the mirror and realize that I wasn’t the person I thought I was all along. So I went to therapy, and I found that it was great, but it wasn’t enough. So I started looking into what else makes me me, how can I get better, why am I here, what’s going on inside of me, and why am I this way? I started interviewing people in metaphysical modalities, spiritual awakening modalities because I felt like something was stirring inside me. I found that it was unbelievably helpful for me to get a lot of the stuff ironed out in my mind and my head.

Long story short, the show became popular because apparently, there are a lot more people out there going through the same kinds of things that I was going through. And now, with the help of Karen, we have interviewed over 140 different people and talked about all kinds of different modalities. And now, we still do it for me, but now we do it for not just me. We do it for everyone else out there as well who’s growing and learning with us.

MICHAEL J: All right, Karen, you’re more on the believer side. Well, it sounds like you are maybe waffling and coming over. But Karen, how did you get involved? Did you rope him into this?

KAREN: I did. When we roped each other, he roped me into believing, and he roped me into the show. Gosh, he started this podcast and kind of locked himself up in the room to do these interviews. And every once in a while, you know, he told me about them. 

But, what happened, how I got involved was he interviewed some people that we were friends with back when we lived in Florida. So, he thought it would be a couple of things that, well, since they were going to be on the show, then I’ll come on too, and we can have the four of us talking. It’d be a lot of fun. And it was. We had a great time. And after that, I popped in from time to time, and then I just kind of never popped out.

WILL: I started out as a skeptic, I guess.

MICHAEL J: That’s the whole show. What were you skeptical of? And what made you really go, “You know what, I’m going to talk about these people”?

WILL: It’s a great question because I never really expected to be doing a show about metaphysics and things like that. I’m very much rooted in the pragmatic world. I need to feel it, touch it, taste it, experience it myself before I can actually say, “Yeah, this is legit.” Sadly, a lot of people out there see one thing and maybe aren’t exactly what they pretend to be.

So, growing up in Connecticut and New York, I had been swindled by the best of the best. I promised myself I would not be swindled in this world. I need to really be able to wrap my head around it for me to be able to say, “Okay, I think there’s something there.” And over the course of the last 140 some-odd interviews, we have experienced a lot that I can’t explain other than that this stuff is real. So I’m not 100% yet on board, but I’m way, way closer than I was before.

MICHAEL: So, Karen, you believe already. You didn’t have to convince yourself, right?

KAREN: Yeah, no, I always have. And, you know, it’s just been like throughout my life, this kind of little constant companion sort of feeling. I guess I remember, I was born in Florida, near the beach. And so, we were constantly at the beach. I remember I’d kind of be by myself in the water, singing little songs to the angels, which I don’t think I’ve ever told Will, can’t even imagine his look right now.

WILL: You sang a song to the angels?

KAREN: I did. I’d have these conversations, it’s just all in my head, but I never really thought to talk about it because I just thought it wasn’t different than anybody else. But apparently it is.

I mean, I don’t know that they talked back, but oh, maybe they did? I don’t know. But um, but no, I’ve just always known that there’s more out there. I’ve had experiences that you just can’t deny, at least I mean, I guess you can deny anything, but I choose not to. And I think so much of this is a choice, a choice to believe, and when you believe in these things, it’s very powerful. It opens up your curiosity, gives you more enjoyment, and it’s wonderful, I think.

MICHAEL J: Well, there are two things I want to jump into before we cut the interviewer part of the show a little shorter today. We’re gonna jump into this or that a little early today. But before we go into that, Will, I have to understand your cancer treatments and what you found with the people that helped you heal. So, tell us about that. I want to know.

WILL: Well, approximately two or three years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and for anyone out there who has been given the diagnosis with a big C, it changes you and changes your life. Suddenly, our mortality became super real. We went to the doctor’s, had a biopsy, and it was confirmed by two doctors who did the whole thing. We didn’t know what we were going to do. So, we decided to go with active surveillance. Basically, they just want you to make sure it’s not growing. If it grows at that point, then we have to make a decision about whether we’re going to do surgery or radiation or how we’re going to handle it.

Over the course of that, and then the next year, I would get another biopsy to see where it was going, if it was growing, shrinking, or staying the same. And it became more targeted at that point. We took some time to try to wrap my head around the diagnosis. I fell into a bit of a funk for a while, as I’m sure you can imagine. Totally. Throughout the course, I was very quiet about it and didn’t open up to very many people because that’s just not really who I am.

