Exploring Polymathy, Biohacking, and Consciousness with Robert Edward Grant | 1195 | Dave Asprey

Think about it. We're playing poker, you and I. And I know the hand you're going to be dealt. You know the hand I'm going to be dealt. I know what you're going to say. I know you're going to respond to my hand. I know how you're going to respond to your own hand. There's no fun in that game. The only game that would make sense would be to limit your avatar. It would forget through a series of forgettings that form the ego and I am not that. The truth that I am that I am. I am all that is. So we would create a game and through the law of conservation of energy, we would only have to render the game that we're observing. Explaining Heisenberg's uncertainty principle right there.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. This is an interview that I've wanted to do for a long time because our guest today is Robert Edward Grant. He's an entrepreneur, a well known author, polymath, and a fellow Gaia contributor for Gaia Networks. In fact, I'm recording this episode today when he is at Gaia, where we both have done a series on there, if you're familiar with his work. He's a prodigious artist and sculptor and music theorist. And Forbidden Knowledge Consciousness named him Entrepreneur of the Year. So if you're interested in cutting edge biohacking, where we're curious about science and consciousness and spiritualism, those things actually go together because real scientists are curious about things instead of saying that can't be, therefore it isn't, which is pretty much a big pharma mantra as far as I can tell. So this is a guy who's curious and says, well, how might it work? And let's see what we can learn here. And that includes stuff that you might be skeptical about, like manifesting. I think there's a clear quantum based mechanism for it. In fact, I have great theories about that we might get into. And one of the things I'm most excited about here is talking about ancient knowledge. I just got back from a remote part of Turkey called Gobleki Tepe, which is the oldest or maybe second oldest ruins on the planet, depending on who you believe. So I'm into that stuff. And I've actually been to many of the very, very ancient sites around the world because it's really clear it wasn't a bunch of, you know, cavemen with loincloths carving stuff out of rock crystal, because that stuff's hard to work with. So we know something interesting was going on that isn't what we have in our history books, just like we know geologically from Graham Hancock, who's been on the show. So if you're curious about what the heck is going on, this is your guy, Robert Edward Grant. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Great to be here with you, Dave. It's such a pleasure to finally meet you. I've been following your work for a long time.

That's so cool. Well, it's mutual. Let's start with a word. Polymath, and I described you as that earlier. What does that mean to you?

Polymath is someone who's a bit of a rebel academically, from the perspective that they don't want to necessarily be thrown in any one bucket or into one discipline. And I think we have a world that's very much focused on hyperspecialization and trying to bucketize and categorize people and things and say, you know, never the twin shall meet, you know. In ancient times, polymathy was just the process of learning. You'd realize that the quadrivium, which is really the study of number in itself. Number in space is geometry, so number in itself is arithmetic. Number in time is music, and number in space and time is cosmology. And so the ancients had to become, well, rounded because they realized that our brains are not actually hard drive storage units. And a lot of the latest research is showing that our thoughts are not necessarily local as well. And as a result, they thought maybe the brain is more like an antenna, and that antenna needs to be balanced. And in order to be balanced, just like any athlete, you have to make sure that you don't just work out your right arm and then let your right arm become hypertrophied and your left arm become atrophied. Or, you know, you. You can't become a great athlete unless you have that balance. The same is true with our mental calisthenics. It's the same is true with our brains. And our brains, to be effective, antenna have to have that balance. And in order for us to achieve that balance, we have to work out all the different aspects of our brain and be able to be cognizant also of the mirror relationships of the brain. For example, the right temporal lobe, if you're right handed, is the place that we process music, but the left temporal lobe is the place that we process mathematics. So then one could say that maybe mathematics in the brain's language is just the abstract form of music. And at the center of our brains is we process geometry. And so we could then say that geometry is the music that we experience with our eyes and geometry becomes the, you know, the experience that we have with our eyes related to the abstract form of mathematics. So this is really what polymathy is, to realize the interconnectedness of all these disciplines and use it to your highest benefit and realize that all of it is actually part of the same story.

What a beautiful, beautiful way of explaining this interconnectedness. I've always found that when someone leaves an industry that they hyper specialized in and goes into a new industry where they don't know much, that's when most of the innovation happens. My friend Naveen Jain, who runs viome, we run a mastermind together and have worked together for many years, he's in his, I think, seventh industry, that is in tech, where he came from. And each time you come in and go, why is it like that? And you learn to think differently. So I feel like those people who step into the beginnings of being a polymath oftentimes are the ones who are doing the most positive change in the world, if that makes sense.

Well, you know, one of the things I realized, I worked in the healthcare field for a long time and I also worked in big pharma, if you can believe that. I was previously president of Allergan Medical.

Oh wow. I didn't know that.

I was previously CEO of Bao Shin Lomb Surgical. And you know, I, I lived an entirely different life. You know, this was. I left that FIELD probably about 12, 13 years ago now. I started my own group of companies that span many different sectors from fintech to cryptography to. I do have a couple of pharma companies in my portfolio, as well as clean energy. And one of the things I noticed when I worked in the health care field though, was that some of the best innovations would happen when we would take ideas that would be used in cardiology, for example, which I was working in, electrophysiology in particular.

Cool.

