The Science of Consciousness: What’s Beyond the Brain? | Mark Gober : 1262

Summary

The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance Episode 1262 | The Science of Consciousness: What’s Beyond the Brain? with Mark Gober Release Date: March 20, 2025
Host: Dave Asprey
Guest: Mark Gober, author & consciousness researcher

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Dave Asprey explores the frontiers of consciousness with Mark Gober, acclaimed author of An End to Upside Down Thinking and six other books on the subject. The conversation delves into the science and philosophy surrounding consciousness, challenging the mainstream materialist view that it arises solely from the brain. Drawing from personal awakenings, scientific research, and spiritual traditions, Dave and Mark discuss what it means if consciousness is non-local, persists after death, and is fundamental to understanding connection, intuition, and altered states. Listeners are invited to question assumptions about reality and consider the implications for human potential, healing, and even AI.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Challenging the Materialist Paradigm of Consciousness

• The mainstream view that "the model that consciousness revolves around our brain, it’s not a proven model" (A, 00:00).
• Mark argues for the alternative: consciousness may be non-local—existing beyond the brain and body.

Mark Gober: "Consciousness survives bodily death. When a person’s body dies, their consciousness simply transitions into a new form. Doesn’t die. It’s still accessible in the stream and it could reconfigure into a new whirlpool." (B, 00:19)

Timestamps:

• [00:00–02:00] Opening challenge to traditional consciousness models
• [23:19] Dave’s perspective on consciousness and death

2. Mark Gober’s Awakening & Journey

• Mark’s shift from “atheistic banker dude” to consciousness researcher stemmed from a personal crisis and subsequent exposure to alternative ideas via podcasts (B, 05:08).
• First domino: Experiencing sensory deprivation tanks and listening to alternative health and consciousness podcasts.

Mark: "I hit a wall in my life in many ways... I was sprinting really fast but not moving. The things we’re told often don’t bring the lasting satisfaction that we expect." (B, 06:04)

Timestamps:

• [05:08–09:19] Mark’s mainstream background and existential dissatisfaction
• [09:37–14:18] First float tank and stirring of new perspectives

3. Sensory Deprivation, Meditation, and Early Experiences

• Float tanks as a means to bypass the brain’s filtering—parallels with meditation and even psychedelics.

Dave: “When we’re in a womb-like environment, we naturally, in our bones, feel safer with no cognitive involvement whatsoever. It’s this feeling of connectedness.” (A, 14:28)

Timestamps:

• [09:37–14:53] Float tank experiences & the sense of interconnectedness

4. Extraordinary Evidence: Near Death & Psychic Phenomena

• Mark shares stories and studies supporting psychic abilities and consciousness beyond the brain:
  • Remote viewing (US government programs, Institute of Noetic Sciences)
  • Near death experiences (NDEs) and veridical out-of-body perceptions
  • Life reviews and the “golden rule” found in afterlife reports

Mark: “At a time when the brain isn’t functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever.” (B, 26:29, quoting Dr. Bruce Grayson)

• Dave reveals family stories and his views on reincarnation as personally and practically useful beliefs. (A, 21:45)

Timestamps:

• [23:19–44:53] Death, afterlife signs, NDEs, remote viewing, and psychic research
• [36:56–46:38] The science and pragmatics of non-local consciousness

5. Spiritual Experience, Practice, and Caution

• The importance of discernment, spiritual protection, and responsible exploration:
  • Spiritual risk in psychedelic/shamanic practices—dangers of “entities” or dark experiences
  • The necessity of skilled guidance and energy protection practices

Dave: "You need to have a spiritual firewall in place at all times … otherwise you’re a puppet.” (A, 43:07)

Timestamps:

• [39:25–45:32] Cautionary tales about spiritual exploration and protection

6. The Role of Intuition and Discerning Inner Guidance

• Both discuss trial-and-error learning to distinguish between intuition, ego, and emotion.

Mark: “Now I feel something that I can’t describe to you of just an inner knowing … That’s a definite yes. I need to go there.” (B, 52:35)

Dave: “The very first and very brief message you get, that’s intuition. It will be very soon after followed by a very large emotional reaction … and then a thought.” (A, 53:31)

Timestamps:

• [51:45–54:33] Cultivating intuition versus fear and ego

7. Social and Ethical Implications

• Implications of real ESP—advantages, ethics (black magic vs. white magic), and the shifting role of science:
  • Studies like the Ganzfeld Experiment showing statistical evidence for telepathy
  • Karma/consequences for “magic” used with ill intent

Mark: "If the person being affected with these techniques is in high integrity, that person should be able to catch it. That might be part of the defense mechanism." (B, 81:27)

Timestamps:

• [76:24–82:18] ESP in practical life and ethics

8. Integration & The Golden Rule

• The “life review” in NDEs frames the golden rule ("do unto others...") as natural law, not just morality.
• Authenticity, expressing truth, and compassion as practical results of these perspectives.

Mark: "It's actually beyond morality. It’s natural law. Because if we are interconnected in some way … what happens to people after a near death experience? … They say, I’m quitting my job. I need to get a divorce...They feel they have to come back and serve." (B, 70:15)

Timestamps:

• [69:13–76:04] NDEs, the golden rule, and authenticity

9. Scientific Suppression, Publishing, & Social Engineering

• Suppression of consciousness research by academic, publishing, and social systems for reasons ranging from ego to organized disempowerment.

Mark: "There are forces that want to suppress this. … This is social engineering. It’s dark versus light.” (B, 31:44, quoting Mario Beauregard)

Timestamps:

• [28:43–34:48] Barriers to scientific paradigm shifts

10. The Limits and Mystery of AI and Consciousness

• Will AI ever be conscious? Mark is skeptical that matter alone will generate new consciousness, but hybrids or other mechanisms are possible.

Mark: “If consciousness is the basis of all reality, we could say that everything in the material world is a manifestation of consciousness. But will new consciousness pop out of matter? We'll have to see…” (B, 87:52)

Timestamps:

• [87:44–88:44] On AI consciousness

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "All you need is one." (B, 35:31)
  • If even one psychic or survival-of-consciousness phenomenon is real, the materialist model fails.
• "We're all connected... maybe I'm not just a body." (B, 26:59)
• "The universe is actually quantum. At least, that's what quantum physics, hard science, is showing us." (A, 19:02)
• "It’s a life changing concept just to consider. But then when seeing scientific evidence suggesting that this might be true, I can’t express to you enough how much it’s changed my life." (B, 90:33)
• "Curiosity, I think, is a way to counter fear and to sense reality." (A, 90:23)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Start Time | Topic | |---|---|---| | 00:00 | Challenge to brain-based consciousness | | 05:08 | Mark Gober’s mainstream origins & awakening | | 09:37 | Float tank experiences & early mind shifts | | 14:28 | Connectedness and sensory deprivation | | 23:19 | Dave’s family story and perspectives on death | | 26:29 | NDE science and beyond-the-brain mind | | 36:56 | Paradigm shift: brain as filter, not source | | 39:25 | Role of altered states; protection in spiritual exploration | | 51:45 | Discernment: intuition vs. fear and ego | | 69:13 | NDEs, life reviews, and the golden rule as natural law | | 76:24 | ESP, ethics, and practical implications | | 87:44 | AI and the possibility of machine consciousness | | 90:33 | Final call to question reality and consciousness models |

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Concluding Practices & Takeaways

How to move closer to deeper consciousness (B, 89:07):

• "Ask what is real? … Go down the rabbit hole of examining assumptions. Not taking things at face value."
• Radical humility: All knowledge is provisional.

How to avoid programming:

• Question all presented truths; examine the assumptions beneath.

One core truth to shake your worldview:

• "Consciousness does not emerge from our brain. Perhaps consciousness is beyond the body…"

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Resources & Where to Find More

• Mark’s books (all seven on Amazon): Hard copy, Kindle, and Audible (narrated by Mark)
• Podcast series: Where is My Mind
• Website: markgober.com

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Final Note from Dave Asprey:

• The episode challenges listeners to explore the boundaries of science and consciousness, question paradigms, and take responsibility for their own reality and spiritual growth. As Mark puts it: “Maybe there’s purpose and meaning to my life that I am here to discover and embody. Authentically.”

Transcript

[A]

The model that consciousness revolves around our brain, it's not a proven model. Your consciousness is just riding around in the body with very limited connection to reality. Because the body, its whole job is to filter out almost all of reality. Because why would you pay attention to the spinning of the planets and gurgling of things? Too much data.

[B]

Consciousness survives bodily death. When a person's body dies, their consciousness simply transitions into a new form. Doesn't die. It's still accessible in the stream and it could reconfigure into a new whirlpool. That is reincarnation wouldn't be paranormal normal.

[A]

What evidence do you really have that consciousness isn't in your brain? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is a show that I am so excited to share with you because you might have noticed that I'm into biohacking. If you've been listening for a long time, you know where biohacking came from. What happens is you might start out saying, saying, look, I care about human performance or I want to lose weight, or I want my brain to work. And I've been in each of these situations. So I want my body to stop hurting or I don't want to get sick anymore, right? So there's a consciousness component. And I believe that if you start on the path of biohacking, you will end up inevitably saying, I'm going to join Dave in living to at least 180 and dying at a time. And by a method of my choice. You're also, if you decide to do that, like, well, my brain works, I have tons of energy. I don't want to be miserable and suffer anymore. So. So I'm going to have to. Well, the technical term would be wake the fuck up, but the more enlightened term would be, I'm going to become more conscious. And you've heard me say over and over, if you work on your mitochondria, you are wired in your bones to be kind to other people. It is a fundamental aspect of life in order to do that. But it's just really hard to shift your energy into that versus staying in fear. So that means we're ultimately studying consciousness. And this is why you'll see guys like Joe Dispenza on stage at my biohacking conference, shameless plug. Biohackingconference.com May 28 Austin. 4,000 people. It's going to be amazing. But you see, Joe and one of my shamanic teachers, Alberto Vioda, will be there this year and it's why? For 20 years I've studied in monasteries and gone to the Andes and Himalayas and done all this stuff that you might not really hear about front and center. And what that comes down to is my model of reality and consciousness has shifted quite a lot because I've seen and eventually learned how to do things that I was raised to believe are entirely impossible. And I've seen them reliably and repeatedly and they just basically smack me in the face enough times that I'm like, oh, my picture of reality is not very accurate. So I've been studying all these different perspectives, some old lineages and some of the more modern things. And our guest today is a guy named Mark Gober. Mark is an author of was this 1, 2, 3, 4, 57 books, the most famous of which is called an end to Upside Down Thinking. And he's an award winning author and we'll call it consciousness researcher, who like me used to hang out in places like Silicon Valley. But he was even worse than being a nerd. He was an investment banker. He had to take three showers before he came into the studio just to get the banker stench off of him. Okay, not really. I think he has good hygiene, but he comes from that world, which I'm very familiar with as well, and has learned to kind of reject a lot of materialist science. So he's a mental force. He does a lot of thinking, a lot of research, and has gone way down the path of saying, oh my God, like there is science behind consciousness, behind things that you wouldn't think are real. So I think we can all learn a lot. And you find someone who has one belief set and then just keeps seeing things and starts questioning their belief set. This is what you've done to become a biohacker. Things just happen to me, I don't know why to I'm in control by choosing my environment inside and outside my body. He's doing the same thing about choosing how to frame reality with no other ado. Mark. Welcome to the studios here in Austin, Dave.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

You and I got to have dinner last night in a room of about 25 or so leading AI researchers, consciousness researchers, top entrepreneurs, Jeffersonian style dialogue. Really, really fun. We had great minds in biology and computer science and there wasn't really a consensus on almost anything. But more people in the room than not thought that our consciousness paradigm maybe wasn't very accurate, that there's a lot of spirituality, a lot of belief systems that were not rigorously Western science. How did you go from being kind of atheistic banker dude into spiritual guru dude who doesn't wear a beaded necklace under your sport coat, but probably wants to.

