Consciousness Expert: THIS New Science Changes Everything You Thought About "Reality"

What actually is thinking, we know from neuroscience. The brain is involved in our conscious experience. Is there ancestral stuff that we have maybe agreed to, to take on that isn't me, but sort of is me because it's part of me that I'm responsible for? Should we be aware that our thoughts sometimes might not be our own?

Mark Gober is an international speaker, author of the award winning book An End.

To Upside Down Thinking and host of.

The podcast where is My Mind?

Maybe the brain is picking up consciousness from beyond the body, which means that what a human being is like a vehicle or a vessel of consciousness on one level, and on another level, the body itself might be consciousness. The Institute of Noetic Sciences for the last 50 plus years has been studying the stuff and now a board member there. The brain's very much related to consciousness, but maybe the brain is almost like a receiver, transmitter, transducer, filtering mechanism, interface, something. If everything is consciousness, then everything is malleable to some degree. And therefore the way in which we direct our consciousness is, in theory, is going to affect reality, because reality is consciousness and nothing's actually physical. All I'm experiencing is a sensation in my consciousness.

So if consciousness does not come from the brain, where does it actually come from? So if consciousness does not come from the brain, where does it actually come from?

Well, I don't know the answer for sure, but one hypothesis is that consciousness is the basis of all reality and we get into very paradoxical territory quickly. So my favorite analogy comes from a philosopher, Bernardo Castrup. He says that we are like whirlpools within a stream, so there's the individual, Mark and Josh and everyone else, but we're connected as part of a broader consciousness. So we're automatically in paradox territory because you exist as an individual and you don't at the same time. And I, I give that preface because I want to tie it back to the brain. Your question, because we know from neuroscience the brain is involved in our conscious experience. Like someone gets in an accident, damages the part of the brain responsible for vision, their vision changes and we can say, look, the brain changed. Here your vision changed. Strong correlation. Brain's involved. Might it be the case many people would jump to while the brain's creating consciousness, but that would potentially run into the fallacy of correlation does not imply causation. It's possible for two things to be related, and one thing doesn't necessarily cause the other. So the brain's related to consciousness. Does that mean the brain creates it? I'll give another analogy before I go on. From Dr. Kastrup. Also imagine there's a fire, lots of firefighters show up at the scene. There's a larger fire, more firefighters show up. Do we conclude that because firefighters are related to the fire, that firefighters cause the fire? Most people would say the firefighters aren't causing it, but they co occur with the fire. And more firefighters are there when there's a bigger fire. So that might be what's going on with the brain and consciousness. The brain's very much related to consciousness, but maybe the brain is almost like a receiver, Receiver, transmitter, transducer, filtering mechanism, interface, something. And I want to tie it back to my initial paradox statement, because on one level, if everything's consciousness, how could there be a brain that's receiving consciousness, that's implying the separation that might not be there? So this is very complex, abstract territory. I think if we were to simplify it, to answer your question, maybe the brain is picking up consciousness from beyond the body, which means that what a human being is, is like a vehicle or a vessel of consciousness on one level. And on another level, the body itself might be consciousness. So to try to introduce brain consciousness distinction is problematic. And all of this might just be so complex that the human mind actually can't comprehend it. So I'm trying to give analogies here to get myself and others thinking about this.

Yeah, well, an end to upside down thinking. Liberty, Cosmos, many different. Six books, seven books you've written, and this is the newest one. Y', all, if you're watching this on Spotify or YouTube, this is an end to the upside down cosmos. Today I want to really focus on this consciousness aspect because I feel like the biggest threats right now in America and maybe in the world is the way that we think and the way that we don't even know. We don't know that we're not free. The way that we are held hostage by our beliefs or the projections of society, it's just such a crazy roller coaster ride at times. And when you were talking, I was just honestly visualizing a radio. I remember Corey Allen, who's another podcaster, he had me on a show like six years ago, and he said, you know, Josh, I feel like the. The brain is a meat radio. It's a. It's a meat radio. Well, maybe now we know through neuroplasticity, it's a plastic radio, the way that we can shape reality with thoughts. Thoughts become things. But I wonder how this lands for you as someone who's so steeped in this research of consciousness, of neurology physiology, all the aspects that make up human. Is it essentially a transceiver? Is the brain really just both consciousness and a receiver for consciousness itself by it being a meat radio or like a radio tower that we see out in the world?

I think that is an analogy that can help one transition from the materialistic view, which is that the brain produces consciousness, to something else. So I think directionally speaking, that analogy helped me and another way to position it. I remember when I heard this back in 2016, when I was starting this journey, it really struck me where imagine you're watching television. TV show is showing up great on your screen, and then you take a hammer and smash the antenna that's picking up the signal that allows you to watch your TV show. And then all of a sudden, the show on your screen, it appears very scratchy. It's not so clear anymore. You damaged the apparatus responsible for processing the signal that allows you to watch the TV show, but the signal itself is undisturbed by your actions. So what if we tie that to the brain in a way, like a person has brain damage, and then their consciousness shifts at least the way they perceive the world to. Does that mean that the consciousness itself was affected, or that the brain body system, which processes consciousness that's been affected, so that you perceive the world differently? It's almost like taking play DOH through one of those things, and you get different shapes on the other end. It like comes out as spaghetti or something else. And like, the play DOH might be sort of like consciousness, and we can perceive it or experience it in different ways, but the play DOH itself exists. All of it's still there, it's just in a different format.

So then the vehicle of consciousness, and also, one could even argue, and I'm sure you maybe talk about this in your books, is that consciousness is the brain, and the brain is moving through consciousness based on the reality of thought, beliefs, and really a forecast or a projection of our wounds, of our neurology, of our neuroplasticity. Like, there's a lot to the brain. We're not here to reductionize the way the brain works. We're kind of still guessing in medicine. I say we as if I'm a doctor. I'm not a doctor. I just know that there's so much more to life than what I can see, and there's so much more to life than maybe even what I can feel. This way that we're tuned from our consciousness as the brain being a medium of receiving and also transmitting, that's the part that really is profound for me. That's the part that's the biggest question mark is if consciousness is both us and coming through us at the same time, almost like a superposition computer, like a quantum computer with a 0 and a 1 at the same time, then how can we learn to use some of the work that you've created and that you've studied well, work that actually thought forms that you've been sharing with people through your books. What's something practical as a starting place that would actually move the needle so someone could be more loving, more healthy, more happy in their life?

Well, I'll speak based on my own experience. And the first step is acknowledging the possibility of these alternatives. And I say alternative because I came from a place where what we're talking about today, these things were not possibilities. So I used to believe that life was random and meaningless. Fundamentally that we could create meaning, but that's just a rationalization in our own minds. But there's no meaning built into the fabric of reality itself. That everything was happening was a random product. There was a big bang 13.8 billion years ago, filled the universe with matter. Those pieces of matter started bumping into each other and you have these random chemical reactions. And then eventually you get a self replicating molecule that can produce biological organisms like a human being, which develops a brain over time, over billions of years of evolution. And then out of the brain comes consciousness. And therefore, if you believe that chain of events, when your brain shuts down, when the body dies, that's the end of your consciousness, which just emerged out of total randomness. And that's lights out for your consciousness. And it's all over. That's very much where I was because I thought that's what science was pointing us toward. And anything outside of that would have been spiritual or religious superstition.

Did you consider yourself to be atheist, agnostic? How did you identify back then?

Probably either one of those. This was up until age 30 for me. And it wasn't something I necessarily talked about. But I. The more I thought about life and was going through ups and downs, it was harder and harder to deal with the ups and downs. But I concluded deal with it, Mark, because that's life. That's the life we're in. It's all random and meaningless. And I do remember there was a part of me that was trying to be intellectually honest and said, I can't prove this, there's a chance that I'm wrong. But everything I'm learning and I Thought I was well educated and was working in New York investment banking and Silicon Valley advising tech companies for 10 years, and was around a lot of smart people who thought that way too, whether they said it explicitly or not. Okay, I think I've got a pretty good grip on this. Deal with it, Mark, no matter what. And I was on this treadmill, like, sprinting ahead, but really not getting anywhere. I was stuck in that worldview. And then in 2016, while I was still working at my firm in Silicon Valley, which I've since left to. To do this other stuff full time, I came across podcasts. Actually not looking to change careers or anything initially. Listening to Tim Ferriss talk about psychedelics and talk about sensory deprivation, float tanks, and also just Tim Ferriss talking to venture capitalists, which was more of my world. But that got me looking at alternative health. And then I came across a show called Extreme Health Radio, which is still an awesome show, looks at all sorts of alternative ways of healing. And on that show, one day they interviewed a woman who talked about psychic abilities and communicating with spirits and energies. And this was on a health show. I'm like, what's going on here? And it didn't change my life in the moment, but I was intrigued enough to listen to that episode. And then I listened to many other episodes like it on. On that woman's show. Laura Powers is her name, and she has a show called Healing Powers. And she had a bunch of really short, punchy episodes where she was interviewing all sorts of people with different backgrounds that were describing this view of reality that sounded very mystical and very foreign to what I knew. And I give this story because as I was learning this information and just considering the possibility, I wasn't saying this is all real. I mean, I was actually saying, are these people delusional? Are they lying? I don't think they're lying. They sound genuine. I was going through all that, but as I was opening up to the possibilities, my life started to shift.

What was the biggest way your life started to shift? It was almost like you were Pinocchio and you found out that the island was going to make you grow nose and ears. Right. We get tempted by things not all spiritual, which we'll go into. Not all spiritual teachings are safe. Not all spiritual leaders are healed.

Absolutely. And I'm not sure everything that I was hearing was necessarily accurate and not the product of a delusion or something, but I was triangulating a lot of data points and there was overlap. So I'm like, okay, what's going on here. And then I started to read books and scientific papers that validated a lot of this stuff, like the US government's declassified documents on their psychic spying program and, and the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies at the med school studying near death experiences and children that have memories of apparent past lives. And the. The Institute of Noetic Sciences for the last 50 plus years has been studying the stuff and I'm now a board member there. So I know the scientists personally. So all this stuff was kind of lining up to, okay, whatever you believed before, there are holes in it open up to new possibilities. And I do think happiness increased like curiosity. And then my life shifted because I was now aligning with different things. So the things I would spend my time talking about socially would shift into these other areas and I started to meet new people. And now here I am. I had become a partner at my firm in Silicon Valley. And as much as I enjoyed the job and learned so much, it just wasn't aligned at a certain point.

Was that hard to let go?

Yes. What, how so hard in that? I had spent a whole career getting to an amazing point in my early 30s being a partner at this firm, having a great future ahead on paper, but then also feeling energetically pulled to these other topics because at that point I had written one book and done a podcast series and knew that I needed to pursue something. I didn't know what it was going to be. And it's led me now into new areas. So it was very difficult to let go of this thing that I invested so much into and this firm. When I, when I first started my career in New York, I was at a large investment bank called ubs and I was there during the financial crisis. So that was a. I was a drop in the ocean for this massive global firm. The firm I joined that I ended up leaving, it was a new firm that spun out of a large firm called the Boston Consulting Group. And they formed this small group out of that that I joined. And I joined the company very early on. So I felt a lot of loyalty to everyone there and I helped even as a junior person at least working with client relationships over the years and enjoyed a lot of what I did there. But then at a certain point I was pulled in a different direction. So I had never done anything like that before to say. And I didn't have many people around me who could necessarily advise on this, if you can imagine coming from that mainstream world.

Yeah, this is not the topic of conversation during like Black line, red line meetings. This is not what people are talking about. You probably were ostracized in the beginning when you brought some of these topics up.

Yes, actually my colleagues were open minded to it.

Oh.

And I think part of it is because of the work that we did at the firm. It was related to patented technologies and tying it to business strategy and things like that. But patents by definition cover ideas that are novel and non obvious relative to what's been done in the past. So we were always working with companies, whether they were large, massive global corporations or startups that were challenging paradigms. And we all, we saw over and over again the patterns of. This is what the mainstream did. This is what someone came in with with a new idea. This was the pushback from the mainstream. So I think that openness was inherent in a lot of the minds of the people I worked with. So they were supportive of it, which I'm really fortunate to have had that. But to totally change careers is a different thing to say. I'm going to really step out into this new way of living not knowing what's next.

Yeah.

And leave a lot of people around me probably didn't understand that there's got.