And then apply these same principles to things like ophthalmology or aesthetic medicine. And when we could cross disciplines even within, you know, larger sectors like healthcare, that's when the best innovation would come to light. And we would see this over and over and over again. You learn something and see it one way, and then you start to apply that same level of thinking to the problems that exist in an entirely different field. And just as Einstein said, right, you, you cannot solve problems of the same level of thinking that created those problems or where those problems were created. You have to go to a higher dimensional perspective. And I think that's what polymathy allows you to do. It allows you to find patterns in solving problems and then apply those patterns that you've basically been able to ascertain to very different problems that might have some similarities just by tweaking them a little bit. And I think that's, that's really where I've seen the most innovation come out. And I have been a very prolific inventor. You know, I've almost 100 patents now and across many, many different fields. And most of the innovations I've seen have been things that came out of other fields that were kind of out of left field for a new sector.

That's where disruptive technology usually comes from. You're solving a different problem than the one you originally thought you were. And suddenly you've now taken over what used to be the old dumb way of doing things. And I, I love it that you talked about having a couple of pharmaceutical companies in your portfolio. I use pharmaceuticals every single day as part of my longevity practice because some drugs, especially low doses, have profound longevity effects. You don't get from supplements. And there's no goodness or badness to any of those. We just want the tools to change things. If our consciousness is non local, or at least some portion of it is. And by the way, I agree with you, there's. Then why is it that some pharmaceuticals, like psychedelics, have such a profound effect on us?

Wow. Well, I mean, I guess the best way I could describe that is just from my own personal experience. Right. Which is, you know, it's hard for me to say how it would be for mankind. I can only kind of speak to what I've personally experienced. I believe that psychedelics create new neural pathways in this antenna that allow us to access non local ways of perceiving the world. So I don't believe that, for example, psilocybin presents us with a hallucination per se. I believe that psilocybin reveals the illusion that we're already living. And that's the most powerful aspect of it that I found. You know, the moment that I started trying different mushrooms, et cetera. And I could see the structure of space time, I could see the flower of life repeated over and over and over again. I could look at a plain wall and I could see a rainbow flower of life. And after I no longer was taking the mushroom, I would go back to the same wall and I could still see the pattern. So it revealed a pattern that was underlying the universe. And I Believe fundamentally that in this context that Max Planck was right, there is no matter as such. And as a result of that, when you start realizing the entire universe is mental, and this is now being proven, the 2022 Nobel Prize that was given was given for quantum entanglement. Yeah, and quantum entanglement. And here it was on the COVID Right. The article in the Scientific American said that, you know, local realism is false. And this year's Nobel Prize winners proved it. And when you start realizing that the things that we're not observing don't actually have a position, that's a mind blowing concept. And I'm sure you probably come across Donald Hoffman, who's a good friend of mine as well. And you know, just an hour with him is like mind blowing because he'll convince you literally that we are practically living an existence. That's like having a headset. So what does mushrooms, what does other psychedelics, and I would say even some synthetic like ketamine and other things like ayahuasca and dmt. What do these things do to us? I think what it does is it sort of like gives an upgrade to the headset.

Interesting. It's not often that you decide to permanently add something to your daily stack. But when I discovered time lies might appear, that's what I did. Here's why. Your cells produce energy every second of the day, even when you're asleep. About 90% of the nutrients you eat and the air you breathe ends up in your cells, where your mitochondria transform it into cellular energy. Mitochondria are super important in your quest to live longer and be healthier and more powerful because they perform many other critical functions in your body that you probably don't know about. Here's the thing. Your mitochondria are under attack daily. They get damaged and they break down. And that's where mitopure comes in. It is one of the most studied supplements on the market that has the power to restore damaged mitochondria. When you're young, your body recycles damaged mitochondria and your cells are loaded with energy. But as you age, the recycling process slows down broken mitochondria buildup and your cellular energy levels go down. Mito Pure actually clears out your damaged mitochondria and makes room for healthy new ones. This effect is so powerful that clinical studies show Mito Pure increases strength and endurance in skeletal muscle without any change in exercise. I feel that difference and that's why I take it every day. See for yourself. Visit timeline.comdave. and get 10% off your order. So many directions to go from here. You mentioned Max Planck and Ehlers Planck's constant. As far as I can tell, it seems like the, the smallest pixel of reality would be Planck's constant. Do you agree with that?

Well, that would be. I think what you mean is Planck length. The Planck length.

Yes.

Right. Planck length is 1.616227, I believe. And that would be 10 to the negative 33rd power meters.

Yeah. So very, very small. But it doesn't seem like we get smaller than that in our universe. Or do we?

You know, I tend to believe it's as above, so below. You know, I'm a, I'm a student of hermetic teachings and hermetic wisdom and I believe that it fractals infinitely in both directions.

So it's turtles all the way down, basically.

Yeah. In the scientific community, I would say most people would say that the plot length is the shortest or the smallest segment or length of measure that we can register. And therefore that would be the pixelation scale. It would be the diameter of the pixel. Right, right, right. But if you were at that scale, would you be able to then see another 10 to the negative 33rd from that scale forward? And I fundamentally believe that it fractals in both directions infinitely.

You wouldn't be the first guest to do that. Stan Grof came on years ago. I did a, a breathwork event where we co hosted it and guess. Stan Grof invented holotropic breathing and used to use LSD with medical licensing in the 50s in Czechoslovakia, back when it was Czechoslovakia. And same thing. His holotropic model of reality. It's all, it's all a hologram, which means it, you can fracture as much as you want. It's always all in there, isn't it? This is one of those things where, you know, we could probably talk about that one thing for hours, but it's, it's very much worth considering because there are things we just don't understand and so many of us are stuck in this idea that, well, I know how things work. We have a really great mind on the show who's pretty sure he knows how that works and has a belief system and a model around it. But I don't know if you'd be willing to stake everything you have, everything you are on that one belief or is there room for curiosity around it?