Then at one point, I don’t remember what made Karen and me decide to open up to the audience, but we talked about it on the show. From that moment on, every single practitioner that was on our show, whether they were energy healers or kinetic body therapists, or from all these different modalities across the spectrum of metaphysics and spirituality, came out in support of me. They all told me what they were doing for me at that point in time. It was one after another after another. So, it came time to get my second biopsy, and it was more targeted. They went in and did the targeted biopsy.

KAREN: Well, first, you did the MRI, and we got the MRI back. There were more spots, which was really scary.

WILL: Yes, that’s true. It was quite scary. So, they went in for the second biopsy. And when I got the results, it’s probably important to mention, I did no surgery, I did no radiation, I did no chemo, no medication, nothing. We did nothing. When we got the results, it was something that I couldn’t read at first because I was terrified of what the results were going to be, especially with the fact that they had found more spots. 

As I was trying to read the results of the biopsy, I knew I was getting it wrong. I couldn’t be reading what I was reading. So, I called Karen in a panic. “Can you please read this and tell me what you see?” And we both started crying because there were 18 cores that they biopsied, and each one, one after another, it was benign, benign, benign, benign, benign. I’m tearing up right now just thinking about it. It was like it was gone. They couldn’t find it.

So, the doctor went to cancel my next appointment, which was the one where she was going to tell me what we need to do from that point forward. And she said, “No, in light of the biopsy results, I think we can just cancel our appointment.” I said, “Absolutely not. I’m going into the office, and I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that this is gone. They write. This is not my imagination.”

Sure enough, I went to the office, and she looked me in the eye, and her words I will never forget were, “Will, you never have to worry about prostate cancer again.” That blew my mind. So, I don’t know what happened or how it happened. All I can say is that a miracle happened, and I owe everything to the listeners of the show, the people who were incredibly supportive, who became part of our community, who became part of our family, really. Because without that, I don’t know where I would have ended up.

MICHAEL J: So, you never did any surgery, did you? You didn’t ever do any chemo?

WILL: I did nothing.

KAREN: Take a pill – nothing. 

WILL: I literally did nothing. It was all thanks to everybody else out there. I meditated by name in a visualize and all that kind of stuff. Joe Dispenza talks about curing yourself and that kind of stuff. And I don’t know if I really believed that for a very long time. And I don’t know that I still believe it now, but I do believe there’s something more mysterious happened that medical science, Western science can’t explain. I also changed my diet and went more to an Ayurvedic diet, so I was eating cleaner.

KAREN: But, that was for a very short period. It wasn’t like you were sticking it out either.

“

I think a lot of it has been shown that many of the illnesses that happen in our bodies are self-inflicted, right? Whether by diet or environment or stress or our thoughts. Our thoughts are incredibly powerful.

WILL: You’re right. But, I think a lot of it has been shown that many of the illnesses that happen in our bodies are self-inflicted, right? Whether by diet or environment or stress or our thoughts. Our thoughts are incredibly powerful. 

My thought is that the trauma that I went through when I first started the show was so intense for me that it caused me to create and manifest this tumor, which then, with the help of the processing that I did through the interviews and the community, the work that they helped me do, it helped to just finally clear it out. It was like an energetic healing. It was, I mean, it sounds weird for me to say it out loud.

MICHAEL J: I mean, I’m watching your face as you say it. And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s the face of a pragmatist right there.” But, that’s your face right there. I’m just saying.

KAREN: You hear these things, and they always happen to someone else. And you’re like, “Was it cancer? Was it really?” You know, did you just think you had this, but no, we are now those people. Like I said, we got the diagnosis. And I happened to, so we both work in TV, and I had done an interview with this incredible oncologist. And I was like, “Alright,” and he specializes in prostate. I’m like, “We’re going to him.” And he confirmed that the diagnosis was true. And so, yeah.

MICHAEL J: That is astounding. And by the way, I do love Joe Dispenza and visualizing the emotions and all the stuff that goes with it. Definitely. Yeah, we’ll get the four of us together. You, me, Karen, and Joe, and we’ll have a party about it one day. 

KAREN: That’s great. 

WILL: If you’ve got an in with Joe, let me know because I would love to have him on the show. I think that’ll be awesome.

MICHAEL J: Now, besides your angels on the beach, and I’m not sure if you met Ariel there or not, you’re a believer. And I’m guessing after the story with Will and going through that with him, you were already a believer, but what was the big thing in your life that made you go like, “Yep, this stuff is all real. And I’m all in. I don’t need to really check it out too much.”