[B]

Yeah, unexpectedly. That's the short answer. Never would have predicted it if you talked to my friends and family like, what happened to Mark? Because this was not on my radar. I was on a mainstream track. I was very interested in the normal things you're supposed to achieve in so school. Getting good grades. I was a competitive athlete, went to Princeton. I was one of the captains of the tennis team there. Then like many of my classmates, went into investment banking. I was there in 2008 during the financial crisis. That's when I graduated and didn't really have a sense of meaning or purpose when I was doing other than this is what you're supposed to do, this is what's going to bring happiness or something. And then I ended up working in Silicon Valley advising tech companies and sort of had an awakening in 2016 in Silicon Valley where I hit a wall in my life in many ways because I was on this treadmill of trying to succeed, either succeeding or not, and then not feeling like I was getting anywhere in the process. I was sprinting really fast but not moving.

[A]

And so you weren't moving towards happiness, towards financial success, towards relationships? What were you not moving to?

[B]

I would say all the above. Of what, what's really going to make life awesome. And the things we're told often don't bring the lasting satisfaction that, that we expect.

[A]

What were the three things that you thought were going to bring happiness? Like the most important three, I would.

[B]

Have said material success and that. That's two categories. One is respect in an industry. So that means progressing but then also doing well financially. So the numbers, I would have said those are two really important things. And beyond that I'm actually not sure. Probably relationship, having the right marriage and the right kids and all that.

[A]

Okay, there you go. How old are you now?

[B]

39.

[A]

39. And you're. It's fantastic. I was on a very similar thing. I'm like, okay, I've top career in Silicon Valley and like, okay, if I just have enough money then I'll be happy. And I make 6 million pre Biden dollars when that was real money. And, and I just looked at a friend, I'm like, I'll be happy when I have 10. I, I literally said that like, what a douchebag, right? And then like, oh, a relationship, I better get married. And that was not a way to be happy. And same same thing. Oh, like let's be an entrepreneur magazine when I'm 23. And none of those had anything to do with happiness. Why didn't they?

[B]

To me, it's because there wasn't a deeper sense of purpose underlying it. And that's what my awakening in 2016 has led me toward, which is, who are we fundamentally and why are we here? And then having answers to those questions, moving forward from that point. And what I would have told you, Dave, if you asked me pre2016, I would have said we live in a fundamentally random and meaningless universe.

[A]

Yeah, I would have said that too.

[B]

And meaningless I would have said to you as well. We can create meaning in our mind, but we're rationalizing the inevitability of we're going to die. And when our brain shuts off, that's the end of our consciousness. There was a big bang 13.8 billion years ago. It was all random interactions of molecules and atoms that led us here, and we just had to deal with it.

[A]

Are you pissed off at yourself for believing that for so long?

[B]

Yes and no. Yes, in that what I now know makes my old worldview look very foolish. But at the same time, I don't think I could have escaped it, given where I was and the orientation I had. It would have been very difficult up until that point in 2016 for me, really, to have a shift.

[A]

You say you had an Awakening in 2016. What does it even mean? What happened?

[B]

Yeah, because for many people it can be different. Some people have a near death experience or a psychedelic trip. For me, it was more of a feeling of being a zombie in life combined with learning about science that challenged my worldview, starting with podcasts, because in 2016, podcasts became more popular. A friend of mine sent me a Tim Ferriss episode with Mark Andreessen. I was like, this is cool. You can listen to venture capitalist talk. And then some of my friends were putting butter and coffee and they're like, listen to Dave Aspie. So I was listening to Dave Aspie Raspberry and lots of altern, more, you know, kind of Joe Rogan, things like that. And then came across a show called Extreme Health Radio. And they were helping. They were talking about people curing themselves of things, using all kinds of alternative treatments, both mentally and physically. Because I was interested in the mental too, of how can I make. Where can I find joy?

[A]

That's where it's at. I mean, even if you have a tumor or something, at least if your brain works and you're happy, yeah, you'll probably heal the tumor exactly.

[B]

So I was. These were all foreign ideas and it was just an. It was a way, an outlet for me because I was so focused on my job and my client work in Silicon Valley to hear these other ideas. So I started doing sensory deprivation. Float tanks.

[A]

Whoa. In 2016.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And tell me about your first float ever.

[B]

So if your audience is not familiar, they probably are, but if they're not, it is water with so much salt that you float on your back, you stay afloat. There's that much salt in it, it's not even that high. And where I went in San Francisco, it was a pod. So you could close the pod. I would like to do no lights, no sound, and it's like meditation on steroids. That's how I see it now. And I would come out of there very relaxed. I would do an hour, actually, sometimes I would book back to back to back, where I do like three hours just to see what it was like. Because I didn't feel at the time I wasn't ready to do the psychedelic realm. I just wasn't as comfortable. But I heard, I think it was on Tim Ferriss podcast. They're like, you don't have to do these substances. You can just meditate a lot. I'm like, all right, let me try that. So I definitely felt peaceful. But also emotions would start to come up, like memories that I hadn't thought about. I'm like, whoa. That memory had been suppressed and it actually had a big impact on my life. So I would have a lot of emotions. And in hindsight, probably those meditations in. Or if you want to call them meditations in the tanks, they might have somehow steered me toward where I ended up in terms of learning about the science. I was on this path without knowing it.

[A]

Float tanks are. They're so interesting. I tried one in 2014, kind of before it became a trend. It'd been on my list forever. You know, I saw the movie Altered States years ago. You probably saw that. I just couldn't find one. So I'm in Las Vegas and I googled around. I was at a conference of some sort. So I found a place. It was the craziest thing ever. I call them and they're like, yeah, yeah, come over. You know, you don't have to take a taxi. We'll send our son over. And I'm waiting. The guy's like 45 minutes late to pick me up. And he pulls up in some beat up old car. This pretty much like Jesse from Breaking Bad in the early part, like. And he gets lost on the way to his own house. I'm like, oh my God, this guy is so loaded on meth. Like, this is probably not a good idea. And I get to the place where the float tank is, and it's a homemade float tank with like plywood and plexiglass and stuff on it. And there's these two kind of tweaker parents and, you know, they're selling 25 bottles of Epsom salt with a piece of lavender in them. And like, this is the sketchiest thing I've ever done. I'll do it. So I lay down in the thing and fortunately nobody killed me. Yeah, it felt same thing. You know, there's no sensory input, so I'm just alone with myself. Right. And it was, it was very similar to some of the psychedelic experiences I'd had. So there, there is value in that, for sure.

[B]

And I was seeing things too. Colors, almost like kaleidoscopes in a way.

[A]

Yeah. What do you think that is? Like, what are those things?

[B]

I don't know. So this is getting into where my work is headed, actually about what the brain is and how its relationship to consciousness actually is in the world. And I think that when we meditate, perhaps we're getting things from our brain out of the way that normally filter out a broader reality. So the float tank and meditation could be like miniature ways of doing that. Whereas a psychedelic trip or a near death experience, those might be more dramatic. So it's like maybe little bits getting into my awareness and while my mind was calm and I was not a person who could sit still or meditate. So that was a big deal for me to sit in those tanks. And really the first time I had to be with myself like that, I.

[A]

Ended up getting one of the pods, probably similar to the one you had for my first upgrade. Labs is in my barn in Canada. I'm like, I know the magazines are going to come here. So I made a special room for it and I had a big stencil made for it that said human cloning tank.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

It's so sci fi. You open it up and there's a guy dripping with water coming out. And yeah, it freaked a few people.

[B]

Out, but sort of like Minority Report, that movie where they come out of. That's what it looks like. It really is, but it's. You're just sitting in salt water. The place I went to an SF was really nice. It was like a spa in the marina.

[A]

So that's how it should be. My experience was pre, like commercialization of this. So I'm glad it's a little bit more normal. Did you ever find it just shredded your hair? Like. Like the. So weird. Just, like, messed up. I didn't do mine nearly as much as I thought I would when I was at my house.

[B]

Yeah, well, the shampoos and soaps that they gave were apparently designed to counteract that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So it was really. It was a great place.

[A]

Sweet. And I. And I'm not suggesting, if you're listening to the show, that you shouldn't go do a triathlon if you never have. I went to a place in Victoria with my son when he was 5. And he was kind of afraid, right. You know, so I held his hand and, you know, he finally let go and was just floating and maybe for five minutes. And I said, congratulations, you did your first float ever. And he looks at me, he goes, that wasn't my first float. What do you mean? And just real peacefully, he goes, when I was inside mommy, I was floating. It was like he remembered being in the womb, and this was the same feeling. And it triggered. I was like, whoa, profound.

[B]

Well, that's actually one of the things that drew me to it versus regular meditation is that you are. Your muscles are totally relaxed. And it's supposed to mimic the womb. It's part of the selling that they were doing.

[A]

Oh, absolutely.

[B]

Felt that way.

[A]

The. The pods I use at 40 years of Zen are also designed to mimic the womb, even though they're for neurofeedback. Because it's not something that we're going to think about. It's just that when we're in a womb like environment, we naturally, in our bones, feel safer with no cognitive involvement whatsoever. Right. It's this feeling of connectedness. And connectedness is one of the things that is a hallmark of your work. We're all connected to each other. Right? So your awakening was a floating.

[B]

Maybe we could say that was the first domino, or we could say some of these earlier podcasts. But if I had to point to one moment, it was listening to a woman on Extreme Health radio named Laura Powers, who I actually end up having on my podcast, Where's My Mind? But she talked about, this is a health podcast, okay? And I had heard many episodes on Curie Cancer and things like that. And this woman is speaking about using psychic abilities and energies to work with clients and interdimensional beings. And the hosts were taking her seriously. So I'm like, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Because I'm not familiar with this this sounds like sci fi. She doesn't sound like she's lying. Is she delusional? How could this be?

[A]

And.

[B]

And it didn't. My life didn't change in that moment. But at the end of the episode, Laura said, well, I have my own podcast, it's called Healing Powers, and I've interviewed a lot of other people. So I said, let me check out this new podcast. And it was person after person after person, different backgrounds coming to this view of reality that was contradicting what I had grown up with. And I'm like, wait a second. I don't know anyone in my network that believes these things. And then I heard a man on her show named Paul Davidson, who I interviewed on my podcast also. Eventually he went to Princeton. Also, he was a psychology major like me, and he was a Hollywood producer. So the Transformer. So incredible guy. And this came after I'd heard a lot of other anecdotes and he's like, I'm working on the Life After Death project because my colleague passed away and he was an atheist. And he said, I don't believe in an afterlife, but if I die before you, and there is one, I'm going to drop you a line. Paul proceeds to describe example after example of things that rocked his world. And the one that really stood out to me. When his colleague died, he said he was home alone in New Mexico working on papers, and left the room, came back, and there was a wet inkblot covering words that related to the death of his former colleague. He didn't put the ink blot there. No one else was there. And he spent three years sending that ink blot to chemistry labs, analyze the composition. And there were strange properties. This was one out of several hundred examples of weird things. So I remember I couldn't even move in my chair because I had heard enough before to say, hm, maybe there's some reality. This is a really smart guy. Whoa. And I started looking around the room. Are there things that I can't see? How could people not know about this? And my curiosity has just grown since then.