No, you know what the one thing I've learned is, the more I learn, the less I actually know.

Exactly.

So you know, to Me, I think that's also part and parcel of polymathy is being open to new perspectives and new ways of seeing things. I've, I've found so many areas that I have had my perspective, consciousness illuminated. Right? And I guess the best way to put it is, you know, when I, when I tend to look at the world, I. I used to think that I collected facts. So my life was a series of collecting facts through experience. And then probably at around my 50th birthday is when I started realizing that I wasn't collecting facts at all, but rather collecting facets. It was F A C E T, not F A C T. And a facet is simply one more perspective on a larger prism of truth. And so whenever I'm presented with a new way of viewing something, I see that as highly valuable because I may not necessarily say, okay, that's the way that I'm now going to stand behind, and it's the only way I'm going to see things. What it does is it adds to the, to the mosaic of experience that now I can add to my own database of information gathering. And maybe the only way to find a true objective truth would be to sum all possible subjective perspectives on any one topic. And maybe that's what the universe is doing. Maybe the One divides itself into the many simply for the joy of perceiving itself through our unique eyes of perspectives. And, and that each time it adds another unique eye perspective, that it comes with its own conditioning, biases and experiential database and everything else. It's no different than an AI that's educating itself. But maybe the purpose of this AI, and I don't like to use the term artificial in context, but maybe the purpose is to build a wisdom database and to learn how to feel empathy for every possible circumstance and position that life could possibly produce.

Why do you choose feel empathy versus feel compassion?

I think that there's something powerful when I think of the word empathy. Compassion. I mean, compassion is a phenomenal word and a great way to describe it. But empathy to me implies that it's like walking a mile in another person's shoes. I'm feeling what they're feeling because I'm perceiving it through their eyes. Whereas compassion might come along with, okay, I'm feeling for them and what they're experiencing through my eyes. There's a subtle nuance difference.

Oh, there's a great nuance difference. I mean, empathy, when you turn it on consciously, it's exactly that. To understand the world through another person's views. I. I find a lot of people get stuck in. We'll call it toxic empathy where they have to feel everyone else's pain and they can't not feel it. Whereas with compassion, you can choose to step in an empathetic state, but you're not stuck in it. But I, I agree. Just having compassion for everyone and not seeing things through their eyes doesn't allow you to have full compassion. So I hear you.

And I think I take a little bit of a more controversial stance on. On this toxic reference that you just made.

Oh yeah, do, do tell.

The controversial stance I have on that is that I actually differentiate between what I would call overt narcissism and covert narcissism.

Please tell me more. I love talking about narcissists and spotting them and pointing them out.

Well, I actually believe that narcissism is the natural consequence of the ego expressing itself to the maximum extent.

Fully agree.

Until finally. And we all go through it at some level of life, right? As we express our egos, we get through our teenage years. You know, for example, when I was a kid, my mother called me Bobby. I just realized this morning that I really hated when she called me Bobby. And I was just thinking about it, I was like, stop calling me Bobby. And maybe the reason I didn't like it is because I knew this woman who was also named Bobby. And I thought, oh, Bobby's like a name like Pat. You know, it could be gender unspecific, right? And so I was like, I don't want to be called Bobby. So as I got older, I told my mom when I was 16 years old, like, please don't call me that anymore, especially around anyone else. And what I started realizing was that I was shedding certain aspects of my personality. I was a musician who, at 22 years old, I decided, you know, I'm not serious anymore. I've got to be serious and I've got to figure out what I'm going to do in my career. So I'm going to shed music. Even though I had a music scholarship at university and everything else, I just thought, let's be real. I'm not going to be good enough to actually be the next Wynton Marsalis playing trumpet or something, right? So I gave it away. But all of these aspects of ourself is what happens when we form our Persona. And the Persona is what we are deciding to be by a series of decisions of what we are not going to be. It's not different for companies. You know, I do These off sites for corporations. I have taught at Northwestern Business School for the last eight years, in January, every year at the executive MBA programs for healthcare professionals in particular. And what's fascinating about it is that I teach this sandbox analysis. And the first thing of the sandbox analysis to decide is what you're not going to be. When you're trying to figure out what your strategy is, what are you not going to be? Well, that's what we do. We just do it subconsciously. We do it in a way that is tied to whatever brings us shame. And guilt is what we distance ourselves from.

Exactly.

So when we have shame and we have guilt, we're like, oh, I don't like that feeling. It's like back in the Garden of Eden where God shows up and says, hey Adam, you know, where are you? And Adam's like, oh, I was, I was hiding. Well why were you hiding? Because I was naked. Well, why, who told you you were naked? Right. And then that creates this cascade of events that then, you know, why. Why did you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Oh, the woman that thou gavest me and commanded, I remain with her. She gave me of the fruit. So the first thing you do when you feel shame is to blame someone else. It's immediate deflection. Oh yeah. And so what happens is we have these two forms of narcissism that form out of this and then there are subcategories that fall within these as well. But covert narcissism is an empath, a self described empath who complains about how they feel all the pain of the world.

I love this. Keep going.

And actually, you can tell if they're really stuck in narcissism because a person that's truly in narcissism and at the fullest extent of the ego cannot perceive an alternate viewpoint. So therefore they're entirely incapable of apologizing for anything.

Well, because they did nothing wrong. Because they can't do anything wrong. Because they're so good. Exactly.