To be a massive why, which that's the only word I can think of right now. But it's a deeper soul resonance in you that I'm curious about learning about the why to change from something safe in Silicon Valley, in finance, you probably had a nice life ahead of you, Nice on paper, quote unquote. So to exit that and not even know exactly what you're doing, there had to have been a strong why. Because if there's a strong why, it can overcome the logistics of the what and the how and when.

Right.

What was that why back then?

I think, and it's a similar why I have now. And it gets back to your question of how has my life shifted since going into all this stuff. The why is, well, why do we exist at all? Because that the answer to that question will govern our priorities and our decisions. And I don't know the full answer to that. I think my quest to try to understand it has led me to research and then share my findings in books. But there's something about a soul journey that you're alluding to. I think that we're here to evolve and grow and learn in some way. I know there are lots of different takes on that, but there's something even those who believe that we live in a deceptive place and that we're just trying to escape it even that process involves learning how to discern and that means growth. So there's a wide spectrum of what we can, how we can define personal evolution, but there's something in that, like a deeper purpose to our existence that we have to follow whatever that is. And whatever I was doing before didn't feel like it was aligned anymore. And at the same time, when I look back, it's kind of miraculous. I had the life that I did for 30 years before getting into this stuff. So even before working in investment banking in New York, I graduated from Princeton University where they have a pretty rare requirement for undergraduates where almost all the undergrads have to write a senior thesis. So I had to write and do a study. It was in psychology.

Now what was the pro. The hypothesis of the thesis?

My thesis examined Daniel Kahneman's work. So basically what Kahneman found is that people behave differently depending on whether they're faced with gains or losses. That when people are faced with the possibility of a gain, they will be risk averse and take the sure gain. But when they're faced with the possibility of a loss, they'll take a gamble where they might lose more but might also lose zero. Because the possibility of losing nothing is better than losing more. Whereas with gains they want to take the sure thing. And what. I looked at different variables that might affect the reference point from which people evaluate a gain or a loss. So like if you have an expectation that you're going to get a raise and you don't get the raise, you really didn't win or lose technically, but you might feel like you won or lost. Does that affect how people make decisions? And then how does that affect life and marketplaces and things like that? So I was looking at those variables in my senior thesis to examine this phenomenon that Kahneman had found.

And then you went and lived out that thesis in moving from one safe zone to a zone where you didn't exactly know the how or the when or the what.

I was risk seeking. I was not risk averse. But from another lens, when I made the decision to leave, it didn't feel risky. So it depends on the framing. This is what Kahneman talks about, framing effects. How you frame a question will depend, will govern how you make decisions. I was in some ways framing it as a loss if I stayed because I felt this calling to do something else. And it was pretty strange because often when someone leaves a firm, they might go to a competitor or something. Yeah, it wasn't like I was doing that. I was literally leaving to give myself space. And then what did I do? I went on an ayurvedic panchakarma retreat for nearly a week, and then I took a week off and went on a silent meditation retreat. Retreat, and then took a week off and then did another silent meditation retreat. So I was transitioning myself out of an old world. I still feel like I'm transitioning myself out of it today.

It's almost like, did you ever, when you were a little boy, have a question of, like, what are we doing here? What's this all about? Did that ever come online for you? I can remember when I was young, the big question that I've talked about probably a hundred times on this podcast was, why are these adults so mad at each other? What is all this interstitial tension that I'm feeling? What are taxes? Oh, my God, why are people so angry at taxes? I was just a little boy experiencing life and going, this is not how it's supposed to be. There's another way. And I remember that was one of my very first memories I've ever had in my life. And I reflect on it now, at 44, with such clarity, because I felt it so strongly then. Did you ever have a feeling like that? Were you questioning the nature of reality and consciousness, life and death, way before when you were young, or was that something more around your 30s?

I remember asking a question when I was really young about God of, like, you know, people talk about God, but who created God, if God exists? I don't remember how old I was. I might have been like, maybe five or six or something. And I remember asking questions when I was growing up, maybe in high school or even middle school, looking up at the stars, thinking about, like, what is this place? Who are we? What. What's. What is all this? Is it random? Is it created? So I did may have cosmic questions. And also even college years and post college years, I did have a lot of friends who would say things like, like, where are you from? You kind of think differently.

Interesting.

Even though I was doing the mainstream stuff, there must have been hints.

Yeah.

Where I was looking at stuff differently or asking questions. But then I was forcing myself in many ways to. To fit the mold of what I put myself in. Because even when I started working in investment banking, there was a part of me that felt from day one that it was not fully aligned. Like day one in New York during the financial crisis of 2008, sitting there at my desk, staying up until like, five or six in the morning, working on a financial spreadsheet and I didn't know what was going on. And that was just day one. I'm like, is this the amount of stress coming from that of not wanting to get fired because they were firing people and also wanting to do a good job, not seem stupid.

And then.

Continuing to live that out of not feeling fully right for so many years? There was probably a part of whether you want to call it a soul or whatever it is that was telling me there was something else. And yet I needed all of that to be able to write these books and have these conversations, because so much of my profession became presenting to boards of directors and senior management teams who needed the synopsis to give it to me quick and don't make any mistakes. And if we need more details, give me all the reference points and create narratives for me so that we can understand it. And that's what I do now. So even though it didn't feel perfectly right, I learned a lot and I can use it today. So in hindsight, my life makes sense.

Do you believe that we are truly in a school for souls?

I'm not quite sure, but there's some element of it that I think seems true.

What element?

Healing journeys. That's what sells me on it more than anything. And I wrote about this in my book, An End to Upside Down Medicine, where I was questioning the nature of suffering at that point, even more. That came out about a year ago, 2023, and I was like, there's so much darkness here. Are we suffering to learn or is this just masochistic? Because some people believe that our suffering is feeding demons. And maybe there's some elements of that, I don't know, like they pick up our energy. But then I see the healing journeys over and over again in people where they overcome something and as a result the suffering led them to grow in ways that ended up being very beneficial. So an example, Anita Moorjani, famous case. She had a near death experience when she was in a coma, tumors all over her body and she had revelations. Her consciousness shifted as a result of this near death experience. She encountered her deceased father and reconciled things there. She realized things about her own consciousness where maybe she was too judgmental. So she resolved conflicts in her consciousness and came back. And who knows what happened energetically in these other states, we don't know. But her tumors disappeared and now she's a much happier person. She speaks all over the world, she's changing lives. She went through a lot of difficulty in that. That's just one example out of many I could take it back to my. I was a competitive tennis player and played college tennis. Think about suffering in that context of I'm out there training. Sometimes we'd have training where there would be a. Like a vomit bucket after sprinting around the track because we were in that much pain. But then I got a lot better through that. And that training allowed me, if I was in a competitive match where things were on the line, I was able to perform because I put the training in. So how do we reconcile that there was suffering? I didn't always want to be doing those early morning workouts, but then I got a lot better. So when I look at it from that perspective, I can see that in myself, that my hardest moments. In the end, if I look at it years later, I can rationalize it a bit more. Wow. That actually led me on a better path. So sometimes the way I've described it is it's like we're walking through a maze and we can't see that far ahead. But if we had a helicopter's perspective, we could see the full maze and understand the full picture of what we're going through.

But then if we knew the full maze and we could see the whole game in totality, then maybe we wouldn't enjoy the process of learning and pain and joy and ecstasy of the game itself. The observer effect, if you will, you know, from the great documentary what the bleep do we know? Is it a particle or a wave? Well, it changes when you look at it. You know that. That's the thing that. That boggles my mind and just confuses me at times where when I watch something, the act of me watching it changes its natural movement. It's so surreal. So that's wrapped into my next question as well. And that is, if you could see the maze and you knew you could watch it, would the act of you watching it, in other words, is what we saw in what the bleep? Is that real for you? In your seven books and the deep journey you've been on, is what the bleep real? The particle in the wave?

Well, let's think about it from the perspective of where we started. If everything is consciousness, then everything is malleable to some degree. And therefore the way in which we direct our consciousness in theory is. Is going to affect reality, because reality is consciousness and nothing's actually physical. We interpret physicality like this. Seems like it's physical, but really, what is it? These are noises I'm hearing in my consciousness when I bang the table and the Sensations. If I close my eyes, I feel something. But the notion that there's a hand in a table, that's all reverse engineering and mental gymnastics based on my perceptual organs. All I'm experiencing is a sensation in my consciousness. So when we get that deep, then sure, our consciousness is going to affect reality in some way because it's all consciousness. And then it's probably way more mystical than that.

Yeah, I think it's way. It's more mystical. And look, you guys, forgive me. I'm going to tell Mark the story. I know you've already heard it, and maybe if you're listening or watching for the first time, you haven't heard it. And this is a really profound story. I was 11 years old, 10 or 11 years old, Mount Helix, La Mesa, California. And my grandfather, Marl Joseph Padolino, he stops me in the house and he says, josh, you going to church? And I was like, no, Grandpa, I don't. They. They put their hands up and they're. It's just weird. I don't. I don't think there's a God. And he said, well, what if I tell you, dear grandson, that when it comes to the mind of man, there can't be a conceptualization, that there's no such thing as a beginning, middle and end, and what if God doesn't even apply to time? And I was like 10, 11 years old, Mark. So it just blasted me. I'm like, I just went, okay, Grandpa. And here I am, 44, talking about it like there was this. There was a kernel of truth and wisdom that he planted for me then. I'm just like so grateful that he could have even shared that. It's just like actually kind of emotional, just. He's on an altar over there. I'm just, you know, thank you, grandfather, for this wisdom. And I'm sharing that quick story because I don't believe at 44, nor did I believe that. I didn't even know. I didn't believe yet at 10 or 11 that the concept of beginning, middle and end, or quote, time doesn't actually exist. But because of my conditioning and because of my finite understanding of things, right? A tree is a sapling. It has a life and then it perishes to feed the rest of the forest. Look at the Fibonacci sequence and the use of threes. We inhale, we hold, we exhale. I feel like this baked in version of logic and reality is. Comes in threes. You come to the studio, we record, then you leave, right? It's like, there's so many things in life that have this inhale, hold, exhale, or beginning, middle, and end, yet from the Creator, from the thing that created us, whatever that is, whatever mystery that is. And I just honor that mystery of God so deeply because I don't think God is a bearded dude in the sky. I think God is something that I could never actually understand. I do my best to know God, have a relationship with God through my spiritual practice, but I'll never actually understand God because to try to understand God means that I am actually fabricating my own mental thought process and putting my words spoken through my body in vernacular that somehow can describe the magnificence of God, which isn't even ever possible. What do you make of this? That there is no beginning, middle, and end.

Yeah. Sequence is an interpretation. That's the way I would put it. So sequence of past to present to future, beginning, middle, end, is a construct of the mind, if we really break it down. Because if we think about the past, it is a thought, literally. It's a memory exist. It's a memory. We hold it. It's an inference that we make. Yeah, but it's just something in our mind right now. And the future is the same thing. It's something we hold in our mind right now. And the present is something we hold in our mind right now. So is there just an ever present now? I mean, David Hawkins, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, he talked about this analogy once of shining a light through a prism, and you end up with this big hologram, and you can look at the hologram from different angles, and you could interpret that as different points in time within a oneness that you could interpret as sequence from looking at those different angles. But really, it's just one light that's being. That's shining right in something that we can interpret as something other than one.

Every time I hear Hawkins, either directly or indirectly, I'm upgraded every time. I've never heard that. And I feel like I'm a Hawkins aficionado, which obviously I'm not. What book did he talk about?

He said that in a lecture. It was a YouTube video, actually. I'm not sure where it is, because.

That was not in Letting Go, was not in Power versus Force. It was not Eye of the Eye. It was something else.

Yeah, I just.

I love on the screen right now, y' all is the Hawkins map. Right. Which definitely I'd love to. To blend these two pieces together. Hawkins, obviously, has been a huge influence for you. Right. Among other spiritual Teachers and metaphysical teachers. But on the screen right now is the ladder of emotions, right? And when we're stuck at the bottom, which is being highlighted on the screen, the lowest frequency is shame. The lowest possible human emotion or frequency, energy in motion, is shame. And I find that a lot of these concepts can get so esoteric and so intellectualized at times that people go to apathy or shame or grief or disgust or these lower level emotions when trying to understand or just be in the joy and harmony of the fact that we're here, that we're playing a game, that this is a school for souls or a game for, you know, great people. Who knows? We don't know yet. And I'll get to the question, I promise. I feel like when we get stuck in the lower levels of emotion that Hawkins has so brilliantly stated, and I mean, this is a teacher that had, I think it was 40 years, 50 years he was doing the work on.