[A]

The idea that there are things you can't see, it actually pisses some people off. And for me, I grew up in New Mexico, and when I was 14 and a half at the time, you could get a license back then, I did total the car within three months. So maybe you shouldn't get a license at that young. But I bought a radar detector. Not a lot of people had them back then. And soon I realized as I'm driving around, I'M driving through all these invisible fields like they're there provably. I can't feel or sense any of these. And I think it really changed my mind to go. I'm constantly surrounded by things I can't sense, and that's just a normal part of reality. Could help that I had Asperger's syndrome. So I'm like a pattern match guy. I'm like, why is it here? Why is it there? What's going on? I'm like constructing a map of bubbles of energy around me because I'm driving through them and I can sense them. And I'm like, oh, that's that flavor of energy. And that flavor of energy becoming really comfortable. The fact that you can't see cell phone, you know, emanations, radio frequencies and all, but that they're there. Why couldn't there be other things that maybe we don't have technology to say?

[B]

Exactly. So even by mainstream standards, scientists will tell you that we can only see a tiny fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. So those sorts of concepts I started to integrate. And I knew a little bit about quantum mechanics with these spooky action at a distance where things are connected that are far away and they're moving at the same time. I'm simplifying this, but whoa. That violates the notion that the speed of light is the fastest you can travel if there's this instantaneous connection. So I started, you know, kind of doing the math in my mind of, hmm, maybe the reason we have this 96% of the universe that's dark matter and dark energy that scientists don't understand, but they have to plug it in to rationalize the whole universe. Maybe that's because they're missing something fundamental. So it started to make sense intellectually, but I still couldn't grasp that so many smart people I knew had no idea about this and even would reject it.

[A]

The universe is actually quantum. At least that's what quantum physics, hard science is showing us. Even though we don't really see it. A lot of things that we do in our life drains your energy and it disrupts your quantum energy. There are things you can do about it. Chronic stress, EMFs, environmental toxins, make you feel bad. I think we all know that. And we work to eliminate those or to reduce them as much as we can. But what if you could actually increase your. Your quantum energy field so that you are more resilient to these things? It turns out you can. And there's a technology called quantum upgrade that comes in. It's a cutting edge quantum streaming service that provides quantum energy. Yeah, I know that doesn't sound believable, except it works. And it's not a woo woo concept. The team at Quantum Upgrade ran randomized double blind placebo controlled studies to get the hardest data. And in one study, Quantum Upgrade as a service completely neutralized the negative effects of 5G exposure on blood flow. Another double blind study found it makes red blood cells more flexible and improves their ability to carry oxygen. It increases ATP production by up to 29%. And those are just a few of the cool things it can do. When you sign up, you can link your phone, your home, your business, even your pet with their energy source. And the cool thing is you don't need to believe in something for it to work. Quantum Upgrade has the science, the testimonials, and now over 13 placebo controlled studies backing what they do. Even though it sounds pretty incredible, I use it because I like to follow the science. Try Quantum upgrade free for 15 days. You don't even need to enter your credit card. Go to QuantumUpgrade IO Dave and just click Pay later at checkout. 15 days. Give it a try, see what you see. You've probably heard that I've been taking Mitopure for years, ever since it first came out. It's one of the few supplements that actually moves the needle when you want your cells to work better and your mitochondria to perform best. Mitopure contains urolithin A, which is a clinically backed magic powder for your mitochondria. And it's backed by 10 years of research. But here's the fun part. It's now available in a gummy that actually tastes good. Yeah, a gummy that you want to eat. And it's not a sugar bomb pretending to be healthy. They're sugar free, they taste amazing, and they deliver the same high dose bioavailable mito pure I've been using in their soft shells. And best of all, because I actually want to eat them, I take more and I feel better. So if you've been serious about your longevity stack, or you just want an easier and better tasting way to get started, try the new Mitopure gummies. They're that Good. Go to timeline.comdave and you get 20% off. God, I want to go in two directions. I have a story about death and a story about science. You want the death story?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Because it's kind of all right. My grandfather, Ph.D. physical chemist, spent his entire life in the nuclear industry, won awards for his Work in it. Right before he died, he knew he was coming to the end. He called my dad and said, you know, I've been an atheist my whole life, and now that I get it really close to the end, I've really been thinking about it, and my dad's going, he's going to convert. Oh, my God. And he goes, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it's all right. So he's like, I'm still an atheist. And he was trolling my dad. But then he said, I'm also a scientist. He said, I've never died before. No. I would argue that he probably has because I know about past lives and whatever. But he goes, I never died before. So it's really just an experiment. So after I cross over, if I can leave you a sign, I will. I mean, very much like your story. That's what made me think about this. Right. You totally reminded me. And so about a week after he died, this huge billboard goes up in town and it said, where's Larry? Which was his name. There was no phone number, no QR code, no. No one knows what it was for. And the whole family's like, was that it? And we don't know. We'll never know, right? Yeah, it was. It was super weird. And since then, like, I don't know, I've done shamanic training and all. I've invited the spirit of my ancestors to come and hang with me. Dude, I can tell when he's there. Right. I'm not that good at talking with things like that. That's not my superpower. But when you work with people who are really adept at these sorts of things, I. I'm very skeptical about death really being that real. It's just a change of state. Are you there too?

[B]

That's where I am, yeah. So it comes from the idea that our consciousness, which is the part of us that's experiencing right now, our subjective inner awareness. Difficult thing to talk about because we can't point to it. So language is always going to have to approximate, but we all have consciousness right now. The idea here, that flipped my world, which is why my first book's called An End to Upside Down Thinking. I used to think consciousness comes out of our brain through chemical and electrical activity because there's so much neuroscience showing affect this part of the brain, it affects your consciousness. Change this part of the brain that is responsible for vision, now your eyesight changes. Close correlations between brain activity, conscious experience. Problem is that correlation is not necessarily causation. If you see firefighters at the scene of the fire, I could say to you, Dave, hey look, those firefighters, they cause the fire.

[A]

Oh yeah. You could even see beans in a place where people live unusually long periods of time and think it's caused by the beans. Just saying.

[B]

We could say that because they're co. They're co occurring.

[A]

Yeah, but it's not the beans.

[B]

We have to really think, well, what's the cause of relationship? So I started looking at this other possibility because I heard so much, so many anecdotes, and then started to see peer reviewed science from the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which I'm now on the board of. But this is 50 plus years of peer reviewed research founded by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut. Princeton University had a lab, the PEAR Lab, for almost 30 years run by the former dean of engineering, studying these phenomena. The US government doing psychic spying programs with declassified documents saying it's real. So all of these things made me say, hmm, first of all, I'd never heard of these things before. So if your audience is new to this, it's mind blowing when you get into it. But secondly, hmm, maybe we have the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Wrong. And consciousness somehow beyond the body and we're tapping into it. And if that's true to your question, maybe when our body dies and our brain shuts off, it's actually kind of a liberation of consciousness and it goes into some other form, but it doesn't actually die.

[A]

You know, I'm sorry, but we're gonna have to cancel you. I mean, there's this guy named Galileo and he stood up and said, what if our model of reality isn't very accurate and the sun doesn't revolve around the earth and it's the other way around. And of course, how dare you. And now it's commonly accepted the model that consciousness revolves around our brain. It's not a proven model, it's just a useful model like Newtonian physics. It's useful, it's just wrong, right?

[B]

Yeah, it's a good approximation. And there are these correlations to. Neuroscience is great, but I find that many scientists, like I used to be, that that mindset, they want to get rid of anything that could sound spiritual. So let's just stick in the materialist paradigm. It's all stuck in the brain versus this other possibility of what if the brain's like a filter? So like the near death experience. One of my favorite quotes from My podcast series, I interviewed Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia Medical Doctor, very credible, smart guy who's been studying near death experiences. So these are people, let's say they're in cardiac arrest, clinically dead, they have an elaborate experience. He said, mark, we're left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn't functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever.

[A]

How does that work?

[B]

Well, if our brain is maybe like a blindfold or getting in the way of our consciousness, it's filtering it in a particular way, like an antenna, then maybe when you get the brain fully out of the way, we can experience this broader reality. Maybe that's what psychedelics are doing. Maybe that's what certain meditation experiences are revealing. And so that changes for me. I. I was so disoriented because I'm like, wait, maybe I'm not just a body. Maybe my identity is beyond my body and I'm tapping into something.

[A]

Whoa, I've evolved or whatever. That sounds super egotistical. We'll say I am at the current place and I view it as having evolved from where I was less conscious. I wear this meat suit around all the time, despite all of its limitations and deficiencies, because it lets me eat steak, chocolate, have sex, dance, listen to music, experience connection, and evolve my consciousness pretty much through suffering some more. And I have no belief that I am my body whatsoever. Right, and the convenient thing about that is you're not afraid of dying, right? Right. If I'm not a fan of the, you know, we're all living in a simulation video game thing. But if you choose to believe in reincarnation, whether you think it's likely or not, it's the only rational choice. Because if you're wrong, you won't know it, you'll be dead. And if you're right, you'll have less fear of death. And fear of death makes you not ask the girl out. It makes you not start the company. It makes you afraid to take risks that are worthy risks. And so I would rationally, as a computer science atheist guy, say I'm going to choose to believe in reincarnation because it improves my quality of life. And as a guy who's done all the spiritual work, I believe in it because I kind of know how this works. And so either way, that means that your consciousness is just riding around in the body with very limited connection to reality, because the body, its whole job is to filter out almost all of reality. Because, you know, why would you pay attention to the spinning of the planets and gurgling of things like it's too much data and then we wouldn't be able to have this conversation. So.

[B]

Well, there was this part of me that thought like you did, but I would say, Mark, get real. What is science telling us? It's all random, don't believe in it, just to believe in it. I was being really hard on myself.

[A]

Isn't that. What is CNN telling us? I mean, do you know the history.

[B]

Of medical journals going back to the Flexner Report?

[A]

No, going back to Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, you know about that?

[B]

I didn't know this connection.

[A]

So he started the publishing industry for medical journals and his idea was basically wine and dine, the most important innovators and professors and things like that. Convince them that they needed to be giving him their most precious stuff to be put in journals so it could be judged as worthy for free. And then he would sell it back to universities. This is what created so many of the problems in science, is that there's now an economic incentive. It dropped all these things. To this day there's four big publications and they all evolved from that one model and his is the law, the largest one. I forget the name of the company, but what, like there's a direct link to, to what's his name, Epstein.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

I don't. You can't even make this up. But that broke science. Right. And so one of the reasons that you believe that, and I believe that is because there is an organized system that suppresses science to make money. And that's gross.