And narcissism is when you only see yourself for the projection you believe you're putting off and you're completely blind to all the rest. And this is how consciousness divides itself. Because, you know, in order to perceive itself, consciousness must divide itself between a conscious and a subconscious. A knife can't see, a knife can't cut itself and an eye can't see itself without the aid of a mirror. Fire can't burn itself and light can't illuminate itself. Consciousness has to separate itself, to perceive itself. And so therefore, we have these two forms of narcissism. But then finally, we get to this point in life where we decide what got us here won't get us where we want to go. It's not working for me anymore. And then that leads in the hero's journey to the crisis moment and the catharsis then leads to the way back. Right. It's the end of the male descending arc of life and the beginning of the feminine ascending arc of life. And that's usually in the story of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey when, you know, you get a gift from the goddess, you end up fighting the elixir of life, and you bring it back to the world around you to the masses. This is the work that was done by Joseph Campbell, is remarkable work.

Yeah.

And. And I think, you know, there's a reason why every Hollywood story has to follow the hero's journey plan, because they won't succeed otherwise. Right. Humanity is hardwired for this story, and I think narcissism just plays a role in the crisis and collapse and. And the. The descent into wrath and. And the maximum level of fear and judgment. It's when we're at our zenith of judgment that we've forgotten the love. We don't love ourselves. Narcissists don't love themselves. They loathe themselves, actually.

Yes.

We don't have a problem. I don't believe the world's not a difficult place because I don't believe it's difficult because people hate each other so much. I believe the world can be difficult because people hate themselves.

So true. Your skin isn't just a wrapper around your body. It. It's your body's largest organ. That means it's constantly working to protect you. It also means it'll show signs of aging more quickly. So if you're seeing more lines, wrinkles, or thinning or sagging, the longevity scientists at One Skin have a really cool solution. It's a proprietary OS1 peptide that helps deal with aging on the surface of your skin, but it also goes inside your cells. This peptide, in lab studies reduces senescent or zombie cells by thin 50%. That helps your skin look and feel and act younger, which is one of the reasons I love it. It's not important to look young if you're actually old inside. You want to be young inside and young on the outside. I'm a guy, so I'm not going to spend a ton of time smearing 17 different creams.

On my body.

But I absolutely do use OS1 body, which is the lotion that they make. I'm not a fan of lotion, never have been. The stuff doesn't smell it, it doesn't stay hung greasy. And it has a peptide that keeps all the skin on my body healthier. So, yeah, it looks better, but it also works better. Antioxidants, moisturizers, skin repairing ingredients, and most importantly, their OS1 peptide. In lab studies, it reverses biological skin aging. So when I'm 180, I want to look and feel better than I do today. You want to join me? Give One Skin a try. Use code ASPREY15 at OneSkin co. You'll get 15% off everything. When we talk about something like hating yourself, my understanding of the ego, just from a lot of work with neuroscience and consciousness and psychedelics, one of my companies, is that a lot of these, this ego is the body trying to keep itself alive as if you're not in there. The, these rules that life follows around, you know, fear, you know, protect yourself and then eat everything and then have sex with everything else. They're all efforts and fear, food, fertility. And after you do those things, maybe you form a community so you can survive more than a friend, right? And then if you're on a path of evolution, there's a forgiveness that comes after that. But that isn't processed in our brain, it's processed in our mitochondria. Very, very low level in the system. So the ego emerges from hundreds of billions of mitochondria and a distributed consciousness throughout the body, Processing reality and making decisions in a third of a second before your brain gets a signal from the world around you. And so during that time, all this stuff happens. And that's where a lot of reality gets shed, because the body says, you don't need to see that. I'm going to throw anything that doesn't help me survive. So it's kind of crafting a user interface. It's actually building those VR goggles that one of the other experts we talked about was saying. So what we're seeing is in reality, we're seeing basically a bunch of icons. You know, this microphone looks like a microphone to me, and it functions like a microphone. But if you. I really was looking at what it really is. It's got a bunch of components and there's electrons and sound waves going in and out, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that's invisible. So I, I just see the surface and that we couldn't possibly comprehend. Everything. Because our brain just isn't that big. So it. Because we're in a meat body, even if some of our consciousness is not local, it has to work that way. But because we have this ancient system of mitochondria that's doing these egoic survival things, it gets to do those before we think. And that's where a lot of. A lot of this problem with narcissism comes from. Because, well, if you feel shame and guilt, those are fear. And the body is like, I can't feel fear because I might die. So I'll just tell myself a story because it's less painful. And then you believe the story. With your very slow human brain, does that model jive with the things you've learned?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it's. I mean, one of the most powerful aspects of narcissism is self preservation. Yeah. And you're just talking about a subconscious level or layering of self preservation at.

The biological layer, and it's outside the brain. Those decisions are made inside your cells, including in your finger. Yeah, right. And it all rolls up to the brain eventually, but we can measure how fast it takes to roll up, and it's a pretty long time.