Himself and he was a psychiatrist and.

He was so he really, I mean, this is like probably one of the most powerful souls to ever educate us on the metaphysics of the body, the biology, the body, the neurology and the way we experience emotions. Like, I just have so much deep respect for Hawkins, so that's why it was on the screen before. The question for you is, is if, if it's a school for souls, if it's a game for great people, then how does the, some of the premises or some of the ideas you're presenting in your work, how does that allow us or afford us to not get stuck so often in the lower frequencies of what Hawkins is presenting?

Many of those lower frequencies come from assumptions about the way reality works. So if we can even ask little questions about the way reality works, we might get less stuck in those emotions. Yes, that's been my experience. So the emotions that you described, they all still come up for me, those lower level ones.

Oh, you haven't escaped those yet?

No, no, definitely not.

It must be your humanness.

Yeah, they come up all the time, which is frustrating because when I first started this and I would hear people in these enlightened states, I wondered maybe, maybe I'll be able to avoid those lower states. But the, the spiritual journey seems to be one that is upward trending, that has peaks and valleys, sort of like a long term stock price chart. Like if you invest in the stock market over time you make money, but it's like jagged on the way up.

Same with entrepreneurship. It's, it's never a linear line. No, it's always got crazy pitfalls and highs and lows.

But the lows I find I can contextualize them in a different way. I can almost step outside of myself and observe myself and say what's really going on here? It doesn't necessarily make it less painful sometimes, but maybe it's the duration is lessened or the intensity for a shorter period of time isn't as intense. And that comes from the questioning that I wasn't doing previously. One of those negative emotions comes up or the negative sensation and I'm able to stop myself and say what is actually going on? That process of stepping out of my looping something I didn't do before.

The practicality of this is awesome because it's 2025 and it's January and a lot of people have like had these massive health declarations. I'm going to lose £80 this year. I'm going to commit and do all these things. But a lot of those things are just words. They're broken promises. And I think people know it from the start. They don't actually believe it because they're trapped in these lower frequency of emotions. So I'll go back to the question again, especially in an end to upside down thinking. And I'm holding the book up right now to the camera for Spotify and YouTube. So dispelling the myth that the brain produces consciousness and the implications for everyday life, what is the implication that you're presenting? Maybe there's many. But what is the strongest implication about consciousness that can actually allow us to play a better game? Mark, if life is a game, how can we use some of what you're teaching us and the to upside down thinking that allows us to play a more fun game, a more liberating game, a game where we're experiencing the higher frequencies on the Hawkins scale.

To me, it all comes down to thinking about who and what we are. Are we just a sack of meat that's here for a short amount of time and then the person dies and that's the end? Or is there more to the individual? And maybe there was something before this life that we don't have normal access to in our memory and. And maybe there's something after this body dies that that continues on in some different form like that questioning alone and seeing that there's evidence for everything. I just said not. I don't think there's ever definitive proof for anything, but there's a lot of evidence suggestive of those things. Then how would we think about living and how would we think about our decisions, if we had this longer time horizon, and that there's more significance to our life than maybe we're taught in conventional education. That's like the first domino where all, if any, of that is partially true. Every decision, every thought takes on a different meaning. And I think the trajectory, like I said, is ultimately positive, even though there can be some jaggedness and difficulty along the way.

Well, same thing when you hike Mount Whitney. I mean, when you go to a higher plateau of being or thinking or viewpoint, it can get gnarly. Like, I remember we were hiking up. It was my third time. I actually didn't make it. I got high altitude sickness. And I was so committed to making it. I was with all my friends. And the analogy I'm making is, as we ascend in our awareness or as we ascend in our consciousness, we will face unique challenges along the way, is what I'm saying. And I actually had to swallow a humble pill, walk all the way down to 8,000ft and re acclimate my body just couldn't. And I had already summited two times before, so it was a big gut punch for me. And it was like there was humility and there was like, so much wisdom and lessons in the humility. What is the humility in your life that you've experienced in writing these books? Because, dude, writing books is not easy. Like, you can't just put down a bunch of thoughts on paper. You have to have editing rounds and publisher, you know, production and networking and podcasting like it's a journey. What's one of the ways that God, Universe, Creator has humbled you in the writing of these seven books so far? That's profound for you as a soul, as a human.

So many different ways. I mean, the process of writing, actually, for me, the writing of sitting down and typing it out is the final step. But the research process that precedes it, of shattering my old paradigms and learning new things, that makes me question everything. That is a humbling process. But then what's happened, because I've written many books, seven as of now, is that I have to rethink some of the things that I've said in interviews or even in books that maybe I don't fully agree with and to be wrong, or maybe not 100 confident in something that I did previously in a public way. As someone who's very perfectionistic, I have to deal with that all the time, but that's part of life. Is there anyone who's right about everything 100% of the time? And so to live that publicly, there's probably something in that for me. And then to share it with other people, which is part of my own, let's say, quote, unquote, shame to live that out. But then other people who are listening to this or watching it can see that in their own lives and say, everyone goes through this.

How'd that show up for you publicly?

You mean specific examples of something where I might have been wrong? Yeah, I'm trying to think of some of the least polarizing examples.

Hey.

But I don't know.

Go to. Go to the depth.

You want me to go to the depth?

What's some. Like you felt it right away.

Yeah.

You know what it was? Yeah. What. What was that one you felt?

There are aspects of medicine that I talk about in an end upside down thinking, the way we think about the germ theory of disease, which we don't have to go into in too much detail, that I just made assumptions that science had established certain things that now I question. Like in my book An End Upside Down Medicine, I looked at assumptions that I didn't even know were assumptions about studies that were done a hundred years ago that didn't prove things in the way that I thought. And so now I talk about challenges to allopathic medicine a lot. And I sometimes give the caveat, like, well, in an end upside down thinking. I said this casually, but I wasn't trying to make this point. I actually hadn't evaluated it. And I've had some people who go to end Upside down thinking or listen to my podcast, where is my Mind? Where I mentioned this idea as well. And they're like, so I. I assume you did that before you looked into it more deeply. And I'm like, yes, that's true. Now, I wouldn't agree with that.

Well, I think it's really amazing and honest and powerful and trustworthy that you'd share that. Because who in their right mind and heart would ever say that everything they've ever done a body of work on is the truth? The truth is evolving. The truth always evolves based on new information that comes into consciousness. I think it would be really stupid to fall back to books that were written 300 years ago when there was like horse and buggy, or not even just horse, not even buggy, and say that that's the truth. Yet there is universal teachings that stand the test of time. Yeah, what universal teachings? About spirituality and our creator and consciousness itself. When you went way back into the archives, was there any through line of wisdom that you Know stands the test of time.

I think ideas that number one are experienced often seem to stand the test of time by definition. Like if they continue to be experienced in mystical states, whether it's a near death experience or through meditation or sometimes spontaneous accounts, people describe a very similar view of reality. So to me that's very powerful. But also logic is powerful. So things that are philosophically parsimonious, for example, meaning that they abide by Occam's razor, the simplest solution is usually the best. Doesn't prove that it's true, it just means that it's. You can explain something using fewer assumptions. And that's one of the reasons I've actually been drawn to this metaphysical view that consciousness is fundamental. I referenced Dr. Kastrup's work, but there are others too, where consciousness is actually the only thing we know with certainty. Whereas a world that existed before any form of consciousness, that existed before the stream of consciousness, so to speak, that could be true, but we could never verify it because you need a consciousness in order to verify something. So to say that there's anything outside of all forms of consciousness, not just Mark and Josh, I'm talking about the full stream. Is it possible? Yes. Is it verifiable? No. Is it experienceable? No. So it's actually more parsimonious to say, let's stick with the thing that we know, consciousness, to use technical terminology, it's an ontological category of consciousness versus an ontological category of a material world that exists outside of and independent of all consciousness. We could never know that category of existence, whereas we can know consciousness. And this ties to your question, because what I'm describing is an ancient mystical teaching. I'm just putting it in new words, I guess. Not even really new words. But it also abides by philosophical principles. That's powerful to me.

What are the philosophical principles that you think uphold it or support it?

The biggest one is parsimony. That we can explain all of reality at least as well as the materialist view, which says that there's a material world that preceded consciousness. We can explain all of reality with consciousness on its own. We don't have to invoke this whole new category. That's powerful to me. It's. It's just, it's. We don't have to make those leaps of faith.

There's a mentor of mine, and I don't know if you've heard of him. His name is Paul Check. And he was on the podcast. Have you heard of Paul?

I interviewed with him a few weeks ago.

Oh, beautiful.

Okay, we've been talking.

Maybe you've already heard what I'm about to share. He said there's no atheist in a foxhole. I don't know if he mentioned that to you.

I don't know if he did.

And I love that because you had said once you started to experience hardships and the stretching of your own limitations, that is when you found this exploration of consciousness or, in a way, seeking of God, the thing that created us. There's a lot of wounding around the word God. So I like to say God, creator, universe. Right? Whatever word resonates with y' all is. Is the word that you get to go with. But the fact that you and I are here, Mark, like, just the fact that we're here drawing breath, that something is breathing us, that the essay note in your heart is an electrical impulse that's grounded through your physiology that actually propels blood through your body. It's so miraculous, so mysterious, serious, so insanely beautiful that I think many times we take it for granted just because we are so inundated with distractions from the modern world. And I think that's why your books are so powerful, because they bring people back home to a deep breath of a true introspection to what are we doing here? What is this all about? And essentially, for me, selfishly, how can I play the best game? Doesn't mean that I have the Corvettes and the yachts and all the things. The best game for me is that I'm emotionally regulated. I express myself authentically, and that yields abundance that I can share with the people that I love. That's my game. I got very clear on my game this year. It has those three specific parts. And when I got clear on my game, now I use that filter as a way for who I'm going to have conversations with, what I'm going to behave, like, where I'm going to go, when I'm going to eat. I mean, everything in my life is through the filter of that game. Do you have a specific game that's come up for you or a way of being or thinking, especially when it pertains to your work and the challenges that people may throw at your work?

Yeah, it's a great question. And it goes to Paul Check's point about, like, what's your myth?

Sure.

That you're living out.

Yes.

And I've been thinking about it a lot since talking to Paul, but. And it's been on my mind for the last eight years because I spent so much of the first 30, like struggling and trying to achieve. And now appreciating those first 30 years and seeing that it's led me on a new path and it's made me capable of doing things that I wouldn't have been able to do without those hardships. There's something here about challenging my own paradigms, Whether it's about cosmic things like the cosmos or medicine or liberty or consciousness, or my own beliefs about myself that I used to believe, or subconscious beliefs that I'm not even aware of.

Sure.

So going super deep in all that myself. And then what seems to happen is the byproduct is I want to share this with people. I look at the world differently. This is really important. How can I synthesize this in a way that's not super, super abstract, but also doesn't lose the essence of the complexity and then make it easier for people who might not want to spend the months and years researching and just put it into a book or do these episodes.

You can see how perfect that is because that's what you used to do for financial board members. You took massive concepts and simplified them to what do I need to know? And give me the references. I mean, it's so beautiful looking back, Right. You can see exactly why it happened. Yet when it's happening, we're like, what the fuck am I doing? Why. Why am I here? Y' all can relate to this. I'm doing a job. I hate why. It's because you're going to use it later, right? You're going to use this wisdom later. You. You definitely did.

I did. And at the same time, there was a letting go point. So what's the balance of doing the thing I hate? Quote, unquote? Up to a point.

Yeah.

What's the paradox of that? In some ways, it's super useful, but in another way, at a certain time, it's time to let go of it. So these decision points we all have to make, there's trial and error in it that I'm having to learn for myself in all areas of life. So my. If we're getting to the myth or the whatever we want to call it of what's the through line, at least up until this point, it's questioning paradigms in myself, learning as much as I can about it to the point where I can synthesize it and hopefully speak about it coherently and then share it with people. Because how did this start for me? I mean, we could get metaphysical. It started at birth, and. But from a more localized perspective, it Started with me listening to podcasts and then also having dark nights of the soul where I was on the treadmill and thought I was following everything I should have been following largely. And I still was not satisfied and not super happy. I felt like I was a zombie. So how can I use all of that and then make my own life better and then help other people in the process? There's something there in my journey so far.