KAREN: Oh, my gosh, there have been so many things. I had, I guess the earliest? I don’t know. I guess it was a dream, the earliest dream-ish that I had was when I was in college. And I remember as I passed out at a friend’s house, we were studying for exams. And all of a sudden, everything just went black like pitch black. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And I could hear this kind of whispering. 

So I’m like, “Hello, who is that?” And I just heard, “She’s not ready.” And there was like this flash, and I woke up, and I was freezing cold, and I couldn’t even sit up. So that was, I think, when I first started thinking, “Okay, maybe this is real.” But, I’ve had so many different experiences. I have a relationship with a ghost who’s just quite lovely.

MICHAEL J: Will’s face on that one.

KAREN: He knows my ghost. He knows everything. 

WILL: You know, it was weird at first, but after a couple of things that I was experiencing through that, I’m like, I can’t explain it. Okay, you wouldn’t call it a ghost.

KAREN: Oh, you know she’s real. 

I mean, we just had that experience too. So I bought an old house when I was in my late 20s, a 1925 house only ever been owned by women, and things would happen. So, I remember seeing on like the Oprah show, once she’s like, “You have to talk to the ghost and tell them to be nice.” So I’m like, “Alright, you’re here. You’re welcome to stay. Just don’t freak me out. Don’t be evil, and kind of do your own thing, but don’t bug me. Okay.” And so, I would have to acknowledge it from time to time when things would happen. 

For example, I had a pen that I was used to being a teacher, and a student gave me this really beautiful pen. So of course, I lost it. Several months go by, and I’m getting ready to go to work, and I lived by myself, and there on my dresser is the pen taken apart in a straight line. The dresser that I went to every day for months. And I named her Lila just because I thought that would be a good name for her.

And when I first started dating, he gave me this really beautiful diamond bracelet. And I wore it all the time. And I was at work one day, and I noticed it wasn’t on, and I’m like, “Oh no.” So, and I have to go home and make sure I haven’t just dropped it outside the front door or something. So I get home, and there’s a guy mowing the yard, and I’m like, “Oh no, maybe he’s mowing it up,” and he said he hadn’t heard any noises or anything. 

So, I go inside. I’m looking everywhere for this bracelet. It’s nowhere. I mean, I’m looking between couch cushions, you name it, in the refrigerator, everywhere, in and out of the house 510 times. So finally, I’m resigned to the fact that I’m gonna have to buy myself another bracelet because I can’t tell him I lost it, like, “Crap, money for this.” But then I’m like, “Well, maybe Lila can help me.” Like, “Alright, Lila. I really need you to help me find this brace.” So, I’d look around the house a little bit more and give up. So, I’m going outside, I open the door, and in a perfect spiral shape, there is my bracelet. 

MICHAEL J: Really?

KAREN: So yeah, like in a perfect spiral shape right there on the front doormat that I had been in and out of several times.

MICHAEL J: Your belief is that you didn’t just not see it. You think Lila literally put it there for you. 

KAREN: I scoured that house. I mean, this was my new boyfriend’s diamond bracelet. You’d look everywhere. I mean, we were just there recently renovating it for we rent it out now. And a painter came and got paint all over the windows, and I was so frustrated. You know, we were doing stuff, and I’m literally scraping the windows off with my fingernail. And I’m thinking about Lila, and all of a sudden, it pops into my head. 

Her name is not Lila; her name is Beulah, which makes perfect sense because Beulah was one of the owners of the house, and I just never thought that maybe it just the wrong name came to me, so I’m like, “Oh, Bueller,” and I kid you not, I looked down, and right next to my hand is a razor blade scraper thing. And he scraped the windows off. And I had been at that window for a good 25 minutes scraping it with my thumbnail along that ledge. I would have seen the scraper; they’re so easy to fall off shelves and things like that would happen. Well, we would hear that, and then we’d wake up in the middle of the night with something shooting off the shelf if we didn’t acknowledge Lila from time to time.

MICHAEL J: Okay, so Beulah Lima is a friendly ghost. Are you still in that house with Beulah Lima, or have you sold that house?

KAREN: No, but I think she follows me around. I think she’s attached more to me now than the house.

MICHAEL J: Okay, and then we’re gonna go with that. I love both of your stories. And I talk to the audience every once in a while, and I have guests on, and I say, I am still on the scale of, you know, Scully to Mulder. I’m still on the Scully level, like a three, moving towards a four right now, because I want to believe, right? I want to be Mulder. And I’m like, willing, I was like the skeptic, right? But, there are so many things that do happen, you go like, “Hey, I can’t explain it.” That one’s good. Well, let that one slide for a while.