[B]

Yeah, and I've seen that up close and personal because I've gotten to know some of these scientists and they'll tell me we will submit a well done study, controlled, double blind, everything you need in normal science. And a journal will say we're not publishing this because the implications violate effectively what our belief system is meaning. There are studies which show, statistically speaking, that psychic phenomena are real and many journals will not go there. Although I'm a bit more optimistic because there have been a few big papers. One that I often reference. 2018, Dr. Etzel Cardena from Lund University. This was published in American Psychologist, the official peer reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological association, aggregating decades of research on psychic phenomena, suggesting statistically that it's real. And actually just early this year in 2025, there was another one published in a prominent psychiatric journal saying there's continued evidence for this. So something's starting to slip through the cracks.

[A]

It's so beautiful and the idea of slipping through the cracks, it just takes a little bit of water in that crack to. To get it open. And I do feel like there's some organized opposition to it, probably from people who know all this stuff and don't want everyone else to know it or not. I can't really say that I know, but do you think that's the case?

[B]

If you had asked me this when I first started writing, I was more of the belief that this was just kind of ignorance and hubris of academics who said, My PhD has a materialist bias. These people are coming in, they challenge my career of research. And I think that's there too.

[A]

Oh, huge.

[B]

But I think there's also. There are forces that want to suppress this. And one of my favorite quotes, it comes from Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist who studies these phenomena. And he said on a podcast called Skeptico a few years ago that he was told by a top neurological institute in Canada, the person who runs it. He didn't name who it was, but he said, the person who runs this told me, you will never do research on spiritual phenomena as long as I'm alive. And his conclusion was, this is social engineering. It's dark versus light.

[A]

It's a very, very controversial perspective. But quite often things that look like they're organized evil, they're emergent behavior of complex systems, which is what I studied, what I built a lot of my early career on. So if you want to make a flower, you can take three basic rules and repeat them an infinite number of times, and beautiful behaviors that look complex emerge, but they're not complex, they're just infinite. So some of what we perceive as evil conspiracies is that. But let's imagine that you were the first person on the planet to come up with AGI. This all knowing, all seeing AI thing, would you tell anyone?

[B]

Be risky to do.

[A]

So not only would it be risky, you lose all the advantage. So let everyone else work on their little fake AGIs while yours is in control. So there is no chance that the first team or government or whatever that has AGI will ever tell anyone, because they would only lose advantage. It's the same thing with consciousness. So if you and your family or your lineage, if you've realized, oh my gosh, consciousness is non local and we can do things with it, let's not tell anyone, right? And the whole system of all these shamanic lineages and Tibetan Buddhism versus Chinese Buddhism versus different shamanic practices, they all have their secrets. And this is like filing patents for inventions. But since they didn't have patents on this, like, well, this has been our family for 20 generations. You can only get access to the inner sanctum after you've gone through level after level. This is actually how they set up lineages. And there's a bookshelf at the back of the monastery that's locked. And until you're at a level, you can't do that because you'll go crazy if you read that stuff. So why would you tell anyone else about what you can do? You would use it to your advantage, and you would only keep it in the clan. Problem is, we need all the operating system manuals for the human body right now. Like, for all the things we're capable of. And so with actually with AI, even just with search engines, so much of the hidden riches of the world's ancient knowledge, they're becoming available despite the efforts of things like the Catholic Church to burn them all and put them in an archive that I'm not allowed to read, you know, And, Pope, if you're listening, with all due respect, could you please open that up? The world needs it right now. And we'll still like you. Right. But, like, that's, like, that's what happened. And am I. Is there disagreement here? Like, poke holes in that?

[B]

Yeah. I should preface this by saying, first of all, I feel like I'm in a position everywhere where I just don't know. I'm asking questions, man.

[A]

Like, take a risk or choose danger. Take a position. I dare you.

[B]

My position is, I think it's probably a combination of all the above, that there are people that want to hide things, there are people that have ego and probably other things in between. But the information we're talking about today is incredibly empowering to the individual. It suggests that we all have these abilities innately and can do things. Whereas I think the system inherently makes us feel disempowered, so there would be an incentive for us to feel disempowered by those who want power.

[A]

There you go. And the combination of all those is good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right. What evidence do you really have that consciousness isn't in your brain? Just break it down. Sure.

[B]

I like to break it down into two categories. One is basically psychic phenomena, non local consciousness, meaning consciousness, not stuck in your brain. It's somewhere beyond space and time. Category one. Category two is potentially that consciousness survives bodily death. And the approach I took because I was still working in my job when I wrote this first book and end upside down, thinking if I'M going to talk about this publicly. I was worried. I was kind of scared. I need to make it as scientific as possible and I need to de risk this. So my approach was if there's one phenomenon that is real in these categories, not necessarily all, just one.

[A]

That's all it takes, right?

[B]

All you need is one. Then our current paradigm that consciousness is just stuck in our skull cannot accommodate that. Whereas the new paradigm where consciousness is maybe the basis of all reality, like Dr. Bernardo Kastrup says, we're whirlpools in a stream of consciousness.

[A]

God, I love that. One of the first meditations I ever learned was like, you're in a river. Wow. You just blew my mind.

[B]

Okay, so there's the individual day, the individual mark. We feel like individuals, but we're actually part of the same stream. That really resonated with me. But it also made very possible things like psychic abilities. Some of the water from my whirlpool getting into yours, that's like a telepathic ability by analogy. Some of my consciousness getting into yours. Hmm, that's not an anomaly anymore. That's actually not paranormal. Paranormal is paranormal. If we assume normal is materialism, that consciousness is stuck in our skull. Also, if some of, let's say one whirlpool delocalizes, the water flows back into the other, into the rest of the stream. By analogy, that's like when a person's body dies, their consciousness simply transitions into a new form. Doesn't die. It's still accessible in the stream and it could reconfigure into a new whirlpool. That is reincarnation wouldn't be paranormal.

[A]

And if they're a politician, it reincarnates into the whirlpool in a toilet.

[B]

I haven't put that part into it.

[A]

Yet, but I'm pretty sure, by the way, seventh grade sense of humor is very enlightened. Keep going. Yeah, at least I'm laughing at myself. Sorry.

[B]

And I also think actually the world, the stream is multi dimensional, so it's probably way beyond comprehension. This is just an analogy. So maybe we do have toilet bowl whirlpools too in there. But basically this gave me a framework to say maybe there's an alternative paradigm. It might not be exactly like whirlpools in a stream, but like, that at least makes these things possible. That would have been impossible. So again, all you need is one and this first book and end Upside Down Thinking and then the podcast series that followed it. Where's My Mind Goes Through all this evidence, the first place I would start is to me very difficult to refute. It is remote viewing. This is the ability to perceive something with the mind that's far away in space and time. Like psychic spying. US GOVERNMENT DECLASSIFIED PROGRAM oh yeah, I interviewed Russell Targ, who was one of the leaders of the program in the 70s, laser physicist. The people involved in this program, by.

[A]

The way, they're not dumb.

[B]

They're not dumb and to them there's no question about whether it's real. It's more of how can we use this and how could it be possible?

[A]

Can you do it?

[B]

I have actually not tried to harness it.

[A]

Why with all the research and all these books, have you not tried something as simple as remote viewing? Come on dude.

[B]

I do meditate, so I send. I maybe in my own way do it, but I haven't felt the calling really to try to understand that much.

[A]

Not interested. What have you tried? What psychic powers have you studied and tried to do?

[B]

I would just say I try to get into a calm state and tap into feelings and sometimes that will manifest as like knowing something with a degree of. But I haven't been trained in it. Like you go to the Monroe Institute. I haven't done that.

[A]

I mean there's tons of different places and techniques. You know, there's iac. A lot of people who do the neuro stuff that I work with will have experiences like that. And some of the ancient teachings, like the yogic things have instructions in them. Yeah, you just said I meditate, I relax and I tune into my feelings. Yeah, like a yoga nidra, like doing a body scan. Like are you just laying there? What's that?

[B]

Well, I've tried different modalities. Okay. I've worked with like Korea yoga for example. Different techniques and ways of controlling the mind. Also I've done silent meditation retreats, Vipassana kind of thing. Not vipassana. I did one with Adyashanti and also his wife Mukti, two of them. So they're like non denominational but with a, like a Zen Buddhist bent to it. But being in that silence, I feel like things just happen. Even if you don't know the specific techniques, you just start tuning in and flowing. And the other part of it for me is the more I've learned, the more that I feel like the universe is ultimately benevolent at the, at the highest level. And we see this in near death experiences. People talk about this love they feel. I think there's a reality to that that they can't even describe with Words.

[A]

Yeah, but the oneness kind of thing.

[B]

The oneness, they're like, yeah, it's there, it's benevolent. But I do know our world and it's not all benevolent. And there are dark forces. So if and when I dive into that stuff, I'd want to do it very carefully because we're sending the mind to different places. And in the psychedelic realm and in other shamanic realms, people encounter beings.

[A]

You can get absolutely taken over and trashed if you don't know what you're doing in the shamanic stuff.

[B]

Yeah. So my fourth book, An End to Upside Down Contact. It's about contact with non human intelligence. Not just UFOs, but what happens in a trip.

[A]

But you haven't done it. No. So I did an interview, this must be like eight years ago, with a guy, I call him Dr. Nicotine. In 1986, he writes the first paper showing that pharmaceutical nicotine reverses Alzheimer's. And it's just done publishing on nicotine as a beneficial compound without smoking ever since. At the end of the show, I'm like, so what do you do? Like a patch, a lozenge? He's like, oh, I've never tried it. And I'm like, what? My mind is blowing. How can you be a scientist and not do the thing you're studying? So like, you haven't done psychedelics. Have you done like holotropic breath work?

[B]

I've done holotropic breath work.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Done breathing to trip balls from that. Like, I mean, I felt lives and leave your body and all that kind of stuff.

[B]

I felt tapped in. I felt okay. I felt like I was seeing things for sure. I mean, I've done things like past life regression. I've worked with psychics, I've done astrologists, I've done all that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Sort of thing.

[A]

I'm just trying to like how much of this is experiential versus book learning.

[B]

I would say a lot of it is. Is book learning. In terms of like, I haven't had near death experience. I haven't had a blowout psychedelic experience.

[A]

We could arrange those for you.

[B]

Like, I've done cacao, which is not really. And I've had. I did one substance that was like a heart opening substance. Um, but nothing.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, right over your head. Yeah, yeah. Hershey's is not cacao, guys.

[B]

No, no, we're talking like, like, what do you call it? Like ceremonial grade cacao, which is. Taps you into.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Other things.

[A]

How about something like hoppe?

[B]

No.

[A]

So Hoppe Normally in the rainforest they blow tobacco smoke up your nose. It's pretty freaking horrible, to be honest. I have a liquid one with a little oxytocin in it that has all the purified stuff. So it's a nasal spray. And most people have a beautiful journey for 10 minutes and feel freaking amazing. And then one out of a hundred who's got an unusual constitution may feel nauseous.

[B]

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I just haven't.