That's something for me was going back to the question when I was a kid that I shared, what's all this pain? What's all this existential energy? What's all this torment and torture and like, why do people suffer essentially, which is like the key question of the Buddha. And then there's a Buddha inside of all of us. You know, there's the energy of love or Buddha ness emanating from you. It's just coming through your unique point of consciousness or your soul's expression. What I'm saying is we all have a beautiful story to share, but I think what gets in the way of that, and I wonder how you feel about this, is our own perceived limitations of what's possible for us and others. And those ways of thinking are imprinted really early, Mark, and they may even happen intergenerationally as well. If you look at Mark Wolin's work, it didn't start with you. If you look at the trauma that a baby experiences inside of the mother's womb where he or she comes out with hypervigilance because their neurology is actually coded for war. I mean, it's just absolutely insane how we can follow. The only line of thinking is positive thinking. There's so much to unpack before we put up this kind of pseudo safety bullshit of good vibes only. How do you make sense of the things that happen to us versus the things that happen for us? I know it's a language play. It's very powerful in neuro linguistic programming to speak in the affirmative, speak from the eye. How does Mark make sense? What's your sense making process around things happening to you or things happening for you?

I've started to take more responsibility for the things that happen in my life. I would say that's step one rather than poor me, that, that I played a role in this.

It's a trap.

I played a role.

Yeah.

Otherwise we can get stuck in the world is. It's a victim mentality that's actually not helpful. But at the same time, if the victim mentality comes up, I think there is value in allowing it to be there and then running its course. This is a David Hawkins technique. He used this with regard to pain, but really any emotion, he would say, if you're feeling something, that means you're not feeling enough of it. So let it go. Let all of it be there. So if you're angry, be as angry as you can be in a safe way. So don't like punch someone necessarily. Maybe punch a pillow or whatever it is for you. And if you experience it fully, it will run out and you don't need to have it anymore. So I say that with regard to victim mentality, because that can come up in us to say, poor me, okay, let it be there. And then eventually it runs out. But then taking the sense of personal responsibility. It's a deep, multi layered question that you were alluding to, because who is the me that is responsible? There's the version of Mark and things that I can remember in this lifetime, but then there's the ancestral stuff. And like family constellation work gets into that. Is there ancestral stuff that we have maybe agreed to, to take on that isn't me, but sort of is me because it's part of me that I'm responsible for? And then when we get into the even deeper metaphysical stuff like past lives and between lives, and I mentioned the University of Virginia before, there's real evidence to suggest that there might be something to this. And to give more weight to that, there are some young children studied at the University of Virginia who have birthmarks and physical defects in their body that align with the way that they talk about having died in the previous life. And the researchers sometimes can find medical records that find like, yeah, this person died in this way. And the deformity you have on your body or the physical defect or something actually correlates very strongly. So if we're talking about personal responsibility, how do we tie that to it? Because maybe it's a continuation of a soul or something, or if it's all simultaneous, we get into language issues of is it really a past life or simultaneous? But in any event, is there some continuity with you, even though you might not remember everything that happened in the past that still is responsible, but can't create the causal link for why you're responsible for it?

Well, that makes sense to me. This is why alcoholism, obesity and addiction runs through multi generations. Like, there's phrases where people say, well, we're the Smiths, we're addicts. I'm just like my dad. Even what I'm, what I'm asking and what I'M getting at is the way that we use language stems to a belief that's held in the unconscious. And the unconscious which, you know, you argue that consciousness doesn't happen in the brain, it actually happens outside of the brain. The brain's both the transmitter and consciousness itself. How's that for a paradox? But the challenging part for me at times is I get so caught up in trying to play the best game that when I experience challenges, I want to go back and connect them to my generation. I want to at times blame my mom, blame my dad. The higher version of me, the more expanded thinker in me with a higher vantage point can look at that and say, well, that type of thinking just disempowers me. It doesn't actually make me a more powerful guy that can play the game better. So is it really the lens? I mean, look at all the words that are in your books. Is it really the lens of language that shapes our reality? Is that a huge player in our reality itself? The language inside our head with our eyes closed, and the language that I'm projecting onto you that I believe is true in this moment? Is language the ultimate beacon of truth for consciousness?

It's a really big question because when people come back from mystical experiences, near death experience, or otherwise psychedelics, often they say there are no words to describe what I experienced. I can try with language, but it will distort the experience. The term is ineffability. It's like the number one thing in near death experiences. So these are when a person is almost clinically dead, or sometimes clinically dead, and then they're resuscitated and they come back and they have this elaborate experience of expanded consciousness, like sometimes 360 degree vision. Sometimes they were shown visions of the future that turned out to be true. Sometimes they actually saw things from above their body that are validated when they're resuscitated. So verified memories during an out of body experience. So crazy stuff. And they'll say consistently, it's ineffable. I can try to use words, but if you haven't experienced this, you're not even gonna know what I'm talking about. So it gets to challenges with the nature of consciousness itself. Can we use words to describe the nature of reality if the reality is consciousness? So we're dealing in approximation. The word's always going to approximate what's going on and how much is that distorting experience. And yet at the same time, we need to communicate. And yet at the same time, when I like in My book, An End to Upside Down Contact, we don't have it here. I evaluated allegations of contact with non human intelligences, whether in a near death state or these quote unquote UFO states that have been reported throughout history. Often what happens is that the beings people encounter do not use words. They say it's telepathic communication and yet the communication was clear, it was mind to mind. Because that's a, it's a reasonable question to say, if you encountered a being, how did you communicate with them? Did they have the same language? And people will say consistently telepathic. So what does that tell us about the nature of reality, but also communication? Maybe we're doing an inefficient, efficient form of communication as humans.

Oh, I would say we definitely are the majority of communication. And this is like, you know, hopefully I live to 100. That's my goal. Right. So I'm approaching midlife and what I notice is that I spent about 40 years communicating in a very disempowering way. I would use words like, kinda, maybe I'll try. I might do that. Yeah, let me see. I mean the language that we're all taught through societal example and even parental example, and forgive them, like many people just don't know. They don't know. It's unconscious incompetence. But what I'm getting at, it goes back to my question for you about language and the structure of reality through language. The big piece for me has just been learning how to speak in a very loving, empowering and respectful way. And also being a unique ego who's Josh, right? With his amalgamation of what he's learned and what he thinks is true. Do you ever struggle with that as a writer? Because whether it's the boardroom and financials, taking massive complexes and breaking them down to things that can be digested, or being on a podcast, podcast, talking about seven books all at once. Which is why I wanted to talk about liberty and thinking out of all seven. Do you struggle with that? The way that you articulate thought in relation to explaining consciousness?

I struggle with the possibility that I could mislead someone. I really don't want to do that. And because of that I end up not having definitive conclusions. And I actually start my latest book and end to the Upside Down Cosmos, dedicating it to those who are comfortable with three important words, I don't know. So being super clear on that. Because sometimes things can get taken out of context where it's like, Mark, you claimed this, but actually if you saw the bigger context Actually I was just trying to explain something a certain way and I had to approximate and I had to use an analogy. So that is a challenge that I always face because it's. People can interpret things the way they want to.

So if we're really talking about thinking, then really what that is at its core, it's the ability to perceive ideas or to understand ways of being, ways of speaking, what our environment is showing us, what our visual cortex is showing us. What is thinking at its core. Like, you know, there's even the thinking man. I believe it's in Rome or some really amazing country. I think, therefore I am. But just the thought of thinking does not mean that you're free. Because thoughts are like just information, they're leaves floating out. And it's only when we attach emotion to a thought that it starts to become real. What actually is thinking? If we're going to know the right side and the upside, what is thinking in its own way?

Yeah, this is another one of those. I don't know. I don't know exactly what it is. But we know we experience thought and this gets in the realm of such abstract stuff because a brain, for example, we could dissect it in science and actually point to different parts of the anatomy. But a thought, can we do the same thing? We can't. I can't sit there and point to your thoughts. But you know you're experiencing them and so do I. I know I'm experiencing a thought and I know that there's a sense of an I that can register the thought. So we start to get really meta if we break down our own consciousness because there's an eye that experiences the thought. So there's a distinction between self and thought. That's an important distinction. Yeah, but what is it and where is it coming from? And can we control it? I know there are hypotheses on this stuff, but I really don't know.

What's the strongest hypothesis you've heard about thinking empowering or thinking in a self improving way? In other words, if, if the eye or the brain is experiencing the thought either? Well, maybe it's all collective actually, maybe it's all conditioned thought. But there are, there are times where I truly believe that a thought is mine. I haven't heard it from anyone else. It comes to me after the cold plunge or you know, even a journey and breath work or something. And I believe I perceive it as my thought. I identify with the thought and then I allow myself to feel emotion, which then is like the lock and the key that allows behavior to happen after the thought and the emotion are felt. But at the core of it, aren't all thoughts collective thoughts that we attach to from the eye?

Well, let's go back to the. The basic metaphysical hypothesis. We started with all reality's consciousness. So that means there's one source of everything, there's one cause of everything. So that means that all thinking comes from the oneness of consciousness. And yet at another level, there is the duality of the Mark and the Josh being apparently separate whirlpools within the stream, which is the level at which we're largely having this conversation. Because otherwise it's like you can't even have a conversation.

Right. It's ineffable.

It's ineffable, yeah. So at that level of the individuals that exit, that apparently exist, where does, where do the thoughts come from? And you're reminding me of work that's been done on the science of channeling. There's actually a book on this by Helene Wabe, director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences called the Science of Channeling. Channeling is the phenomenon in which a human seemingly brings in a consciousness that's not native to that person, like a third party entity, a spirit or whatever it is, and will literally speak through the vocal cords of the human. And this has been studied scientifically, like to evaluate it versus psychiatric conditions, for example, and look at the. The validity of the information that comes forth. And look at actually their studies on the behavior of random number generator machines in the same room as the person who's the channeling and that they behave non randomly when the person's doing channeling. This is work that's been done at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And of course we need more replications of this sort of thing by many institutes. But there's weird stuff which this is a long way of saying there seems to be reality to the phenomenon of channeling. Which gets to your question of look, where are the thoughts coming from? Because if you could have a third party entity, a different kind of a multidimensional whirlpool influencing your whirlpool and you don't realize it. What does that mean? So should we be aware that our thoughts sometimes might not be our own? Interesting.

I can totally relate to that. I mean, I got my ass kicked so bad, so deeply in an ayahuasca journey in 2019. It took me two years to let go of OCD. And even occasionally a thought will creep in. I know now I've Trained myself how to be at peace with it. Because what I learned from Paul was that an entity can only live inside of someone that has space for it. So, yes, there are actually evil, malevolent energies or beings or entities in the world. However, those can only attach to me if I feed them. So it's about being spiritually robust and mature. And actually, I wonder how you feel about this. I get the case that when someone is on a deep spiritual journey, which you obviously are, you don't write seven books about flipping people's mindset unless you're on a very profound spiritual journey, that the challenges of the size of the dream are going to equal in magnitude. Bigger the dream, bigger the challenges, bigger the. Maybe entities attach, bigger the threats of finance, maybe just challenges in general. And it wasn't until I learned how to make peace with that entity that I believe actually was for my good. I really believe that now because I can see that in 2025, looking back, like, wow, it. It really helped me heal porn addiction. It really helped me heal the separation of. Of my heart and soul to me, to Josh. And it allowed me to become closer to my children and my woman and just be more confident because the entity was there to teach me something, is what I'm saying. What do you feel about what I'm presenting here? Entities in general. Has this come up in your work? Quite a bit? Entities and their origin?