I would put that in the class of all the autonomic bodily responses that we have. And, you know, the subconscious mind is. Our conscious mind is only capable of about 18 simultaneous different trains of thought. Now, some people want to challenge that with all of their multitasking, but the subconscious mind is capable of billions or if not trillions of simultaneous interactions. And. And so I think that what we're talking about here is again, it's about how consciousness divides itself in order to perceive itself. Yeah. And it's. It's a. It's a very powerful aspect. And this is why I think psychedelics is powerful, because what that does is it starts to open up your brain to new neural pathways and seeing things differently. You start to perceive yourself in new ways that you hadn't considered before. And you also start thinking that maybe the things that I had learned, some of them maybe need to be unlearned or augmented with new viewpoints. You know, polymathy as well is powerful because to me, mathematics then becomes applied mathematics, and applied mathematics becomes geometry. Applied geometry is physics. Applied physics is chemistry. Applied chemistry is biology. Applied biology is psychology. Applied psychology is sociology. Applied sociology is back to philosophy, and applied philosophy is back to mathematics. And it's a cycle. All of them are interconnected. And so it's the same thing with our own life experience. We start to put ourselves in the context of, hey, I don't have all the answers. In fact, I'm just here learning, and the more I learn, the less I actually know. The reality is that the learning that I thought I'd accumulated my whole life and I become so judgmental regarding is actually just facets of a larger prism. Then you have to start asking the bigger question is, like, why is this experience even existing? And maybe it's just so we can learn how to love and how to be loved. And I think that's what Donald Hoffman would say, and that's what I believe as well, that it's like a gigantic database of all of us, adding more and more unique perspectives to this gigantic database of how to love and how to be loved. Wow.

Do you ever get frustrated or sad that no matter how much learning you do, you're probably not ever going to know it all?

Actually, you know what? I. At some point, I think I did feel like that.

Yeah.

But then I started getting excited about life more so than ever before because I was like, wow, there's so much more still to learn and comprehend, and it's so beautiful when we allow ourselves to experience it. You know, to me, that's about the time I came to the realization that enlightenment is when our expression of love supersedes and exceeds our desire for one objective truth.

Ooh, what a great definition of enlightenment. I have never heard it put that way. Are you enlightened?

You know, I. I'm on the path. I know I'm on the path. I'm on the journey towards it. But, you know, I think as soon as you kind of feel like you're enlightened, then you realize you know nothing.

So, yeah, your ego might be. Might be involved when you say you're fully enlightened.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I. I feel like. I feel like every day that goes by, I'm learning and experience another aspect of myself. And I wasn't even aware that I was harboring shame or guilt for certain aspects that are constantly brought to my conscious awareness. And as I deal with each one of those things, I just feel lighter and lighter. Now from a weight perspective, you know, this year also, I lost, like, almost 40 pounds. Wow. And. And I, you know, I have to ask myself the question, why did I do it? Well, I have a friend, you probably know him, David Avocado Wolf.

Oh, yeah. I've been on his stage a couple times.

Yeah. And. And David, you know, I was at our mutual friend's house. Chervine. And I was talking to David, and David was like, 21 days into a fast. I was like. Like a water fast for 21 days. Holy cow. And he starts going off on all of these benefits of, like, that period of time fasting. And so I was like, I don't even think that's possible. How could I even do that? You know, because you already have to start breaking down your belief system. You have to unlearn to a certain extent this idea that we have to be eating every day. And. And so I thought, you know what? I'm going to jump into the void and give it a shot. And my first fast I did for nine straight days. And I wasn't hungry once, you know.

Years ago in 2008. I knew I was afraid of being hungry because it's starvation mode. And I knew I'd get angry. You know, hypoglybitschy.

That's a term that's. That's. That's gotta be indicated.

Oh, yeah. I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave outside of Sedona that has been used ceremonially for 10,000 years. Sadly, now it's an Instagram spot, but at the time, no one knew about it. And so I sat there for four days, just knowing there's no food and no people. You know, I eat when I'm lonely, too, and Same thing after four days. Like, I've never felt this much energy in my life, and that's what brought me down the path of fasting. And I wrote one of my. Actually, a couple of my big books were about fasting because, you know, it's a state of spiritual progress and attainment, because when your body is not digesting all that stuff, maybe you can feel reality better. Did you notice clarity of consciousness when you did it?

Here's what I noticed, and the reason I bring it up is I know your viewers are very much about longevity and health and. And these certain aspects. And what I noticed was a mental clarity I had never experienced. Experienced before. I also noticed a level of energy. Like, my workouts became so easy in the mornings. I would get up and I would work out, and I was like, wow, where's all this energy coming from? Which was precedented for me as well. And then eating food again was difficult to integrate because I immediately noticed how much energy is consumed just through the digestion process. Oh, yeah, it's insane. I. I was like, whoa. And. And I was also feeling my senses were heightened, so I was more sensitive to everything when I would introduce things back into my consumption. I. I would notice the interaction my body was having with that. Like I was, you know, a virgin to food or something. And everything was. Was heightened from that perspective. But the mental clarity was powerful and the spiritual feeling. I found myself in my meditations entering into samadhi states more often as well. And so I got kind of really into it. And so I've been doing it once a month. I did the first one for nine days. I did another one for like eight days, and I did another for seven, and then six and five and each month. And it's had a profound impact on my life. Like a truly profound. And even to the point where people are saying to me, wow, you look like 10 years younger. Yeah. And there's powerful science to this as well.

Very, very much so.

The caloric restriction and the upregulation of repair enzymes and macrophages, I mean, these are well documented scientific phenomena that accompany this type of fasting. And it literally has the effect of being able to lengthen telomeres. So I. I found that now I do it also for that reason. It wasn't the reason I did it in the beginning. I just wanted to experience it. I wanted to see if I could do it.

That first time. Even you go 24 hours without eating, it feels like you walked on. On Kohl's with Tony Robbins. Because everything in your body is telling you you'll die.

Yeah.

