What Will The Coming “Age Of Abundance” Look Like? (AI, Solar Power, Computer-Brain Interfaces, Robots & More!) With Brett Hurt.

My name is Ben Greenfield. And on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

I really think that people should not be afraid of technology. People should be afraid of how people use technology. Technology itself is not good or evil. The way you use technology, like algorithms are not.

My guest on this show is Bret Hirt. He's a serial tech entrepreneur. He's an investor. He's the author of a brand new book called Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance. For All. You'll hear Brett's incredible backstory. Uh, he is a guy who delves into a lot of different categories, as you will find out, and, uh, he's just one fun dude, um, who's also a very smart cookie.

Do we want to be a species that destroys ourselves with technology, or do we want to be a species that don't be afraid of technology, be part of the light, to use technology to create the world that frankly, we should all want, which is a world led from the heart, not from the ego.

So, all of the shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/BrettHurt, B-R-E-T-T-H-U-R-T, BenGreenfieldLife.com/BrettHurt.

Let's go talk with Brett. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond. Alright, I carry a tiny little shot of this around to restaurants when I drink, which isn't all the time. But let's say I take my wife out to a date, I'm having a cocktail before dinner, usually splitting a glass of wine with her dinner and, woo, living on the edge, baby. A ZBiotics pre-alcohol. Is what I use for this. So, it's a probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. And here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in your gut, and it's a buildup of that byproduct, not dehydration as many people think, that's to blame for rough days after drinking. 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For better blood flow, your best erections, and better health, go to tryjoymode.com/Ben or enter code BEN at checkout for 20% off. I spent 20 years measuring and optimizing everything about my body. Deep performance metrics, cold stress, heat stress, sleep scores, blood panels, peptide protocols, testosterone, telomeres, VO2 max, you name it. And somewhere in the middle of building what looked like a perfect life, I almost lost the life that I was building it for. Boundless: The Man Who Became Human is a brand-new feature documentary that follows what happened when the optimization framework that I spent 2 decades constructing ran headlong into the things that metrics could never measure. My marriage, my sons, my faith. The private archive footage in this documentary has never been seen publicly. Some of it I debated even including at all. 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When I met you, Brett, you were I don't know if you remember this, we were down south at our friend's wedding. Was it Lexington?

It was Lexington. It was Lincoln and Julie. Yeah.

Yeah. So, we were at Lincoln and Julie's wedding and this was the day before the wedding and I showed up at the gym at the hotel with my wife and you were at the gym with your wife. We might have been the only 4 people in the gym actually, a testament to our dedication. But, I hadn't really hung out with you or met you and I saw this guy in the corner doing mobility exercises and then this whole routine with the X3 Bar. I've had the founder of that bar on my podcast. Is that your routine everywhere you go?

It is, yeah. I have a routine where I always have a backpack with all the equipment in it. No matter where I'm at anywhere in the world, doesn't matter if they have a gym or not, I just can work out either at their gym or in the room, but I bring that bag with me. It's an X3 bar, it's a yoga mat, it's some pads for my elbows because I do a very long plank. I built up to a 24-minute-a-day plank.

Yeah, I saw that you were in the plank position for a long time.

And that's like the best exercise, I think, because it's a whole body exercise, especially great for a 54-year-old man, because you don't have any kind of lower back issues ever again if you do that. Like I was noticing in my early 40s, I'd bend over sometimes and be like, ah, you know, and you know that none of that ever happens. You know, it's great for everything, right? Skiing, everything. It's good to have a strong core. And I do a lot of stretches too, but my strength training is X3 Bar. It works incredibly well.

And do you, when you're doing the X3 Bar, and by the way, for people who haven't seen this thing, it's a series of elastic bands, a little bar, and the bands are surprisingly difficult to move against. And when I got one, it came with a little placard with a full-body workout and you do one single set to failure. Is that kind of what you do?

That's right. Yeah. And it's wonderful because you have a pull day and a push day and you work out 6 days a week. And so think about that. You're maxing out your pec, you're maxing out your tricep, you're maxing out your thighs for squats, you're maxing out your calves, et cetera, every other day as opposed to like a huge workout or you're in the gym for like an hour and a half, 2 hours. And you're really stressing your tendons, et cetera, et cetera. So, you're getting to hit your muscles more frequently and stay conditioned and it just makes me feel great.

Variable resistance, like the harder you press against the bands, obviously they're pressing back against you. And then, when I interviewed John who designed that thing, Dr. John Jaquish, he described how level 2 is at the end of each set, you kind of bounce a little bit to exhaust the slow twitch muscles.

Yeah, you do. Let's say you're doing a bench press as you're going back here, your tendons when they're that stretched out are half the width of your finger. This finger is like the width of a tendon in a rest state, your pec tendon. So, twice as stretched out, so it's half that size and you've got the heaviness of all the weight right there. You're doing bands, it's more slack there and it's increasing tension. And so you do full range till complete exhaustion, then you do half range until complete exhaustion without breaking. Then you just do the tiny bounces until complete exhaustion. You do not want to do bench press after that. You know, until again, 2 days from there.

Yeah. Do you do cardio at all?

I do, but I do it like you're doing it right now. You know, Deborah and I in our neighborhood do a nice long hike every morning for about an hour and hit the hills. I know that you do more short burst things 'cause I saw you running in our neighborhood, you know, when you were over here. Yeah.

You, you live in a very hilly neighborhood. We were doing, I think we were doing hill sprints at one point.

Yeah, so I could learn a thing or two for you, from you for sure. But I'm also, I'm at a place where I feel good about my body. I feel very good about my cardio. My biomarkers are better at age 54 by far than they were at age 40. And I'm just building for longevity and not trying to become super muscular. I used to be, I'm 186, 187 pounds right now. I used to be 225 and I was much more built. I was much more like look like a bodybuilder type. And that's hard to sustain for my frame. And I was having to eat like a horse and all that stuff.

Yeah. I was going to say it's hard to sustain on the gut too.

Yeah. And I just didn't feel, I didn't feel as good as I feel now. My heart was pumping harder, et cetera. And so, So it looked good, it was good for dating, et cetera. It helped lead to me meeting my wife, but it wasn't a, it wasn't like, you know, a sustainable practice.