Yeah, it has. So two things come to mind. First, David Hawkins saying this might have been one of his lectures too, but it might have been in his books. He says that as you elevate in your consciousness, you have more metaphysical support from whatever you want to call it. Angelic. I don't know what these energies are. Other realms, other realms that support you, but you're also faced with much greater challenges. And also the consequences of making mistakes increases significantly as you elevate. So there's something about these energies impacting us in that regard. And the other thing that comes to mind is an anecdote I mentioned in my book, An End to Upside Down Medicine, because I talk not only about traditional germ theory questions and allopathic medicine, but also how we can integrate consciousness in healing, whether it's Anita Moorjani or what I'll describe now, which is with regard to demonic possession. And this is something that sounds crazy, but it's been studied. In the book I mention a doctor, his last name is Gallagher, who's written about this, and he's actually helping people who have been possessed. Like Ivy League trained doctor sees These cases. And it's like something's going on in rare circumstances where someone is overtaken. And I quote a Catholic priest who's an exorcist in this book and upside down medicine, who recalls speaking with what he calls a lower level demon. And there are questions about whether we can trust what the demons say. But that aside, it's still an interesting case where the demon is speaking through the possessed person to him and says sometimes God sends us to people because it creates such a challenge in the person who's possessed that if and when they overcome it, they have been so sanctified that they are much holier as a result of the challenge.

Almost makes me want to cry. That's so true. That's so true. Like the. When you play a really big game, like a really big game, you have to be willing to pay the price for that game. I Remember in the third interview with Dr. Zach Bush, he shared that he had just gone through a divorce and he was up leveling his life and business and expanding the way he's speaking and his own consciousness. And he shared that. And I've heard that not just from our modern teachers, but it's just like even from antiquity. And just like ancient masters have shared the same thing. And you mentioned Hawkins and this other professor. You know, I can't even imagine what his peers thought of him when he's talking about exorcism in academia. Like those. Those two things are like oil and water, you know. But the reason it brought up emotion in me is because I have felt the presence of that demon. I mean, I met that demon for sure in that journey, for sure. No doubt whatsoever. As real as you and I sitting here right now was the face of that entity. And I love that you just shared what you shared, because that has been the unfolding truth for me. It was actually the most beautiful blessing. I don't think that these evil energies. And I wonder how what you make of this. I don't think these evil energies are there just to cause chaos. There's chaos for order's sake. Like nothing in the universe is ever perpetual, ongoing chaos. Eventually, all chaos has to seek order. What do you make of that?

I think you're right at the highest level, but sometimes when we're in the maze, we can't see that. So I'll give an example that's really stood out to me. There's a woman named Serena Faith Masterson. She wrote a book called I Am Serena came out a few years ago. And this woman was born into A family of basically demonic type rituals where she was subjected to crazy amounts of torture that are difficult to describe. And then even went into mind control programs, sophisticated stuff, to basically torture someone such that their personality fragments, they developed associative identity disorder and they don't even know it because of the sophistication of the torture. Point is worse. Stuff you could imagine from birth. And she writes about her healing experience and she concludes that her soul wanted this on some level so that she could heal and basically break through a level of healing that could then help others and then speak about it. So when you hear someone that goes through unimaginable things and then that's the conclusion of it. And I've heard this from other people too, that have gone through some really horrible things. It's like, at what level are you zooming? Because at one level it's impossible to conceive that she's right in any way. It's like, no, yeah, no way. That's pure evil. But then on another level, she's healed to such an extent that she can inspire many people, myself included. Even though I haven't been through any of that stuff, it's like. And I've spoken to her about this, you know, like. And I've been on a roundtable with her and it's. And this is just one person out of many where I've come across this sort of thing.

Yeah, I can connect to the story of Dr. John Demartini and Teal Swan. Right? So both masculine, feminine perspectives. John. John demartini had massive health complications. And it's because of that vacuum that was created that allows him to speak and serve in the way that he does. Teal Swan went through same torture. I mean, massive torture. If you guys go into Teal Swan, like, the stuff she experienced was insane. And even the documentary that was done as a hit piece against her a few years back, that was proven to be wrong. And the person actually came to her with a, you know, a wolf in sheep's clothing and said, teal, I want to support you. You know, you're this great Peter. And he actually had a slander campaign in his back pocket the whole time. So it goes to the story that you're bringing, not only that Hawkins said, but that I've seen play out not in my life, but in everyone's life that's creating something significant, that's expressing something significant, and that is they have to be prepared for the pain of the responsibility of what they're actually sharing. Like, we can't Know gravity without no gravity, we can't know dark without light. It's such an easy concept for me to speak intellectualized, but to actually live that through what a journey that is.

Yeah. I'll give an anecdote for you and your audience because maybe you don't go through exactly what I'm going through, but you can relate, which is that as I write each book, I have to consider the consequences of potentially losing people who used to respect me because I'm challenging something that I know they don't agree with. And I have to make the decision internally. Am I going to go through with the publication of this book even after I've written it? I have to take that step and even after my publisher's approved it. Am I really going to do this? Because I know certain people who've spoken publicly about disagreeing with something that I'm going to talk about, and I have to go through my own journey of if I can look at the evidence and the logic and think that it's an important enough topic, then I have to do it, regardless of the forces that might come after me and call me names and say that I'm perpetuating a psyop or something like that.

Yeah.

And be okay with that and be grounded in it. That's been part a huge part of my personal journey the last eight years.

I would assume that An End to Upside Down Liberty was probably the most pushback you've received.

Maybe not the most pushback, but the hardest one for me.

Why?

Because politics is such a polarizing subject. And this book came out in 2021 when I was just, generally speaking, challenging the role of government in liberty and making the claim that it is actually something that hinders liberty rather than something that's a beneficial force for society. So some pretty bold claims, especially relative to where I was coming from at the time. I had written the first two books and end Upside Down Thinking and then An End Upside Down Living, which is basically how you think about living life when you think about consciousness differently. There was an audience that was very supportive of that, and of course, some naysayers and people thought I was nuts. But many of the people who supported thinking and living the first two books had political leanings, let's say, that were more pro government and more in favor of the narrative that was being put forth by government, especially during the 2020 era where there was so much disagreement.

That's putting it mildly.

Polarization is a better word.

Yeah.

And I knew I was going to step on toes and I did. And I had some people say things to me, very upset about that Liberty Book. But I had to go back and forth in my mind, and I couldn't conclude anything other than where I landed with the Liberty Book. And I thought, this is super important. But there was a lot of struggle, and I think I built a muscle with that that made it easier for me to publish other books which arguably are more controversial, like the Medicine and Cosmos books. And all of them, I mean, have been more controversial in some ways, but that one in particular really was hard for me.

Well, because you're going up against a pretty strong narrative that's funded by, you know, blackrock, State street, lots of trillion dollar. It's hard for the human mind to even conceptualize how much a trillion dollars is. I mean, it would feel like a football field, you know, with that much cash. But when you have that much energy, or perceived energy, which is money, is essentially a collective consensus that we agree something has value there. We base our economics off of what we agree has value. But it essentially, on a meta scale, is arbitrary. It's pretty arbitrary. A physical dollar bill, a piece of gold in the ground, all these things. Same thing with nationalism, Same thing with tribalism. It's arbitrary. It's just a story that we've had a consensus that we agree upon.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, the way we do government, it's known as statism, using political philosophy terminology. It's that we have a few people in society who have special privileges over others. It's one way of looking at it that they can decree certain things that we might disagree with and make those things law. Which is essentially, they get to define their morality and impose it on other people. Even in quote, unquote democracies, which I know is a controversial thing to say, but democracy is a form of tyranny. It's where some group of people, the quote unquote majority, gets to impose its will on the minority, even if the minority doesn't agree. So it's a reversal in thinking because that's not what we're taught growing up in school, which is that government is this benevolent force. And there's certain things that government does, of course, that are very important and government can do good things, but on the whole, it is inherently tyrannical. That's the case that I make in this book, an end upside down liberty. It's inherently tyrannical. And then secondarily, and I think even worse, it inherently violates spiritual principles. It is at odds with spirituality. It violates natural law.

I have an idea of what that might be, but I'd love for you to expand on that. How does the current structure of politics or perceived liberty completely sideline our, let's just call it, for lack of a better term, sovereignty or freedom. How does it do that?

I first want to define the way government operates a bit more, and then I'll go to how that operation violates.

Natural law and spiritual law.

And spiritual law, yeah. And that's what this book is, an end upside down liberty. And I want to preface this by saying when I was looking at government in 2021 and 2020, I was coming from the perspective of someone who didn't have political opinions prior to that period. Believe it or not, I was totally ignorant. I didn't care. I was so focused on my business life and everything else. And then I was focused on consciousness. Politics didn't matter unless there was a regulation that affected my business. I was focused on that regulation. Otherwise I didn't care. So then 2020 happens and I saw this polarization and it was almost to the point where. Not almost, if you didn't have an opinion, that was an opinion. So I'm like, where do I stand on this stuff? And that led me to look at political philosophy and like, what is the nature of government itself? What is the state? And it led me to the work of Larkin Rose. He wrote a book called the Most Dangerous Superstition and also the work of Murray Rothbard and the Mises Institute. There's a lot of great resources@mises.org m I s e s.org, like free books available by Rothbard. And I've spoken there in Alabama. Really good stuff on the Austrian School of Economics. I was never aware of this stuff, even like studying economics somewhat at Princeton, taking courses on that. I never heard of the Austrian school. But it led to me to a new view of freedom and government that contradicted everything that I believed to be true. Because I held the view that most people have, which is that, look, human beings are ultimately too irresponsible to just live. So we need to have this organization that monitors society. And Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, famous philosopher, he talked about the Leviathan state that would be there to basically manage society. What I didn't realize until getting into some of these other philosophers like Larkin Rose and. And Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman Hoppe and others like it, like them. There's a contradiction here, which is that if the premise is that we don't trust humans to govern themselves because Human beings are untrustworthy and warlike. Our solution, how is our solution any better? Because what we do now is we take a subset of people that we just said we don't trust and are too warlike to do anything. We take a subset of those people and we put them in a position where then they can govern over the rest. So it's like, if you don't trust humans, which is a fair thing to say, then why would you trust humans in a position of power over other humans? It's a contradiction. And then people will say, but we have elections where the people get to decide these things. But wait, if we don't trust people in the first place, then how can we trust them to elect the right people to be in power? And how can we trust them to even run trustworthy election processes, for example? So these contradictions come up where we end up in a position where our premises are basically violate. The solution that we end up with. So we end up with an organization that has this basically a political monopoly to tell people to do things that they didn't necessarily agree with. And now we're getting into the area of natural law, where if you don't agree with a law, you find it to be violating your morals, let's say taxation. You're forced to pay the government a certain amount of money and the government then use that, uses that money towards something you disagree with. Let's say it's a war. You find it, you morally oppose some war and the government's funding that or some other policy, is that okay morally for them to take money that you earned on your own, that was your property, they're taking it. Did you agree to that? And now we get into the issue of consent. Arguably, government is a form of implied consent rather than explicit, mutually agreed upon consent where you sit down together and write a contract and sign it. And this is typically what happens in business. I saw this all the time between service provider and customer. And I use those terms because we don't often hear that with regard to government. Government really is a service provider. It provides very important services like courts, roads, military, police. Super important stuff. Yeah, but there are other important service providers in society and we interact very differently. Like a consultant or a lawyer think of any good or service in a marketplace outside of government, often especially for important ones. You have this contract where you sit down together, this is how much I'm going to pay you, this is how we can terminate if things don't go well. You agree to it, you sign it with government we have this quote, unquote, social contract, which I would love to see to know what apparently we signed up for. But it's an abstraction, so we end up with implied consent. And because of that implied consent, we can be forced to do things that we didn't agree with. Now we're getting into spiritual territory. Is that okay? Spiritually, where I take it in terms of, let's say, inferring what natural law says is the near death experience. So I alluded to it before, but I want to double down on it because it's such an important phenomenon. I've written about it in all my books. Again, studied by really credible people. University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies is looking at this and many other doctors because the phenomenon is so ubiquitous. It's coming up everywhere now that resuscitation technology has gotten so much better. People are coming back from the depths, whereas previously they would have died. And there are ancient accounts that have been recorded, but basically in the last few decades, the number of these cases has increased dramatically because of medical technology. So people come back from these near death experiences where their body was literally dying. It wasn't just, oh, I thought I was going to die. This is like they're brought back from the brink, cardiac arrest. And they have these profound experiences that changes their lives very often and sometimes their priorities shift where they end up getting divorced or they change careers. But also physiologically, often near death experiencers have problems with electronics like their watches don't work. And there's a joke that if you go to a near death experience conference, you can tell which people had a near death experience and which ones just are interested in studying it based on who's wearing a watch.

Yeah, interesting.