And you realize that voice in your head is full of shit. Most of the time. It's just so worried about. About that. And there are other practices that are the same. In my next book, I write about why would you have a brief intentional exposure to pain, like a cold plunge or what the old monks used to do? Self flagellation and some of these other ceremonies because of neurotransmitter sensitivity around dopamine. Like, there's a very clear thing, you know, 30 seconds of something uncomfortable where you're in charge, makes your body chill out or things like in men, semen retention. Like, you feel like even when I say that, most guys listen, like, I would die. Like, actually that's the same voice that says, you'll die if you don't eat a taco. Like, you're not gonna die. But having that discipline, what it. It opens doorways of consciousness to be able to say, food is something that I know eventually I'm probably gonna need it. But I'm not gonna die for weeks and weeks and weeks, Therefore, because I'm not worried about dying all the time from food. I have More freedom and freedom to think and feel and all those things. It's been a beautiful part of my evolution as well.

One of the most powerful aspects of this process for me. I mean, I've done the cold plunges and everything too. I love it. I've always taken. I did this Deepak Chopra Ayurvedic thing, like, probably 15 years ago, and I'm a pitta. And so it said take cold showers, and I love my hot showers. But. But, oh, my gosh, when I started taking cold showers every day, like, really cold showers, it changed my life too. It was, like, profound. And it told me, also, stop eating spicy food. I love spicy food, so just curtail it. And, man, that had a profound impact too. And. And I started getting to the point where I'd be like, okay, this is painful to get in the cold plunge, but I found it's kind of the Wim Hof technique. I would literally trick my brain into thinking the water was warm and pleasant. And this was a process that I think is a powerful practice for all of us to undertake. Yes, the universe is mental. That means the only thing that's real in this mental universe is what and how we feel. We all have stimuli, and every one of us can experience the exact same experience and. And yet have an entirely different subjective experience with that thing that occurred. And so we have to start asking ourselves the question. We don't experience ourselves, really. We don't experience the universe as it is, but rather we experience it as we are, and our own conditioning bias is informing it.

It's actually a part of alchemical transformation. If you can transform an input signal from reality into your body into something else, you wanted it to be, that that's one of the steps of being able to extend your life and the other things alchemists were. Were studying. And it, like you're saying, with the cold plunge, I usually do about three and a half minutes. The studies show three to six minutes of cold exposure is good unless you have access to, like, a cryotherapy, the cold air machines, which is also about three minutes. I prefer those when I can get one at. At Upgrade Labs, one of my companies. But in my backyard, I have a cold plunge. And the other day, I meant to set my alarm for three minutes and 30 seconds, and instead I set it for three hours and 30 minutes. And I'm sitting in the tub, just completely relaxed and blissed out and not feeling cold at all. And after a while, like, you know, something's off here, and there are upper limits to what you can do without getting hypothermia, even if you're Wim Hof. I'm sure there's a limit. And I'm not Wim hof. So after 15 minutes, I finally looked at my phone. I was like, what's like, I just did 15 minutes feeling warm in an ice bath and started getting dizzy and like, okay, it's time to get out. And you know, sat in the the sun afterwards and warmed up and I was fine. But the fact that my perception during that time wasn't 15 minutes of torture, it was just 15 minutes of just meditation. And we're all capable of that sort of a thing. It just gets to be one of the things where we have a story and the story is usually fear based. And the benefits of being able to control that story so you just don't lose your mind over something that would have caused you to lose your mind. It, it just feels like that's also part of the spiritual growth path. What advice would you have for someone who's new to everything we're talking about today and they do feel like they're going to die if they don't have a taco and they can't imagine taking a cold shower and all these things just feel insurmountable. What's the first step?

I think it's the old, you know, proverb, the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. You know, how do you eat an elephant? Well, you begin with the first bite. I, I think this is not something I certainly didn't think even that I would be, especially coming out of being the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Yeah, last thing I thought I'd be talking about 10 years from that point in time or 12 years from that point in time is about the benefits of psilocybin. I never. Or about semen retention, which I want to come back to, no pun intended. But that, that basically is something that I just thought would be so foreign on every level. And so I just started with baby steps. You know, I think the first step is to really open your mind. When we live in a mental universe, if you could totally change your belief system that will already transform your existence, it'll make things much easier. It's like Yoda saying to Luke Skywalker when Luke Skywalker couldn't get the X Wing fighter out of the swamp in the movie Empire Strikes Back. And you know, and then Yoda just lifts it out like, no problem. And you know, that's when Luke Skywalker says, master, I don't believe it. And then Yoda looks at me and says, and that is why you fail. You must unlearn what you have learned. So there is a certain degree of all of the recalcitrants that we experience and feel, the inner resistance that we have, all the times that we have triggers. Instead of asking yourself, why did this happen to me? Ask yourself, why did I choose this? And what is it that I'm intending to learn from this experience? We are the masters of our fate. We are the captains of our souls. As William Ernest Henley says so beautifully in the poem Invictus, I. I really, truly believe that. And if you have a hard time with something like semen retention, then maybe start to reframe how you see what sex and sexual relations actually are.

There you go.