Yeah. You've, you've moved on from sun's out, guns out mode. People who might be familiar with your name as a pretty well-known tech entrepreneur might wonder at what point you actually got into fitness because there's of course that stereotype of the nerdy tech entrepreneur who gets sand kicked on their face at the beach or whatever. So, was fitness always an interest of yours or did it kind of develop at some point along the way?

So, it hit for me almost with the launch of the Joshua Tree album by U2 because I started to hit puberty, I've been programming since I was 7 years old, obsessively, over 40 hours a week since 7, thanks to amazing mom who learned how to program with me and just gave me unconditional love and support. And when I turned about 14, I was 140 pounds and really tall. I'm like 6'3", but that looks really Ben Greenfield: What's quantum energy?

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And so, and I wanted to start dating as I hit puberty. And so, I realized like, "Hey, I need to transform my body." And I started to work out totally obsessively, started to eat like a horse. I went from 140 to 225. From age 14 to around, I think age 20 was where I hit 225. Everybody at UT Austin thought I played football. Of course, I always told the truth that I was just a nerd and I was inventing an internet game. It became one of the most popular games on the internet. It was called Renegade Outpost. And Renegade Outpost was amazing. There was a whole conference that people built around it. I didn't have any money, but they would, They'd get me to come speak.

And you were, you were the original designer of Renegade Outpost?

Yeah, I built it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had it, I had a team, people all over the world, like there were programmers in Russia and Germany and stuff, but we all did it for free. It was all for fun and we were all nerds. And, and it was amazing. People in real life got married that met on the game and, you know, yeah, it was so cool.

It was so cool.

It actually became the foundation for World of Warcraft, believe it or not. Which was a big breakout. I never made any money on it.

I was going to say, so you did it for fun, but with the popularity of the game, like it never really resulted in anything monetizable.

Yeah. I mean, I've made plenty of money, but I didn't make my money that way. And it was all just a labor of love, right? And it was never about capitalist, capitalistic motions for that. I only decided that I need to start making money with technology when my mom, said to me like, hey, if you want to sit around here and program, I'll completely support you. Like I always have. But if you're not going to get a job, then you can do it out there. And she pointed at the door. It's the only time where she gave me an ultimatum. I was like, all right. So then I became, you know, an entrepreneur capitalist and, you know, I've started 6 companies over the past 30 years and took a company public for over a billion dollar outcome and, you know, had, had all types of capitalistic success. Yeah.

So from the time your mom threatened to like kick you out of the house, you know, and obviously you've been programming at 7, did you go straight into entrepreneurship or did you go to college?

I did go to college. I did not want to go to college. That was another ultimatum. My mom said, if you don't go to college, then again, you know, you're going to have to. So they did pay for my college, but it was UT Austin. There was no notion of a college tour. I grew up in Austin. When I was born in Austin in 1972, it was 260,000 people. It's 2.6 million now.

Oh, you weren't one of the trendy imports.

My, you know, I've got a legacy at UT as well. My grandfather was one of the top mathematics professors. He spent his whole career there. And so I ended up going there. I did not want to go, but my mom again gave me an ultimatum. And I'm glad I went. And then I got into that and got into the competitive nature of that and eventually went to the Wharton School, which at the time was really the number one business school and is still in the top 3 and got my MBA there. And it was at Wharton where I became an entrepreneur. And so I became an entrepreneur at age 24 and I'm 54, so I've done that for 30 years. And as you, I think, you know, you know, Deborah and I also, are investors in 151 startups. 12 of them are unicorns now, and we're also investors in 50 VC funds, including, and a crypto fund. We were one of the first investors in Multicoin, which is a really good investment.

In terms of that start at around 24 years old in entrepreneurship, what was the first actual big successful company that you built and exited?

Well, the first one that had Nice exit was Core Metrics. So Core Metrics, I started when I was 26. It was one of the first, what are now called software as a service companies. When I was raising money for that, I was describing to venture capitalists that it's like a mainframe and a dumb terminal or a client and a server. Frankly, my internet game was like that, right? People would Telnet into my game and we could constantly upgrade the software. And you know, I started that when I was 18. And so CoreMetrics, literally translated, were the metrics you needed to run your online business, and it became the standard for e-commerce sites all over the world to run their business. It came too late because the dot-com bust was almost about to happen. Of course, I didn't know that in starting it, And we got to 100 customers and then the dot-com bust happened and we went from 100 to 3 because 97 of our customers went out of business. I had to let go of two-thirds of the staff, which was horrible. It's like the most horrible thing, you know, throwing up in the trash can, the whole thing. I mean, it just felt like complete crap. And then we built back from there. We won Walmart and the Home Depot and built, a company that exited for around $300 million to IBM. And then that led to Bazaarvoice, which popularized customer reviews all over the world and today has over 14,000 customers and is in 60 international languages and became the standard for people reading product reviews while they're shopping on e-commerce sites. So you go to Walmart, the customer reviews are powered by Bazaarvoice. It's the software inside. And that company went from zero to $100 million of ARR in 6 years. Seems like small potatoes now in the days of Anthropic, but back then that was like a really big deal. And we had over a billion-dollar IPO and it was named by Wall Street Journal in 2012 as one of the top 5 IPOs of the year. And it was a dream come true entrepreneurially. And I then had made enough money where I never needed to work again. And so I tried retiring because unfortunately I lost both my parents when I was pretty young. I, by the way, I manifested this. This is pretty crazy. You know, I know that you're very spiritual also. I set a goal when I was 25 that I would found a company and take it public by the time I turned 40. I turned 40 on the IPO roadshow for Bazaarvoice, literally.

Oh wow.

Like on the roadshow, I turned 40. And had this, and it was really the number one place to work in Austin was small, then medium, then large.

Yeah. I don't know, Brett, that sounds like procrastination to me. Like you hit it at the very last moment.