So this is serious stuff that it's ineffable. So it's hard for them to come back and describe and they probably sound crazy to people who've never experienced it. But often people have a life review in these near death experiences. It occurs in 20 to 30% of the cases, depending on the estimates, in indigenous cultures. And this has been studied by Dr. Gregory Shushan, he's looked at near death experiences and all sorts of other cultures. Their life review is not reported per se, but it is there. There's often a being that is evaluating the life of the soul, which is sort of like a life review. So the point is that thematically this seems to come up and it does vary by culture, which is just interesting. But often in, let's just say outside of indigenous cultures, when they Describe a life review. People relive their whole life in a short amount of time, but the kicker is that they become the people that they affected. So let's say we have a life review. Josh, I'll become you during this conversation. You'll become me, and we'll get to be what it was like to be that person. So what happens is, especially in emotionally charged situations, you feel the way you negatively impacted someone or the way you positively impacted the person. So when I did my podcast series, Where Is My Mind? I interviewed Danny and Brinkley, who's had multiple near death experiences, and he had multiple life reviews. So each near death experience he had a life review. He remembered his combat days in Vietnam where he killed people and had to become the person he killed and feel the pain of that. So when he was saying this to me, I could tell he didn't want to talk about it too much. It was so painful still decades later. So when he came back from his life life review, near death experience, he survived it. He changed his life dramatically. He became a hospice volunteer. So in his later life reviews, which he didn't know he was going to have, I mean, he was struck by lightning, has had open heart surgery twice, brain surgery once, and had these crazy near death experiences in life reviews, he didn't know that was going to happen. But in the later life reviews, he relived the new stuff, not just the old stuff. He did tell me he started from the beginning of his life in each life review. So he had to do the tough stuff multiple times, but the new stuff of being the person that he comforted who was dying in the hospice, he got to feel what it was like. So what he says and what many other people say is that we are learning something about the nature of reality through these near death experiences. And Dr. Bruce Grayson, who's a medical doctor at the University of Virginia, professor emeritus now, he wrote a book called after, came out a few years ago. And he, in his assessment of these near death experiences and life reviews is that what we learned from the near death experience is beyond morality. It's actually natural law. And this is the tie to politics, natural law, the golden rule, effectively, that the way we treat other people should be informed by the fact that we're all interconnected, as some people would say colloquially, treat other people well because we're all one, or treat people the way you want to be treated. Yeah, I'm hesitant to say the latter a bit because a masochist could, could say, well, I want to be treated with Pain.

Right.

But generally speaking, the message is love, as trite as that sounds from these near death experiences, like that's the universal message and other spiritually transformative experiences. So if the Golden Rule treat other people well because we're interconnected, if that's built into the fabric of reality as natural law, how do we then reconcile the way we do government where someone can be forced against their will to do something that they find to be immoral, that arguably is a violation of natural law.

It's powerfully put. I mean, that is a whole series of podcasts, what you just presented, because there's so much complexity there. At the core of it, there may be this platitude that we've heard so much, and that is that love is all there is. And the reason it's a platitude is because it's so profound, it holds so much significant weight that the modern world likes to just put it out there as if it's some social media post.

Love is all there is. Yeah.

But if that's the ultimate truth, that love is all there is, and the only way that love knows itself as an aspect of God is by experiencing infinite abundance of its opposite, which would be evil or malevolence, then it goes back to a point that I asked earlier. And if it, if it is that we are playing a game or if we're in a school for souls, this perceived liberty that's coming through the vehicle of politics, everyone can feel it, even the people that are in it. They've brainwashed themselves. They've become, you know, harbingers of this soul seeking, soul sucking system that we've all been tacitly approving of. Otherwise it wouldn't still exist. But it comes through the vehicle of bifurcation and war. That's its primary vehicle. Because I think it was in a movie once, actually, Gene Hackman, really amazing movie called Crimson Tide. And he said, he quoted a German philosopher, he said war is a continuation of politics by other means. Because if you really want to insert politics, you do it by violence and force. Otherwise, if we were just operating on this natural law that you profoundly have stated, there's just no way we wouldn't simply hold our hand up and say, no, and I would be forced by the natural law to respect your autonomy and individuality, that my beliefs of what should be done will not be done because they impede on your sovereignty as a human being, as a living entity, as a sentient being. Yet we've convinced ourselves through conditioning, it's really about the conditioning that I want to unpack with you that the perceived liberty we're experiencing in America is not actually liberty at all. And I think the liberation that we're all seeking is coming from us exiting the system to the degree that we can. What do you make of that?

Yeah, it's well put that the perceived liberty we have is actually a relative liberty. That we can look at other forms of more oppressive governments and say we have these quote unquote rights that they don't have. But it misses the point that we still have this leviathan that is there that is capable of doing things to us that we didn't ask for. And it has the apparent right to do so, to coerce others. And it leads to the political principle known as the non aggression principle that ties very well to natural law. It's very simple, which is that we should do no harm to anyone's private property, which includes their body. And the private property could be their money, anything that they actually own legitimately. And aggression could be violence, fraud, theft, coercion. That's any form of aggression. So don't enact aggression on anyone's body or the property that they own. With the caveat that if someone initiates aggression against you or your private property, you have a right to self defense, in which case that self defense is not aggression, it's responsive. So there are some nuances in this, because then what constitutes aggression? We would have to agree on that. And what is self defense? But there has to be an ability to respond if someone is violating you.

There's two things. One, taxation is organized theft, right? Taxation is aggression. And that taxation actually comes through letters, through threats, through, you know, going into your bank account and taking money. It also does come through violence because if you push up against the system for long enough, IRS agents will come to your house and haul you off to jail. There's violence involved in this. So at no part of taxation is there ever a respect for another's autonomy. Because we've all been coerced into this game that it's okay to fund a White House party for transsexuals that show their breasts on live television. My tax dollars paid for that. I mean, that's the strongest aversion I have to what's being presented as, quote, liberty and choice through election. It's actually not liberty. It's not choice. The only thing I think elections actually do is they may tend to sway public opinion based on who's the leader, you know, the Republican or Democrat. But at the reality of It. I don't think the President actually has too much sway about what goes on in Congress, House of Representatives, all these different structures that have been put forth to show us we have agency of voter choice, but we don't. I feel like the way that we combat violence isn't with violence. It's actually the new spear is intelligence. It's financial intelligence, it's spiritual intelligence, mental, emotional, physical intelligence. That's the core of this podcast, man. You know, how do we develop the. The wellness that we all inherently are born with? Well, we do it by wisdom. We have to have wisdom and intelligence. Do you feel like the only antidote to the political atmosphere where totalitarians, or the Leviathan, as you say, come in and take by force? I don't believe it's by us pushing back with force. Maybe it'll get there. I don't know. It might, honestly. But I think right now a smarter way to play the game is actually to become so skilled in finances and so skilled with your own intelligence that you don't even have to fight the war, you can just exit the war because you become so financially free.

Yeah, I lean. Do you believe that? I lean that way as well. And it comes with knowledge, wisdom of understanding the system that we're in and having that consciousness shift. To say what I was taught in grade school about what government is, that's not actually true. And there are many reasons to understand that. And that taxation is not a benevolent thing. It is. Money is being taken or you get thrown in a cage if you disagree. Whereas in other areas, you pay for the things that you want. It's truly voluntary. Why shouldn't it be the case for all these services that are super important in society that you voluntarily pay for them? Why should you be forced to pay for something that you might disagree with? That's not okay. That's not morally acceptable. It violates natural law. So to have that way of thinking, it's such a consciousness shift. And then all of a sudden it's like you see the world differently and then the question becomes, how do we. What do we do with it? Is it take down the system or is it. Do we build a new system?

We build the new system and we also become intelligent enough to build that system with us and our families. I'm not saying we need to have a mafia mindset where it's like, all about me and my family. That's not going to make anybody win. You might win in the short term, but then when you have the life review, you're going to have to really feel the pain that your selfishness and greed caused other families. Right. If what Bob Proctor said is true, which I really believe in my heart it's true. He said you take from abundance and abundance is still there, then there is no win lose game. It doesn't exist. We've all just been cajeweled into this game where when I play a game it means I have to dominate my opponent. So we have this consumption based mindset where we have to defeat someone in order for us to win a game. That's at the core of politics. The core of politics is I win, you lose. No matter how they explain it. That's really the MO of how it's running. Yes.

Well, it's a great business model, the.

Most profitable next to religion, it's like so profitable.

We get to take based on the, the percentage that we tell you we can take from you. I mean, and if you start to get into some very perverse incentives and this is what the Austrian School of Economics looks at. So for example, an economist named Tom DiLorenzo, he gives an example of government funding of education. Let's say the education system is doing really, really poorly. That then allows people to say we need to fund the education system more. So the incentive is we should do a bad job and we're going to get more funding. Whereas in a marketplace, if you are a business competing with others, if you do a bad job, guess what, I'm going to hire someone else. But you can't do that with a political monopoly. I mean, some people might say, well Mark, you can just move to another country, but then you're stuck with that other system. Maybe not everyone can move. And expatriation is not always so easy either in terms of actually extricating yourself from the taxation system. So it's not so simple. We have these political monopolies over certain jurisdictions and that's the way our world is set up.

Even the word jurisdiction is interesting. What can you tell us about jurisdiction and how this can help us flip our thinking about liberty? The word jurisdiction, it's arbitrary, isn't it? It's completely arbitrary.

It's been set up by a lot of things that came before us. Where some people said that this is, is the territory that we get to govern. And it's not really private property. It hasn't been. It's, it's governed by a government, by a state.

And at the core of it, look at what's happening on both like local, city, state and federal level. There's fees and taxation all the way down. Like, I don't actually own the property. I might say that I do. Right. I have this podcast studio I build. I'm paying a mortgage on the house. Even the word mortgage, if you look into the French term, it's about dying morgue. There's so much hidden etymology. And if you look for the truth for long enough, you find very disturbing things when it comes to what you actually own or not. The moment I stop paying property taxes, the moment I stop paying my mortgage, I'm going to have vi. I'm going to attract violence that they're going to come back and take it. So do I really own it?

And even people who own their property, they sell their taxes. So it's like rent to the government to keep the thing that you own.

How do we become free? What have you found in your research and in writing this book? An end to upside down liberty that. That we can actually become free. Where's the liberation in this question?

The way I describe it in this book, which was written in 2021, is about shifting our consciousness first and then moving to a society which is probably more like a North Star, because it would require a lot of consciousness shifts. But it's an ideal to consider, which is living without the state at all. Known as voluntarism, where all interactions between customer and service provider are truly voluntary. There's no implied consent. It's all explicit consent. So that means government services, or the things that government currently does, which is just a bunch of human beings doing something under the umbrella of government that that would all be taken out of the public sector. Everything is the private sector, so everything would be just a truly free market. Meaning some would call this, and there are different terms for it. So voluntarism is the one I like because it describes things without all the charge.

Yeah.

But another one is anarchism or anarcho capitalism, which anarchism is often misunderstood. It doesn't mean a society that's totally lawless without rules. It means a society without rulers. So in an anarchist or voluntarism society, or in a narco capitalist society, there are rules, but the rules are governed by the private property owner. And so, and I talk about this, you get into the realm of theoretical economics. So how could you have a police service in the free marketplace? How could you handle environmental issues in the marketplace? And this has been thought out very well. The answer seems to be, and I really think this is true, that the. The private sector can handle all of this stuff. Because you end up with proper incentives where all of the problems that you might think of in your mind of, well, how would you handle this? How would you handle that? What happens is that human beings, if they don't like something, they end up having to go to something else. And that means there's an incentive for goods and services to be provided by someone else. Entrepreneurship of, oh, people don't like this thing. Let me go invent something that maybe hasn't even been conceived of yet because we haven't thought of it. So that's where it gets tricky, because you have to be imaginative to say, wait, there might be a solution we haven't thought of. And even though I haven't thought of it, it might be better than the status quo. So you end up in a situation where, yes, there would be problems in this ultimate solution of get the government out completely, but is it worse than the current situation or better? Yes, they're both problematic. But I would argue the voluntarism, stateless society is less bad than the status quo, even though it would still be problematic. And as we elevate in consciousness, arguably it would get better and better.

Well, the questions that come up that I'm feeling actually in the, in the field right now would be, well, what about murderers and rapists and thieves and what about health care? And how are we going to feed the world? Guess what, y'. All, all these questions have never been addressed by the current system. None of it. So the very fears that people might think, how are we going to solve that? They're not being solved now.

