← The Rubin Report
The Rubin Report
Why We Are on the Cusp of Curing Most Diseases & Living to 120 | Deepak Chopra
00:22:47
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
T-Mobile Advertiser
Introducing family freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days. Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement. Example Apple iPhone 16, 128 gigs $829.99 eligible trade in. Example iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel Contact us.
- [00:30]
Rubrik/Libsyn Ads Advertiser
AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails, and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation at rubrik.com that's R U-B-R-I-K.com.
- [01:08]
Dave Rubin
All right, I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is legendary author, speaker, and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra. Deepak, I feel like I could have given you a much, much longer intro there. I mean, 90 plus books. Chopra Center. You've helped heal and spiritually connect literally millions of people for decades now. What do you consider yourself first professionally?
- [01:35]
Deepak Chopra
You know, Dave, I'm still trying to figure out what I'll do when I grow up. I don't know. Jack of all trades.
- [01:43]
Dave Rubin
Jack of all trades. Well, I guess, you know, we're going to. We only have about 25 minutes, and I want to use the time wisely. I want to talk a little bit about some of the AI stuff you're doing. But for. For somebody that's tuning into this, that doesn't know you, I can't imagine such a person exists. Deepak Cho. I mean, what should they think of you first? It's sort of the same question, but I need a serious answer.
- [02:05]
Deepak Chopra
I am trained as a medical doctor. I'm an internist, board certified. Then I studied what is called neuroendocrinology, which is brain chemistry. I have practiced as a licensed physician. California, Massachusetts, Florida. I still hold my licenses. I do my single credits. I teach at a couple of medical schools still. And then I kind of moved on to integrative medicine, mind body medicine, and ultimately, what a lack of a better word, spiritual intelligence. And what people call the hard problem of consciousness. What is the universe made of and how do we know it exists? So that's where I am right now.
- [03:04]
Dave Rubin
All right, so I Think people will understand this is going to be tough to do in 25 minutes because there's a lot of stuff here. So first off, I'm going to request a second interview before we even start this first one. So how much of what is wrong with us physically is actually a spiritual or mental problem?
- [03:29]
Deepak Chopra
Well, that's being too simplistic. So let me get you the science. Okay? 5% of all disease is determined by what are called fully penetrant gene mutations, which. A gene mutation is a genetic error. So that's what. Think of it a gene as a word. And think of DNA as the Alphabet. And the word of course could be part of a sentence. The sentence could be part of a paragraph, paragraph could be part of a chapter in a book. The human body is an epic of, of biological evolution, but also cosmic evolution, you know, from all the way from the big bang 13.8 billion years to right now. You are a timeline, so am I. Parallel timeline of 13.8 billion years of evolution. And DNA is the Alphabet, which is just four letters. A, T, C, G. Am I getting too complex?
- [04:44]
Dave Rubin
So far so good. I'm with you so far.
- [04:46]
Deepak Chopra
The English language has 26 letters, but the Alphabet of life is four letters. Adenine, Guanine, cytosine, thymine, A, T, C, G, short. The alphabets arrange differently, just like in English. 26 letters. You can create an epic. You could Write Shakespeare with 26 letters. But life writes the whole story of existence in four letters. And you have 25,000 genes in your body which you half of which you bought from your parents. So Mother gave you 12 and a half thousand or whatever. 12,000. Father gave you 12,000. 24,000 genes. But in addition, you have 2 million bacterial genesis. So technically speaking, you have more bacterial genes than human genes. You are a few human cells hanging on to a bacterial column. You are the evolution of bacterial consciousness. Anyway, 5% of disease is due to mutations. Think of a typo. So you have the Encyclopedia Britannica, that's your body. And there's one chapter that has one word that has a typo and that's a mutation. And 5% of those mutations are fully penetrate. That means if you have that mutation, you're going to get the disease no matter what you do. Those are known gene mutations. One example is Baraka gene, which is a gene for breast cancer. So the reason I mention it, Angelina Jolie had that gene or has that gene and she had a preventive mastectomy to prevent her from getting breast cancer, which was the right thing. To do now, where we are today with our technology is that we already have a technology called gene editing. So you can cut and paste genes, technically speaking, the way you cut and paste your