Well, I'll tell you what, I actually missed the goal because I, it went public on February 24th and I turned 40 on February 14th, but the IPO roadshow had started at least, right? We were like on the road, but I kind of joked with friends that I missed the goal by 10 days. And you know, then I started to invest in startups during retirement. I thought I was going to stay retired and ultimately then I started Data.World. And last year on July 7th, ServiceNow bought Data.World. And one thing you'll know in reading my book or this conversation is my divine number is 7. So ServiceNow announced it on 5/7., and they closed it on 7/7. But it's been my divine number ever since I was 7 years old. And my mom very selflessly and very lovingly helped me find my passion and then let me do that without prejudice, even though people in Texas were telling her that she was quote unquote ruining me because I didn't know how to play football. I didn't know how to do anything but work on that computer. And I heard her defend me and she would be like, my son's found his passion. Just let him be. And I didn't realize how magnificent that was until I had children of my own and all the mania. You know, you have kids, you know, you know all the mania of like people like everybody has to learn Mandarin now because the world's going to be Chinese, or everybody has to do this or that, or don't code anymore because AI will take all those jobs, or all this just lunacy that we constantly deal with. And you know, we're like maniacs when we have kids because, we want them to turn out well. And, you know, but really what I learned from my mom is expose your kids to lots of things when they find their thing, as long as they're not like creating bombs and, you know, turning into terrorists or something like, then let them do it without prejudice and let them grow up to be incredible, you know, people like, yeah, you're right too.

Comparisonitis and also, you know, pressure. I guess maybe even a little bit of the tiger parenting flavor that's saturated much of the way that we raise our kids. And that also, I think, combined with the individualistic nature of carve out your own path, but then sometimes we as parents try to play a pretty major role in that, I think pushes a lot of kids into either doing what everybody else is doing or feeling like they need to be somebody that the world expects them to be. And I certainly have experienced a little bit of that myself as a parent watching one of my sons, Taren, he is in his room for like 2 or 3 hours a day designing cards for a card game. Part of me inside wants to scream, dude, like what you're doing right now, Claude Design could do 10 times faster, but he's literally just like handcrafting these cards on a design pad and he's so proud of each illustration and he's turning these into games that, you know, I, I would hope at some point would be valued because they're designed by a human.

They absolutely could be.

Yeah.

Yeah. I do think that we'll have a return to the things that make us most human. And you can spot AI art a mile away, whereas something that's like deeply human, deeply created with our souls and with our heart, you know, created with love, like you can feel it.

Right. And, and there's the personal satisfaction from having created something that monetization aside is like a work of art that you've made as, you know, for me from a religious standpoint, if we are symbols of a great creator and we're called to create, then, you know, why deny that?

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'll say at the same time that, you know, at TED this year, there was a woman giving a beautiful TED Talk about AI art that she created. That we all agreed was not art that the world has ever seen. It was art that only could be created with AI. And she now is getting— she was signed by a record label. She's in her, either in her late 50s or early 60s. I don't know her age, but I'm just guessing. She's getting signed by a record label for AI-generated music that's so beautiful and is a soul song for her. And she's like, I never thought in my lifetime that this would happen. Right? And so both things can be true at the same time. Like we can, AI can help us become more human, but it also can help us become less human. Right? And the world is constantly balancing and trading off against things. And I will tell you that AI's made me way, way more creative, But, you know, for my book, you know, the Love Conquers Fear book, which by the way, Ben, this is the first time I've got in my hands, literally, which is pretty awesome. Like, check this out. This is pretty awesome. That's the—

Oh, you have the print. Oh, that's pretty. Yeah.

That's the cosmic phoenix on it. But you can see the, you know, the COVID Oh, that's awesome. John Mackey.

Yeah. At some point you got, you gotta get a copy sent up to Idaho to replace my e-version.

It's coming. It's already coming. Yeah, you're on the list. But you know, like that is 100% human. And I just finished today my 20th hour in the studio recording the Audible. And I don't know if you've done Audible for your books. I know you're prolific.

I have done Audible for a very, very large book before, like dozens and dozens of hours. Very hard. Very tempting to have AI do it.

It is very hard. It is very hard. It is much easier to talk to you on this podcast. It's much easier for me to present in front of 1,000 people at a conference. Like it is completely unforgiving to do it in a studio because you gotta pronounce everything perfectly. You gotta do retakes, you have to hit the emotional chords, you know, it's really, and you're not feeling that energy from people in an audience. It's intense.

And you can't tune out. Because the emotion of you tuning out comes through in the audiobook. That's what I've found. Similar if you're just reading a book aloud to your child, right? As soon as you tune out, they can sense that you're just saying the words versus actually into what you're reading.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And, I put my heart and soul into that book and I can't wait till it comes out on June 23rd in honor of the solstice where the light overcomes the dark. It's what humanity needs.

Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about the journey that led to the book because When you and I were talking in Lexington, I think it was at a breakfast after the wedding, I thought you were just kind of like the tech guy and then you started to talk about your spiritual journey. And later, when I was at your house in Austin, you shared with me that you've read every spiritual text, I think, or close to everyone that exists and you kind of went on this big journey. What sparked that?

Well, so I've always felt a closeness to God since I was young. I've had experiences with God since I was very young. I've had many moments where I was witnessing just profound natural beauty, usually in nature, where I felt like just absolutely surrounded by love unconditionally. And prayer has been a big part of my entrepreneurial quote unquote success, right? Like just, and never asking God to make me wealthy or any of that kind of stuff. Just more like give me strength, especially during the hardest moments. You know, my heart, my childhood was a little bit hard. My mom was amazing. My dad thought I was wasting my life. He can't understand what I was creating because you couldn't touch and feel it. He was a physical entrepreneur. He invented the world's first halogen fishing light, a bunch of physical products, and everything I was inventing was virtual. And I was picked on tons at school because people are like, it was a revenge on the nerds type of thing. Right now, now we're in this weird period with AI of responsibility of the nerds, which is a whole different thing. But I grew up like with prayer as part of my just natural, like I just naturally would do it. Nobody had to tell me to do it. I didn't, grow up going to the synagogue, et cetera.

Ben Greenfield: Brett, do you mean formally as some people would imagine prayer, like a morning prayer session, or are you talking about talking throughout the day or both?