“

I want to believe, I really want to believe there’s more to this life than just this. And I’m finding that the more I open myself up to the possibility, if only for a minute. Now, I’m finding that the more I release my initial bullcrap response and allow myself to say, ‘Let me take a look at it’ the universe is sending things to me to show me, little by little.

WILL: It does. I’m the same way. I want to believe, I really want to believe there’s more to this life than just this, right? And I’m finding that the more I open myself up to the possibility, if only for a minute, there was a time when I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, right. Now, shut up. That’s just not... that’s not right.” But, now I’m finding that the more I release my initial bullcrap response and allow myself to say, “Let me take a look at it” the universe is sending things to me to show me, little by little. 

Things happen that are blowing my mind. And I go to all lengths to figure out how this could possibly have happened rationally. And there have been times when I just... I just can’t. One thing just happened the other day. We were interviewing someone in person at their store. I was setting up the gear, and there are these microphones where they hang. There’s a little nut, this big nut, like this big, right? The size of a quarter, almost. And it’s golden, really obvious. I’m going to attach it to the microphone, and it just slips off my hand and bounces on the ground and vanishes. 

Karen is right there next to me, watching this thing happen. So, we’re like, “Well, it must have bounced somewhere on the ground.” So, there are four of us on the ground, and the carpet is beige.

KAREN: And it’s like that really plush, it’s more white because it’s really plush, so it’s not really going to bounce really high.

WILL: Right. This nut, it’s really bright golden yellow, so you should be able to see it. There were four of us on our hands and knees on the ground trying to find this damn thing. We couldn’t find it anywhere.

KAREN: I took that fountain apart. It was a little rock fountain, and I thought maybe it’s in the rocks. I took the whole fountain apart, looking for it, and then put it all back together. Yeah, it was nowhere to be found.

WILL: It was just gone. It just vanished. Karen and I both said, “You saw it, right?” You started falling on my hands, but it hit the ground and just poof, gone. So we were like, “Okay, this is really weird. There’s obviously a rational explanation, but I can’t waste time looking for it or finding the answer now. So let’s just move forward.” I ended up doing the interview holding the microphone.

Then, at the end of the interview, there were several people watching in the store, and one of them came to me and said, “You should check your pocket.” I thought, “Check my pocket? Okay, let me just humor her.” So I checked my pockets, even though there was no possible way for the nut to end up there. But when I stuck my hands in both my pockets, I was shocked because when I pulled my hand out of my right pocket, the damn nut was in my hand.

Okay, Michael, when you’re a guy and you’re wearing jeans and you’re sitting, the pockets fold up and flatten out, so there’s no possible way for the nut to end up in my pocket unless I picked it up and put it there. I swear to everything that’s holy to me, I did not do that.

KAREN: I would have seen you do that, and it would have had to bounce backward, around the table leg, and somehow get into your pocket.

MICHAEL J: I’ve done that fantasy role before to go like to go here to there.

WILL: Yeah, we’re going to put up the string maps or whatever to figure it out. It’s sheer impossibility. And yet there it was, in my damn pocket the entire time we were doing the interview. And they were saying, “Yeah, we’d gotten to that it was in your pocket. You need to check your pocket.” Now, wow. I mean, I can't have gone through this thing 1000 times. I’ve asked Karen, the people we’re interviewing, people that were there. I interrogated everybody who put this in my pocket, right? Because I didn’t feel a damn thing.

KAREN: It was like the magician pulling it out, “Here it is!”.

WILL: What’s behind your ear? Right? It was the weirdest thing. And I just can’t explain it. Well, things like that have started to happen to me now, because I’ve opened myself up to the possibility that there could be something else out there. And the way I did it is by adopting a quantum physics mentality, right? Quantum mechanics helps you to put everything in because anything could happen. We’re in a world of pure potentiality. And anything could happen. And the universe is saying, “You want to see how crazy you can get.”

MICHAEL J: I will say that the quantum, and the scientists in the quantum are definitely starting to overlap the metaphysical and the spiritual. And it’s really interesting to see how those two things are coming together. 

WILL: Definitely. 

KAREN: Yeah.

MICHAEL J: I think I’ve gone from a Scully three to a Scully four, maybe Scully 5 soon. We’ll see.

About Our Guest

Will Rodriguez & Karen Endsley have talked to people deeply entrenched in the spiritual, metaphysical, mental health and self-help worlds. Whether your interests lie in the metaphysical or the spiritual or even grounded in the three-dimensional world, their show will help you explore the endless possibilities of self-growth — tinged with a hint of the supernatural. Learn more about Will and Karen here. 

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