[A]

It's oftentimes paired with something like aya or even mushrooms. Okay. You're doing a lot of book learning and you've kind of scraped the surface of the experiential stuff. My path has been different. Where I did do the book learning stuff, I read dmt, the spirit molecule. It turns out I'm really good friends with one of the subjects of that experiment at UNM. He's 70 now and, you know, he's 20 years old. They gave him IV DMT and he. He's a very unusual and fantastic human being. Glenn, talking about you. So I went. I read the book and I went down to Peru and found a shaman before they were. Really did this for white people. I'm like, I'm just going to give it a try. And I've gone to Mount Kailash and done all this crazy stuff, some of which I talk about. I wrote the book on fasting in a cave for four days. And so I'm like, the culture anthropologist is like, I'll just go live with the tribe and see what it's like to eat grubs and. Right.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

Well, I mean, it could be awesome. It could also be dangerous because there's been times when I've gotten in places that it probably shouldn't be. And I've been blessed by having some very powerful teachers and gurus who will find me. And like, yeah, you done that one up, Dave. Like, let's get you out of that. So having some supports there. Yeah, but. But here's why I'm encouraging you to go deeper on this stuff. If I was using interdimensional beings right now to control what you're doing, would you know it?

[B]

I wouldn't know for sure. I might feel something, but I wouldn't identify it.

[A]

Don't you believe that it might behoove you to have a spiritual firewall in place at all times to keep other things, whether they're people with the powers that you believe in or entities that you believe in with powers you believe in from. With your reality?

[B]

I'm totally into that.

[A]

You need to do that. Yeah, right. In fact, if you're listening to the show you how to do that. This is part of having a clean spiritual practice, because the more awakened you become, well, the less the powers that be like it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

The way Terence McKenna describes it in his final, final book with Don Juan, as he's getting his final step in his initiation into being a shaman, he says, I'm going to show you reality. This is a shaman that may or may not exist. And they're walking down a road at night, and he says, I'm going to show you. And he looks and there's these dark beings that are feeding off of negative energy and people like big parasites all over. And he describes, like, the most horrifying, like, disturbing, disgusting things, like, this is reality. Like they're causing suffering because they feed on it. I'm not saying this is true or not. I'm just saying this is, you know, in a major book in the field, I interviewed his brother after he passed. At the end of that story, he flings himself off a cliff in the middle of the night and wakes up like 600 miles away in his bed the next morning. Like, I located. I don't know what's going on, but. So if there are those things out there and you're starting to delve into these realms. I'm a computer security guy. I'm a computer hacker. The reason it's called biohacking. Hackers protect themselves. Hackers know how to take over other systems. And since you've proven with the work that you have, at least I would call it proof that others can affect your consciousness. That means you must have awareness of when others are doing that. Otherwise you're a puppet.

[B]

Yeah, no, it's a great point and it's something I've worked on. Perhaps not in the ways you've described, working with people who have been in those realms and they talk about energy practices and protecting your field. So I've done it in that sense.

[A]

And do you know how to protect your field?

[B]

There are energy exercises that I do.

[A]

Okay, good.

[B]

So you have some protections in my consciousness, but I haven't experienced those. To meet those beings firsthand, which I now think are real beings that, like when people do DMT and they encounter entities, I think that's real. And this notion of parasitic entities, to me, that's totally real.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

I personally just haven't felt comfortable yet going into those realms. I need to have the right person there who could guide properly.

[A]

Amen.

[B]

And that's super important.

[A]

Terribly important.

[B]

But I don't feel qualified right now to go there.

[A]

There's some wisdom in that for sure. There are some things that I know how to do particular with technology that I'm not willing to do to myself because I. I still have enough rare egoic instances where if I turn that stuff on, I would probably manifest chaos that I want to in my life or the lives of others. Right. And that's just like maybe some point. And it's, it's a tough thing because people are listening. I mean, some of them are going to say, I'm just going to go do Aya. I'm giving a talk at south by actually tomorrow about altered states. And like ayahuasca is the very last psychedelic I think people should, should try after they've done all the other ones in a certain order because there's great spiritual risk and, you know, who you do it with really matters. So I worry about people doing, you know, ayahuasca with untrained people or even just acid at a party if you don't have the right set and setting. I think it can have some spiritual risks. What are the spiritual risks you've come across in your research from opening your mind with inappropriate meditation or psychedelics that people might not think about?

[B]

Well, these practices can open one up to unseen realms. And those, whether we call them parasitic entities or trickster beings, like shape shifting, which sounds like science fiction and is in mythology, those are real. John Mack, who was the head of psychiatry at Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner. I wrote about him in my book on Contact. He studied the phenomenon known as alien abduction, which I know sounds insane, but as a psychiatrist, he was studying people that claim this happened.

[A]

Dude, my mom's from Roswell. I got you.

[B]

I know it sounds crazy, though. I didn't really believe it. He wrote a book called Abduction, and it's like a. Like a meticulously done book. In any event, one of the things he says, he says the alien beings are consummate shape shifters, but they can change form. But if reality is just consciousness and you know how to manipulate, then you could potentially change form. That makes sense to me.

[A]

And people who can see can see you do it.

[B]

They can see you do it, but not everyone can see. So the question is, maybe you enter a realm and you encounter a being that appears to you as benevolent. Can you discern whether the being is trustworthy or not? So these are the things, those sorts of things are worth considering.

[A]

You just put everyone listening into they live. The John Carpenter movie, right? Have you seen It.

[B]

I haven't seen that one.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Oh, is that with the sunglasses?

[A]

You put the glasses on and everything says obey and all that. Super dark. But it's one of my favorite movies.

[B]

I think there's a lot of wisdom in that.

[A]

Your lens on reality might matter. Right? Yeah.

[B]

Right. And so another. Another reason I haven't gone down this more psychonautic path, I'll say, is that when I talk to people who have been in these realms and when I talk to a lot of them and there's like an overlap in the Venn diagram that I get really interested. They talk so much about how much your inner state matters. And when you get into a very harmonious state where you're emanating from the heart space, and you've talked about this, like the toroidal field that comes out and the energy we emanate that can actually be protective. So managing our thoughts and our subconscious beliefs that can be protective on its own, combined with the knowledge that there are forces that could come after you that can be very powerful.

[A]

I did so much neurofeedback before I did any meaningful psychedelics that I have never had what people call a bad trip. I can feel when, oh, that could go dark. But there's just an inner control system of self regulation that has served me really well. And yet, even though there is a bad trip, I've gotten to some places where I probably shouldn't. Shouldn't be. And I think it's absolutely necessary that when people are experimenting with those things that you have the people you can call who are true masters.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they exist. And most of them are not that easy to find. Right. And there are some that are well known, but they can pull entities off of you. They can reset blown out circuits and things like that. And I mean blown out circuits. I had a really profound experience at a Joe Dispenza event. Joe's speaking about his science for the second year at the biohacking conference here in Austin in May and has become a friend. And I. This was one of the more profound spiritual experiences I've had. Granted, I might have done the second ayahuasca ceremony of my life the day before. I spent seven days doing Joe Dispenza's work. So afterwards I called up one of the people who helped me on things and she's like, did you. You blew out, like, literally, you blew the fuse on one of your chakras.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

We need to. And I was feeling. I was like, something's not right. I don't. I Don't know what that is. I don't have that level of discernment. I have a lot of internal systems, but without the appropriate spiritual engineer or mechanic, if you go to these places and you don't know who to call, you can spend months or years stuck in a dark place, disconnected, disassociated. And all the old spiritual literature, they write about this like the fast path of enlightenment is fraught with going crazy. If you don't go crazy, you might be enlightened in one lifetime. Right. So how many people go crazy when they start learning what you're teaching?

[B]

Some people do because it's so disorienting or they encounter something that, I mean, I can't even describe because it hasn't been my experience. And you need to call on people that are very aware. So another thing I've done is worked with many energy healers who I trust and they will pull off energy entities or balance the energies, whether it's reiki or other practices that I found to be super important. But I don't want to discount the entire field of psychedelics. I hope I don't come across that way because I think for many people it's been incredibly impactful and there's definitely a place for it in the right set and setting with the right mindset. And sometimes it's the only way to break through. So I'm not saying I'm against it.

[A]

Oh, neither am I if I'm sounding that way. It's. It's just they're a tool and like the breath work, energy work.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Effectively heavily meditated. My next book is pretty much all of the ways to enter altered states. Without or with psychedelics. It doesn't really matter. Why, what state do you want and why do you want it and how do you get there fastest? That's what I care about.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the reason these altered states matter is they let you see reality. Much more like, oh, it's not a hard cold universe. It's a manifestation of consciousness, which I love it that you've written seven books and you're, you're going deep on that.

[B]

Yeah. I mean even the mild experience I've had with cacao and the heart opening substance, there were, you know, I wasn't going in the other realms, but those things can help kickstart. You know, sometimes you need a first domino.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When you're a little bit stuck. So I think it just requires discernment. That's. That would be my passage.

[A]

How do you know the difference between.

[B]

Fear and Discernment, which is a broader question to me. How do we discern intuition from something that's not intuition? This feels like my biggest challenge, and maybe the human condition is.

[A]

Do you want to talk about it? Like, I've got the recipe.

[B]

Like, I want to hear it.

[A]

I've worked on this for so freaking long.

[B]

Can I tell you how I've done it? And then you can.

[A]

Please do. Yeah. Okay.

[B]

For me, it's first of all been trickled.

[A]

You already know. Good.

[B]

Well, I'll tell you what I've experienced, but I'd love to hear from you how to enhance this trial and error.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Where I will feel something, and then I go down the path that I thought I felt and realize that was some part of my ego entering versus now. I've. I've failed so many times or gone on the wrong path. I would never say it's a wrong path because I learned.

[A]

Yeah, there you go.

[B]

But on a path that caused more suffering, let's say, than I needed. And now I feel something that I can't describe to you of just an inner knowing of, Like, I felt that before and I know what happens. That's a definite yes. I need to go there. So that's what it is for me.

[A]

I think you already got it, dude. Okay, so, like, I've had a couple guests on who talk about teaching intuition. And it's one of the things that I teach. When people are doing neurofeedback and you've done enough meditation and all, when people meditate enough, your ability to sense reality increases. And I don't mean just like, I can see aliens or whatever. I mean that if you have an untrained mind, if there's a brief flickering of the lights, you won't see it. If you have a trained mind, you're like, oh, yeah, there was some lights were on. They went off for a tiny fraction of a second, came back on, and I noticed that. Right, so it's the noticing there.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So a trained mind can sense narrower slices of time. And when something happens in the world around you or that you perceive in the world around you, given that it all may be inside you. So confusing, the very first and very brief message you get, that's intuition. And it will be very soon after, followed by a very large emotional reaction to that followed by a thought. So it's like intuition suppressed by emotion, suppressed by thought. And then you smile and you know, Dave's a good boy.

[B]

Yeah, Right.

[A]

So it's the timing of the intuition and the ability to catch that first thing. And you said it perfectly. Like, it's so cool. You're like, I don't really know. I'm like, dude, you totally know. When you learn how to focus on that narrow first signal, you already know all kinds of stuff that you don't know. You know, as long as you get the emotion and the ego out of the way. Right. So what is your biggest example of just knowing something that was impactful without having to think about it?