It was just spontaneous. Okay. It's like start praying and it was almost always in nature. And I always had curiosity. I'm Jewish. I always had this curiosity, but And Judaism's all about questioning why, why, why, why Passover, there's the child that we read about in the, at our Seder where the child that just asks why over and over again. So part of what makes Judaism work is this constant questioning. Well, why is it that way? Well, really, is that really how the universe started? Is that, and just on and on and on. And it leads to a very curious mind and And so I, I had a psychedelic journey when I was just, I just turned 50, and that shifted my understanding of the reality that we're in profoundly. I, the first soul I encountered in that journey was my mom and all the unconditional love she'd given me. I literally relive, like, since being a baby. She took me in that journey to my wife's soul, showed me that I'd married my soulmate and that I was healing through my wife something that I always wanted for her, that I always wanted for my wife to— I always want for my mom, rather, to have a life where she did some things for herself. She was so selfless to me and my sister that all she did was for us. And we're just like, take a trip for yourself, et cetera. And so, you know, Deborah's like traveled the world, you know, since she was 36, since we made a lot of money. Because I'm like, look, we've made a lot of money. We're never going to spend it all unless we're just idiots and buy a bunch of stupid material things we don't need. And like, you know, go and enjoy, like, you know, you're free and I'll be there with you for some trips. And That's why I always went for my mom. But my mom showed me. That's why I took that action. And then I had my best friend growing up reaching out to me in the journey, begging me, like urgently begging me to reach out. And I did the next day. He and I got reconnected. It was really beautiful. And he told me 3 years later, he said, brother, I got to tell you something. He said, you know, that day that you reached out, it was like really shocking to me. Because God had answered my prayers. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, I was in a deep prayer the day before you reached out. I had tears streaming down my face. I was just really wanting you desperately to reach out to me, and you reached out the next day. I said, brother, you're not going to believe what I was doing the day that you were in that prayer. I could feel your prayer.

It's hard to not believe in a spiritual dimension after experiencing something like that.

And literally my whole body lit up when he told me that, and I started to move to tears. And so that started me on what I call the soul quest. And I've read over 85 books in the last 18 months trying to really grapple with the nature of the reality that we're in. What is consciousness? Reading tons of books on quantum physics, lots of books on spirituality, like you mentioned, lot of books on AI as well, and putting them all together. And realizing that many things can be true at the same time.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. I want to hear a little bit more about kind of the thesis you developed from all that reading, which I know is partially this new book that is just coming out about the time this podcast comes out. But before that, back to the psychedelic journey. I mean, some people hear that and they're like, well, that sounds kind of random. Did you eat mushrooms on the beach? Were you at a rave and somebody gave you a little too much E, or Was this something that was presented to you that was planned out? I know for the reasons of legality, there might be things you can and cannot say, but tell me what you want to share about what led up to the psychedelic journey.

Sure. So, I write about it in Chapter 13 of the Love, Conquer, Spirit book. I won't mention the person's name because that's not fair to them because they haven't gone public with that. But, One of my best friends kept telling me that they were having conversations with my soul, and I thought, well, that's just weird. But they were sending me transcripts of what my soul was saying. And I was like, how are you getting that? Because I want to meet that guy. That sounds like some higher version of me. And they said, well, I've been going to this place and I'm doing these journeys and they record you and you transcribe it. And so I became curious and Debra and I discussed it. And after 2 years of resisting, like meeting that guy, that my soul, essentially I decided, you know, I'm 50. Like, you know, I did mushrooms once when I was young. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. That was just weird. I did LSD once when I was young, same thing. It was just kind of weird. I took ecstasy probably 10 times when I was young. I'd go out dancing the night away at clubs and that actually had some utility, like open up my heart, but it does deplete you if you do it too often. And so, I'd done it 10 times. I started to notice it was really depleting.

Yeah, yeah. The moody Mondays or Tuesdays, they start to stack up.

And that kind of freaked me out and I was like, okay, I'm not going to do that anymore. Because I've never been addicted to anything. I've never been an alcoholic, et cetera. And so I was just like, you know, I was resisting because I like, that was my old version of me and like that, it just sounds weird and, you know, I didn't want to mess up my life or whatever. And I ended up just having, like I said, that transformational experience. And then I've done 6 journeys to date.. And the third one is where I met God, like really met God. And when that happens, it changes your life forever. And by the way, that can happen through meditation. I have lots of friends that have happened for them through meditation. It can happen through near-death experiences. You'd never wish a near-death experience on someone, or it can happen just spontaneously. I had a woman on episode 31 of Love Conquers Fear. You've been on Love Conquers Fear as well. Thank you. You were amazing on there. And Pariah Beam, she was in a shower and she tells the story of she's never done psychedelics. She went to Burning Man, has never done it. She was surrounded by this beautiful light and just unconditional love. And that was God showing up for her. And she knew it. She just knew it. Her soul knew it. And ever since, she's been on a soul quest as well. Not triggered by psychedelics. But what I'm doing with this movement, with Love Conquers Fear, is actually a very old message. It's in the Tao Te Ching, it's in the Bhagavad Gita, it's in the Torah, it's in the Bible, it's in the Quran, it's in Buddhism, it's in all the texts. It's in Stoicism too, by the way. It's like there are non-God or non kind of religious paths to get to the same place. What I'm doing is bringing those together and saying, look, our actual reality is one where we come from light and love, And two things can be true. Like, yes, hallelujah for science. I mean, you know, in the past 250 years, if you go back 250 years ago, Homo sapiens have been around for 400,000 years. 90% of the global population 250 years ago was in, was what could not read, and 80% was in abject poverty.

So great.

Okay. So we've like got more abundance than we've ever had. That's not true in every country. I, personify an Uber driver that I met from Chad who picked me up in Austin. Chad, only 1 in 8 people today have electricity.

Wow.