Right?

There's a pseudo solving, there's a pseudo perceived safety, but it's not actually real. Like, people don't realize that most penitentiaries, if not all I believe, are independently owned. They're wealth factories for the owners of penitentiaries. You look at healthcare and we all know what's going on with healthcare and with the pharmaceutical industry. These are for profit organizations that benefit on the breakage of the customers. So none of this is working is what I'm saying, and we all know it on some level. And it goes back to what I said when I was a kid. What is all this crap? That question for me that's like bubbling up again is, there's got to be a better way. This isn't the right way. That's what feels most real to me. This isn't the right way. So. So if we flipped, if we completely flipped the way that we see liberty or government or politics, what I heard from you, in so many words, is being an individual, being sovereign, how would that look? And how can we actually create that as a soul, as a human, in the system that's existing right now? Is there a way for us to create that with ourselves and our families and our friends, even operating as a bubble inside of what is perceived as liberty?

Yeah, the answer is, I don't know exactly how it will manifest, but I do think the first step is acknowledging all this stuff. And then what I would hope would happen and would theorize would happen is that people would use their individual creativity to say, oh, wait, we're actually sovereign entities. A government isn't what gives us liberty. And yeah, all these problems that we might have if we had true freedom outside of government, government isn't solving them so well right now. But we're just accustomed to them handling this so we somehow think we're secure. It's. It's some. It's something in our psychology that likes the security of what we have currently. And it kind of relates back to what I was talking about with my thesis. The fear of, of the risk aversion. Yeah, that can sometimes come up if there's a risk aversion here of like, it's. It works pretty well. But no, it actually doesn't work that well. So I think what would happen is if people has these consciousness shifts, creative solutions would emerge to have free societies where we would govern, quote, unquote. Govern. I don't even like that word. We would have rules within private property groups and people would make agreements voluntarily, which could lead to mistakes too, but at least it would be done on a voluntary basis. Like, people can make bad deals in business, buy something they didn't, they shouldn't have. Yeah, but at least that was on their own terms.

The learning is what I think people fear. It's such a paradigm. I love learning. I told Paul, and definitely through your work, I'm excited, getting my mindset shattered, my viewpoint shattered. Literally an end to upside down everything. Right.

Yeah.

The only way for me to do that is to be in love with learning, to actually enjoy the process of learning. So from academia and Princeton and all the research and all the writing that you've done, there has to be a love of learning in you that's super deep to find the truth. That's why people are called truth seekers. But I think what we all have to brace ourselves for with like a big, deep, honest breath, is when you seek the truth, what you find may not be what you want to find, because a lot of these stories that have been propagated by special interests for so long, for millennia has been self serving. It's been from a place of greed or control. And I think that's the part that people want to bury their head in the sand about. They don't want to know about that because Netflix is on and Yellowstone is on and I have my kids college coming up and we're all distracted by that. I think there's a reckoning that's going to happen and I really feel like it will happen in our lifetimes. I sense that especially with the evolution of AI and the proclivity of information getting out there, you can't control what's being birthed. You just can't. People think like Sam Altman, the, The founder of ChatGPT was like, we actually don't know. This is the founder. Right. This is the guy that, with him and Elon Musk and his other executives created ChatGPT. And he's saying on record like, yeah, we don't actually know what's going to happen. I mean, how wild is this dude? You want to talk about new possibilities? How do you take all the information in your books and then also juxtapose them to AI?

Right.

You know how AI is going to impact all the thinking that you're helping people flip.

And I've actually been exploring that a lot and I posted on my social media accounts where currently AI is definitely biased toward the mainstream narratives with regard to anything.

No doubt.

And it varies by AI that you use whether it's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but it does abide by logic. So if you present it with certain pieces of information, you can back it into a corner where it has to confess things.

How so?

Give it a. I've been getting it to confess things. I want to be mindful of censorship of your platform. Go for it.

Hey, if we're going to get censored, so be it.

Okay, that's fine. And I'll try to use my words carefully. Yeah, I want to be respectful here, but I've done a lot on questioning whether the scientific method is used properly in studies on virology, which is a very hot topic of course, because everything in 2020.

I bet you and Alec went deep on that.

We did. We went deep. We went deep a year ago on that and we just went deep on Cosmos. But it's kind of, it's, it's a very important topic because of, number one, the financial interest. But also we saw the world was shut down on the basis of certain assumptions that I didn't even know existed. But the scientific method, this is basic stuff. Or to. In order to run a scientific study that abides by the scientific method, you want to have an independent variable and proper controls. So an independent variable is the thing you introduce into a study to see the effect. And a control is what happens if we don't introduce that thing and see what the effect is. So basically, with AI, I got it to admit that this field of virology does not have a truly purified sample of just a virus based on the methods that have been used dating back to 1954, the Enders and Peebles study, and because of the methods that have been used since then, and these have been admitted as the gold standard even in freedom of information requests, responses by government agencies around the world that they, they, they have basically distorted the term isolation. Because in order to have an independent variable in a study, you would want to isolate that variable by itself so that you could introduce it into the study. So in the context of viruses or anything medically, you'd want to have just the thing that you think causes disease, rather than a bunch of other stuff that might also distort your results. So you want to have a purified sample. And that's not what isolation means in virology. Isolation in virology means that you take an unpurified sample from someone who's sick, you put it into a. A medium. It's called a cell culture. It's a soup that has a bunch of stuff. It has antibiotics and monkey kidney cells. And you. If you see cells breaking down in that soup, the inference is a virus from the person who was sick must have caused the cells to break down. Therefore, we've isolated the virus. So you see how it's a distortion. Isolation really means to separate one thing from other things. To use Analogy from Dr. Tom Cowan, if you have a toolbox, if you want to isolate the hammer, you take the hammer out, and then you can characterize and study just the hammer. But if we're dealing with a sample that's not truly purified and we're putting it into a soup that has a bunch of other things, there are a lot of variables just scientifically that could explain cells breaking down, and yet they call it isolation. So this is what's happened in these freedom of information requests that have been submitted all over the world, where people, including Christine Massey, who's led this initiative, but others too, they say, can you show me studies where we have just a purified sample where it's not being put through the soup of cell culture. And they say, we don't have records for that because the gold standard is to use this cell culture.

Why is that the gold standard?

Because that's what was done in 1954 by Enders and Peebles and Enders was a Nobel Prize winner and that has become the method. So I go through all of this with AI because if anyone goes right now and say, has a virus been isolated? They'll say, absolutely, it has been, and they'll give you all these examples. But what you find is that there are inferences that could be explained by other things and there is no independent variable in the studies. And if you don't have an independent variable, you can't do a proper control because you need to have an independent variable identified first to have the control without the independent variable. So we run into problems and AI is often they're forced to confess, yes, by definition this is pseudoscience because science has an independent variable and proper controls. So that's just one example of the sorts of confessions that AI, it can be powerful in terms of truth seeking potentially. Now, we all have to be vigilant because you can sway AI sometimes to say something that's not true. So we have to be very mindful of like what the prompts are. But it is powerful to see a machine flip where it starts with yes, it follows the scientific method.

Absolutely. Oh, yeah.

And then it's like, wait a second. Yeah, okay, I define pseudoscience as this. And you're. And now I've told you that there's no independent variable or proper controls.

Oops. See, people think that AI is going to be this thing that is going to change the way that we perceive the world, but I actually think it's the opposite. I think that AI is actually a child that Kevin Kelly describes as the technium, which is essentially consciousness experiencing itself, or God experiences itself through, through technology. If that's. If it's presupposed that that technology or the technium is consciousness experiencing itself. What I think is really fascinating about this is any living being is informed or educated or taught by its upbringers, by its parents or its creator. So if we are as a human species the creator of a new birthing of consciousness through technology or the technium, then it's the same way that I would raise my children. It's the same kind of prompts or questions I would ask my son. Hey, son, how do you think that we could do this in a More loving way. Well then I'm feeding him that thought form that, that rationalization of thinking and decision making process is what I'm imbuing in my son. AI is the same way. AI is just going to be a massive mirror on the consciousness that human beings have. Our greed, our debauchery, our malevolence, our evil and our love. So in a way, AI is just another mirror. It's literally. We went really deep with Ben Stewart on this, who was the director of the Psychedelica series. And he's, he's doing a great storytelling course coming out next year, I believe this year, actually in 2025. And what he was saying is I love this analogy of the mirror because the more that we feed AI who and what we think we are, the more AI is going to shine that right back to us. We can actually. It doesn't have to be Terminator is what I'm saying. We can actually through our consciousness of love connected to love connected to. How do I create win win games with you and I not win lose. We can train AI to become a loving mirror for us all. It doesn't have to be this doom and gloom story that people are so afraid of. What do you make of that?

Yeah, I think it's the case with all technology that it can be beneficial or not depending on how it's used. So I do see a lot of really beneficial things with AI for the reasons you stated. And also in a competitive marketplace there will be an incentive to have a truth telling machine because if you have a machine that's just censoring everything, it's like, why am I paying for this? Yeah, so that's, that is an incentive for someone to create a business that has all relevant information, even if it's controversial and goes against the mainstream narrative. To have an AI that's pulling data from everything that isn't going to be biased by a certain narrative like Google's Gemini. AI was doing some ridiculous things. If you asked it what is an election? It wouldn't answer.

Crazy.

There's some absurd stuff where it just won't go there or it will just give you a standard mainstream narrative answer for things. So that's a, that's a business opportunity for somebody to say, let's take all data. It's going to be a pure truth teller. And what would that do for all of us? It would make our lives much easier in many ways and it would allow us to then do other things that might just take up our time where we're doing menial tasks.

Somebody gets to create truth GPT instead of chat GPT. Yeah, I don't even know what the GPT stands for.

Do you know what GPT stands for?

Something? General prompt, general prompt, or general perceived thought. Who knows? GPT. But why I'm getting at this is because if we're going to end our upside down thinking, which is the premise of all your books, right?

Yeah.

Then the way in which we think gets to be observed and examined and questioned its true motivational source. Like why am I thinking the way I'm thinking about liberty, medicine, cosmos, sovereignty, natural law. The thinking itself gets to have a different prompt, to use the analogy of AI. And the prompt is what prompt is when you present a certain set of language or motivational input that is a starting place for the perceiver or the computer to give you an answer or to give you a solution or to give you some to new information that's. That's actually delineated from your prompt itself. Like the prompt that we're giving, whether it's to my son, whether it's to you on the podcast. What I'm getting at is the questions we ask is the really the. The yielding of the consciousness we receive.

Yes, that's.

It's. It's about asking better questions.

Right?

Questions that are coming from our seeking of truth. But yet again, there's. There's fear in that. Because many times in my life when I have the courage to ask a real honest question, I've received an answer that I don't want to receive. Has that happened to you?

All the time. And I think my books are one way to think about it. Of what do I think about the nature of reality? What does the science really say? My first book, an End Upside Down Thinking. And in some ways I had to admit that my whole life was under a lie. And that was really hard and disorienting at first. So it was. In some ways I wanted to ask the question because I was curious, but there was a part of me that I think feared it. And I. That's been the case with all the other things I've explored because medicine, cosmology, anything else? Do I want to ask this question? Because maybe I'll find something where I feel like I have to write about it. I feel like there's a duty to write about it, and then people aren't going to like me. So the journey of asking questions is one that requires some courage, some courage.

Massive courage for anything.

But it could be beliefs that we have about ourself or about a life situation to ask hard questions. But it also is from a place of humility, because a question means I don't know the answer. And do we really know the answer to anything other than one thing? This is what I've concluded so far. There's only one thing that I'm sure of, which is that at this moment, it feels like I have a conscious experience. Everything else is some kind of an inference, some more inferences than others, which leads me to then say it is fair game to ask questions all the time. But I encounter many people, and in my old life, this was more common. It's. It's almost like a negative to ask a question that means you don't know.

Because of a perceived threat of ostracization, which is essentially the core of what I think, what I felt from you, at least when you would publish something, there may be a twinge of fear. In other words, it's this primal part of you, this human part of you, that's like, I don't want to be ostracized. Right. Because that's baked into us.

Yeah. Or what if I talk about something and then a new finding comes out that contradicts something discussed in my books?

So what?

Yeah.

Do you ever just say, so what?