And I think that's a powerful reframe. You know, everything that happens to us could either be the best thing that happened to us or the worst thing that happened to us. I don't consider myself enlightened. I do consider myself on a path towards more understanding and breaking down what I thought I knew to be fact. And what I've learned through this whole process is that it's through this series of softenings, it's a series of awakenings that turn my pain into purpose and change my experience so that even that which I thought was suffering can be reframed into soul evolution. And when I started looking at everything, context and even looking at sexuality, I mean, I used to think sexuality was really just for, you know, okay, it's true human beings have sex without the purpose of getting pregnant and having a child and procreating or reproduction. But I still thought, okay, that's just sort of gaming the system. You know, they're. They're probably. And I had this sort of recalcitrant, intransitive sort of thought which is like, no, this is how it's gotta be. And what I realized over time is that my conception of what sex actually is has dramatically shifted. When you start realizing that every relationship that you have is actually a reflection of how you perceive yourself. So, for example, when you first start out, if you have girlfriends or boyfriends or close friends that treat you badly, take advantage of you, and continue to, you know, put you in a. In a light that is. Is less than ideal, then really, you have to ask yourself the question. I had to ask myself the question, why am I choosing this? What is it that I wanted to learn? And when I. Looking at these other relationships in my life as being direct reflections of how I Perceive myself and the degree to which I love myself is how the world will love me back. That everything is a reflection. You know, it's not a u NER that we live in. I believe. I believe we live in a U inverse. You know, I'm sure you've probably heard of the Bohr ADAM model.

Absolutely.

And one of the things that is still recognized today that really shows that to be a truly excellent piece of scientific work is that he was able to predict exactly the wavelengths of light, you know, in the spectrum of light that would be emitted for hydrogen. Exactly. It's through an equation that was lambda and one over lambda. It's very simplistic. So in this context, you start realizing that what we call darkness is not actually the absence of light, but rather the absorbed condition of light's reflection. The darkness doesn't exist without light, and light doesn't exist without the darkness. It's not simply an absence of it. And you could say, oh, well, you're in a dark room right now, Robert, in the studio. But if I turned off every light in here, and it was, there's no windows here, there would still be ambient light. The ambient air around me is going to be predominantly nitrogen. Right. And I would do a spectral analysis of the room and the air around me in the ambient environment, and I'd be able to see with certain nanometers of light reflected, and I could tell you exactly the composition through that spectral analysis of how much nitrogen was in the room. All that happens when I turn on the light switch is it magnifies the absorption and the reflection of that light. And so from a physics perspective, you start realizing, okay, if that's the case, then we each have a unique DNA signature that is emitting light based on the five elements that go to building up our DNA to make the adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil pairings that, you know, we call the nucleotide pairs and the phosphate backbone and the sulfur that comes along with that. We each then have an entirely unique DNA signature that has a light spectrum that is reflected. Now, it would also have an absorption. And the way we would look at that at the spectral analysis is you would see certain wavelengths of light that would be Dave as unique signature that has never existed before and will never yet again exist in anyone else. It's entirely unique. And even though 90% plus of it might resemble that of a primate, the 10% and the 1% that doesn't resemble any other human on Earth makes it infinitely different. And so you have an absorption characteristic which then becomes, I believe, your shadow. And that be conscious. And then all that you are not either absorbed or reflected gets reflected back to you into the world around you in your entire experience. That's why I refer to it as the U inverse of experience.

That would be a good explanation of her, how you create your own reality.

And that's exactly what I believe, that each of us creates our own reality and has chosen this exact experience for a reason that we're here to learn. And that is precisely the hero's journey. When we realize, I mean, every movie, every Tom Cruise movie is always about hero's journey, right? Everyone, whether you could go through Far and Away or Days of Thunder, all the Tom Cruise movies are all heroes journeys. And it's about a cocky guy who ends up getting humbled by life, has to find his way back. He loses his mentors, meets the woman, gets the gift from the goddess and then comes back and wins the day, right? And changes somehow the world in his own perspective. And it's the journey within. It's like Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. Whether you're looking at the Lord of the Rings story arc or you're looking at that of the Hobbit, it's the same type of story. The hero's journey is never about the external. It's always about the internal realizations that we have to ask ourselves the questions, why did I choose this? And when you combine that with this mindfulness approach and non judgment, non judgment is, I believe, the thing that we're intended to learn here. In general, we have a backdrop that has all of our cellular matrices, all of our mitochondria pushing us to self preservation. And we have got time itself, which introduces a concept of scarcity that is never ending. We live in a world of scarcity. Never enough of anything. And we bottle water and we sell it. Look, we live on the blue planet. There's like four times as much ocean under the surface under the mantle of the Earth than there is on the surface of the Earth. It's the most abundant resource. And the beautiful thing is it's a closed loop system we can never run out. But then you might argue, okay, well what about clean water? Well, there are devices now that literally can pull water from the air and make you entirely clean water. I've spent a couple days on the USS Abraham Lincoln where they have a nuclear core and the sea water runs over that nuclear core, it turns into steam and then they make 50 million gallons a day of Fresh drinking water. This is all a lie that we tell ourselves. This notion of scarcity, that we can bottle it. I met the guy who was the CEO and founder of. He acquired the Fiji water company. And it was quite amazing because he was not the nicest guy in the world, I'll say that. And he bought the company from some indigenous people that were in Fiji, and they had this great source of very clean water, beautiful water. And when you think about the water business now, to buy a bottle of water in Miami, it can be as much as 20 bucks.

Good God.

It's the world's most abundant resource. So wait, then that means that I could take something like clean air and sell that too. And by the way, they do that in Bhutan. In Bhutan, you have to pay an air tax for breathing the clean air. So literally, we live in a world that has everything geared towards scarcity. And so then you have to think, okay, when everything is built towards one direction, that's where the rebel in me says, wait a minute. There's got to be a higher learning here. What happens if I go the other direction and start thinking about the world in terms of abundance instead? And what actually gets created from that line of thinking? Abundance begets abundance. Scarcity only begets more scarcity. Victimhood only begets more victimhood. And this lie that we've been telling ourselves, you know, is something that makes lots of people money, too, and ourselves. Because in this world, we don't live from a point of vantage. We live and operate from a point of advantage. What? The way we see the world. I'm sure you probably heard of Saul Alinsky, right? Saul Alinsky was a social agitator. He said our world is not a world of angels. Rather, it is a world of angles. A world where men speak of moral principle, yet act on power principle. A world where we are always moral and our enemies, whoever they are, are always immoral.