In a country of 21 billion people. So we're in this exponential curves where we can create abundance. And it was the Love Conquers Fear journey which led to the embodiment, I would say, of my soul in this physical vessel that is before you right now. That was like the ultimate calling for me in this lifetime. And then everything clicked where it's like all the entrepreneurial success, the programming since I was 7, the voices talking to me since I was young, the prayer, et cetera, that everything was to prepare me for this moment where humanity would need different people to help us shift to create abundance for everyone on the planet versus play the zero-sum power games, profit over people, like pharmaceutical complex, opioid complex, all of this stuff that is, you know, leads to a lot of suffering. Like, so again, two things can be true. Like we, you know, capitalism can be great in many ways. And I'm a capitalist and proud conscious capitalist. And it can also go too far. Like, is it right to create algorithms that purposely get teenage girls so addicted and so comparison-based that they get completely emotionally unregulated? No, it's not right. That is a choice. Don't ever let a technologist tell you that's not a choice. I can tell you, I know programming. Back and forth.

Right. Do you, you, you mean that, that, that's intentionally present in that software?

It is intentionally present because it's, because it is, it is goal-seeking addictive behaviors. Just like, just like chemically engineering food is seeking addictive behaviors, right? It's, it's, it wants you to constantly just keep eating that food. And, you know, and, and then we have to deal with the societal cost of like, you know, diabetes and obesity and all of those bad health outcomes. And humanity has to transcend this moment, and technology is the forcing function for us to do so. So what I've seen in my journeys is that the divine is working through us. God is working through us. We're the hands of God, and we have to decide what we want to be when we grow up. Do we want to be a species that destroys ourself with technology, or do we want to be a species that decides to create abundance for all of us with technology? And if we do that, then what I've been shown is we get access to the rest of the universe. And right now we're very landlocked. We're on a single planet. It took us more than 50 years to get back to the moon. We didn't even land on it. Artemis II is great. I'm not I'm not criticizing it, but it took more than 50 years. We only know what 4% of the universe is made of. We call that matter. We don't know what the other 96% is. We call it dark energy and dark matter. We've never reconciled quantum physics and classical science. We don't know what consciousness is, right? And so there's like, there's so many things for us to discover and the stakes are so high. And, you know, for, for your audience standpoint, I was just on with a famous neuroscientist right before this, and he's got an amazing invention that is only based on a theory of consciousness. And it's a company I'm now thinking about investing in. And I invest in a lot of companies kind of in this area. And, you know, it's like as we decoded space more and more, we could create GPS. And so part of what's so exciting is, is we navigate consciousness more and figure out what it is. I don't think we'll ever figure out the true nature of God. Like, that's impossible. We can't, we're like fish in an ocean, so we can't step out of the ocean and observe consciousness, but we can see more and more that it's rooted in love, light. I think it exists in the quantum field. You know, we know that there's a field through Higgs boson and what happened at CERN. And so that's super exciting. Like, you know, and then when we get access to the rest of the universe, we'll actually find out if we can conquer faster than light speed travel. I think we'll be able to figure that out. If we can travel interdimensionally, if we're living in a multi-universal reality, I mean, we just don't know. And, but just a universe, just a galaxy is unfathomably big. And we know that we're now through James Webb Telescope, we're in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies. And my personal opinion is it's probably just infinite, period, that we're probably, there's probably trillions of galaxies and like just a galaxy alone is like, insane, insane, really hard to come up with.

Yeah, yeah. It's a staggering, staggering thought. The flavor of the psychedelic journey that you experienced, I believe I'm familiar with the organization that you worked with, is very intentional. Meaning you have someone there with you. It's a very controlled set and setting. You are typically being recorded. You're often pouring through the transcripts for 1 or 2 or 3 months And so, the reason I'm naming that is because I want people to realize, well, you don't necessarily have great insights by taking a heroic dose of psilocybin on the beach even though that might happen. What you did was very intentional, very controlled, and very safe.

Ben Greenfield: Very safe, yeah. And I would say that I've met more and more people that have done really big journeys, like either a really big hero's dose of psilocybin or a big ibogaine journey. And I'm very pro-ibogaine. I've been supporting Americans for Ibogaine. We hosted at our house Governor Perry and Brian Hubbard for the Americans for Ibogaine fundraiser last September 11th. It was a very incredible day for us to host here at the house. But integration really matters. And something like ibogaine is for a certain type of situation, like vets that literally about to kill themselves. You know, we've lost 4 times as many vets to suicide, et cetera. Like, I haven't had that type of PTSD. And so I think you've really gotta be careful with where you're going. You know, I was hearing stories actually just 2 nights ago from people that have done ibogaine journeys at this place. I won't mention the place, where they don't have integration coaches for you afterwards, which is crazy. And so the place I went, I had a phenomenal integration coach, spent lots and lots of time, really a lot of time laboring through transcripts. And I don't do it at parties, which makes me maybe a little bit socially awkward. It probably makes me doubly socially awkward that I stopped drinking about a year and a half ago because of a journey. Where I literally was seeing my body. And the words that came out of my mouth were, you're just poisoning yourself. You have a big mission in this lifetime. You need to just move on. It's time for you to move on. It was 10 seconds. Boom. I just never wanted to drink again. I still have a sip during Passover or something like that, for ceremonial, but it just completely killed. I mean, you guys have been to our house. I've got this nice wine room and it's just sitting there and just—

Just sitting there useless.

Yeah.

I mean, Johns Hopkins has certainly demonstrated the efficacy of compounds like that for addiction. Although I should mention, again, you don't just take the drug and then you're not addicted. I mean, I got my hands on the Johns Hopkins post-treatment integration protocol. And it's like a multi-hundred-page document. And every day, you're doing the work.

You're doing the work. Yeah. And I just feel like it's very important to tell people that if they think about doing a psychedelic journey, definitely check references, definitely be prepared to do work pre and post, very much go in with where, you know, you can trust the people where you can completely surrender. It's like the end of yoga where you're laying there and you just melt into the floor. You want to be able to, in that place, to surrender and don't do things like I had one friend who's like, oh man, I'd never touch psychedelic skin because I had a really bad trip. I said, well, tell me more about it. And he said, well, I got drunk the night before. Except I'm like, wait, hold on. I was like, time out. I was like, wait, you got drunk the night before? He is like, yeah, yeah, you know, shouldn't have been that big. I was like, dude, that's a big deal. You had a toxic molecule. They told you not to drink a week before.

Yeah. Yeah. That establishes you're either ignoring the advice of the organization you're working with because, you know, there is a strict dieta leading into these type of experiences or it was a bad organization 'cause they never gave you a diet to follow.