email. This technology is now approved for sickle cell anemia and a couple of neurological disorders. But soon it'll be for cancer, heart disease, autoimmune illness. So those 5% of genetic mistakes will be taken care of. Also thanks to Covid. And during COVID people were doing a lot of research on vaccines. Notwithstanding that a lot of people have crazy ideas about vaccines, but vaccines are very effective in preventing infections. And I grew up in India, where I saw people dying of polio, smallpox, all gone now because of vaccines. So you are soon going to have vaccines for cancer, heart disease, everything. So that 5% is taken care of. Now, the remaining 95% of even the genetic mutations are not fully penetrate, which means they don't guarantee the disease. They can be modified by mind, body practices, meditation, spiritual experience. But they can also be modified through other things like sleep, good sleep, like stress management, like exercise, like healthy nutrition, sometimes with certain supplements. Emotions, relationships, biological rhythm, circadian. You know, when people have jet lag or they're working at night, their rhythms get out of whack. So when we know all this knowledge now, we know that 95% of disease is preventable. It's predictable, it requires your participation. It's a process. And many diseases are now reversible through these epigenetic modulations. So that's a long answer. That disease is complicated, but only 5% is fully genetically determined, probably less. According to the latest statistics, 2% of disease is fully guaranteed by genetic mutations. Technology will take care of that. The rest is how you live your life, basically.
- [09:13]
Dave Rubin
So if we can take care of, through gene editing, the 5%, and then if we do the other stuff that you just mentioned, eat right, sleep right supplements, good spiritual health and all of those things. Are we on the horizon of something else that we will come to think of as human? In some sense.
- [09:32]
Deepak Chopra
You will be able to extend your health span to about 120 years. And after that, probably not, because we have genetic programs for death in our body. There's a phenomenon in biology called apoptosis, programmed cellular death. And that's very good, because if a cell forgets to die, it becomes cancerous. So actually, death serves a purpose. Your stomach cells die every five days, so you can make new ones. Your skin cells die once a month, your skeleton recycles every three months, et cetera, et cetera. So death is Built into our system for renewal, for recycling. And what we call physical death is the same thing. The universe renews life through physical death, through biological organisms. You know, we. We reproduce ourselves and we recycle. Matter recycles, energy cycles, Information recycles. And now the evidence is that consciousness recycles. And if by consciousness we mean your soul, then your soul recycles as a new body, new mind, new brain, everything. To stop death would be the worst thing we do. We'd be mummified. We might as well be in a museum, like a plastic flower or a marble statue. So death is very important for renewal of life.
- [11:07]
Chris Gethard
Hi, I'm Chris Gethard, and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call. Talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survive mass shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous.
- [11:38]
Dave Rubin
Would a fairly simple way to look at that be in essence, if you could not die, really, you couldn't rejuvenate. I mean, you couldn't reincarnate.
- [11:47]
Deepak Chopra
You couldn't. So you do need death. So death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Death is the continuum of birth and death. Continuum, yeah, sorry. Life is the continuum of birth and death, and it's already happening. Every moment. Cells are dying in your body, new ones are being born, so it's already happening. You don't have the body of a baby now, or an infant or a teenager, unless you want to run for president. Then you can have an old body, and then you can have emotions. You know, that's a qualification to run for these days, that you stop your emotions at the age of eight. You don't recycle them, or you don't evolve. But otherwise, in a normal development process, birth and death is a dance, okay? And it's a healthy dance. But given that you still will be able to live 120 years, die free of disease, been there, done that, have a party and celebrate your death, which is. I'm 79 years. That's my next chapter. You know, statistically, although I'm in good health, so I find the prospect of death and renewal very exciting. It's the most creative thing you can do.
- [13:08]
Dave Rubin
It's an incredible way to look at it. When did you realize the importance of the spiritual element? I mean, as someone that came from integrative medicine, so you were obviously looking at the body a little bit differently than traditional Western medicine. But when did you realize that the spiritual. Spiritual part was so deeply connected?