[B]

I think my books are clearest examples where something comes in. And every time, for me, it's been a real test in my authenticity because increasingly I'm writing about topics that could alienate members of my audience who say, I used to like Mark, but now he's kind of gone off the reservation. And a part of me has to consider that. And then the fear comes in. But I feel that initial spark that you're describing that I can't. I can't draw it out for you, but I feel it subjectively that says this is a yes. And you can't not do this. And if you don't do it, actually, it's going to be super painful. And that's one of the biggest things I've noticed on my journey, where I used to push through inauthenticity.

[A]

Oh, yeah. So many people do. Because you're supposed to, right?

[B]

You're supposed to. And now it's, I have to be my authentic self, and if I don't, I'm going to get sick. It will manifest physically in illness.

[A]

Wow. It sounds like you're doing it right. Have you read Rick Rubin's latest book?

[B]

No.

[A]

You might enjoy it. I was so honored to get to know him and have him on the show a couple times. Go to Shangri La studios and like, is this even happening? He's one of the more enlightened people I. I've met, actually. I would say he's a living incarnation of a muse. You know, one of the Greek muses who just calls out art. But he talks about, for artists, and writing a book is a work of art. You write it to your own truth and for yourself, not for your audience. And then if you write it for your audience, it doesn't work.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that the artists who consistently produce great things, they produce it for. For them. And it's so authentic and congruent throughout that then it resonates. But that if you try to do the. What you're supposed to do, it, it doesn't have the vibe. And. And I. I've Watched them. One time we were driving somewhere. It was really magical. We were in a canyon somewhere in California. And I mentioned this blend of, like, North African and EDM music that I liked. And it was like, he's a peaceful guy. And then all of a sudden, it was like watching a. It was like a lion or some kind of big cat, like, from this peaceful guy all of a sudden. And like, all radar dishes, ears pointed like, do I need to pounce? And then his energy feel, like, scanned and said like, oh, that's not what I look for. And then just back to peace. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, he has this innate sense to spot new and different kinds of art. And when I read that book, I'm like, oh, my God. Like, this explains so much about why if you don't follow your path, as you have discovered Right. It doesn't work. And I love what you said in your books. Same too. People say, oh, I channel that. And I used to make fun of people who channel. And I've dated people who channel now. And what they're doing is they're just setting aside the emotions and the thoughts and they're just going with the inner knowing. And you become like a channel for something. And I know that I don't directly channel, but I do know that a lot of what I write in my books is inner knowing. It's not like I've done all the research and just like you have. You've read all these books and you're all these people, but sometimes you just know and you write down and you're like, oh, yeah, it's supported by all this stuff. Right? Okay, cool. Not all writers do that. That's cool.

[B]

Well, because I had a career, I think that's part of the reason I wasn't a writer. I don't even think of myself as a writer now. I have written, but I was working when my first book came out. This was just a passion project, and it's continued that way where I don't know if I'm going to write anymore, but I want to do what feels most passionate to me. And that's part of the intuition that you're describing too, that I see a combination there. And I also feel it with people. Like, I get a real sense of a person within a fraction of a second. I know so much. And then I realize later on I can reverse engineer what I knew in that fraction of a second.

[A]

Wow. I'm still working on that one. I oftentimes will rely on other people I trust to have better intuition about that than I do. One of my teachers taught me that there's a class of people who, who see other people's energy or see beings and all of that. And there's other people who don't see but do. So I was frustrated for many years. I'm like, I work so freaking hard and like seeing this stuff is very difficult and I can sense it, but I don't see it. And so there's, there's no like judgment about that. And I even know I'm not going to share it publicly, but I know the brainwave patterns of people who see things versus people who don't. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You can actually predict it based on an EEG scan. You can if you know what to look for. Like, oh my God, isn't that cool?

[B]

Right? And there have been studies on, for example, psychics versus medium slash channelers, which are different skills. One is being telepathic versus tapping into some other entity, some other whirlpool. And these have been demonstrated for example, at ion's Institute of Noetic Sciences controlled studies. But also looking at the brain patterns and you see distinctions between a telepathic ability and a channeling mediumship. So the brain is interfacing here and there's a distinction. It's amazing.

[A]

It is so cool. Staring at screens all day is wrecking your vision and your brain. You might just think it's aging, but it's not. It's a broken eye brain connection. And it gets worse every hour you spend looking at a screen. If you plan to live to 180 and beyond, you need to protect your dominant sense. Now here's the good news. You can train your visual system just like you train your body or your brain. Screen fit is a science backed method built by Dr. Bryce Applebaum that rebuilds how your brain and eyes work together. No eye drops, no appointments, no gimmicks. Just 15 minutes a day to sharpen focus, reduce fatigue and protect your vision for the long haul. I saw real results in just a week. If you strive for peak performance or plan to live a very long time like I do, you want clear vision to match, go to screenfit.com Dave or use code Dave to get $200 off and try it for yourself. You'll see what I mean. Literally, if you're using a protein powder, you need to hear this. The Clean Label project recently tested 160 top selling protein powders in the US and they found that nearly half exceeded the Prop 65 threshold for lead. Oops. That's why I love Puree's PW1 whey protein. The clean label project does third party testing on every single batch against over 200 contaminants. Puri is the only clean protein brand in the US with a Clean Label Project transparency certification. And every bag has a QR code so you can scan it and see what's in it. And of course, it comes from pasture raised cow's milk with no hormones, GMOs, no pesticides, and it doesn't have the metals, pesticides and harmful toxins that are in a lot of common protein powders. So switch to PW1 right now. Listeners can get 20% off the already discounted subscription subscriptions. You'll get almost a third off the price. Go to Puree.com Dave and use code Dave. That's P-U-O-R-I.com Dave. I have a little confession to make. Okay, so in my mid to late 20s, I started running a longevity nonprofit group that met in Palo Alto. And we were three blocks away from where ions met and where ANS was. And we actually met the board of IONS way back then to say maybe we should like, share some nonprofit stuff. I met a longevity group where everyone thinks we're crazy because we're trying to live like, you know, twice as long as you're supposed to and bring all those people in. And I never went to an IONS meeting. So I'm like, those people are crazy. And I'm like, you guys aren't crazy. I'm such a dumbass. If I would have gone to the longevity stuff and ions, I wonder where I would be now. Because these are people studying consciousness. And I was just more like, could I not feel like shit and not die? That would be helpful, right? But I think it's super cool that years later I'm like, man, I missed out and you're on their board. So anyway, sorry, full circle. Sorry. I was dismissing that stuff when I was younger. It was not the right move. Let's assume that, I don't know, telepathy, remote viewing, esp, that they're real. What are the implications for society? Like. Like this seems like this could mess a lot of stuff up.

[B]

It really, it could mess things up and that it would disrupt, but I think ultimately would clean things up. So let me, let me go to a few data points that will help to make. Make this not sound crazy or the audience, because I'm trying to remember where I was and the things that I needed to hear. So that's why I'm bringing in the science again because it will sound crazy otherwise. So I want to go back to remote viewing quickly. The declassified documents from the CIA. Direct quote, remote viewing is a real phenomenon. Implications are revolutionary. You can see these in my book. You can find them online. Direct quotes, declassified documents.

[A]

It's real. You can train it like it. It's a fact, Right?

[B]

Wild. So that means consciousness is somehow independent of space and time. Telepathy. There's a new podcast called the Telepathy Tapes which made it to number one on the podcast charts ahead of Joe Rogan. So there's a popularization of the science of this stuff. So I think that's really good. But near death experiences, that's where I want to go in terms of some of the implications. So near death experience, person has some kind of physiological trauma to the body. This isn't someone just saying, I think I'm going to die. No, this is like you almost die.

[A]

Had it happen twice.

[B]

I get it, you know, but what's interesting is that the people who've had it happen, it's difficult to describe it to others because they will say, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, it's ineffable. There are no words adequate to describe what happened to me.

[A]

It's very much like being on a trip. Like, how do you explain your mushroom trip? You really can't. Right.

[B]

And what I've found in the research, like Dr. Bruce Grayson has worked on this at UVA, there are people who have looked at the descriptions under different psychedelic substances and the descriptions under NDEs, near death experiences. And while there are some similarities, and because we use language as an approximation, they sound similar, but there actually is no substance that's able to replicate every part of the near death experience phenomenon.

[A]

In other words, it's not dmt.

[B]

In other words, it's not dmt. Because I know your audience might be thinking, well, maybe there's just chemicals in the brain that are the thing that's.

[A]

Been disproven at length. If you dig into your books or other research on this. Right.

[B]

I mean, it's a good hypothesis and there could be chemicals that are involved in some way. But there are cases. These to me are the most compelling. They're called veridical out of body experiences. Veridical means a verified memory. So the person is on the operating table about to die, for example, and they say, upon being resuscitated, my consciousness was hovering over my body. It was actually in the other room. I heard the Conversations, I saw these things. And the doctor says that's impossible because we can timestamp when that memory occurred. And you're right. And your body should not have been able to perceive that even if you were alive, because it was outside your body. But we know based on what your body was doing you were clinically dead or close to it. Maybe there was a tiny bit of brain functioning, but that shouldn't be possible. So we have by definition something non hallucinatory because it's a verified memory at a time when the brain and body should not have been capable of producing that. Based on the modern paradigm, what do.

[A]

You think about this idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Wasn't like Neil DeGrasse Tyson has said.

[B]

That that is invoked very often. To me there is extraordinary evidence because we have decades of research in addition to, as you pointed out, this is ancient stuff that is now we're sort of rediscovering. It's not really new.

[A]

It's not new, but it's kind of funny. The second he said that, I'm like, oh, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is not a scientist. The fricking scientific method we learned in seventh grade. If you have one valid data point that disproves your hypothesis, it is not true. But it may be a useful model. So when a guy who says I'm a leading scientist and probably a shill for big Pharma or something, but when he comes out and says extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it means he has lost the plot and he is now a religious scientist and he is not a scientist. Because all I need is one provable thing that shatters what I believed to go God. What I believed was really helpful, but it's not real. And now it's the outliers. That's where all of my attention has gone. Like I don't care if I'm the only person to live at least 180, I think I'd consider myself kind of a failure. I would haven't shared very well. But I want to be the outlier. And if I'm not, I want to find that liar and do what that person did. Right. And so it feels like that's part of our suppressive belief system, that you need extraordinary evidence. No, like you said, give me one example. In my life, I have dozens of examples that there's no possible way that this is just random to the point that I don't question it anymore. But it took me a lot of kind of inner soul searching to get there. And it Sounds like you've done the same thing.

[B]

I've taken a very similar approach. The anomalies are the things to focus on.

[A]

On.

[B]

And it's only anomaly. Anomaly means something that doesn't match the pattern. Basically doesn't fit the model. Well, instead of calling it an anomaly, maybe our model's wrong. Like you said, if there's a law that says all swans are white and we find a single black swan after finding millions of white swans, the law said all swans are white.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And it's not all science tends to say, oh, we're going to brush that aside, not a big deal.

[A]

Yeah, Therefore it's not a swan.

[B]

It's not a swan. Yeah, like what?

[A]

What planet are you guys on?