And I think, I think, you know, Brian Morescu, you know, who wrote the Immortality Code.

Oh yeah. He's been on the show. Yeah.

Yeah, he was on episode 48 of Love Conquers Fear. And, he makes this point on that episode that we need to establish kind of this new age wisdom school to do these things in a way with really good protocols and really good integration and really good preparation. I agree.

Yeah. Interesting guys. You're going to toe them on psychedelics and never done them.

He hasn't, but he told the story on that episode about his near-death experience that led to his calling. So, he has seen beyond the veil. He has.

Yeah, yeah. You don't just need compounds to go to those places.

I mean, I think a near-death experience is the most profound, but again, you wouldn't wish it on someone.

You mentioned a couple of times as you were talking about some of the elements of "Love Conquers Fear," this idea of abundance and kind of getting down into brass tacks beyond just the esoteric. What do you think life's going to look like in, I don't know, 3 years, 5 years when we have robots or a lot of the work that we would normally do is being done for us. I mean, yada, yada, yada. Like what's it actually going to look like, do you think?

Well, so again, it's a choice of how we want to construct the world and it's always a choice. We have choices all along the way. Like we at one point made the choice for capitalism, in the start of this country that we would have slaves, right? And that was a real contentious choice. And, you know, Constitution like codified, you know, some of our people counting as partial people, et cetera. And so, you know, we've, we obviously have transcended that. And part of what helped us transcend that was the Industrial Revolution, like, you know, machines that we could use for plowing the fields, et cetera. Made it completely obsolete to think about we need human labor, forced human labor to do these things. And there's lots of things we need to transcend. There's lots of constructs we need to break through. And so technology is the forcing function because literally we have no choice but to transcend them. Like, that's what's being forced right now. Like, AI, is not itself an evil technology. Like, people need to get over the fear of using AI. Using technology with intentionality and a good heart, like leading with love, is the way to use technology. I mean, when we discovered fire, you could use that technology to set people on fire, or you could use it to cook food and create more warm environments and we have much higher IQs as a result of being able to consume cooked food, change the world and electricity changed the world. We've only had electricity for 0.1% of our evolutionary time on Earth. Crazy to think about, right? And so our fear center is very highly developed. And so, you know, I, for me it crystallized, 'cause I want to answer this question in this way. Crystallized on this drive with this Uber driver. Okay. So he picks me up, it's at 4:30 in the morning in Austin. His name is Kalibu. We're just having this amazing connection. You know, when you meet someone, you're just like, I'm meant to know that person. We're just like jamming.

Wait, is this the same guy? Is this the guy from Chad?

This is the guy from Chad. Yeah. And so we're just like, me and Kalibu, he's driving me to the airport. We're just like going back and forth, just having it. It's 4:30 in the morning. We're just having this like amazing conversation. And I'm like quickly using ChatGPT. I use all the models, but this time I was using ChatGPT to be like, all right, I need to learn about Chad because I don't know anything about Chad. I mean, I know it's in Africa, but I know nothing about Chad. And so I'm learning about it. I'm asking him questions. I'm learning that only 1 in 8 have electricity. I'm learning that healthcare abundance is not a thing there. Food is not a thing there. I mean, yes, they, have some food, but they're mostly starving. You know, water, clean water is not a thing there. You know, roads are barely a thing there, et cetera. Country of 21 million people. I'm like, shit, this is pretty crazy in 2025. And of course we know intuitively that there's countries like that, but when you meet someone like that and he's just like, oh my gosh, Brett, I'm in the land of abundance. Like I've never been in a more beautiful country than America. Right? So many people douse in America, like, Put yourself in Kalibu's body, right? And he is just like, oh my gosh, like, this is such an amazing place. I cannot wait. I'm saving up for the next 6 years to move my wife and children here. I'm like, oh, how many children do you have? He's got like 4 kids. He has his, he's supporting financially his parents through his Uber wages. He's supporting the whole family. I look up, well, how much is it going to cost him to buy a plane ticket for them? It's like $2,400. For like not a very nice plane ticket to get them over here. I'm like, okay, this is going to take a long time. And it really hit me emotionally. And I'm like, how will we create abundance in a place like Chad? Like, how will humanity do that? You realize that the youngest population in the world and the fastest growing youngest population in the world is on the continent of Africa by far. It's like an insane growth compared to any other continent and countries. And so it is the future of humanity. Like the future of humanity is where the youth are. And so, you know, we have to like think about like in a globally connected world, the fact that we're 99.9% the same genetically across this world, no matter all the various forms we come in. And so I have this like great connection with him. You know, it's very personal and And I, and it hits me, I'm like, the way we're going to get there for Calibu is through AI, quantum computing, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces. And so I just got to start going through like, well, how are we going to do that? We need to decode the energy of the sun. 18 seconds of the sun's rays that fall on Earth, 18 seconds would power America's energy needs for over a year.

And, and that, and that wouldn't result in some type of global catastrophic event by somehow using up those 18 seconds that we maybe don't know should have been used elsewhere. There's no risk.

There's no risk because over 99 point, you know, many nines percent of the sun's rays that fall on Earth go unused. Like God put the bright fusion bulb in the sky.

That's kind of crazy that, I mean, as far as I know, there's not a great deal of work being done to harness that.

Actually, it's really exciting. Like solar starts, you remember how our power grid almost failed here?

Yeah.

You know, because of the icepocalypse, as I call it. And we were like an hour away from literally the entire Texas power grid. Yeah.

And all of us up here in Idaho are making fun of you. You've probably heard of it.

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Well, kind of rightfully so, because we decided to have our own power grid and we don't want to share with other states. And, you know, Texas, you know, I mean, that's in me too. I'm very independent. But, but, but basically we have an insane number of solar starts now since that near power grid failure. And the price of solar is going down exponentially now across the world. And so it is already, we're on that curve. Like anybody that's ever been in technology knows that when a curve starts going like that, it's just going to keep going like that. And you know, when the cost curve starts going like that, I mean, I remember when Keith Benjamin told me when Amazon was being heckled by Barron's and and Jeff Bezos was on the COVID with Amazon Bomb with a bomb next to his head and it was losing so much money and yada, yada, yada. He was like, I had put all of my mom's money in Amazon stock. Everything, 100% of her cash is now in Amazon stock. And I'm like, that's crazy. He's like, trust me, I helped take Amazon public. This is going to turn out really well for her. Right? It did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good bet.