- [13:28]
Deepak Chopra
So this is what happened. I was doing neuroendocrinology in Boston with the number one expert in the world. He's now 101, by the way. And if he finds a snake in his garden, he dissects the brain to look for neurochemicals. So we were looking at neurochemicals in the 1970s and 1980s, like dopamine, oxytocin, opiates, serotonin. Now everybody knows these things. Then it was like, oh, what are these things? You know, the molecules of emotion, we call them. And these molecules trigger your responses in the body. So, you know, we know that serotonin and dopamine are triggered by emotions. So your emotions and the neurochemicals and your immune system and your endocrine system, hormonal, they're all connected. There's a discipline called psychoneuro immuno endocrine modulation, which is all this combined thing that led me to integrative medicine because my training was in brain chemistry. Then I realized that, you know, this is all about the mind. What about, is there something deeper called the spirit? And then I realized that this is actually the number one and number two open question in science. The number one question in science is, what is the universe made of? And without going into details, the answer is that the universe is made of nothing. You know, it starts as nothing, and then it looks like everything. So how does nothing become everything? And how do we become aware of that? Let that. That's New York.
- [15:18]
Dave Rubin
I was saying there's something sort of deeply profound about the sirens behind you as you're explaining the meaning of life.
- [15:25]
Deepak Chopra
Yeah, the music of New York. So anyway, so what were they saying? The heart problem?
- [15:32]
Dave Rubin
Out of nothing came something, nothing came.
- [15:35]
Deepak Chopra
Something, not something, everything. And then came something that not only there's existence, this whole thing, but we are conscious of it. How do we know we exist? That is called the hard problem of consciousness. And so if you go on Google or AI and you say, what are the 125 unsolved problems in science? The number one is, what's the universe made of? And number two is, if it's made of nothing, why does it look like something? And how do we know that it exists? And so that's called the heart problem of consciousness. And I struggled with that along with many people, and people are still struggling. And then I realized that it is. We are struggling with this problem because we think there's a physical universe made of atoms and molecules and gravity and force fields. And then we say, how does these physical molecules create thought, imagination, feeling, love, compassion, joy, equanimity, self awareness, existential anxiety, the fear of death? How does matter create this? And became obvious to me. It doesn't. It's the other way around. You start with consciousness. That leads to perceptual activity, which is seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smell, smelling. That leads to cognitive ability, which is thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires. So in my mind, that became an obsession. And then I now hooked up with scientists who actually understand what I'm saying, because 99% of scientists think I'm crazy. I'm back. But finally I found some who agree with me and we are tackling these problems. I'm writing a new book with a cognitive scientist, world famous. It's called beyond the Matrix. How Conscious beings create the universe. So the universe doesn't exist in the absence of you and me. So if everybody disappeared, there would be no universe.
- [17:42]
Dave Rubin
How much of a challenge is that in and of itself to just find scientists who can talk about this stuff?
- [17:47]
Deepak Chopra
That is like 1%. But I found some really good scientists. And my next book is with the guy called Don Hoffman. He's a cognitive scientist at the University of California, and he's one of the best, you know, and he wrote a book a few years ago, the Case Against Reality, which means the physical world is not real. It's a simulation. It's a. Yeah, it's a. It's like the Matrix.
- [18:15]
Dave Rubin
The Matrix.
- [18:17]
Deepak Chopra
It's the Matrix. And he came up with the math and the physics and all that. The book was criticized, but I championed it and we became friends. And he's very credible now. You go all the Mind Body conferences. He's like the keynote speaker. And I just saw him yesterday on Instagram speaking on something. So we are writing a book together. Knows the math, he knows the physics, and I know the conscience. The spiritual.
- [18:44]
Dave Rubin
That's super interesting to me. I often talk about on the show how in essence, because of the phone. I mean, we're in the Matrix in some extent because we are now the battery for the digital world. So I absolutely will read that. Let me ask you Something because obviously on my day to day basis, I'm doing more in the political realm rather than the spiritual realm. So this is a nice break for me, to be frank. But what do you make of our, if this is a fair term, what do you make of our collective spiritual experience right now? The level of which, you know, the anxiety that people feel endlessly, the obsession with politics, the culture wars, all of these things, the endless scrolling on the phones, the inundated, endless slamming of news in their faces. If collective spiritual awareness is a thing, if that's the right term, or if you want to give me another one.