[B]

But they'll say, our model's so predictive. Look at how it does this and that. I'm interested in what's a comprehensive model to explain reality, which means everything needs to be explained.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So these veridical outof body experiences, in addition to many miraculous things, there's a book called the Self Does Not Die which has documented over 100 of these cases, which is really hard to do because usually the person's about to die and you're not thinking about like writing this up.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But when you can document and timestamp the memory and what the body was doing and those sorts of things, it reveals that perhaps these near death experiences, back to your initial question about meaning, they might be telling us something about the nature of reality. When your brain's out of the way, people come back with these incredible stories and we could say, oh, that's just your brain hallucinating. No, maybe there's more to the story. And what do people come back saying, and I should caveat this, if we're talking about black swans. There's a fraction of near death experiences that are described as hellish and they're not well understood and many people are not comfortable speaking about them. But that does happen. The vast majority of the ones that are spoken about are positive. And people will say, I was immersed in unconditional love. I cannot describe to you what it was like, but it was amazing. One man I interviewed, Dr. Alan Huguenot, he had a near death experience decades ago. He's a scientist himself. He said, I was being held by this being who I've known for a long time and I felt like I was a baby being held in arms and I didn't want to go back. And he said, I don't mean to sound suicidal, but I can't wait to Go back to that place I was in. So we're hearing story after story like this. And in fact, roughly 20 to 30% of near death experiences involve a life review.

[A]

It was very common in the teachings I've followed.

[B]

Ancient teachings talk about this like sort of judging yourself. Although when I interviewed Daniel Brinkley, who's had four of these near death experiences with a life review, he said, it's really not judgment, Mark. It's you're observing yourself.

[A]

It's you reviewing your life, not some guy with a hammer. Right?

[B]

You're feeling it. And what he told me and others have reported is that you become the person that you affected in the life review. You see it through their eyes. So what Danny Brinkley told me, and he had a difficult time talking about it still decades later. He was in combat in Vietnam and he killed people in combat. He became the people that he killed in the near death experience. He felt that pain. And he also felt the pain of the children that would no longer have a father. He felt the indirect effects of his actions. So it could be that big, or you could have someone say, I felt what it was like to not be nice to the cashier in line and how it messed up the cashier's mood. And then every other person in the line was not treated as well. So the little things sometimes are the big things. So we're getting to your question about implications. And for me, this notion of a.

[A]

Golden rule, it's a big deal.

[B]

It might not just be a fairy tale. And religions all over the world and spiritual traditions, they say it in a different way. Dr. Bruce Grayson from UVA, having studied many of these people who have come back, he says that it's actually beyond morality. It's natural law. Because if we are interconnected in some way, and when you remove the filter, one whirlpool can feel what it's like to be another whirlpool. And then, whoa. What happens to people after a near death experience? They feel that. They try to explain it to people, but people don't get it. And they say, I'm quitting my job. I need to get a divorce. In Daniel Brinkley's case, he became a hospice volunteer.

[A]

Hospice volunteers are some of the most interesting and enlightened people you'll ever meet because they've become not just comfortable with death, but they've learned how to be loving in the presence of something that's terrifying.

[B]

And that's what Dannion re experienced in his later life reviews which he didn't know he'd have he got to feel what it was like to be the dying person being comforted by him. Powerful. Right? So that has made me recontextualize every interaction. It's made me recontextualize fear. So when I'm thinking about a book topic that's coming in strong and I'm getting that intuitive hit that I felt before, and then I'm like, can I talk about this publicly? Are people going to think I'm nuts? Then I think about the broader implications on a metaphysical level, and I say, no, this is. This is about more than just my limited perspective, and I have to do it.

[A]

Plus, if people don't think you're nuts, you're probably not very interested.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, but the fear goes away. The fear is lessened by that higher context, is what I mean.

[A]

It does lessen the fear. And I've just gotten to the point that every time you think hateful thoughts towards another, well, it harms me to do that, but it also harms the other person. And these things don't stop. They propagate. Like electromagnetic waves propagate to the edges of the universe every time your heartbeats, they just get weaker and weaker. Fortunately, we're wired to be kind to each other if you're not sitting in all the egoic things and all that. So a lot of my practice, like, if I've anything triggers me, like, ooh, I should probably work on that because I'm triggered, that means now I'm hating on something or being reactive to something. Something in a negative way that directly affects reality in a way I didn't understand when I was younger. Like, getting mad at politics. I just, like, curiosity. I'm like, wow, look at what both sides are doing. Like, that's really interesting.

[B]

Yeah. But what I found in that process is there's a tendency for me to, like, want to judge myself. Oh, why do I still have this negative emotion? And then I pull back and say, no, actually, that was an emotion that needs to be expressed. Let it be expressed, and then just sit back and don't act on it and be crazy. And so I think that's a really. That's easy to say, but in. In the moment, to actually be a third person and say, mark, what's going on there? Just let it go.

[A]

Ooh. If you're feeling the emotion, if you don't express it, if we're all connected and our conscious controls things, feeling the negative emotion towards another is harmful even if you don't express it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So how do you turn off the fear, negative emotions?

[B]

I love the advice of Dr. David Hawkins, who is a psychiatrist.

[A]

I love him. Okay.

[B]

And then turned spiritual teacher. So he's got both sides. He's probably my biggest spiritual teacher. I never met him, but he wrote a book called Letting Go, which I would recommend to your audience.

[A]

Oh, man. I don't think I would have made it through my divorce. That.

[B]

Yeah, incredible. Letting Go of the Pathway of Surrender. Highly recommend. Also, his view was that when you're feeling an emotion, you're actually not feeling enough of it. So if you feel anger, that means there's a little bit of suppression, and you need to let it all out. And then the emotion runs out.

[A]

Yep. You let it out one time completely. That's so cool. I thank you for bringing that up. That's a big one.

[B]

Big one.

[A]

Is it possible that if you're. If this negative emotion is, you know, anguish, I'm fine. But if it's like, I hate that guy. Those are the things. You don't want to let him out because you don't want him to happen.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So if you're feeling that, you got to work through and figure out what is the root of that, and it's not what you think it is. Yeah, that's what I'm attempting to write about in my next book is like, what is the process so that you don't hate on other people automatically? And, God, I. I think I had maybe extra work to do on that, given how I came into the world and all.

[B]

Yeah. Maybe not directing it towards someone. So what Hawkins would say is there's something about the feeling itself which is not actually descriptive, that's underlying, maybe the hatred toward that person. You go to that feeling, so you're not directing it, and you let that feeling go. He says you just focus on the feeling. Go focus on the external circumstances, and that's where you sit and you feel it fully.

[A]

That is a beautiful practice. Is that something you've managed to do?

[B]

Most of the time? I do. And this is part of the protection that, you know, trying to not bring in those negative energies because I'm holding them. So it is part of the practice. Another thing I want to mention that's been kind of paradoxical with regard to this. This golden rule, because we want to treat people well, but sometimes, let's just say firing someone in a job, getting divorced, whatever it is, sometimes you might have to do something that could upset the person, but it's expressing your truth, and you're being in integrity so ultimately it is the best path. So you get in some tricky scenarios where you're like, I have to be in integrity. And that's really the authenticity. That's where it all comes back to. To me.

[A]

I'm glad you talked about firing people. As an entrepreneur, that's one of the hardest things. Right. And one of my mentors finally taught me this. And it's that when you. The first time, actually, your intuition tells you you should fire someone. It's always right, if it's intuition, not an emotion. And that when you decide to fire someone, they know they're not succeeding, and because of that, they're holding back. The people are succeeding.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I've recontextualized letting someone go with as much kindness as I can, even if they have a reaction or whatever, where I'm being kind to that person so they can find somewhere where they're a fit and I'm being kind to everyone else. I'm responsible for feeding with their salary and people who support me. So I'm being kind to my team. I'm being kind to the person who's not a good fit. That's ultimate integrity. Right. But I could also be like, oh, my gosh, like I'm being mean to this. But it's not like making them stay when they're struggling and miserable and there's nothing that I can do to fix it. That's actually mean.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Right.

[B]

From a higher perspective, you can see that that would actually not be abiding by the Golden Rule. So the temporary suffering, which is, by the way, not even in your control, you're being in integrity. And maybe they have something to learn in the process. You are enabling them to learn by being in integrity and expressing it. It's a hard. It's easy to say again, but I think an important practice it is, let's.

[A]

Say ESP is real. Yeah. Okay. And you've said pretty much it is. I would agree with you. So if you had esp, wouldn't that give you an unfair advantage over other people?

[B]

I would say that we all have it, but maybe we haven't all harnessed it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And what we see in many of the studies, for example, of just everyday people, college students, the classic study on telepathy. It's worth maybe going through design, the design of it, to express this point. It's called the Ganzfeld Experiment. Skeptics have reviewed the methodology and the scientists have redone the methodology, try to meet their standards. So decades of research on this. You have two People. One person's Bob. And Bob is put into a relaxed state in his own room. Jane's in another room. Jane is shown an image by the experimenters and they say, jane, this sounds crazy, but try to send with your mind what you see to Bob in the other room. She does that for a while. And then Bob is shown four images and the experimenters say, bob, which of the four was Jane mentally sending to you? We would guess, if there's no effect at all, that the person in Bob's room over many trials would guess correctly. About one out of four times, roughly 25%. The experimenters find that it's 30 to 32% of the time, plus or minus, which statistically speaking is massive. It's in the realm of six sigma results. More than a billion to one odds against chance. This is why there are peer reviewed papers that are saying we aggregate the analysis. In American psychologists, there's something going on. But my point is that it's very subtle in people who haven't necessarily trained it. And it might be the occasional I thought of someone and then they texted me, but I wrote it off as chance because it's only a 5 to 7% differential from 25 to 30 to 32. So it's subtle. And then you have people who are maybe in the US government's program who are naturally inclined, or the autistic, telepathic savants, or, you know, people have varying degrees of abilities and lots of domains. Artists, LeBron James and Michael Jordan versus anyone who can dribble. So there's, there's a spectrum and then there are things that can be trained. I think that's where you're heading, where maybe we're all in that 30 to 32% range naturally, aside from some outliers. But we can do things to get our percentages up.

[A]

If you were negotiating with someone and they had worked on their abilities and you hadn't, aren't you screwed?

[B]

I don't know. It's a good question. I think from my perspective, intuition kicks in pretty quickly. And I might not know the mechanism by which someone's trying to mess with me, but I might sense it.

[A]

You might sense it. Years ago when I was in business school, we had a negotiating class and these are really fun because I get a piece of paper that says what I have and what I know, and the other person gets a piece of paper with what they have, what they know. And our job is to come to a deal. This is how you practice it, the way Chris Voss would or Something. How do you negotiate? I didn't know it at the time, but this was a case where there was no common ground. You're not supposed to be able to come up with an answer. And I'm sitting down with someone who has a high up job with a government regulatory body. I had just learned an ancient Chinese technique that can be used for healing. And I asked the teacher, I said, well, couldn't it also be used, like, against an opponent who's, you know, trying to harm you? And he goes, oh, yeah. He said, I have all kinds of attorneys who know this. And like, they'll do it on the judge or they'll do it on opposing counsel. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, you know, he's like, yeah, my family's had this for 28 generations. It's. It's just a tool. It's like a shovel. You can hit someone with their. Dig a hole. It's just a tool. And I was like, oh, my God. I didn't really believe it. So two weeks later, I'm in the negotiating class. I'm like, I'm going to do this technique. So I did something to interfere with the flow of energy in my negotiating upon it. And this person agreed to cheat on their taxes so that we could come up. A government regulatory person agreed to cheat on their taxes. This was not in real life. This was just an exercise. And it was not graded. Otherwise I wouldn't have even done this because I don't want to cross any ethical things. And when we get back into the class and I find out there was no comp. The only person to get an. To get a. And the professor's like, that's not possible. And I was like. So I undid what I did. And I was like, I'm not messing around with that. Like that. That's. I don't want to walk around with that kind of. Yeah, you know, that kind of thing and, you know, just randomly with other people. But to experiment with that, like, this is like a dark power I'm not interested in, but I saw it happen. And that should not have been.