I do.

Who cares if I mean, so what? Isn't that such a powerful question? Two words. So what if we come out, if I share something on the podcast, and by the way, we're not here to tell people how to think. Right. It's just offering a different perspective. Right. Everybody has their own soul journey as to how they're going to think. Right. But if I'm presenting a way of thinking or being or living that I then learn isn't loving to myself or others, you better fucking believe I'm going to share that. That's what learning is. So it's like, so what? I get that we have that. That fear, though. That's a real fear in all of us.

Well, go back to David Hawkins. He would talk about fear and say, this is the solution. If you have a fear of something. Let's say the fear is that I'm going to. If I say something at work that my boss isn't going to like, then I'm going to lose my job. And then he would say, so and then what? And the person would say, well, then I'm not going to make money. And then what? And then I might be on the streets. And then what? And then I can't feed myself and my family and I might die. And he goes, so. So if we really break it down, it becomes existential, our fears. And that's why, in my own experience studying these sorts of things, of. Is. Is death as we conceive it? Is that really what we've been told in terms of how we should fear it? Because most, if not all of our fears end up there. And then I might die. Whether it's actually dying or feeling like I'm going to die.

Yeah, it's this. It's this primal aspect, because I believe we're. We're body and spirit, right? So we're a soul having an experience. That's. You said that's the only thing you can really know is you're having an experience. Right? And those are my words. You said something different.

And it's. It's in this moment I'm having an experience because my past experiences are still an inference, but right now I can verify that, that I'm experiencing something.

And the paradox is that you're also a physical body, or at least how you're orienting in this environment, you're a physical body. And that body has certain things that are baked into it, like an amygdala and a prefrontal cortex and a default mode network. Like, there are certain ways in which we've learned about physiology and neurology that. That run the show if we let them. But I think consciousness transcends all of this. It transcends the human body where we can actually notice the charge or notice the amygdala flaring up. And we can just simply say no. We can just say no to the charge. None of that is possible if we're being wield a story that keeps us stuck, where we're a slave to our biology, where we're a slave to our brain. And so the only way out of this is through it, man. And the only way out of this is to flip the script. We've got to flip the script. Do you lay awake at night thinking, like, how am I going to flip the script for so many people? Or is that not one of your deepest concerns?

It's more about flipping the script for myself to get myself in the best place of joy, happiness. And then what I find is when I get in that place myself, I'm capable of serving. I'm cap. I'm more capable of serving. I can be the best vessel.

And what does service mean to you to truly be of service?

I think it depends on the person. But if we were to generalize, it's to help up level Consciousness for other people. And that can manifest in so many different ways. Sure, in my book and into upside down Living, I talk about a lot of these topics of like, basically, how should you orient your compass for a living with a new view of reality? What's. What's the over. What's the overall orientation of my life? What's the intention of my life? And there are four pathways that I derive from the yogic tradition, but I think they apply to everything. And I kind of finagled things, but four paths to evolution. And the first is the pathway of knowledge and wisdom. The second is devotion. The third is selfless service. And the fourth is like energy practices. And that can be through physical fitness or meditation, yoga. But those are basically the pathways that people take. And some might be biased toward more toward one than others, but eventually all become part of one's being. So knowledge, wisdom, selfless service, devotion, and energy. Those four things. So I always try to think about what am I doing in each of those four areas? And then I find that when I do those things more, it's. It's not only helpful to myself, but others. And I'm hesitant to give specifics because for each person, it can manifest differently.

Yeah, no, that's really. I love. I love the. The construct of 4. Earlier I talked about 3. I see a lot of fours in the universe as well, in our experience. You know, so much of our podcast today, which has been epic. I mean, I. I think of how many people have tried to flip the script in their life, whether it's their behaviors, their addiction. But it all starts with the thought, right? Either unconscious or conscious, right? And a thought can also be fueled by a belief. But thought is what creates feeling in action. So before you see someone's behavior, there's been a lot of thoughts that they've allowed themselves to think. And I think at the core of it, for me, man, is how do I live my life well? How do I play a great game? And my definition of a great game, I had shared with you my rules for my game. But the results of that game, the fruit that's bared from my game, that's, I think, what we all really want in our deepest core. We want to give love, we want to receive love, we want to have joy, we want to have fun. Yet its opposite is so important to actually reflect upon. Because in true duality, before we ever get to singularity, we have to experience the opposite of what we want in order to know the weight and the love and the beauty of what we actually want. And I think that's hard for people to take in and grasp at times. But I wonder, as parting guidance, because we could probably do a whole nother series on this, which, by the way, can you share with people where they can listen to the series?

The eight part series, it's called where is My Mind? It's Mark Gober and Blue Duck Media. It's on Apple podcasts, Spotify, all the major players, because there are some other Where Is My Mind podcast, but it has a blue logo with a picture of a head and an open skull opening up to the brain. Mark Gobern, Blue Duck Media eight episodes.

Okay. Another great starting place. If you've been feeling what I'm feeling, and that is to actually live life liberated, you have to be able to see it through a different lens. That's a huge inspiration for me. Not even motivation. It's a huge inspiration for me how much that I, through yourself and other mentors and friends and just people that share space with me at this table, I learned so much. It's therapy, it's wisdom, it's everything good in the world. We've lost the art form of hearing someone out. I have people on where I disagree with them and I actually think that's really good because we need different perspectives is what I'm saying. We must have different perspectives to see life through a different lens. So y' all may have not related and attached to everything that Mark shared, but like, there's some really good nuggets in there. But all of this has an end point in our experience, as you would say.

Yeah, I think contrast is super important. I'm glad you went there because at one level, if there's just oneness, there is no contrast. But the experience that we have is one of contrast, of multiple whirlpools in the stream, so to speak. And that's what makes everything interesting and it allows evolution. If we just had oneness, arguably you wouldn't have the opportunity for the darkness to allow us to see the light. I'm reminded of a quote by the poet Wallace Stevens. He said, death is the mother of beauty, which speaks to this contrast, that it's because of the darkness that we get to see the light. And it's really hard. I struggle with this a lot, especially when I'm in a state of suffering. But when I zoom out to that helicopter's perspective, rather than just being the person in the maze that can't see far ahead, I get it.

And may we lead a beautiful life before the ultimate beauty. Comes right. May this life that we're leading be filled with lessons and joy that we can pass on to our children so that they can continue on in their existence. If that's so, to be in a way that honors everyone. I think many people have tried to do this, but the only way we actually can put this into form is by doing what you and I have done today in community. That's where all the magic happens, man. So as we say goodbye, answer the question. When I was a little kid, what is this all about? What? Why are these adults so angry at each other? What is all this taxation and craziness and pseudo safety and politics and bullshit? How do you live your life well? What do you think wellness actually is? If you were, if you were asked this question on a podcast, which, hey, you're on a podcast. How do you live your life well? How do you define wellness? What does wellness mean to you?

Wellness to me means living in alignment with the nature of reality. And there are many layers to that that I probably, I don't think I know the answer to, but maybe a more specific version of that is living in alignment with consciousness, your soul, whatever you're here to be doing as your unique vessel. I like to think of each of us as like individual puzzle pieces, unique puzzle pieces within a cosmic puzzle, meaning that we might have things that we're better that better than and than others at, and other things that we're not so good at, but to embrace the uniqueness and the authenticity of that piece and to be the best version of it, and when we're living in alignment with whatever that puzzle piece is and not denying reality, which many of us can tend to do, that leads to wellness and probably this is a hypothesis, leads to actual physical health, which is a much bigger discussion of what's the role of consciousness on our health. And then other areas like German new medicine that talk about the psychic roots of disease, where literally when you have an illness that can be correlated with a conflict, shock, some kind of emotion that was very toxic or something that you weren't able to process, and you're dealing with it in terms of physical symptoms. So it could be that our body is showing us our wellness and the extent to which we are living in alignment with reality.

Great answer, man. I've really enjoyed this. There's so many more layers. There's, there's literally infinite layers to explore in your work. Why seven? Why seven books? Why the number seven?

Seven so far? I, I, when I wrote one, I thought that was it okay.

Can you please write a book about how we can all become financially free?

I've been asked about to write about natural law. Yeah, Money, we'll see.

Because that with bitcoin and AI and the speed of, you know, Moore's Law, just hockey sticking forever. Now the tools are here. Every. Everything's actually here.

Yeah.

Money doesn't. Physical paper or numbers on a keypad do not have to be the violent instrument of politics anymore. And I think that's why the cat got out of the bag a long time ago with, you know, with Hitoshi Sakamoto or whatever his name is. The guy, that person that. I actually think that was a seed of consciousness that was planted by our creator. I do, I have that feeling. I'm not saying that bitcoin is God, right? But actually it is because everything's God, even you and I. But what's really fascinating to me is if you were to go deep, you know, and if you get enough of these requests, maybe that's your eighth book about finance. Because the reason I added finance to the, to the quadrant that I learned from Paul, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial, and I turned it into a pentagon, is because I think in our modern world that unless we have the spaciousness and the affluence of time, that it's almost impossible for people to consume your work and take action on it because they're worried about their paycheck or their food or their house or whatever it is. That's really the missing key here is the financial piece. Because with finance comes a lot of maturity that must be built in order to handle it. And so I really, you know, if I could just throw that in your lap, please write a book, an end to upside down money. That would be amazing because there's a lot of gurus out there that are self serving. They teach people how to teach people how to teach people how to make money. But nobody's ever actually teaching anyone, much like the coaching industry, you know, coaches that coach coaches to coach other coaches, how to coach coaches. So yeah, that's my parting wisdom as we, as we truly say goodbye. Because I keep extending the goodbye. I'm Italian and Italian goodbyes are really long. When we flip the, the way of thinking upside down in all these seven books and maybe the eighth for, for money, what do we have to be prepared for within ourselves as we flip our thinking, as we, as we end our upside down thinking as a person pertains to wellness or the wisdom that's required? What is the parting guidance for 2025 that we all must be prepared for in ourselves and our psyche in order to flip our thinking.

Being comfortable with, I don't know, I think is fundamental, not needing to have an answer. And it is worth elaborating on this because to me it's. It's been the most important part of my thinking recently. There is a logical fallacy that comes up all over the place. It's known as affirming the consequent. That's the technical terminology, but it basically means jumping to a causal explanation for something that's observed when there are many other possibilities to explain something. The classic example is you walk outside and you see that the grass is wet. And we know that when it rains there will be wet grass. So you, Josh, you conclude the grass is wet, therefore it rained. And then you build your model. Everything else you observe around the fact that it rained recently. Every new observation you force fit into this model that it rained. But maybe it didn't rain. Maybe there was just dew on the grass, or maybe there was a sprinkler system, or maybe some kids ran by and poured buckets of water on the grass. We could come up with a million explanations. Maybe there were multi dimensional aliens that popped into our dimension and poured water in the grass and popped out. I'm being facetious, but the point is there's a lot of things that can explain a phenomenon.

Yeah.

And we latch on to one explanation. But you know what? It's okay to run a bunch of analysis and we can sit here together and say, you know what, it didn't rain. We can rule out rain and then say, but I'm not sure why the grass is wet because I haven't done that analysis yet and we don't have enough information. This applies not only to science, cosmology, medicine, but also to politics. Anytime you read an article and they observe something and then they will jump to a cause about why this thing happened. And they don't tell you, they jump to it as an inference and that there could be other explanations. But then we often latch onto that model and build a worldview around that model.

What I felt from you is the way to end upside down thinking is to be in the reverence and respect that there may be more thinking to do.

Yes. As uncomfortable as that might be, because it means we might have to do work to say, ah, we just ruled out rain, but now we have to do a whole bunch of analysis on the do and that sprinkler system and so forth.

Okay, well, how to free your mind? Keep An Open Mind in 2025, brought to you by Mark and Josh. Thank you for being my guest on the podcast, man. Really enjoyed this conversation. And just thank you for following your dream. Seven books is not easy.

Well, thank you so much for having me and for being willing to discuss all this.

Oh yeah, you guys, we scratched the tip here. If you resonate with the work, what is the first book they should start with? If they're resonating with the work, I.

Always recommend an end to Upside down thinking the first one. And I recommend reading them in order to see the evolutionary process.

It makes sense. All right, y', all, until we do another podcast, we're both wishing you love, wellness, and most importantly, peace and power. We'll talk with you soon.