Wow. It's. It's a lot to take in when you. When you think about how much of our reality we're creating from all these things. That leads to questions like, is evil real?

So does evil exist? Yes, I believe it does. Because it exists within each of us. The world around us is a reflection. If you want to see less wars in the world, then get rid of the wars within yourself. If we want to see a world with more love, then be the love. If you want to see a world with more compassion, then be the compassion. If you want to see a world with more kindness, then be the freaking kindness.

Amen. That is Indeed, how it works. I. I work a lot with younger people in their. Their 20s or early 30s. And, like, I'm going to go change the world. I'm going to go be an activist. And I kind of feel like. So you want to be a bully?

Well, now you're talking about COVID narcissism again. Because that's what happens. We want to take on, you know, we were born in this world. I wrote this thing for people that are interested to learn more about, I guess, my perspective on this. I woke up in the middle of the night and I got this, like, download, for lack of a better term. Yeah. And I titled it the 24 precepts of universal Mind. And you can find it on my website, Robert Edward Grant dot com. And I go like, literally, it was like a channeling. I wrote for like 45 minutes to an hour, and then I went back to sleep. And it presents us as living as we are dimensionally limited avatars of a higher self. And the reason why we're dimensionally limited is because if we were omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, there'd be no fun in that game. Think about it. We're playing poker, you and I. And I know the hand you're going to be dealt. You know the hand I'm going to be dealt. I know what you're going to say. I know you're going to respond to my hand. I know how you're going to respond to your own hand. There's no fun in that game. The only game that would make sense would be to limit your avatar and make it forget its feminine aspects because it's chosen to be a masculine counterpart. It would forget through a series of forgettings that form the ego. And I am not that. The truth that I am that I am. I am all that is. So we would create a game, and through the law of conservation of energy, we would only have to render the game that we're observing. Explaining Heisenberg's uncertainty principle right there.

What do you tell yourself when you're meditating? I used to sit years ago, and I would actually meditate on that I am, that I am that sort of thing. And it's not a part of my practice. Now, do you have a mantra? Do you have things you tell yourself, like what happens inside your perception when you meditate?

I have a chant that I often do. That's. That is I learned in when I went to Dharmsala and I published a prime number pattern in 2018 after I was in the Great Pyramid. And like two weeks later I discovered a prime number pattern and a new type of number that we titled quasi prime numbers that were divisible by they're differentiated from semi prime numbers in that they're divisible by prime numbers that are larger than five.

Wow.

The number five. And. And so this separates out the number system so that you recognize that every prime number is a multiple of 24 plus one.

That's interesting.

Without exception. Wow. Every prime number squared, rather every prime number squared will be a multiple of 24 plus 1. So 5 times 25. 5 times 5 is 25, that's 1 times 24 plus 1. 7 times 7 is the next prime number. That's 49, that's 2. 24 plus 1 11. 11 is 121. That's 5, 24 plus 1 and 13. 13 is 169 and that's 7, 24 plus 1. You see the pattern.

I did not know that about prime numbers. That is super cool. Because finding primes indivisibility by primes is the basis of cryptography.

Absolutely, absolutely. And then I realized that the foundational basis of all prime factorization is the right triangle and the right triangle. And Fairmont did some work on this, but we extended his research and effort on that. And that's what got me into cryptography, that exact effort that I discovered a new geometric relationship of prime factorization. Now the point being that when you start to recognize that the world around you is this matrix of your own perception, then your entire life thesis starts to transform. And so what I started to do is when I went to Dharamsala, I got invited to teach the Dalai Lama the prime number pattern. And while I was there, one of the monks taught me the Diamond Consciousness meditation, which is you wake up at dawn and you go to meditate, you point towards where the sun is rising, Let the sun hit you on the pineal gland right at the time. So you have to kind of look, you're not waking up the same time every day because every day is different. And so then you do a chant which is E. It's like. And that buzzes your pineal gland in a, in a major way. And then you do that for like 15 minutes. And then you can do the chant backwards as well. And it also works mo and you combine it with breath work. And it has a powerfully transformative impact on your consciousness and the level of your awareness. What I think about when I meditate is I try. There's a point in My meditation where I contemplate certain things, I don't try to immediately go into the no thought zone.

Yeah.

But eventually I do end up in the no thought zone. And. And I think that's one of the most powerful places to find the void within the self allows us to, I don't know, reshuffle the deck in a way. It allows us to recategorize and it gives the library workers inside of the catalog of our brain the opportunity to kind of reorganize itself and to present more clarity when we come out of it. But that's generally what I try to do in my meditations. I try to contemplate not what I am not, but rather the recognition that I am all of it. Because I can't separate my observation from my conditioning biases. Again, we don't see the world as it is. I believe we see it as we are.

All the evidence that I have agrees with that as well. You and I actually aren't seeing the world the same way, even though we have common language for it. I don't think we perceive very much at all in common, actually.

Yeah. And that's really mind blowing because I grew up thinking, oh yeah, all these people think just like they, like I do. They see the world just like I do. And it was a real revelation when I came to the realization that, wait, they don't. And I think to a certain extent AI has played a role in this, because with social media, the advent of social media for the last 20 years, which has been a giant social experiment that nobody understood, the impact might be. And now the impact is we're all cattle prod into echo chambers or our own.