[B]

Two thoughts there. Dr. Dean Radin, the chief scientist at IONS, he wrote a book called Real Magic. He's one of the OGs.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Knows the ins and outs of all these studies. I'm giving the high level.

[A]

And he's on the board with you.

[B]

He's the chief scientist at ions. At ions.

[A]

So cool, man. You're living the life. Okay, keep going.

[B]

It is amazing. Pinching myself. But his Book Real magic goes through the statistical evidence for these psychic phenomena. He also wrote a book called Super Normal.

[A]

That's the book. It's so good. Okay.

[B]

Because these extraordinary abilities, he says, actually it's not supernatural, it's super normal. We can harness them. So my two thoughts are, number one, if the person that one is affecting with these black magic techniques, basically, I.

[A]

Don'T know, they're black. I would just call them magic because they could be used for good.

[B]

They could be used for good. No, I agree with you.

[A]

Which I want to get. I've never practice black magic because there's black magic and white magic.

[B]

Yes. Okay. Super important.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But these techniques, let's say if a person is in high integrity, that person should be able to catch it. And if they've done the inner work. And that might be part of the defense mechanism.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Secondly, the. The potential consequences. I don't know how the universe works exactly, but what I've gleaned from having done a lot of research is that there could be very negative consequences if someone intervenes through, let's say, black magic, knowingly altering someone's life in a negative way that could have serious consequences for the soul.

[A]

It's kind of called karma.

[B]

Karma. Whereas white magic, which I'm not as familiar with how that works, but it's. It's trying to manipulate reality in a positive way. And then the word manipulate, we'd have to define how is it actually being done. I. I don't. I mean, maybe we're all doing that in our own way. Like, writing a book is sort of a form of magic because you might activate someone or even having a conversation and trying to help someone.

[A]

Well, isn't there a reason that we call it spelling? I would argue that every book and even every spoken word, to a certain extent, they are casting a spell on someone else's consciousness because we're translating these feelings, these. These thoughts into a form that can take over someone else. So I taught this to my kids. Every time you read a book, you're installing a new app on your phone, and the phone's your mind. Like, each book teaches you a new way to look at reality. Right. And which is why you want to pick the right books so that you can learn these different ways of accessing reality. And your books are super cool because they're very cutting edge. And if you want to say, wow, like, maybe I want a completely different view of the world. And the. The skill for me has been feeling intense discomfort. The first time I came across this Stuff I, I kind of drank from a giant fire hose over a 10 day personal development thing that just, I was like, oh my God, I have to pay attention to signals from below my neck, like heart and all those. And there's all this weird shit in the world, like ah. And it was very strong cognitive dissonance. And like I have to learn so much. And you can go from there to where I am now. Maybe there's another point where you can simultaneously just say, I'm going to look at it through my rationalist science lens. I'm going to flip the script. I'll look at it through like an energetic lens and look at it through a trauma lens. And you just realize there's things, but you have the ability to have all of these at your disposal and to flip from one to the other without feeling pain. You just think, oh, that's a different way of looking at it. I can look at it with Newtonian physics or quantum physics, right? Or I can look at a spreadsheet in my finance department with discounted cash flow models or with some other made up finance analytic thing that you know from your banker time, right? It's the same freaking numbers. But one of the says the company is valuable, the other one says it's worthless, right? Which is it? What lens? I think your books have new lenses and you actually do a very powerful job of spelling so that people can put that new framework into their consciousness and consider it as a way to look.

[B]

Thank you for saying that.

[A]

That's cool.

[B]

I put a lot of intention into the books and even these conversations for the reasons we've discussed because I, I am hyper aware of potential karmic consequences or whatever you want to call them, Universal law, consequences of misleading people. And that's why I'm very cautious in making claims with definitive statements because I don't want to mislead people. And I think to me it's more about bringing an energy that I feel super passionate about. And maybe that comes through words, written words, spoken words. There is a frequency and energy that we maybe don't fully understand that is impacting people. And I want that to be as pure as possible. That's how I frame this. And even before I write my books, I, I've done this for every single one. I call in benevolent forces before I type the first word. I don't see them. I hope they're there. I think there's evidence they're there. And I say that I am the vessel for this book. May it be for the highest Good. And help as many people as possible and be in the highest truth effectively. Because I want to be super clear and that whatever dark falsehoods, I don't want them to be involved in this. So I think there's a power if consciousness is really fundamental in setting those intentions, whether it works mechanically that way or not. Where we orient our Compass, which is my second book, An End to Upside Down Living, I think it's super important where we direct our consciousness in terms of our intentions. It's huge.

[A]

Thank you for sharing that practice. There are a lot of people who write books who listen to the show and I would just invite you. If you're an author writing a blog post, try it. Yeah, the worst it'll do is take a little bit of time and it could be really helpful. I do something similar with mine and for several of my books now to the point that it blows my mind. On the last night, usually right in the middle of the night, the last night that I finished the book, an owl will land really close to me. The first time it was like four feet away, right outside a window at two in the morning. I've never seen an owl there. I was like, what? And as I finished, I think it was smarter, not harder. Yeah, right. Right where I write, right above me on the peak of things. And owl was sitting where they never said. I was like, whoa. So who knows? Maybe it's just me noticing randomness, but I don't think so.

[B]

Well, I'll give an anecdote here. This is going to get a little wild and crazy, but in my book, An End to Upside Down Contact, owls come up all the time in contact phenomena. And there's a man named Mike Clelland who studied this phenomenon specifically. I don't know about this guy, written books on it. And what he finds is basically this anecdote is a person is driving on the side of the road, looks, goes and looks at an owl. All of a sudden it's a few hours later and they don't know what's happened. They go to see a hypnotherapist to try to recover the missing time. Missing time is a big phenomenon with contact. And the hypnotherapist will put the person into relaxed state and they'll say, I want you to try to go up to that owl and describe it to me. And they'll say, wait a second, that's not an owl. That's actually a gray alien. It's not just owls. It can be raccoons. Actually, Kerry Mullis who invented the PCR test, Nobel Prize winner. He talked about this encountering a glowing raccoon in the woods and then having missing time. So these animals, we talk about shape shifting. I know it's getting weird. But when we appreciate that consciousness is more than just the brain and there are other dimensions, we have to open up to these possibilities that what we perceive is not necessarily what we think it is.

[A]

That is so profound. Wow.

[B]

Yeah. The term is a screen memory. So the memory of is of an owl, but that might be shielding what is actually there.

[A]

So cool. I'm gonna have to go hypnotize myself. You studied consciousness for a very long time. And reality. Is AI conscious? Or will it ever be?

[B]

Such a deep question. If consciousness is the basis of all reality, we could say that everything in the material world is a manifestation of consciousness. But will new consciousness pop out of matter? We'll have to see. But if matter does not create new consciousness, it might not happen in that mechanism. But could there be a way by which a machine AI integrates biological material into itself and then creates a hybrid? Or could we manifest something with our mind and alter reality in a certain way? So I think it's very complex from a materialistic perspective. I don't think it's just going to magically pop out of a machine, but through other means. Maybe it's more complex.

[A]

When I asked you that question, your first response, your pupils contracted and you actually had about a two second fear response. What was that? Hmm.

[B]

The fear response was. There was a lot to say, and I wanted to say it in a short amount of time.

[A]

Very.

[B]

And also not mislead the audience.

[A]

Number one, congratulations on noticing that it happened. Most people don't notice that. Number two, knowing where it came from, that's a high level of power. All right. That's awesome.

[B]

And that you noticed it. I appreciate that.

[A]

Oh, thank you. What is one thing that a person can do right now to increase their level of consciousness? Maybe to move closer to these powers?

[B]

Ask what is real? In other words, if something is told to us as being true, it's presented that way. Ask how do we know that's true? And start going down the rabbit hole of examining assumptions and not taking things at face value.

[A]

How do you stop yourself from being programmable?

[B]

I ask questions. So by asking whether or not something that's presented to me is the full truth, that allows me not to necessarily believe it immediately. Maybe eventually I will. But the process of asking questions. David Hawkins, again, he talked about radical humility. And he also Said all knowledge is provisional, meaning we know something at this moment, but new information could come in. So I think that intellectual humility is really critical to not be programmed.

[A]

That's beautiful. I also like to ask, what assumptions did that person make that they don't even know they made in order to say what they're saying? And I realized, oh my gosh, there's a lot of assumptions that they didn't test. They just thought they were real. Like where consciousness comes from, which is the whole body of your work.

[B]

Embedded presuppositions. If you listen to someone's statements, you can count almost how many times they assume something to be true because science just told them and they haven't gone back and looked at the assumptions underlying the science. So now when I speak, I feel like I'm always having to hedge because I'm not even sure of certain things that I haven't fully examined yet.

[A]

Well, that is curiosity, I think, is a way to counter fear and to sense reality. So well done. What is one truth about consciousness that will shake people to their core?

[B]

The notion that possibly consciousness does not emerge from our brain. That perhaps consciousness is beyond the body and that our body is somehow tapping into it. Whether it's like an antenna receiver or a filtering mechanism or an interface. That our true identity is beyond this physical form. It is a life changing concept just to consider. But then when seeing scientific evidence suggesting that this might be true, I can't express to you enough how much it's changed my life.

[A]

Mine too. I actually believe that my consciousness made my brain and my body and did a pretty shitty job, to be honest. But whatever right is shifting that, it just, it brings peace.

[B]

If nothing else, it broadens one's context for life and it starts to bring questions in about meaning and purpose. Because if I'm not just my body, and I'm not just a random product of 13.8 billion years of stuff that had no intelligence behind it, then maybe there's purpose and meaning to my life that I am here to discover and embody. Authentically beautiful.

[A]

If you like today's episode, maybe you should put an end to upside down thinking. And you could do that by reading the book by that title or one of the six other books by Mark Gober. Mark, where do people find you online?

[B]

My website. It's markgober.com M A R K G O B R.com all seven books are on Amazon in hard copy, Kindle and Audible formats. I narrate all the audibles myself and my eight episode podcast series. It's kind of similar to the Telepathy tapes, but it's from 2019 still available. On this topic of consciousness, I've interviewed people like Dr. Dean Radin, Bruce Grayson from UVA, Brian Josephson, Nobel Prize winning physicist. If you're interested in that. Where is my mind on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all the major players.

[A]

Sweet. Thank you for being curious and making such a radical change in your life and taking what you've learned and sharing it. Genuinely appreciate it.

[B]

Thank you Dave. Thanks for having me and thanks for all that you do.

[A]

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

[C]

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.