But at that point in time, it was what was believed. So, and he told me at that point in time that he said, look, you have to imagine a world where bandwidth is going to go to zero cost. It's just going to be ubiquitous. Everybody's going to have high-speed internet, shipping these products. He's going to have he's going to have, you know, everywhere, everywhere that matters is going to have a warehouse there. He's going to be able to get them. And he's like, and he's going to go into all these different business lines. Like this was before AWS and all this stuff. So, so I mean, you know, I was like, okay, we decode the, we can decode the sun, then we have energy everywhere. We can desalinate all over the planet. We can power robots with solar, it's just constantly coming in, you know, and you know, you gotta get solar batteries to a point where they can store enough to even run at night so you can have 24/7. And look, you need the robots to go build the roads that Chad needs to build the healthcare abundance they need to build the farming, et cetera, they need. And, you know, quantum computing's going to dramatically speed everything up. And brain computer interfaces are going to help us decode the nature of consciousness and this actual reality that we're in and going to help us self-regulate. Because right now we're very unregulated in America in terms— I'm talking about regulation in terms of our brain constantly being hijacked by social media algorithmic programming of the things that should make us terrified.

Well, our brain's already being hijacked, but when you say brain-computer interface, that's a scary phrase for a lot of people who would imagine some kind of the necessity for a tech implant or something like that. Are you thinking of something along those lines?

Well, so I'm not thinking along those lines except for some use cases. So I do believe when Elon Musk says we're going to cure blindness through Neuralink, I think that's correct. Like these are just input mechanisms. You can see quadriplegics, you know, as, as the initial patients of things like Neuralink that are getting a new lease on life. Like, and it's really beautiful if you haven't seen those videos of the people that have gotten the implants. I do not believe in the Ray Kurzweil claim that we're just going to merge with machines. Like, I think, or that we're just going to be able to upload our brains. I think there's something extremely divine about consciousness. I think that we're never going to fully understand the nature of consciousness, but we're going to be able to understand how to navigate consciousness better and how to get emotionally regulated much better. As a result.

But you don't believe consciousness is purely materialistic that we can somehow simulate it or replicate it or clone it?

Yeah, absolutely not. No, no. Consciousness is for sure fundamental. We are fish swimming in the ocean. We cannot step outside of consciousness. That's why we can never understand completely what consciousness is. I do not think the hard problem will ever be solved. There's not a biological solve for the hard problem of consciousness. But I do think that we can grasp at it more and more. And you know what I, what I came out with before the Love Conquers Fear book is The Lattice, you know, which I think you've read, which is my science fiction novella, which I came out with last September to give humanity a positive vision of the way things could play out. And it covers the years 2030 through 2085. And you may remember in The Lattice, it's brain-computer interfaces that proves that spirituality and science are two sides of the same coin, and that unites humanity. And as a result, that actually came through a psychedelic journey, by the way, that first part of it.

Oh, interesting.

What I call God's final exam. God's final exam was, will we make it or not? Are we going to be one of those keystone species in the universe? Are we going to extinct ourselves? And we pass the exam, we unite, then we start to collaborate globally. And we start to solve things like faster-than-light speed travel, et cetera. We have a very Star Trek-like future. But it's funny because at the end of The Lattice, as Dr. Alexander Bliss, the protagonist, is passing away, he realizes that the ancient mystics already knew what we had to prove scientifically. And that's why in The Lattice, by quoting from different ancient scripture sources, whether it's, whether it's Kabbalah, you know, the Zohar, whether it's the Tao Te Ching, whether it's the Bible, et cetera, it's all the same. It's just us like being in the dark, grasping different parts of God like an elephant and trying to say, well, I have my hand on the tail. This is what God is. And another person's got their hand on the trunk. And, but it's all the same thing. And by the way, that doesn't nullify anything like Jesus is the son of God, just like you and I are sons of God. Jesus is just at a much higher level of consciousness than you or I are at and had a much more direct kind of connection to source. And there's many people that have been like that. Dalai Lama is like that, Moses, Abraham, et cetera. And so that's super exciting. And we're kind of seeing that through the telepathy tapes and other that there's these children that people would say, well, they're disabled, but actually they have much more special gifts, right?

Disabled, but enabled.

Exactly. They're much more enabled, but they're treated in a certain way, just like, you know, in a crude comparison, like the way I was treated when I was a little nerd growing up, you know, like being different.

My sons are 18. And I know you have children and they're kind of in the teenage-ish years, maybe a little older. What advice would you give to, and the reason I ask is also because, I mean, I don't know if you saw the recent graduation speeches where a lot of young people are booing and seem very scared of and threatened by AI. I mean, what advice do you give to a young up-and-comer in terms of how to prepare for What might be that age of abundance that would ideally happen if things fall into place the way that you're proposing in the book?

Well, so I really think that people should not be afraid of technology. People should be afraid of how people use technology. Technology itself is not good or evil. The way you use technology, like algorithms are not actually evil unless you create an algorithm to goal seek to make people depressed. So they keep click, click, clicking like a mouse in a maze looking for the cheese because you want to push ads at them and put profits over people. That's a different thing, right? That's an application of technology for a profit over people motive. And it has societal impacts. Just like, you know, if you've ever seen that movie, Thank You for Smoking, you know, Aaron Eckhart, you know, in that movie, he It's a great line of like, everybody's got to pay their mortgage. And so, so like, the more that humanity rediscovers the heart, the more the heart conquers the head, the more we get back to what ancient scripture was talking about. Again, whether it's the Bible or if you actually listen to what Jesus said, directly quoting, it was all about selfless service, right? It was all about manifesting love. In each other.

Right. Love God, love others.