- [19:35]
Deepak Chopra
Our collective mind, Leave the spirit alone, because the spirit is infinite possibilities. But our collective mind today is insane. Okay, we have war, we have terrorism, we have climate change. Notwithstanding people who say there's no climate change. We have climate change, we have war, we have terrorism, we have mechanized death, we have drones, we have chronic disease, we have polarization because the world is being run by gangsters. And we call them leaders, but they're only interested in power mongering, cronyism, corruption, money laundering and everything that is basically, you know, they're gangsters, they're not leaders. And, and we elect them, so we can't even blame them. Okay, so we're all insane. I think a few years when I recognized that, I decided to check out. I mean, I still watch the news, but it doesn't affect me because I look at it as collective insanity. And unless, and if we don't think it's insane, then we are also insane. We are declaring our insanity. There are now solutions. Thanks to AI and thanks to what we know, there's solutions for everything. Collective solutions. So, you know, you have shared vision, collective creativity. You create a spiritual emotional bond. You have maximum diversity. Another bad word these days. But diversity is the fundamental essence of creativity. Maximum diversity, shared vision, emotional, spiritual connection, complementing each other's strengths. Think of a really good sports team. If we could emulate a sports team, collectively, we could change the world. But I don't see it happening. I have seen medieval minds and modern technologies. Perfect recipe for extinction for an insane species.
- [21:42]
Dave Rubin
Well, we definitely can't end with that, but we are short on time here and I really do hope we can pick this up for a more extended interview, hopefully in person.
- [21:50]
Deepak Chopra
But.
- [21:50]
Dave Rubin
But so, so tell me this, so how are you leveraging AI to solve that? To solve what you just laid out there, which is like Deepak Chopra going dark? I can't do that.
- [22:00]
Deepak Chopra
So I have my own AI. Deepak Chopra, AI but I've also created a community. Deepak chopra.com where there are three or four principles. Love in action, attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance, insight, creativity, humanity. And we collectively embark on the change we want to see in the world by first becoming the change ourselves. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, you can't create peace by being an angry peace activist. That's an oxymoron. It'll get you the Nobel Prize. But you'll never create peace if you don't have peace in yourself. Peace can only be created by those who are peaceful. So how do we have peace? A billion people who are peaceful, who are creative, who have love, empathy, compassion, joy, equanimity, and who are there for each other so we can collectively transform the world. It's a dream, but, you know, it may or may not happen. But then what's a dream for you know, that's what I'm doing now at my age. I'm creating global communities of empathy, compassion, love, creativity, insight, intuition and joy. Joy is the only measure of success. Otherwise you wasted your life.
- [23:19]
Dave Rubin
Do you feel at all times that you're. You're doing it all right, all the time that you know in some sense because you are the guru in this field, that you're able to.
- [23:27]
Deepak Chopra
No, no, I don't believe in gurus. In fact, the word guru, spell it for me.
- [23:34]
Dave Rubin
G U R U. Gee, you are. As I said it, I saw what was happening there.
- [23:42]
Deepak Chopra
So, yes, let's all be gurus of ourselves and then we have hope.
- [23:49]
Dave Rubin
Deepak, we absolutely will do this again. I thank you just for this, this tiny intro. We're going to link to your AI and to the website down below and, and good luck. Good luck in New York with all those sirens.
- [24:02]
Deepak Chopra
Yeah, I live here. I live here to see that it doesn't bother me.
- [24:08]
Dave Rubin
Inner peace amongst the craziness. Thank you.
- [24:11]
Deepak Chopra
Thank you, Dave. Thank you very much.
- [24:17]
T-Mobile Advertiser
Introducing family freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days. Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement. Example Apple iPhone 16128 gigs $829.99 eligible trade in. Example iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due. If you pay off early or cancel contact us.
- [24:47]
Rubrik/Libsyn Ads Advertiser
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.