Yes. And, and if, and so if we do that with any technology, we'll be fine. 100%. So it's up to us. Like a nuclear weapon itself is a horrible technology in the way it was designed to be used to create mass destruction. We have 50 times the amount of nuclear weapons today that we need to destroy all of humanity, almost all of humanity, and put the world into a nuclear winter for a decade. That's like The Matrix where the skies are dark and that would pop through to even see the sun. That would, that's what it would do. Like 2%, 2% of today's nuclear weapons. So we, why do we do that? Right? Because we're trying to hijack each other's amygdala, the fear center. It's like, Ben, if you punch me, I'm going to punch you so hard, I destroy everything. Right? And it's a crazy— it's a lunacy. It's called MAD. It's called mutually assured destruction. It's literally like humanity has a disease of the sphere center and the way that we play these power games over each other. And so we have to wake up collectively. And I think that the divine is trying to wake us up right now. I think that's why you see more and more things happening as people awaken. I think you'll see a lot more things like the telepathy tapes happen as people wake up and consciousness is forcing us to wake up. Consciousness and God to me are synonymous and both rooted deeply in love and unconditional love for us all. I would tell them, like, follow your passions. Like, hopefully you have a mom like I did where they understand that you're really passionate about something, you know, your son working on the cards and You know, you're smart enough to, you know, like Steven Spielberg's parents were smart enough to say, hey, you're watching a lot of movies, but wow, you're really dissecting them. And they weren't saying you're wasting your time, Steven, right? You know, create the world's best director. And so, you know, I would say don't be afraid of technology. Be part of the light to use technology to create the world that frankly, we should all want, which is a world led from the heart, not from the ego. And actually do what Jesus said. Like, you could do what Jesus said now at scale across the planet. And by the way, it may not take that many human beings to wake up. Like, it took one in India. It took one Gandhi to change an entire country to say, through our sheer numbers, We can tell the British to stop and we can do it through nonviolence, right? So it may be just a handful of bodhisattvas that like really get going and say, we're going to use technology at scale to create the social network that should have been created to create the food products that should have been created, right? To create the pharmaceutical products that should have been created, not the ones that just barely work and keep us addicted, or the depression drugs where if you mix two together, it makes you more suicidal, et cetera. And so it's up to us, it's up to Team Humanity. And the technology is a forcing function, A, for us to decide, because with great power comes great responsibility. So our ability to destroy ourselves has never been more present, but B, it also gives you superpowers to create abundance.

And so And I would even say, by the way, abundance without the potential stress or extreme urgent necessity for monetization because automation and AI might fulfill Maslow's hierarchy in such a way that we actually freed up to kind of create that flywheel of abundance.

And I would also say if I was a parent, if I'm talking to parents versus the teenager, I would say parents, like, regulate yourself. Like Abraham Lincoln had a beautiful quote which said, if you want your child to walk in a certain direction, you yourself must walk in that direction. So like, get off the junk food. And I'm talking about the mental junk food too. Like stop watching the TV about the worst aspects of humanity that are amplified through some fiction story. Like, you know, show the kids things like Unknown Cosmic Time Machine. It's a documentary on Netflix about the making of the James Webb Telescope. You watch that as a family, you end that documentary with this feeling of humanity can do anything. It's like beautiful, right? And there's so much content, like, you know, what we put in our minds is much, much more sacred than anything else, any other part of our body. And And, that's true of all things, right? I mean, I stopped watching pornography years ago, et cetera. That also came through a journey. It wasn't even in the journey that gave me that insight. It was just as I walked a more spiritual path, it just didn't even have a pull for me anymore.

Yeah. And, anything like sex, for example, which is sacred, I think the more spiritually aware you become, the more you realize that sacred things like that need to be kept sacred.

That's right. And it actually, you know, you stop watching porn, guess what? Like sex gets better because you're making love and you're not like, you know, you don't have that crap in your mind that isn't love. They're just performing for money, you know? And it's very objectifying. You know, there's a chapter in my book, chapter 8, on the objectification of women. And it's about the millennia of suffering that we've had. That's where the othering comes from. That's where the punching down comes from. And it's because of testosterone dominance, which led to really crazy decisions like women not having the right to vote in our country here in America until about 100 years ago. But women of color, that took another 50 years, or women not being able to have a checking account in America until the late 1970s. So let's say they were in a bad marriage. They had to go to their dad and say, hey, can you help me get a checking account? Because I need to get out of this marriage. And the dad said like, just suck it up and be nice to your husband or whatever, then they just had to suffer for the rest of their life until the law changed.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. We've only scratched the surface of what's actually in "Love Conquers Fear." I feel like I could just talk with you all day, Brett. So, I will in the shownotes, I'm going to link not just to that but also the trilogy that you wrote. It's not super long, guys, don't worry. And that's going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/bretthirt, B-R-E-T-T-H-I-R-T. And then the book, Love, Cocker, Fear, I'm assuming now available on Amazon, Barnes Noble.

It's available on June 23rd.

June 23rd. Okay. So, that'll be—

It's me reading Audible for better or worse, although it's the best version of my voice because I had to say it over and over and over again. It's not an AI me. The book is available on hardcover for preorder right now. And of course, the Kindle version, all the things I'm going to, the publisher is waiting probably 6 months before it goes to paperback. And yeah, it's super fun. It's my soul song. I mean, this is my love letter to humanity. It's my deep prayer for us to make it to the other side. And let me just say, just to wrap up in terms of the book, that it covers everything from geopolitics to healthcare, to education, to, as I mentioned, the objectification of women, to nuclear weapons and warfare, to climate change and energy, to religion. So it's really like if you like books that aren't dogmatically separating things and mixing it all together and saying, how, how are you going to create abundance in all of these areas? How are we going to overcome the biggest problems in these areas? This is a book for you. I mean, it's a book about consciousness, AI, spirituality, all in one, where usually things, they're, they're because of our dogmatic separation, the way we're programmed, people are afraid to kind of cross the streams. You know, Ghostbusters always said don't cross the streams and I've crossed all the streams with this book, but it's because it's, 'cause that's, I think the way we need to be operating.

Yeah. And you did a good job and people should read it. So bengreenfieldlife.com/bretthurt, check it out. And the book again is Love Conquers Fear. Brett, thanks so much, man. We'll have to celebrate the next time I'm in Austin. We'll, we'll grab sushi or You bet.

Yeah, thank you.

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